[KS] Air conditioning and facial paralysis

[i_heinz fenkl]

Sounds like a nice structuralist configuration is developing:

yontan (black, full of holes, cylindrical, hot) causes death via invisible 
agent in winter in unventilated room
fan (white blade, inversion of holes, cylindrical, cold) causes death via 
invisible agent in summer in otherwise unventilated room

A classic inverted parallelism.

The dongp'ung in the outhouse belief could be attributed to the Korean 
penchant for associative wordplay -- i.e., tongp'ung --> ttongp'ung
Oddly enough, it is also a folk belief that going out to smell the ttong in 
the outhouse is a way to recover from carbon monoxide poisoning. (My cousins 
and I were made to do this on two occasions back in the winter of '69.)





On Wed, 20 Sep 2006 01:04:07 +1200
  "Stephen Epstein" <Stephen.Epstein at vuw.ac.nz> wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Thanks to everyone for the additional information, although I'm still not 
>much closer to figuring out the answers I'm looking for on fan death. I 
> suspect that ideas about chungp'ung and so on helped render the idea more 
>plausible, but they don't really help get to when the story originated and 
>why it seems to have a Korean localization. Also, I'd heard the theory that 
>the story may have spread as a result of government-initiated austerity 
>measures in the post-War period but I imagine someone would have turned up 
>clearer evidence if so. 
> 
> One thought I've had is that the notion of fan death got started in Korea as 
>folk wisdom's summertime inverse parallel to the all too real wintertime 
>deaths that resulted from yont'an briquettes, as David mentions below. This 
>theory fits neatly into a structuralist framework of explanation and might 
>explain why the idea of fan death is not present in China and Japan, where 
>yont'an were used but presumably, not the danger they were in Korea as a 
>result of ondol heating. If my yont'an hypothesis is full of holes (other 
>than the 32 or so of the briquettes....), please feel free to correct me. My 
>explanation might also account for an origin of the fan death story after the 
>Korean War when the use of yont'an began to spread as their price came down 
>and firewood grew more expensive. For more on yont'an, see the following 
>piece from the always enlightening Andrei Lankov: 
> http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/opinion/200502/kt2005020319114654130.htm ). 
> 
> Btw, just one further note on chungp'ung: in Pak Wan-so's autobiographical 
>novel, Who Ate Up All the Singa, she relates that her grandfather succumbed 
>to dongp'ung in an outhouse (and that everyone knew that a case of dongp'ung 
>that fell on someone in an outhouse was incurable). Was there a whole range 
>of "winds" with differing types of stroke/paralysis?
> 
> Cheers, Stephen
> ________________________________
> 
>From: koreanstudies-bounces at koreaweb.ws 이(가) 다음 사람 대신 보냄 David McCann
> Sent: 2006-09-19 (화) 오후 8:57
> To: Korean Studies Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [KS] Air conditioning and facial paralysis
> 
> 
> A related note:
> 
> Back in the days, in 1967 my family in Andong set up a heater for me in my 
>room.  It was ondol 'heated,' but a bowl of water beside me on the table 
>would freeze overnight.
> 
> The heater used charcoal briquettes, and seemed to do the job.  But one 
>night, evidently, the wind came from an unexpected direction.  I woke up, 
>barely, in the middle of the night, eyes streaming, mucous pouring, quite 
>unable to do more than crawl over to the door and fall out onto the small 
>porch outside.
> 
> I realized later how lucky I had been that those yont'an briquettes were so 
>terribly full of impurities.  I think it was the sulfur that had saved me. 
> The newspapers carried fairly frequent stories of others who hadn't had such 
>luck.
> 
> David McCann
> 
> On 9/18/06 4:02 PM, Edward Massengill wrote: 
> 
> 	Just as I was getting a big kick out of teasing my Korean wife about the 
>apparent absurdity of “death by fan” (which she believes) the picture was 
>clouded by references to “cold air” and “paralysis”.
> 
> 	 
> 
> 	Just a few weeks ago, one of my best friends told me that one night 
>recently she inadvertently left her air conditioning system on very low. The 
>next morning she woke up with paralysis (hopefully temporary but still 
>present after more than a month) on one side of her face. Neither she nor her 
>doctors are Korean.
> 
> 	 
> 
> 	Edward Massengill
> 
> 	Amateur Koreanist
> 
> 	 
> 
> 

----------------
Heinz Insu Fenkl