Adventures in Asia

“My Lovable Girl,” “My Lovely Girl,” “She’s So Lovable,” “You Are Cute for Me”… Whatever this drama is called. Rain’s new drama. That one. Yeah, I watched it. For the noobs that may be reading this, I’ll give a brief explanation on Rain. Rain is pretty much the first South Korean actor/singer to gain huge international success. He debuted in the kpop world in 2002, and since then has used his stage name Rain as a pun in as many album/song titles as possible. His most famous music video has got to be “Love Song,” which involved him body rolling shirtless. The album, Rainism, was deemed inappropriate for listeners under the age of 19 for being so shmexy. The term “chocolate abs” became rabid among kpop fans around this time. Rain has released a lot of music and done multiple dramas and movies, but the only other Rain drama I’ve seen is “Full House” (2004), which I unfortunately decided to marathon when I was sick last spring. Unless you actually like soap operas, I don’t recomm...

Lately I’ve been thinking about media, why I like the music and shows that I do, and the censorship (or lack thereof) that governments impose on it. There are countries like China, where censorship is so strict that creativity is stifled and/or stamped out. No one outside of China really watches Chinese media (that I know of), despite the country being large and developed enough to potentially produce some good stuff. (I mean, Korea’s Man From the Stars took over China for a reason. China didn’t have a show that could compete with it.) I consider consuming Chinese media for linguistic benefits, because I need to learn Mandarin in order to live here – not because it’s anything new or interesting. Then there are countries like the U.S. with no censorship, where the media is always selling you something, always feeding some primal need, creatively finding new ways to dumb down content to a single common denominator that will reach the biggest audience and generat...