All posts filed under: Personal

Things I find interesting unrelated to Korea

Finding Fletcher—Or Losing Her Audience? From Sapphic Icon to the Queerbaiting/Biphobia Divide

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For longtime subscribers to Real Koreans, hello! It’s Emily—it’s been a while. As you may know, I started this blog to write about things I was passionate about, which was mainly feminism, youth rights, and LGBT community updates in South Korea. I’ve stopped writing for a while, because I was unsure what I had to say about Korea, having moved away in 2014.In my 11th year abroad, I finally know what I have to say, which is the same as back then: writing about things I care about, which will include Korea, but also many other topics, like analysing my favourite arts & culture scenes (like today), how to deal with anti-Asian racism in Europe, and my experiences working in global nonprofits. The sapphic Internet has been up in flames the past three days over a new release from FLETCHER, in which the lesbian icon confesses to being in love with a man. While she last alluded to seeing someone in an interview June last year, there was no build-up to this major pivot in …

My first racist ‘attack’ in Europe and what I learned from it

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Image source: Daum Blog Caption: Choose the wrong option. (the artist is mocking the idea of racism by using a multiple-choice question format popular in Korean education) Last Friday, I was leaving a supermarket when a group of young, white, mostly male, Dutch people ran up to me, took a photo of me, then ran away laughing. I froze, ran into MediaMarkt, the electronics store next door, which I was headed to originally, and stayed there for a good fifteen minutes before I went outside, looked around and made sure they were gone, got on my bike and pedaled back home. I asked myself if what had happened had really just happened. Yes. I saw the flash. I heard them laugh. I was sure. Back home, I sat down and wrote an angry and descriptive post along the lines of: “To the white, male, Dutch youth who just took a picture of me in front of the supermarket on this street, go fuck yourselves, go get cancer, go crash into a train. Same to the people who have …