Whenever a person travels to a foreign country, there will be aspects of the foreign culture which s/he will inevitably find incomprehensible. This is my third trip to Korea, and as such I find life here substantially less bewildering than I did my first time around. However, there's one aspect of Korean culture that continues to confuse and amaze me: ddong.
What is ddong? Shit. Poop. Crap. Feces. Dung. Turds. I'm not entirely sure of the correct translation, but you get the point; ddong is the stuff that comes out of your ass. In my opinion, feces are not cute, I don't associate them with my favorite cartoons, I don't want a t-shirt with poop on it, and I don't want stickers with little graphics of smiling turds. I do kind of want to go to Seoul and find the street lined with giant mosaic piles of ddong. What?! Yes, you heard me right. Take a look:
What is ddong? Shit. Poop. Crap. Feces. Dung. Turds. I'm not entirely sure of the correct translation, but you get the point; ddong is the stuff that comes out of your ass. In my opinion, feces are not cute, I don't associate them with my favorite cartoons, I don't want a t-shirt with poop on it, and I don't want stickers with little graphics of smiling turds. I do kind of want to go to Seoul and find the street lined with giant mosaic piles of ddong. What?! Yes, you heard me right. Take a look:
This picture was taken by dry the rain and I found it here.
Koreans (or at least enough of them to count as a marketing base and to warrant ddong-based street art) seem somewhat obsessed with ddong. That list of things I don't associate with feces? Well, you can find all of those things here. Ddong always looks "cute" (or at least as cute as shit can be), and it frequently has a smiley face. Often it is located next to a cute cartoon character. Often, it is being orbited by flies. I bought a thing of stickers the other day, and it had a whole row of smiling crap-heaps. They were the first to go when I offered them to my students! Luckily for you, I took a picture:
Can anyone enlighten me on why this is?
It's also somewhat frustrating to note that ddong and dong are completely different words! For the life of me, I cannot tell the difference in their pronunciation, although Koreans can. A dong is a city district. I live in Seo-ho Dong. This means that if I go to another part of town and decide to take a taxi home, I have to use the word dong when I talk to the driver. I'm always worried I'm going to say ddong by mistake!
10 comments:
I hope that someone answers your question. I have no idea and I find that relly weird. Are you sure that the stickers/street art etc. are actually ddong? Maybe they were supposed to be honey combs (and perhaps the swarming insects are bees?.
Do children still try to stick their fingers in your ass and the assess of their classmates? I really didn't care for that.
Melissa
Nope, it's definitely ddong.
None of the kids at my school do that fingesr up the ass thing, but if you browse through blogs of teachers over here, you'll discover that it still happens...
In the not-too-distant past, when Korea was largely an agriculture- based subsistence economy, most Koreans saved their poop and used it to fertalize the family rice fields and garden. Small children saw poop as valuable AND as a source of entertainment that they could have fun with while being taught to work it into the soil with their hands. My guess is that the cute little kids playing with poop image became intwined in the Korean culture and is now a firmly established meme.
Whatever. It doesn't mean poop to me.
Even as an anthropologist, I have to say that stickers and sculptures of literal s*** are beyond the limits of my cultural relativism. 'Ol Boas would be disappointed, but hell, it's *poop* for crying out loud! lol
-Brooke S.
Hi,
Thanks Bob for enlightning us. I had a similar experience in Bangkok with kiosks selling poop key chains and I couldn't figure out why?....maybe Thais also used poop in a similar way in the past.
Roy
PS - Hi Jane
Incidentally, in my illustrious state, dry moose nuggets are shellaced and made into things like earrings, necklaces, tie tacks, and coffee stirrers. The creepy part is that people really buy them. I seriously do not know what the tourist fascination with moose turds is about.
~Brooke
I think this reflects a healthy unrepressed attitude toward a bodily function that is a part of our daily lives. :-)
But isn't fertilizing food with human poop supposed to be a health risk? Like, we're not susceptible to the bacteria in cow poop, but we are to the poop of other humans...
This is getting reminiscent of the discussion over at Cute Overload about the photo of the toddler licking a pig's snout...
gotta love that learning about other cultures and how they view their poop.
I have heard, but have not verified, that germans have a little shelf in their toilets that they can examine their poop.
it is good that at least one culture makes good use of their poop...
Well, you kow how Russian toilets are, right? - there's kind of a shelf built into them. I never thought it was to examine your poop; I just thought someone designed a toilet that way, and so they continued building them that way, because "that's the way it's always been done"
Haha--
I was trying to teach my students the concept of VERB last year (I just wanted them to make a full sentence, for crying out loud!). They couldn't understand that verbs are the words that we use to talk about actions, so I finally broke down and used the Korean word for verb: "dong-sa." Except, that apparently I accidentally said "ddong-ssa," which happens to mean, "take a shit." They thought it was pretty hilarious...
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