writing updates, 5/14/2014 + sci-fi art, entry #4

This post is all about my scribbles, yes, but since I write science fiction, it's a good place to give you some more sci-fi art. So here you go:

Now, on to the meat of the matter.

June 29 is the day that's circled on my calendar. On that day, it will have been exactly five months since I submitted a query to Ace & Roc Science Fiction & Fantasy, imprints of the Penguin Group. I'll know for sure by then if Penguin is interested in my novel or if they aren't. If the latter is the case—and their continued silence indicates to me that it is—then I have a backup plan. 

Baen Books, a renowned sci-fi press, doesn't just accept unsolicited queries: they accept unsolicited manuscripts. I checked their submission guide and it seems they prefer works between 100,000-130,000 words. Mine is 114,000. They prefer a simple style and judge works primarily on plot and characterization, and if it's one thing my work is oozing with, it's plot and characterization. My style is simple, with a few sesquipedalian terms scattered in here and there (crucial to the plot, of course). Baen also offers "competitive" payment rates. Vague wording, yes, but then Ace & Roc didn't breathe a word about payment at all. 

The only downside is that the "reporting time" (response time) is 9-12 months. Ouch. 

Well, can't win 'em all. As Baen sheepishly admits, they get a lot of manuscripts. So I'd basically have to wait until next April or possibly next July to find out if Baen wants to publish my baby or not. Miss H and I shall be gone from Korea by then, and hopefully installed in a tasteful, spacious two-bedroom apartment in Henderson, Nevada and engaged upon entry-level jobs with wondrous prospects, blabbity blabbity blah. 

At least I have a timeline. 

No joy yet on the short fiction front. Daily Science Fiction is considering my 1,100-word short story "Boxing Day," which I submitted on May 2. I expect a reply within a fortnight. 

In the meantime, to keep myself busy, I've conducted yet another full-blown proofread-and-line-edit of Novel #1. Gawd, this feels like the zillionth one I've done, and it probably is. When I finish I'll do the same thing to Novel #3 (not for the first or the last time) and then following that I'll finish Novel #4. (Novel #2, as you'll recall, is a work of historical fiction unrelated to my humongous sci-fi opus). I really want to get started on Novel #5 before the year's out. That one's going to be fun. I've been taking long walks and brainstorming it for a long while now and I've had some spectacular ideas, wheezes which will keep the fans happy and my fingers busy. 

As for nonfiction, well...Korail just instigated another scenic train route. You remember how I told you about the O-Train and V-Train? Well, those were so successful that they started up another sightseer, the S-Train, down in the southern part of the peninsula. There's talk of G- and B-Trains to travel up the east and west coasts of Korea as well. But the big one is the DMZ-Train, which...well, I don't know much more about than you do. But I do know that the end of the line is the infamous Dorasan Station, a fully-equipped and squeaky-clean yet abandoned and ghostly whistle stop. It's the last one before the DMZ, and the railway line stretches on emptily into the distance, a high road to nowhere. It was part of the USO tour that Miss H and I did in 2012. It'd be cool to roll up to it in an actual train, though, and see the countryside in between Seoul and the DMZ. Dorasan Station was built during a rare period of amity between the two Koreas and was intended to serve as a gateway for trade and industry (and perhaps passenger service) between Seoul and Pyongyang, but the creeping enmity between the two nations killed the dream and left the station derelict. I imagine I could write a pretty travel article about a ride on the DMZ-Train and submit it anywhere I liked, using some of the vivid imagery and florid prose for which I am renowned. 

Oh, and I imagine the big Z-shaped train trip I'm taking through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore this summer (not to mention the week I'm spending in Hong Kong afterward) would be fine travel-journalism fodder too. 

So. That's where I am. 

Wish me luck. 

Park, Lee, and Kim...oh my!

Have you ever wondered why such a staggeringly large slice of the Korean population is named Park, Lee, or Kim? 

So have I. In fact, it used to be the most burning question I had about this peninsula, right behind what "Seoul" means. 

But not anymore. I found the answer. 

