Hangul: The Korean War Treaty Negotiation Game Created by Ruth Paget

Hangul:  The Korean Treaty Negotiation Game Created by Ruth Paget

Historical Background:

The conflict in the Korean Peninsula began on June 25, 1950 with fighting ending on July 27, 1953.

No treaty was written or signed to end this war with the result that North and South Korea today are divided with a demilitarized zone (DMZ) at roughly what is the 38^th parallel.

North Korean troops are stationed on one side of the DMZ and South Korean and American troops are stationed on the other; the Korean War has never been settled and is still on.

Game Objective:

Write a treaty ending the Korean War that provides the Korean people with:

-food

-clothing

-shelter

-energy resources for heat and cooling

-reunification of families

-self-determination

Level 1: Identify Parties Who Participated in the initial Conflict and Entered Into it through Time

-Use encyclopedias or the online CIA Factbook to determine who started the war and for what reason

-Identify all parties who have contributed to tensions in this region

-Resources you might consult include World Book Encyclopedia, Britannica, and infoplease.com for access to college-level encyclopedias

Level 2: Treaty Language Considerations

-Look up information on the Korean alphabet called hangul

-Hangul has diverged in format between North and South Korea.  How does this situation affect drafting a treaty?

Level 3:  Food Insufficiency Concerns

North Korea experienced famine from 1994 – 1998.

-How does North Korea refer to this period of famine and why?

-Identify what caused famine.  What foods in particular might have been affected?

-Is North Korea self-sufficient in food even with good harvests?

-Could food insufficiency affect North Korea’s foreign policy?

Level 4: Gain Knowledge of Korean Food

Read books about Korean food and think about self-sufficiency versus imports:

-Cook Korean!  A Comic Book with Recipes by Robin Ha

-Everyday Korean by Kim Sunié

-Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Hepinstall

-Korean BBQ: Master your Grill in Seven Sauces by Bill Kim

-Korean Food Made Simple by Judy Joo

-Korean Home Cooking: Classic and Modern Recipes by Sohui Kim

-Koreatown: A Cookbook by Deuki Hong

-Maangchi’s Big Book of Korean Cooking from Everyday Meals to Celebration Cuisine by Maangchi

-Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking: Authentic Dishes for the Home Cook by Maangchi

-Seoul Food Korean Cookbook: Korean Food from Kimchi and Bimibap to Fried Chicken and Bingsoo by Naomi Imatome-Yun

-Vegetarian Dishes from my Korean Home by Shin Kim

Level 5: Public Health Issues

-What sanitation systems are in place where the treaty might be negotiated and signed?

-What are medical facilities like?  Are there medical supplies readily available?

-What are hotels like?  Are recycling systems in place to help prevent the spread of disease?

-What rodent control systems are in place.

Treaty negotiators do not want to become sick from bad food or rapid spread of disease.  They also need rest.

Level 6: Treaty Negotiation Procedural Considerations

-What is the Korean War called by the various parties who have participated in it?

-Who would legally represent these countries in negotiation?

-What shape of table would negotiators have?  This was a consideration for signing the treaty to end the Vietnam War.

-What catering considerations have to be taken into account?  North and South Koreans might want their own caterers even though they eat the same food.

-How would interpretation be set up?

-How would translation be set up?

-How would transportation be set up?

Level 7: Read A.H. Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation

-Determine what North and South Koreans need in terms of food, clothing, and shelter.  Providing for people might make acceptance of treaties easier.

-Look at both of these regions for climate concerns.

-Research Korean domestic architecture and public transit systems to see if they meet current housing and transportation needs?  How will demographic growth affect these two areas?

Level 8:  Read Getting Past No: Negotiation in Difficult Situations by William Ury

-Use the framework in this book from the Harvard Negotiation Project to identify obstacles to the peace process in the Korean Peninsula

Level 9: Read Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury

Use this book as a framework from the Harvard Negotiation Project to identify needs that must be met and to brainstorm various ways of meeting them

Level 10: Treaty Conclusion Meal

Try cooking a Korean meal at home or go to a Korean restaurant and sample some of the following items:

-pan chan: assorted vegetable appetizers that can be sour or savory

-dak gu yi: grilled chicken with sauce

-bul go gi: grilled beef with sauce

-on ji gu bok um: stir-fry squid with vegetables

-Korean sushi

-kalbi: ribs with sauce

-barley tea

Notes:

-Where does beef come from in Korea?  Who owns this region?  How did the beef get introduced there or is it indigenous to the territory?

-Learn how to use Korean chopsticks

Game on and congratulations to Parasite for winning Best Picture!

