"Korea: The Impossible Country" by Daniel Tudor (2012)

"Seoul Metro stations are full of advertisements showing happy multicultural families, and in particular, dutiful Southeast Asian wives who seemingly enjoy cooking Korean food and studying the Korean language for the benefit of their grateful husbands.  The aim of these poster campaigns is to increase social acceptance of such women, by portraying them as warm, somewhat subservient (and thus non-threatening), and as near Korean as possible.  In the long run, this will probably have to change..."

I've been to South Korea twice.  My first visit was in 2002, when I joined a guided tour of Seoul, the DMZ and Odaesan National Park.  My second visit was last summer, when I spent a couple days walking around Incheon with my family.

I was very unimpressed with South Korea the first time I visited.  In 2002 our super sketchy tour guides took us to some of the least interesting places and worst restaurants Seoul and nearby localities had to offer.  The weather, the food and the people were all rubbing me the wrong way, and remember being glad that the multi-day tour ended as briefly as it did.  I enjoyed Odaesan National Park, but that was, up until this year at least, my one good memory of South Korea.

2024 was a much better trip.  Last August we visited sans tour guides, checked ourselves into a homestay not far from the airport, and walked around the Unseo area, enjoying two meals before boarding our connecting flight to Taipei.  It was, aside from getting lost on our way to the homestay, a very good two days, and I left Korea thinking about returning next summer.

Hence my purchasing this book at the Incheon International Airport.  It was written by a British writer whose primary contributions to the West's understanding of South Korea consist of articles published in The Economist.  According a blurb on the back cover, he lived (or has lived) in Korea "for a number of years," where he also manages a brewing company located in Seoul.  His Wikipedia page only details his exploits up to this point, so I can only assume this information remains current.

His account of Korean history, culture, economy and related topics is what you'd expect from a book of this type.  It's written for a Western audience, it refrains from saying anything too controversial, and it's been fact-checked thoroughly.  There are some typos in the text that really shouldn't be there, but overall it seems, to me at least, a solid guide to a country that I'm not that familiar with.

From my perspective as an American who's been living in Taiwan for over 24 years now, it's unfortunate that the author overlooks Taiwan in many of his discussions of how South Korea compares to other countries and cultures across the globe.  As fellow "tigers" South Korea and Taiwan have had very similar histories, and it is often this very similarity that puts them at odds in economic terms.

All of the above said, this book has increased my resolve to revisit South Korea next summer.  I think there's more to South Korea than what meets the eye, and the less obvious aspects of this country merit further exploration.

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"To Rule the Waves" by Bruce D. Jones (2021)

"Even assuming that the US Navy's presence in the Near Seas is only to defend the Law of the Sea Convention (and the US no longer even really maintains that stance), these "freedom of navigation operations put US warships in a position to subsequently impede China's military options in the Taiwan Strait, and across the South and East China Seas.  And so, from the late 1990s onward, China focused its energy and effort on building out its capacity to push back, to defend its interests in the Near Seas, and frustrate or limit USN freedom within those waters."

Bruce D. Jones works at the Brookings Institution.  He has also served as advisor to the World Bank.  Aside from To Rule the Waves he's written one other book on his own, 2014's Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers and the Tension between Rivalry and Restraint.

To Rule the Waves, which isn't even included in the author's Wikipedia entry, outlines how various world powers attempt to control the seas, both along their own coastlines and in an international context.  It places issues such as international shipping, territorial disputes and oceanography in the context of climate change, and does so in a well-researched manner that doesn't fall too heavily on one side or the other.

After a short introductory section the author divides his study into three parts, these being a) the ports, routes and companies most relevant to international shipping, b) piracy and international disputes involving the demarcation of national vs. international waters, and c) the study of oceanography in the context of climate change, and how our understanding(s) of climate change plays into all of the topics covered up to that point.

It is, all in all, a very balanced account of both how the sea is relevant to our daily lives and how this same sea continues to shape our future.  Everything from Maersk to the Aegis radar system is discussed, and the author seems especially well-informed with regard to the US Navy and its role in world trade.

I have a few complaints, however, which hopefully the author has already anticipated and which he will address in some future, still more comprehensive book.  