First, let me introduce you to a building:

                                                                                                               from Wikimedia Commons

It's called Gyeongbokgung ("Palace Greatly Blessed By Heaven") and it stands in central Seoul, near the intersection of Lines 3 and 5. Up the hill behind it is a famous Buddhist temple and the Blue House, the official residence of the Korean president. Gyeongbokgung was the largest and grandest of the Five Grand Palaces built by the Joseon Dynasty. Originally constructed in 1395, right after Joseon's foundation, and then later burned and abandoned for three centuries, it was reconstructed in 1867. 

Now here's where things start to get controversial. 

The official word is that Gyeongbokgung was burned to the ground by Imperial Japan shortly after their annexation of Korea in the early 20th century. But various reports and accounts I've heard tell a different story. Let me back up and do some more explaining.

Korea's surnames, like Scotland's, were all clan-based in antiquity. The Kims were a clan unto themselves back in the day, and a very powerful one. So were the Parks (or Bak, as I prefer to romanize it). The Lees, too. But there were hundreds of others: Choi, Bae, Woo, Lim, Jang, Jeong, Bang, Go, Min, Hong, Seo, Gang, Yoo, Heo, Yoon, Gwak, Gwon, Yang, Hwang, Myeong, Dong, Ryu, Noh, Na, and Pyo come readily to mind.

Here's the thing, though. Korea used to have a caste system. The Kims, Lees and Parks got so powerful that they became the rulers of some of the peninsula's mightiest kingdoms: Baekje, Silla, Goguryeo, and Joseon. Everybody else got the shaft. The Gangs and Yoos and Yangs remained commoners. Granted, any commoner could sit for the gwageo (civil service examination) and become a yangban (civil servant), entitled to an estate and aristocratic privileges...but hey, noble names were still noble names, and common ones common.

When the Japanese annexed Korea in 1910, one of the first things they did was abolish the caste system. Suddenly a Kim was no better than a Choi, and Park no worthier than a Jang. But the names themselves still retained some time-honored clout. It was a mark of prestige to be a Kim or a Park, even if the Japanese had barged in and said it didn't count for beans anymore. 

So, according to what I've heard, Gyeongbokgung wasn't burned down by the Japanese. It was burned down by the Koreans. See, Gyeongbokgung was where the Hall of Records was. Everybody's birth certificates and genealogies were in there. With those reduced to ashes, a lowly Pyo or Hong could waltz right into the nearest Japanese registrar's office and say "Hello there. I'm Mr. Kim." Or "Howdy doody, ilbon saram! I'm Mr. Lee!" 

I don't know if that's true or not, but I have to admit it's a compelling theory. Korea suffers from a deplorable excess of Kims, Lees and Parks because their granddads all wanted to put on airs and had no qualms about committing arson to do it. This is why I secretly rejoice whenever I see an extremely rare surname (such as Gwak, Yang or Pyo) because I know that that person's ancestors had enough pride in their roots not to torch the royal palace and then fake their names during the next census.

And now you know the rest of the story.

P.S. Can you think of anybody else who might be using the name "Kim" to give themselves some street cred...?

30 Days to a Better Man, Day 20: perform service

Two-thirds done!

Another caveat: you don't actually have go to out and perform the service on this day (unless, of course, the opportunity presents itself). But you should take time to at least schedule some volunteer work.

A soup kitchen in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.

I selected Itaewon Global Village Center. They have several different volunteer activities that they do. You can pass out food to the elderly or infirm, or do the same for the poor little waifs at an orphanage, among other things. I'm curious about helping the poor while I'm here, as poverty is a taboo subject in Korea (thanks to Confucianism). The homeless and destitute are generally swept under the rug. But for the amputees panhandling in the subway station or the wild-haired bums scrounging through garbage, a foreigner might believe that there aren't any poor people in this country. And I've been wanting to volunteer at a Korean orphanage ever since I saw this.

So! I sent IGVC an application form today. I'll let you know when I get a reply from them. This is the moment when taking on a challenge like this really starts to pay off. I've always been lax with volunteering. I didn't do it enough, and I'm fairly certain it knocked me out of the running for several jobs. It left a black stain on my conscience, too. I haven't volunteered since the last balloon launch with NKP. (I'm actually in that video, by the way, at 14:10; the guy with aviator shades and the fedora, obviously.)