Hangul Created by Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Introducing Korean Food to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Introducing Korean Food to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Once my family had been to Orient Express in Seaside (California) and liked the barbecued beef called bulgogi and the array of little dishes called pan ch’an of sour vegetables flavored with sesame oil, I wanted to take my daughter Florence out for some more Korean food as an early dinner meal after picking her up from school.

My husband worked late hours at the time, so I treated early dinners with Florence as a cultural field trip when we went to ethnic restaurants.

I did some more background reading on Korean cuisine and called my editor at The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000).

I asked my editor, if I could review the Hidden Korea Restaurant in Marina to introduce Monterey County residents to some other restaurants that serve Korean foods in the County.

The editor agreed to let me review the restaurant for that reason.  My review follows:

Hidden Korea: Marina’s New Korea Restaurant is off the Beaten Path, but Worth a Few Wrong Turns

The New Korea Restaurant in Marina is tough to find.  But, its elusive location has not kept customers away for the past thirty years.  Word-of-mouth brings in most diners.

My husband’s Korean colleagues recommended it.  I immediately liked the place when I walked in and saw the wood tables and Korean script poetry on the walls.

We started our meal with what I dubbed a Korean pizza: the haemul pajon pancake, containing scallions and seafood.  The rice flour used to make haemul pajon gives it a chewy texture.

Sesame oil and soy sauce give the pancake a savory taste that accents the seafood flavors.

Golden crust covered in the haemul pajon , which was cut into squares for easy dipping in soy sauce.  I thought the Korean pancake was delicious.  Like pizza, this dish can easily serve as a main meal for two.

My husband Laurent alternated eating between the two main dishes he ordered:

-maemal soondubu and bulgogi

-the spicy, dark red soup that no doubt gets its kick from the addition of gochu jang : Korean hot chili paste made from melted glutinous rice, soybean cake, red hot chili, and salt among other items.

Laurent stifled a few snuffles as he ate.  He said the soup was delicious as his cheeks turned pink.

He especially liked the pieces of tobu (Korean tofu).  Fresh mussels, octopus, and shrimp made up of the seafood contingent in his soup, but they were more like condiments than the main ingredient.

The thin filets of beef were very tender and some of the best that I have tasted on the Peninsula.  Every cook has his or her own secret for this dish, but the meat typically marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, rice wine, sesame oil, and sugar before getting broiled.

The meat comes steaming to the table on top of brown onions.

Korea is unique in East Asia for its beef consumption; the Chinese favor pork and the Japanese favor fish.  In the 13^th century, Ghenghis Khan’s Mongol hordes overran the Korean peninsula and brought their taste for beef with them.

Koreans are picky about their meat looking for all cuts to liven up to the reputation of the beef on Korea’s southern island of Cheju.

With their country surrounded by water on three sides, Koreans have always featured fish and seafood in their cuisine.  My main entrée, nakji bokum, octopus stir-fry, was one such dish.

This dish is a spicy mixture with lots of hot, green peppers, so the faint of spicy foods should beware.

Spicy gochu jang paste goes into the stir-fry along with chili powder, sesame oil, strips of red peppers, carrot ovals, and onions.

I loved the hot spicy taste with the chewy octopus.  Some of the thinner tentacles were a little tough, but that happens when you cook thin and thick pieces together.

My favorite part of a Korean meal is the mixture of side dishes called pan ch’an.  Usually they consist of pickled vegetables seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil called haemul.

I liked the kimchi, which left a nice tingle in my mouth as did the cucumber kimchi.  The cucumber kimchi had a slight fish flavor to it.  Several Korean cookbooks note that the oysters used to season kimchi dissolve, leaving only their briny tang.

The chilis and chili powder that seem so typically Korean have not always been part of Korean cooking.  Pickled cabbage has been around for 4,000 years.

Chilies, an American agricultural product, entered Korea beginning in 1592 according to food historian and cookbook author Copeland Marks in his book The Korean Kitchen: Classic Recipes from the Land of the Morning Sun.

It was during a seven-year war between Japan and Korea that Portuguese Catholic priests, who were accompanying the Japanese troops, took the chili seeds and/or plants to Korea.

The Portuguese got the plants from the Spanish, who had brought them from Central America to Europe.  Koreans adopted the chilies just like the Italians adopted the American tomato.

We drank Korean barley-corn tea with our meal, which is different from black and green teas.  The Koreans prefer decaffeinated brew made by boiling barley and corn and, then, straining the liquid.

The tea soothed our tongues from the spicy foods.  I felt like picking some up in a Korean grocery store after we left this restaurant that definitely deserves a detour.

End of Article

Since I wrote that article, a very good cookbook on Korean food has been published called Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin.

Before going to a Korean restaurant now, I would recommend reading that book, so you would know what is on the menu.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

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Flaming Table Korean Barbecue by Ruth Paget

Flaming Table Korean Barbecue by Ruth Paget


Korean Barbecue is a lot of food to eat.  It is expensive, but I still queried The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200, 000) to do an article on it.  They asked me to go and have fun with little Florence.

