It’s the day of the Korean presidential election. The nation is at a crossroads, choosing who will lead it for the next 5 years. Korean voters must weigh important issues of policy, ideology, and personal character when make their decision. But we don’t, so instead of talking about Korea-USA-Japan relations or the Daejang-dong scandal, let’s take a look at the drama queens who the candidates married.
Kim Hyekung
We start out with the 55-year old wife of the left-wing candidate. There’s really not much to say here. She’s just your typical corrupt politician’s wife. When her husband was mayor of a major city she had a few members of his staff assigned to her as full-time personal servants. Among other favors, they took a government credit card and did all of her shopping for her, allegedly spending as much as $100,000. And when she wanted some kind of girlpills but didn’t want the prescription to be in her name, she had one of these servants get a prescription for it.
Kim Keonhee
There’s nothing typical about this 49-year old girlboss who married the candidate for the right-wing party. She’s been stirring up a typhoon of drama and seething.
The first big scandal to hit was over her slightly embellishing her resume. In Korea that generates an incredible amount of seething compared to just straight-up stealing money, so it became a huge campaign issue. She publically apologized, but this only raised more questions. Was she really being sincere, or was she wearing too much makeup to truly feel remorse?
What do you think? Is this bow sincere enough?
Shamans
As the bitterly-fought campaign continues, rumors swirl that our second Ms. Kim is quite fond of shamans. What is a shaman in the Korean context? There are fortune tellers who follow traditions dating back many centuries to before the arrival of foreign religions. Think of it kind of like if European pagans actually still existed. Kim seems to be surrounded by a lot of people who follow those ancient traditions mixed in with Daoism, Buddhism, and just plain old nonsense.
If you don’t dress like this, you ain’t reading my fortune.
The rumors really blow up when her husband is seen at a debate with the Chinese character for king (王) written on his palm. He insists that one of his fans just wrote it on him because he was doing some real king shit. It’s unclear if he also handed him a crown and said “you dropped this”. The public was skeptical of this explanation and assumed it was some kind of good luck charm.
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Seems perfectly normal.
Attention was drawn to various figures hanging around the campaign, like some guy known as Jeon who was caught on video acting like he was part of the staff. The excuse this time was that he’s a Buddhist monk so there’s nothing strange going on, but the Buddhists disavowed any knowledge of him. Some weirdo youtube guru also claims to be mentoring the candidate.
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Master Cheongong looks like a level-headed guy.
Phone Conversations
The drama that had been building up for months explodes when the phone conversations come out. Our heroine Kim had spent several hours on the phone discussing the most sensitive details or her life and her husband’s campaign with a left-wing youtuber, who of course recorded all of it and dumped it all online when it would be most damaging. Why would someone willingly reveal so much to the opposition during a presidential campaign? I guess that’s just how much women like to talk about themselves?
It’s clear from these recordings that the rumors about shamans are well-founded. Kim insists that she doesn’t actually like shamans, she prefers pondering the meaning of life with Daoist and Buddhist cranks and getting her fortune telling from them. For example, she is already planning to move the guest room at the presidential residence because a Daoist master told her it has bad feng shui. More disturbingly, she reveals that she and her husband have made many crucial decisions in their lives and careers based on hocus pocus. It’s even what brought the two together. They both share a gift for clairvoyance. More than just a power couple, they’re a supernatural power couple!
Artist’s rendition of what Kim may look like after she has leveled up her power a bit more.
The phone call provides a lot of other bonus drama, most notably her explaining that the right-wing party isn’t getting metooed nearly as hard as the left because they do a better job of paying off their accusers.
The Pettiest Issues
Despite all this, my favorite drama about her is the pettiest kind. The Korean left can be quite socially conservative, especially when they’re trying to tear down a woman they hate. There’s been a number of accusations about her being too uppity and failing her responsibilities as a good housewife.
A top politician in the opposing party Mr. Song claimed that if her husband was elected, she would be secretly in control of him. The evidence? She speaks to him using an informal mode of speech. This generated some controversy when her defenders pointed out that women now don’t speak to their husbands in a formal tone because they’re not living in medieval times, and maybe Song was being really weird and MGTOWy. Song then backpedaled and claimed that he wasn’t being sexist, and in fact he speaks formally to his wife because she’s a couple years older than him, which just sounds even weirder.
They throw out everything they always say about women. She might have worked at a hostess bar when she was young. She admits to having had plastic surgery, an utterly shocking thing for a Korean woman to do. And finally we get to her greatest sin of all. When she moves into the presidential residence there will only be the pitter patter of 4 cats’ paws because Kim is childless.
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Always love your effortposts
I don't know what's going on in Korea but I thought you BTFO'd the dictator's daughter/cultist President a few years ago. Is this cult an offshoot of that or is it another "muh REAL paganism" thing?
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There's lots of cults and people doing the old asian wise man scam, I guess what we'd call a "life coach" in English. The one who had power over the former president was a lot like the ones associated with Kim, but they aren't the same people.
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And I thought 90s Russia was bad in promoting schizo cults. At least none of them got even close to power.
Gonna make some home-made kimchi (suprisingly similarly made to Russian sour cabbage but with soy paste and chilis) fried rice in your honor tomorrow. I don't know what Marsey to use so I guess I'll be racist so sorry
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Nice. I haven't ever made kimchi but I've seen an actual Korean (not trans-Korean like me) making giant batches of it in big plastic tubs. I want to do that someday. I recall hearing a similar story from someone in Iran. I guess a lot of cultures have come up with similar ideas about what to do with cabbage.
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I've been doing that in these 1-liter glass jars and 5-liter plastic containers since 2018 using Maangchi's recipe. Sauerkraut is already popular in Russian cuisine but I wanted something more flavorful and spicy than the so-called "Korean-style carrots" kimchi replacements developed in the late 80s.
Kimchi unironically might be my favorite vegetable dish only rivaled by roasted/fried Brussels sprouts (and they suck when overcooked).
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Good idea. I gotta try this sometime. Looks like a lot of work, but something I could do.
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