Be that as it may, it's high time I did something to help the South Koreans. This country's been good to me. I need to pay them back.

Stay loose for Day 21.

30 Days to a Better Man, Day 6: update your résumé

Years ago I went to see a professional résumé-polisher in Boulder, Colorado. He lived in a spacious bungalow with an attached greenhouse, which my mother and I had to navigate to reach his desk, tucked away in a corner beside two huge windows looking out at the pine- and rock-strewn hillsides. He was a scholarly sort of man, tall, thin, white-haired, with spectacles and nimble fingers. He reminded me of one of my old English professors, but wasn't brain-burnt by decades of hallucinogens. He checked my puny résumé over, asked a few questions, cleaned up the formatting, added some strategic lines and font changes, eliminated the weak links, and handed it back to me. It was like alchemy. A few ingredients here, a few waves of the ol' wand there, a scatter of signs and symbols, and whammo — solid gold.

It's a bit of a jolt when you figure out that your résumé is two years out of date. I've switched jobs and done some volunteer work since 2012, all of which would be juicy additions to the old CV. There's my stint at Sejong University and the volunteer work I did up in Paju sending weather balloons laden with socks to North Korea. (I'd love to see what future prospective employers make of that.) 

But there's a problem. My résumé is too full.

Now, I know what you're going to say. "Oh, if there's not enough room, then you need to get rid of the old, weak stuff and add in the fresh stuff at the top." Fine and dandy. I'd do that if I was interested in being a teacher for the rest of my life. But I ain't. I'm a journalist, dang it. I want to work in radio. And the oldest thing on my résumé happens to be the year that I worked for Thunder Radio at North Dakota State University (2005, if you're curious). I don't want to ditch that. It's all I've got going for me if I want to get a journalism job.

I can't ditch any of the other stuff either: my job as an unpaid intern at the Victorville Daily Press in 2006; writing for the NDSU Spectrum as an opinion columnist between 2006-2007;  or working as a technical writer for the university's IT Help Desk in 2007. And I can't leave out the two hagwon jobs I've had in Korea: Reading Town in 2008-2009 or Avalon English in 2012-2013. Otherwise there'll be big, ugly gaps in my work history and my CV will look like a mouthful of rotten teeth.

And before you ask, I can't make the font any smaller. It's already sitting at 10 points. Any tinier and the interviewer will need a magnifying glass to read it.

Oh well. I'll figure it out. I have two hours and 13 minutes before midnight hits and it's on to Day 7. 

Wish me luck...

making a bug-out bag in Korea

Do you know what a bug-out bag is?

If you don't, follow that link and read the article. You'll need some context. I'll wait.

In case you're too lazy to do that, though, let me just give you the skinny: the term "bugging out" means evacuating your home due to fire, earthquake, poison gas leak, alien invasion...or war. A bug-out bag is an emergency kit, personally assembled by you, a forward-thinking human being, in case you have to be away from your home for 72 hours.

The only natural disasters that face Seoul on a regular basis are monsoons, fires, and maybe the occasional tsunami. (Japan does a pretty good job of soaking up all the typhoons and earthquakes that come this way, though.)

You have to remember, though, what's sitting just 60 kilometers (37 miles) north of this city.

That's right. North Korea.

On Wednesdays I have no class, which means I get to putter around doing whatever I want. Today even more so: I had no choice but to moon around the apartment all day waiting for the deliveryman to arrive with the Coleman waterproof matches I ordered from Gmarket. I bought myself a Stanwell beechwood pipe and some tobacco a month ago, but I've been dogged by the lack of proper lighting materials. You can't use a Zippo to light a pipe, 'cause the butane makes the tobacco taste funny. Moreover, you have to hold the lighter upside-down, and that singes your fingers. Wooden matches, however, neither taint the flavor of your smoke nor char the rim of your pipe. So I had my heart set on matches. After a fruitless search through every grocery mart, convenience store and bar in my area, I found them on Gmarket and ordered them. They were due to arrive today, and the deliveryman wouldn't just leave them at the door; I had to receive them personally. So I couldn't leave.

