Schoolgirl Howl Machines
As it is for expatriates everywhere, after you recover from the initial 'stop poking at my ego-balloon' sensitivity of the first few culture-shocked months of living in a new and different country, there are a thousand little things you begin to take in stride, things that friends or family would pick up on instantly if they were to come and visit.
One of these, one you'll notice immediately if you spend any time watching one of the many evening variety shows on Korean TV (all of the major networks stream on the net live or on demand, by the way, if you're curious and have the bandwidth : the big three : MBC, KBS, SBS. Even without being able to read Korean, you should be able to find the streams pretty easily...) is what I've called the 'schoolgirl howl'.
This is a sound I cannot for the life of me reproduce. I've tried. It is reminiscent of the kind of pre-orgasmic squeals that teenyboppers on those black-and-white newsreels in the early 60's would emit when faced with the Beatles, or Elvis, and I suppose, in a deliberately more chaste fashion, that's what it's modelled on. It sounds a bit like a very high-pitched 'ooo-WOOOO-OOoo!', done chorally. The thing is, though, that it's delivered with clockwork regularity every 10 or 15 seconds, when anyone does or says anything even remotely interesting. And even when they don't -- a chef is brought into the studio to prepare some normal, everyday food, and the guests on stage crowd around the table to sample his creation. One of them dips his spoon, tastes: the schoolgirl howl.
"Oh my goodness I am uncontrollably excited in a non-sexual fashion by the fact that that dog just jumped through a hoop!" is the message. It's ritualistic, of course. It's contrived in the same way that the applause light and audience wranglers elicit carefully-timed reactions from the bleachers on David Letterman. But the artificiality of controlled, note-perfect choral ululation, a simulation of wild abandon, raised at the most banal of actions in the studio, is enough to raise hackles if you pay attention to it, perhaps because it's so unfamiliar to the western viewer.
To add an extra layer of weirdness, theschoolgirl howl is also omnipresent on prerecorded segments. It would seem that Korea has invented, parallel to the sitcom laughtrack machines in the West, a Schoolgirl Howl Machine. I imagine the engineer in the booth, bored look on his face, cigarette dangling from his lip, pushing the lever for another howl, and twiddling a knob for that extra bit of oomph because the current howl-ee is a member of the latest boy-band, wondering how he got there.
I rarely even notice it these days.
[originally published January 2002]