My first complaint is the lack of detail with regard to China's government, its military, and most specifically its navy.  The workings of the US Navy take up a lot of space in this book, and a lack of detail with regard to China's side of the equation is particularly glaring.  I realize that China's government and military aren't as transparent as their US equivalents, but this book often returns to a contest between the US and China for control of the seas, and more information on China's side of this contest  would have been helpful.

My second complaint is the page-long description of Taiwan's history.  This description omits a few important things, and leads one to believe that China has more claims on the island than it actually does.  Dates of immigration, Taiwan's loss of UN membership, and the details of various treaties are all relevant to larger discussions of tensions in the South China Sea.

My third and last complaint is the exclusion of the fishing industry from this book.  Fisheries are discussed in passing, but the fishing fleets of the various world powers, especially those operating in the South China Sea, should have been explored to some extent.  "The flag follows trade?"  What about "trade follows fish?"  Disputes over fisheries inform several disagreements between nations, and including some of these disputes would have rounded out some of the sections nicely.

Yet aside from these complaints I still think that To Rule the Waves is a good book, and moreover a book well worth reading.  If, like me, you live in East Asia, you'll find a renewed understanding of many essential topics in its pages, alongside some trivia you may not have come across before.

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"Liberal Fascism" by Johan Goldberg (2008)

"Yet selective quotations and sweeping generalizations..."

I should probably start by saying that I'm not a person who enjoys talking about politics.  When people start in with all their "right-wing" and "left-wing" and "liberals" and "conservatives" my thoughts tend to journey elsewhere, to a magical world of wonder where people (and cute, talking animals) don't pepper their speech with quite so many "isms."

So by my own admission I'm not quite prepared to discuss "Liberal Fascism" without sounding completely ignorant, completely apathetic, or both.  I've never found politics that interesting, and I have never seen the point of political parties.  I tend to agree with George Washington, who intimated that political parties were harmful to any democracy.

In other words: "A (insert political affiliation here) is anyone who disagrees with me, or anyone I don't like, and a (insert opposing political affiliation here) is anyone who agrees with me, or anyone I like."  This pretty much sums up what I get out of most political discussions.

So in this book, "Liberal Fascism," author Jonah Goldberg claims that fascism originated with liberals in several countries, and is in no way the creation of right-leaning conservatives.  OK, I'll buy that...  I guess.  He goes on to trace the origins of fascism, and also the progress of fascist ideas in American political history.  He pinpoints the Wilson administration in particular, though of course he finds evidence of fascist policies in the democratic administrations that followed it.

The author is a right-wing, conservative type of guy, and he's tired of being labeled a fascist by no-good liberals who don't know their own political history.  I think that such frustration is understandable, but his arguments are a bit thin, and a bit too easily proven.  In the end that's the problem with fascism: it's so ill-defined that once you see it in one place, you start seeing in everywhere.

Which, in a way, points out another weakness in his argument.  If Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, and Clinton were such rampant fascists, ready to trample the Constitution for the sake of "progress," what were the so-called conservatives doing during their administrations?  Were they all so steadfast in their defense of individual freedoms?  Were they all so forthright?  

I have trouble believing that the abuses of individual rights perpetrated from the 20s onward were the responsibility of liberals alone, and I think that any attempt to find something as badly defined as "fascism" in previous Republican administrations might be equally successful.  I think, in other words, that it might be more to the point to say that fascism is a human phenomenon, irrespective of political affiliation.

But hey, what do I know?  I barely know my reactionaries from my socialists.  I (mistakenly) thought that Hitler was just a self-obsessed, exploitative racist, and not someone who failed to understand fascism as Mussolini practiced it.  I suppose I find it more instructive to trace the "mistakes of history" back to qualities that exist within every individual and every group, and not back to one particular political group that I don't like.

This, to me, is the most disappointing thing about "Liberal Fascism," in that it fails to draw a more meaningful lesson from the Holocaust.  Instead of realizing that yes, such a thing can happen anywhere, among any sorts of people, the author chooses to paint the liberals with that brush, whatever a liberal might happen to be. 

"Liberal Fascism" might be a new kind of name-calling, but it's still just name-calling, and as such it fails to enlighten its intended audience.  Like many ongoing political discussions, its premise revolves around familiar "Us vs. Them" type arguments, which are, incidentally, one of the signs by which fascism is often known.