To pass the time, I watched the 2012 movie Red Dawn.

And suddenly I thought of a much better use for those Coleman waterproof matches.

The movie made me realize just how unprepared Miss H and I were for a disaster—of any kind. She and I have talked about preparing bug-out bags for months now, ever since we moved into our new place in East Seoul. We did all the usual stay-at-home preparations, like compiling our important documents, files, IDs, bankbooks and passports into one convenient and safe location, buying eight liters of emergency water, acquiring flashlights and lanterns and candles and a fire extinguisher, et cetera. But somehow we never got around to putting together a bug-out bag. Senseless, I know. A 72-hour emergency kit would be invaluable in case we had to leave the apartment (and, say, assemble at Jamsil Stadium for evacuation by the U.S. Army as North Korean troops overrun the DMZ).

So I resolved to fix this inadequacy this very afternoon. After taking delivery of the matches, I stuck six boxes into my Timberland® 20-liter backpack. (The other six boxes will go into my drawer with my pipe.)

And that was the start of it all. I hunted high and low through the apartment and located some other items to stick in:

• 2 cans of tuna
• Nature Valley® granola bars
• 2 flashlights
• a deck of cards
• plastic sporknife (yes, they exist)
• diarrhea medication
• multitool
• first-aid kit
• sunblock
• lens wipes
• 2 liters of water
• complete change of clothes
• Colgate® WISP™ toothbrushes
• lensatic compass
• Ziploc® bags
• vitamin tablets
• cash and coins

Noticing that there were several items on my list that just weren't in the apartment, I hopped the subway across the river to Cheonho and went to E-Mart. There, I acquired the following:

• Ottogi tuna (2 bundles of 3 cans, ₩3960 apiece)
• bowls of prepared rice (pack of 3, ₩3450)
• Diget chocolate biscuits (₩1580)
• Dr. You granola bars (2 boxes of 4, ₩3980 apiece)
• kitchen knife (₩2000)
• small paring knife (₩1000)
• folding knife (₩5100)
• hand saw (₩7900)
• folding trowel (₩7500)
• packet of quick-start charcoal (₩1360)
• camping rope (6mm x 10m, ₩2,900)
• duct tape (10 meters, ₩1350)

The items remaining on my list are:

• glow sticks (for when flashlights fail)
• hand-cranked radio
• ponchos
• tarp
• space blankets
• signal mirror (though I think I'll just use the small shaving mirror in my grooming kit)
• safety whistle
• camp axe

I'll have to get these either at Homeplus (which is a subsidiary of Tesco, and generally better stocked than E-Mart) or a camping supply store.

Some of you might scoff at the completeness of this list. "What do you need a hand axe for?" you'll ask. Good question. Hopefully, we'll never need it. But just in case the North Koreans come storming across that border faster than expected (or they bring some Chinese or Russian friends with them), I want to be ready. The worst-case scenario here is Miss H and I hiking through the wild hills of K-Land trying to get back behind friendly lines, or make our way down to Busan to catch a boat for Japan. If we have to rough it for a few days, at least I'll have the tools, ropes, tarps, and matches I need to make our campsites comfortable. Even if the North Koreans never invade (or the zombies never attack, it don't matter to me) we'll at least have a well-stocked supply kit for untoward exigencies.

One more thing.

You'll notice that I entitled this post "making a bug-out bag in Korea."

The emphasis was intentional. There are some items which I would normally include in my bug-out bag, but can't, because I live in Korea. The first one, obviously, is this:

A gun, stupid.

When disaster strikes, people go crazy. Ain't no denying that. I think K (Tommy Lee Jones's character from the Men in Black franchise) said it best:  "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." So when the crap hits the fan and looters take to the streets, I want to be prepared to defend what's mine: my life, my property and my loved ones. I have to be honest: as an American, I'm a bit uncomfortable living in a country that doesn't allow private gun ownership, especially when there's a militaristic regime lurking on the horizon.