Nak Won Barbecue is no longer in business, but there is still a barbecue house where the old restaurant was.  They just have new owners.  They do not use the fire pit tables anymore to barbecue.  Barbecuing is done in the kitchen now.

My entire family learned a lot about Korean food on this review.  I looked at a Korean cookbook before going, but it is always fun to see what you are actually served in a restaurant.

I did this review in the Year 2000 and love it that Korean food is the big “in” thing now like Vietnamese and Thai food.  I consider this to be another use of my degree in Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations.  I knew my extended family members were joking, but they did ask me when I graduated, “What is that? How are you going to make a living?”

My family no longer laughs about that degree that I got in 1986.  With that thought in mind, my family and I went to Nak Wan Barbecue, looking to have a fun time.  I wrote the following restaurant review for the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 100, 000):

Nak for Barbecue

My daughter Florence loves Korean bulgogi, thin strips of grilled beef that have been marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, and sugar.  Nak Wan Barbecue in Marina, with its charcoal pit grill tables tops her list as the “most fun place in town” to sample this delicacy.

My entire family shares her opinion.  Usually when we go to Nak Wan, we all ordered bulgogi.  The night I reviewed the restaurant, we allowed our daughter to order bulgogi as usual.

My husband Laurent ordered dak bulgogi, a grilled chicken version of this dish, and I ordered dol sot bimimbap, a mixed rice, meat, and a vegetable dish.  We sat in the regular dining area.  You can still order a grilled dish there, but it will be prepared in the kitchen rather than at the table.

The owner opened his restaurant eight years ago, using recipes he learned from his mother: waiting for your food is half the fun at this family restaurant.

If you sit at the fire pit, the waitress will turn on the flames in the charcoal pit.  Then, she will add the charcoal, which turns out to be no ordinary charcoal.  This charcoal comes from oak trees.  The redolent smell of oak trees rises up from the table as customers warm their hands above it.  You could see all of this from the regular dining room area, too.

We picked up the pieces of bulgogi with our chopsticks.  Laurent has become handy with chopsticks, too.

Nak Wan’s bulgogi is tender and less sugary than what you get in other restaurants.  The beef gets tender by having length-wise and cross-wise incisions made into it before it marinates.  The oak charcoal contributes a woodsy flavor to the meat.  The chicken bulgogi that Laurent ordered was equally tender and juicy.

I have learned enough Korean to know that I have to order bibimbap in its “dol sot” version, if I want it to arrive piping hot instead of cold, which I find unappetizing, especially since I like it topped off with an over-easy egg.

The cookbook Traditional Korean Food published by the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism describes bibimbap as “steamed rice with assorted wild vegetables.”  The owner described it to me as “mountain food” with tamer vegetables at sea level.

Bean sprouts, thin slices of zucchini, carrot matchsticks, tofu rods, strips of bulgogi, and purplish, brown onion-tasting straws decorated the top of the rice, wagon-wheel-style at Nak Wan.

A fried egg reigned over it all.  The stone bowl arrived sizzling with the rice adhering to the bowl.  I mixed all these ingredients together with kochusan hot sauce made from red peppers and soy bean paste.  The spicy sauce was balanced out by the savory, onion-tasting stems and salty-sweet beef.

The sauce formed a crust with the rice on the bottom of the bowl that tasted like a salsa-flavored rice Krispie treat.  The bibimbap was such a tasty meal that I could only pick at the pan ch’an (side dishes) that I usually finish.

Pan ch’an surround you at almost all Korean formal meals.  They run the gamut from hot and spicy to salty, savory, and outright bland to counter the effects of the hot and spicy offerings.

The food you will always find in a selection of pan ch’an is cabbage kimchi, Korea’s national food.

“Kimchi is over 4,000 years old,” the owner said, “and each family has its own recipe for making it.”

To make kimchi, cabbage is sprinkled with salt and gets passed down like sauerkraut, but there the resemblance ends.

The Koreans add lots of red chili pepper, garlic, and secret family ingredients to kimchi.  I like Nak Wan’s crunchy cabbage kimchi as well as its cucumber version.

Rice cools off the tongue from both of these dishes, but I actually liked letting the temperature go up as I drank some of Korea’s thirst-quenching OB beer with the kimchi.

The only thing I really did not care for was the turnip soup, which I thought was bland.  They do have hot sauce you can add to make the food spicy.

Nak Wan Barbecue is well-known among Marina’s Korean community; all the seats around us were full of Koreans.  I knew that was a good advertisement for a good restaurant.

End of Article

Book Recommendation:

Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

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