The fool, pictured above…是你！

One of the most unexpected, and perhaps guiltiest pleasure of living in China is….Korean girls, or KCC’s (Kim Chi Chicks) as I like to call them You’d never think that the land of Kim Jong il would produce such fine women, but it does. KCCs are a genetically modified hybrid of J and C girls. They have the fashion intelligence, though sometimes dark and boyish, of Js and the no non-sense of Cs. The empathy of Js and feistiness of Cs. The impeccable manners of Js and those sly social engineering skills of Cs. The cute coquettishness of Js and the drive of Cs. Could they be the perfect East Asian women? Let’s find out.

There’s WMY, WBY, LMY, and the one with the glasses that always wears the track suit and dances really well and speaks excellent Mandarin, whose “bap” I couldn’t manage to “bibim”…and then there’s Min Seon…Ah. Also known as “hao hao” (ok ok). Ah…Min Seon came to Chengdu to study Chinese for one year at Sichuan University. I can’t tell you how we met, but it had something to do with my love for both Korean pao cai (i.e. kimchi) and paoing mei mei. I think it really started around December of last year. I remember it was kinda cold…and I had a cold. And there was a lunch together. And then, somehow, we started text messaging…all the time. She seemed to always want to “da” (hit) me, not to be confused with wanting to “do” me. She made me Christmas card with Chinese and Korean text. And she was always saying something about AV….she watched her brother’s AV on accident. Right.

Anyway, Min Seon had studied Chinese for even less time than me, but her level was far superior, though her local dialect was not. One day Min Seon invited me to her “love house” for dinner. Of course she didn’t trust me, so two of our other friends also showed up. She can cook pretty well. After she saw I wasn’t the wolf I seem to be, she let her guard down and next thing I knew I was spending 4 or 5 nights a week watching bootleg DVDs at the “love house”. She wouldn’t watch the director’s cut of “Lust Caution” with me, though. Can you blame her? (note: The pronunciation of that movie in Chinese sounds like my name, backwards. How ironic). One night she cooked me kimchi pizza. She didn’t use bread for the crust, though. She used nian gao, which is glutinous rice. You can guess how that was. But aside from that, we always ate chips and those Japanese Pocky sticks. And xiao kao（street bbq), of course, but usually without MSG. A small sacrifice to make for a good friend. It tastes about the same, actually.

Min Seon uses words like “entropy” and “fucking damn”. She calls me “ma” and I call her “ba…bo”. She told me that all Korean actresses should be 48 kilos. She taught me that when eating Korean BBQ, you have to take it all in with one bite. Once she didn’t, and that hot sauce of theirs fell all over her shirt. ha! Her use of pinyin is second only to the King - yours truly. She taught me about the men in trench coats that expose themselves to schoolgirls (it’s like a right of passage or something). She would always walk me out of her apt under the pretense of politeness and making sure I find a cab home, but really she does it as an excuse to flirt with the security guys at the entrance to her building. She said that if I go to Korea, I’ll be able to take food into the public baths, especially yogurt, rub it on myself and then eat it. She taught me how to say “help!!!” and point to my back, so I can get old Korean men to rub yogurt on me and scrub my back with that brillo pad they use (she gave me one of those brillo pads). Once, she made me smell spoiled kimchi. She contemplates, deeply, questions like, “would you make your bf carry your purse?”. And then shows me a Korean movie about a guy who, conceding the purse, ended up walking in his gf’s high heels. And “kill kill kill” is Korean for “ha ha ha”.

Sometimes she would come out drinking. RS had told me to be careful of Korean women - they can drink any man under the table, she said. Ah…true indeed. She can drink and always appears to be just the same as when first sat down at the table. She also bought me a “cao mei beizi” (strawberry cup). She has a matching one. Anyway, as our friendship progressed, Mean Sun, as I sometimes like to call her, started to put new demands on me. Like going to IKEA for fun. She said we could get free coffee there and even food. Plus, there is a free bus that runs between the University and the store, so it would be convenient.

Hell no. She kept pushing, though. She knew IKEA was like world peace, so she settled for some other, more achievable “missions”. One was getting me to go to the Marco Polo bridge. Despite being only a 10 minute walk from her place, I never wanted to venture there. The other was to eat “banana cai”, basically fried bananas with syrup. And another was to watch a classic Chinese movie, “tian mi mi” (sweet secret). One day in April, anticipating that I’d be headed back to the States, I called up Min Seon and got down to business, fulfilling all of the missions except “IKEA travel”, as it translates to from Chinese. We documented it all, of course, but she has the pictures on her blog (see link below).

I added one mission of my own. In the most moving scene of the movie, there is a guy on is bicycle and a girl on the back and the theme song playing. This (the bike thing) is ubiquitous in China. It’s romantic, really. When I bought my bike, I had a China dream - put a mei nv on the back of my bike. Well, the first night I bought my bike I fulfilled that dream, but since Min Seon hadn’t, I figured she should be given the chance. That’s right, after doing all she asked of me, I thought it appropriate for MS to ride a bicycle with ME on the back. Oh yeah, and she had to sing the theme song from the movie.

She crashed the bike.

After the earthquake, MS went back to Korea. We never got a chance to say goodbye or go to IKEA….thankfully. She is busy protesting American beef imports, watching her brother’s AV stash while he’s away at his 2 year compulsory military duty, and updating her new blog, “mo dei wenti” (”no problem”, in local dialect).