The second item is this:

It's a survival knife, in case you didn't know. An Aitor Jungle King II, to be exact. I haven't really shopped around and chosen the survival knife that best suits me, but this is pretty much what I'm looking for: a straight blade with a saw-edge and a good long grip with a lanyard ring. A splendid knife for cutting branches, skinning game, or personal defense.

Korea has this thing about knives, though. Turns out that any pocketknife with a blade longer than six centimeters (a paltry 2.36 inches) is classified as a "sword" under Korean law, and requires a "sword permit." This means that the 10-inch Bowie knife I have in my footlocker back in California would get me chucked in jail over here. Bollocks. I'm not sure what the laws concerning non-folding or straight-bladed knives are like, but I have a feeling they're similarly restrictive. The three knives I bought today at E-Mart were an attempt to ameliorate this deficiency.

And there you have it! My Korean bug-out bag. Once I acquire those last few vital items (particularly the tarp and ponchos), Miss H and I will be well ahead of any disaster which fickle chance decides to throw at us. With any luck, we'll never need this stuff, but it sure will be nice to have on hand.

And if we want to go camping, we're already packed...

preconceptions about China

No word yet on that nightly journal I'm supposed to be keeping. Be that as it may, I have some thoughts to share with you.

I'm researching China, particularly the eats, and I'm getting really jazzed about this little four-day jaunt. But some unsettling questions remain in my mind.

I have mixed feelings about China.

The government, not its citizens, mind you. So far I've found that people are people, no matter where you go. But China, and her communist leaders, have done some things that I find difficult to swallow. The country's history is more checkered than the flag at the NASCAR finish line. I'm trying real hard to be objective here, but I am and always was a subjective bugger, and that usually filters through to my perceptions about other places. Some of these issues that I have with China and its history are seeping in around the loose edges of my consciousness, and I have to get them off my chest before they're diluted by experience.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of China, of course, is the color red. Communism. Mao Zedong. The Great Leap Forward. Josef Stalin, Kim Il-sung, Pol Pot, and other prominent communist dictators who've influenced or been influenced by China and its politics.

I have a problem with communism. What's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander. I get that. China has a different moral code, a different work ethic, a different societal paradigm and a much different history than America or any other Western state. But still: the idea of communism itself seems, to me, fundamentally flawed and diseased. In my mind, human beings were not meant to exist in classless, moneyless, stateless societies. I'm no social Darwinist; there's times when I've despaired of the ossification of class in Western society and its total dependence on currency. But there's no denying that capitalism and competition encourage hard work and innovation. That, to me, seems preferable to the alternative: a society focused on production (at the expense of intellectualism)—a breeding ground for conformity, mediocrity, and stagnation, in which the group is superior to the individual.

Whether or not that's what's happened in China is debatable, because of the second problem I have with the place:

They're not even doing communism right.

I remember penning a passionate article about this in my high school's literary magazine back in 2002 or thereabouts. One of the basic tenets of communist theory is that the people have control, and that's that. Society is stateless: there is little to no concentration of power, no overarching authority. This is what makes North Korea's proper name so laughable: the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is four lies in one. It's anything but democratic, inasmuch as the power is held by one family and one family only, with the mere pretense of choice on the part of the people. The citizens do not own the means of production, nor do they have any say in the government—the Great/Dear/Outstanding Leader does. The definition of the word "republic" is a state in which political affairs are public matters and not the private concern of the rulers; as I pointed out before, the people have about as much say in (or knowledge of) political affairs in North Korea as do chipmunks or cucumbers. And finally, "of Korea" implies that the DPRK considers itself the rightful government of the entire peninsula, which is about as horrifying as it is hilarious.

Not my photo. This is China, not North Korea.

Though China's human rights record is far from spotless (I'll get to that in a minute), they at least seem to have empowered their citizens to a greater degree than the Hermit Kingdom. Even so, power is centralized and concentrated in Beijing, which means that the "stateless" part of communism is being openly flouted. Moreover, even a superficial glance at China's economy and society reveals that it is neither moneyless nor classless. At best this makes the Chinese government hypocritical; at worst, it makes them dishonest. I have no use for dishonest people—let alone a dishonest political system.

