Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and The Polar Intertia Journal, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition.
Colin sits down at Busan’s eFM with broadcaster, teacher, rapper, and television star Chad Kirton, also known as Fusion. They discuss whether the setting gets him into Korean or English mode; how he came up with his show segment “Don’t Trust the Dictionary”; what a “bunnyhug” is; how the Korean desire for perfection affects their acquisition of foreign languages; the danger of agreeing in Korean when you have no idea what people are saying; what he seeks out in Busan when he goes on television; what powers burnt eel can supposedly give you; why many Koreans seem to forget Busan exists; the perpetually educational nature of Korean media; how he travels for hardworking Koreans live vicariously through television; what constitutes his 16-hour workday; when he first came to Korea, studying tae kwon do in Pohang; how Korea sometimes brings out in the Westerner the desires they might not have let out at home; how bilingual broadcasting became his speciality, beginning with the English-learning show for which he phonetically memorized his Korean lines; his first night as The Midnight Rider; how his version of “Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner” works; the diversity of age he’s discovered among his listenership; how he began rapping — in Korea, freestyle, on the air; how he keeps learning Korean when many long-term expatriates plateau; his first home in Korea, with frozen pipes and above a river of raw sewage; the way that Koreans seem able to feel each other’s feelings; what it meant to him when he first experienced Busan’s T.G.I. Friday’s; what counts as Canadian food; how he answers questions about how Canadians do things; what he tells people who want to come to Korea and teach English; how you still have to start at the bottom in Korea, but why the bottom isn’t so bad; the need to understand how to “think like a Korean”; his encounter with Koreans who lived in, of all places, Medicine Hat; how much time to spend in a foreign country to really internalize the culture; the similarities and differences between his radio, television, rapping, and teaching personalities; and the difficulty of avoiding all forbidden words (in both the English and Korean “swearing Rolodex”) while freestyling on the radio.
Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.