Every night from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., it's Korea Time.
For two hours, my mother's neighborhood TV station broadcasts programming from the homeland, and despite the array of recording technologies available to her, my mother has to see it live. That's why when I invited her last month to stay with me for a couple of days while my wife was out of town, her first question to me was, "Do you get the KBS channel at your house?"
We do. So when the clock struck eight that evening, we were sitting on the couch, waiting for the shows to begin. I was on my laptop, checking out the latest celebrity sadness via PerezHilton and TMZ, when I heard the Celine Dion song, "My Heart Will Go on." Which was strange because the last time I checked, we were watching Korean programming. I unglued my eyes from the photo of a lost, drunken celebrity-of-the-week to glance at the TV screen.
Standing at the tippy-top of a stage that looked like a multi-layered wedding cake, a Korean woman as skinny as Celine herself was belting out the tune. She even did the arm motions, up high, down low, reaching out as the veins in her neck popped out.
She sang in English, which made sense because the original song is in English. But what didn't make sense to me was that this was a program from Korea, for Koreans. After that song, she sang another one that I didn't recognize, but it, too, was entirely in English.
"What the hell is going on here?" I asked my mother.
"This is what people are listening to nowadays," she said. "These English songs."
It's no big news that American things are cool back in the homeland. That was the way it was when I was a kid living in Seoul in the early '80s, and now with the advent of the Internet, media from the States proliferates like never before. So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was.
Later that night, I found the Korean popular music chart for October 2007. The Top 10 artists had names like Eru, Brown-Eyed Soul, FT Island, See Ya, SG Wannabe, and Jo PD. Those are not translated equivalents.  That's what they're called in Korea, by their English names, though Koreans might have trouble enunciating sounds that don't even exist in the language. For example, FT would sound like "ae-poo-tee." Poo indeed.
For much of Korean history, we've been the cultural receivers, whether from forcible occupation by China or Japan, or voluntarily, as is the case now, by the United States. It's a fact I don't like to admit because it screws with my sense of identity.
The truth is, I've always felt that Korea was the forgotten little brother in the family of East Asian countries. Even in the most remote cities, there are Chinese restaurants, and when anyone thinks of martial arts, kung fu is the default. Japan has sushi and kimonos and anime and Nintendo - and the list goes on and on. For a little island country, it is a treasure trove of distinctiveness.
So what do we have in Korea that's truly Korean? Kimchi and bulgogi, I suppose. Hyundai and Kia cars, too, but let's face it, they're just following the road that was paved by Honda and Toyota. We have some talented filmmakers in Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk, but I'm not sure if their works will ever be able to reach the lofty heights of Akira Kurosawa or Ang Lee.
One thing that is absolutely Korean is our language, Hangeul, which goes all the way back to 1443, when King Sejong the Great invented 14 consonants and six vowels and freed us from the shackles of the Chinese Hanja characters. Most linguists agree that Korean is a language isolate, which, according to Wikipedia, is "a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other living languages." In short, our language is completely and utterly unique. It owes nothing to the Chinese or the Japanese. It is as Korean as kimchi.
So to hear Koreans singing songs in English is, for me, depressing beyond words. Of course I'm not suggesting martial law against anything not Korean. All I want is for us to make some effort to keep our culture ours. Singing in our own language would be a start.
But perhaps I'm asking for too much, because this is what I found when I did some more late-night Googling of our across-the-Yellow-Sea neighbors. From the Land of the Rising Sun, seven of their top 10 musicians: Mr. Children, NEWS, BUMP OF CHICKEN, ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, GLAY, RIP SLYME, Hey! Say! JUMP. Over in China, from their top 10: Jason Chan, Gary Chaw, Vincy Chan, Joey Yung, Justin Lo, Kelvin Kawn.
Is this the price we pay for globalization, the fusion of cultures, languages melding into one other? It's sad and inevitable, but I suppose my heart will go on.