Setting that aside, let's talk about the biggest bee in my bonnet about China: human rights.

Here's a little preamble from Amnesty International's website:

Amnesty International has documented widespread human rights violations in China. An estimated 500,000 people are currently enduring punitive detention without charge or trial, and millions are unable to access the legal system to seek redress for their grievances. Harassment, surveillance, house arrest, and imprisonment of human rights defenders are on the rise, and censorship of the Internet and other media has grown. Repression of minority groups, including Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians, and of Falun Gong practitioners and Christians who practice their religion outside state-sanctioned churches continues. While the recent reinstatement of Supreme People's Court review of death penalty cases may result in lower numbers of executions, China remains the leading executioner in the world.

Possibly I was biased by being born in a country where freedom of speech and freedom of the press actually mean something, are protected by a constitution (the supreme and inviolable law of the land), and are sacrosanct in the hearts and minds of the people. Thus it shocks me when I hear that the Internet is heavily censored in China, with social media sites like Facebook being routinely shut down or blocked. The Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is indefatigable at censoring news reports and filtering what information the people receive. The Chinese government is enormous, inefficient, bureaucratic, and callous. Petitioners cannot easily seek redress of grievances, and are often lost in the shuffle or crushed by the big wheels. The class system is not only extant but downright marginalizing, equal to anything seen in South Africa. In 2005, Jiang Wenran, acting director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta, stated that an apartheid-like segregation system was in effect in China. City-dwellers, he said, enjoy a wealth of social and economic perks while peasants, or "rural workers," are treated like second-class citizens. They require a portfolio of hard-to-obtain passes to work in provinces other than the ones in which they reside. Movement is restricted. Freedom of association is nonexistent, freedom of religion is a joke, and people are regularly stripped of their rights if they do something, anything, that causes the CPC to label them "subversive." And then of course there's the one-child policy. To me, a government that fines its citizens for having more than one kid is just plain tyrannical.

In addition to these documented transgressions, dark rumors abound of torture, brutality and degradation in China's arbitrary detention centers. Evidence has surfaced that Mao and his followers abused the science of psychiatry to their own political ends, declaring thousands of people mentally ill, thereby discrediting them. (Statistics hint that this practice continues to this day, especially in the persecution of practitioners of Falun Gong, which the CPC has branded undesirable.)

Besides all that, we have the official Chinese policy of refusing to acknowledge North Korean runaways as political refugees. Instead, China calls them "economic migrants," captures them and deports them back to North Korea, where, as we all know, they face separation, torture, "reeducation," forced labor and execution.

And speaking of North Korea, let's not forget that China has abetted the existence of that oppressive regime with food and electricity for nigh-on 60 years now. I have a bit of a problem with that as well. For all I know, Chinese soldiers might have killed some of my grandfather's best buddies back during the Korean War, too. So I'm a little ticked off at the country on my granddad's behalf, silly as that sounds.

And do I even need to mention Tibet?

Not my photo.

I don't like any of this. No way, no how.

What really sticks in my craw is that China does (or allegedly does) all of this stuff even after signing UN-sanctioned agreements saying that it won't do it. China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but never ratified it. So they just do whatever they please. Hell's donkeys.

In a nutshell, my preconceived notion of China is this: it's a country, a big country, with a huge population and a long and storied history, which in the 20th century had some tremendous political and societal upheavals, during which a rather unscrupulous man came to power, espousing communism and imposing his vision upon the country and its people with varying degrees of success. What we have now is a country used to be doing told what to do, which is really too big to regulate, whose citizens are finally starting to get fed up thanks to the unstoppable influx of Western technology (and with it, ideology), and whose ruling party has all but abandoned the proper pursuit of dogmatic communism in favor of a corrupt regime based on absolute power, suppression of dissent, a single-party state, and strict regulation of economics, society and human life, thereby blighting a nation and its sovereign dignity.

The Temple of Heaven, one of the things on my Beijing to-do list. From Wikimedia Commons.

