Yes, yes. To start with, this is a book called Digilog, written by Professor Lee O-young. I think the Eastern books I’m going to introduce from here on started with questions like these: What is Korean culture? I’m Korean, but I wasn’t sure what my roots were as a Korean. The music we listen to now and all the things we use in our everyday lives are a mixture of Western influences and various other things. As I began exploring what our true roots were, I started reading a lot of books, and Lee O-young wrote quite a lot of books like that, too. Digilog is a combination of the words digital and analog. The book presents a paradigm in which, through the power of combining A and B to create something new, we can mix digital and analog very well—mix them well—and make them our own. What I found particularly striking here was a feature of Korean culture: its bibimbap-like quality. “On closer inspection, from sinseollo to popular dishes like bibimbap and steamed egg, and even the kimbap commonly eaten today, one learns that Korean food regards harmony among the five cardinal colors as a virtue. The development of seasonings and garnishes is one reason for this. We can also see directly, at the table set for ancestral rites, that Korean food acts as a medium for communicating with the universe.” There are a lot of really grand metaphors, so they make you feel quite uplifted. Eating food in these five cardinal colors is practically the same as taking the universe into your body. That is what is Korean. I’m just flipping through it briefly now, but it seems to be laid out so it’s easy to read. Yes, the author uses a lot of food metaphors: “Eat information. Eat. Food is a medium. What you eat is what stays with you. Koreans eat anything”—they eat tteokguk, too. As I started thinking, “Ah, is this what our roots are?” I think I got a lot of clues.
