On a Personal Note…
by James Na ~ December 28th, 2009. Filed under: Air Koryo.First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to Richardson and to the readers of the blog.
My wife and I recently received a Christmas gift of sorts from my wife’s, shall we say, less than mature brother. He travels frequently to Asia and lived in Japan for many years (he is one of these Midwesterners who saw the TV mini-series Shogun one time too many and took off for Asia as soon as he graduated from college).
His gift to us was an Air Koryo t-shirt. That’s right — a t-shirt from the national airline of North Korea.
I have known my BIL for at least 15 years. During that time I have marveled at his distressing inability to grow up and assume responsibilities of a grown man, but this “gift,” which I am pretty sure was some sort of an attempt of a joke, just stunned me. I hate to engage in what one pundit calls reductio ad hitlerum, but this is rather like handing a Jew a Luftwaffe shirt from the Wehrmacht era as a Hannukah gift.
Yes, I know Air Koryo is the nominally civil aviation arm of North Korea. It is nonetheless an arm of the reviled North Korean regime — any dollar spent on it is a dollar contributed to this loathsome monstrosity, which also happened to have killed and abducted my own family members, the fate of some of whom is unknown even today.
I suppose growing up in a culture, in which wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt is “kinda cool,” this might be considered some sort of an eclectic gift. I did not and found it in very bad taste to say the least.
I am for the moment at a loss as to what to do with this item. Throw it in a trash? Burn it? Maybe I will keep it in a special place until I see my brother-in-law, at which point I might drop him with an elbow to his face, put a carotid choke (what Brazilians call mata leon) on him and then stuff his gasping mouth with the said t-shirt. That might make me feel much better about this gift — although I might be in the dog house with my in-laws for about 20 years.
December 29th, 2009 at 8:48 am
Man lighten up! It’s not like he gave you the shrunken head of a political dissident.
December 30th, 2009 at 10:08 am
As for the brother-in-law, I’d come up with some sort of clever vengeance gift next Christmas.
As for the shirt itself, I’d hawk it on E-Bay.
January 1st, 2010 at 6:24 pm
I do NOT wish to derive one cent from it.
January 2nd, 2010 at 4:40 am
Throw it away. Nothing else you can with offensive garbage.
And let him know how you about it. Let him know, powerfully, angrily, what that shirt symbolizes, and why you didn’t find it humurous or cute or whatever he was aiming at.
January 3rd, 2010 at 5:07 pm
[...] Someone was quite unhappy with their Christmas present. [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 2:50 am
Hmmm…. interesting…. however…..
lighten up, man.
Unless your brother-in-law got the damn thing from inside DPRK or the state-run store located in Sino-DPRK border region, the shirt’s probably a cheaply made Chinese “knock off” anyway…. which means the money went to some Chinese guy looking to make a fast buck from Western tourists to make ends meet…. no danger of the money ever going back to the regime.
January 13th, 2010 at 5:15 am
I think you should donate this T-shirt to Richardson. He loved to collect something like this.
January 14th, 2010 at 3:24 am
i guess i agree with Saber, but if you are unhappy with it, don’t throw it out or burn it, what the hell does that achieve? no, hawk it on e-bay and donate the proceeds. we can but hope it fetches more than the government of North Korea got for selling it, if sell it they did.
there are plenty of NK human rights NGOs out there who’d be happy to get $20 off you, i know that much.
January 30th, 2010 at 6:16 pm
Love the blog, I’ve been following it for quite some time.
However if I were you, I’d delete this post.
-You’ve overreacted to a fairly innocuous gag gift to put it mildly.
-Your comparison of Air Koryo to the Luftwaffe is unfortunate and offensive; Lufthansa would have been the correct comparison to Air Koryo, and he did not give you KPAF t-shirt.
-Using a blog dedicated to such serious issues, as a forum to publically call your brother-in-law names and cast aspersions on his character over a silly little gag gift; denigrates the rest of the so far excellent content.
If I were you, I would delete this post, shove the t-shirt in a drawer somewhere and reappraise the issue in about six months with a cooler head. Then make your decision.
February 1st, 2010 at 12:50 pm
That’s interesting. My brother-in-law contributing to an arm of an evil, monstrous regime for some sort of a twisted gag is “innocuous” and I apparently “overreacted” to it. But my drawing a parallel to the Nazis is “unfortunate” and “offensive.”
Hmmm.
Well, point taken on one thing. Air Koryo is probably more like the Lufthansa of the 30’s (a quasi-military arm of Nazi Germany that nominally performed a civil function). But Air Koryo is no more a simple airliner than North Korean state-owned banks are simple banks.
Nonetheless, the comparison wasn’t so much about who is more evil or any nonesense like that (I don’t particularly care to engage in quantification of evil). Just as giving Nazi paraphernalia to someone who is Jewish will likely enrage, certainly offend that person, especially if he suffered loss of family at Nazi hands, handing me — whose family was abducted and perished at the hands of the North Korean regime — a North Korean government paraphernalia is enraging. That’s it.
I find it bizzarre that you would find it “unfortunate and offensive.” I would certainly like to know the reasoning behind that statement.
As for the content of this blog, the final arbiter on that is Richardson who is the owner and editor of the blog. But I think I would not be out of bounds to say that while much of the blog is about substantive policy issues regarding North Korea and the surrounding region, posts do occasionally veer into the odd, the humorous, the personal and even, very rarely, the angry. After all, it is a blog.