So, yeah. I'll visit their country. I'll peruse their monuments. I'll stand in their square. I'll tour their palaces. I'll eat their nibbles. I'll breathe their air and sleep in their beds and watch them go about their lives. But that doesn't mean I have to like the way they run their business.

We'll see how much this trip changes my mind.

an escalating situation

I've never written much about the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on this blog. This is the first time I've ever tagged a post with "North Korea," in fact. I'm reading Barbara Demick's book Nothing to Envy, which follows the lives of six North Korean citizens through the famine of the 1990s; I was probably going to scribble a bit about that at some point. But now that the rhetoric and posturing and threats are escalating, I feel like I should tell you what's on my mind. Just in case I get blown away in the next 48 hours.

As you may have heard, things are getting out of hand over here. The situation here is tenser than I've ever seen in my 26 months of living in South Korea. Kim Jong-un has torn up the armistice, effectively putting the Koreas back into a state of open warfare; disconnected the hotlines between the two nations; mobilized his military and beefed up artillery and infantry forces along the border; refused entry to South Korean workers at the jointly-run industrial complex inside the DMZ; and leveled a constant stream of invectives and hostilities against South Korea, the U.S.A. and their allies.

In its latest move, Pyongyang has gone so far as to threaten a nuclear strike against the United States. Stating that its military has been cleared to use "smaller, lighter, and more diversified" nuclear weapons, the rogue nation declared that war could break out "today or tomorrow."

Although Al Jazeera reports that Korea has threatened the U.S. specifically, by proxy those threats refer to South Korea as well. Expert analysts believe that, despite all the bluster, the D.P.R.K. does not have the capability to deliver a missile to an American territory in the Pacific, be it Guam or Hawaii. (The U.S. recently announced its intention to place a missile defense system on Guam, which might be what's got Pyongyang's panties in a twist.)

If that's true, then the only places that North Korea can hit are South Korea or Japan. Japan would be an unwise choice, as it's a key U.S. ally and bombing it would bring on the wrath of the sleeping giant. South Korea is no less an important friend of the United States, but as we've seen with the Cheonan disaster and the Yeonpyeong Island incident, South Korea's not shy about poking its neighbor with a big stick. The attack that North Korea has threatened may come "today or tomorrow" might be leveled at Seoul or somewhere close by.

I don't know about you, but this has got me rather worried. I'm not one to panic easily, but things are different now than they were when I lived in Korea before. This time I'm in Seoul, just in case you missed my last six posts. I'm at ground zero, so to speak. The front lines. I've read that an estimated one million missiles will fall upon this city if war ever breaks out. And it's not just me anymore, either: Miss H is here, and our black cat Charlie. Whatever befalls me befalls them as well, good or ill. That would wrack anybody's nerves. Mine are fraying a smidgen.

On the ground, the situation is calm. Everyone here is going about their lives as usual. Blah, blah, blah, we've seen it all before. And I have to admit, I'm pretty blasé about North Korea now, having lived on the peninsula for almost two and a half years without incident.

So why am I so worried? Well, a couple of reasons. First of all, North Korea usually doesn't close the jointly-run Gaeseong Industrial Region. It's a source of hard currency for the regime and closing it hampers its floundering economy. Even when Seoul and Pyongyang are trading rhetorical blows, the complex stays open. The fact that it's closed to South Koreans now is...disturbing, to say the least.

Second, while I've seen heated exchanges between the two nations before, this most recent one is quite a bit more vitriolic than usual. The barrage of threats from the North has lasted longer and been more vehement than any I've previously witnessed (well, since the death of Kim Jong-il, anyway).

And that brings me to my final point: there's been a recent regime change. Kim Jong-un is running the country now, and he may feel that he's got something to prove. His grandfather and his dad kept the United Nations and the U.S. on their toes for 60 years; now it's Kim the Third's turn. He may have a chip on his shoulder. Perhaps he's looking for ways to make his mark, and has decided that a smoking crater in the center of downtown Seoul is just the way to do it. He may even be foolish or naïve enough to assume that he'll get away with it.

So here I am—with my loved ones—at the epicenter of six decades of stewing resentment and barely-controlled aggression.

What's new with you lately?