#119. 주작 -- God of lies

It is still snowing where I live. It has been a really long winter, and although I try, it is difficult to look upon the winter season with kindness when it has been dragging on for nearly six months. Save for the Christmas season, winter is the depressing time of the year where the land is barren and the weather harsh. It is something that you must prepare for during the happy and plentiful seasons of spring, summer, and autumn.

Did you ever stop to think that the House Stark is perhaps being a little unfair to winter?

Having lived in Korea, I can tell you that the winter in Korea is just as unpleasant as the winters anywhere else. However, the Koreans seemed to have made a valiant effort against the (well-deserved) notion of "winter sucks," and here is how:

The central idea behind the Daoist philosophy (in Korean, this is called the "도가 (Daoist) 사상 (philosophy)"), which is one of the ingredients that shaped the traditional Korean shamanistic beliefs, is that one must not struggle against what is natural. For example, getting old, dying, as well as the winter, is just a natural way ("도" in Korean) of life, and it is pointless to resist. Furthermore, by enduring and obeying the natural way, one eventually arrives at something positive, such as birth (many Koreans believe in the past life and rebirth to some degree!) or maybe even spring.

The Daoists presumably needed to come up with a simpler way to explain this idea to the laypeople (Daoism was born around 400 BC, by the way!) Their idea seems to have been that they would correspond a "mascot" to each of these ideas, and there won't be a preconceived positive or negative notions attached to these mascots.

They began by assigning a god to each direction. They assigned:

- "청룡", or a blue ("청", as in "청바지" meaning blue jeans) dragon ("룡", as in "공룡" meaning dinosaur) to the east;
- "백호", or a white ("백", as in "백조" meaning swan) tiger ("호", as in "호랑이" meaning tiger) to the west;
- "주작", or a red ("주", as in "주황색" meaning orange colour) bird ("작", as in "공작" meaning a peacock) to the south; and
- "현무", or a black turtle-snake (this imaginary animal is said to have the body of a turtle, and the face and the tail of a snake), to the north.

These mural paintings of the four gods are often found in the ruins and tombs of Goguryeo -- it is said that the Tang Dynasty sent some of its Daoist priests to Goguryeo as part of their diplomatic efforts.

These are called 사방신 in Korean, or four (사) gods (신) of directions (방) if you translate it. These gods not only guard the evils coming in from these directions, but they are also in charge of various other elements of life. For example:

- the 청룡, or the blue dragon (east), is in charge of spring, childhood, and the feeling of anger;
- the 백호, or the white tiger (west), is in charge of autumn, elderliness, and the feeling of sadness;
- the 주작, or the red bird (south), is in charge of summer, youth, and the feeling of happiness;
- the 현무, or the black turtle-snake (north), is in charge of winter, death, and the feeling of fear.

By using these imaginary animals, the Daoists tried to place the everyday occurrences on an equal footing, and emphasized that one is not superior than the other. Living through things as they come may have been easier with this analogy.

It is not a coincidence that the Korean flag is made up of the four colours of the four gods -- red, blue, black, and white.

You can find these gods everywhere in the Korean history. You may find some artwork that draws its motives from these four directional gods, or you may find some ornaments in the Korean architecture (almost like gargoyles) in their shapes. The people of Goguryeo used to paint these gods in the appropriate directions in their houses, in hopes that they protect their houses from all bad things that lurk outside.

However, in this age of the internet, the four gods are no longer on an equal footing. Instead, the 주작, the red bird of the south, the summer, and the youth, is more popular and better-known compared to the other gods, thanks to none other than StarCraft.

StarCraft, of course, could be the game that built the reputation of Korean gamers on the international stage. It was the game that everyone played since the 2000s, and the Korean gamers were the best in the world. Korea even had some betting sites, where you could bet on the outcomes of StarCraft games in the professional league.

In 2010, there was a huge scandal in the Korean gamers' community, where several professional gamers were bribed to rig the outcomes of the games (it seems that they were paid around $5000 USD per game). When this scandal, called "승부 (outcome) 조작 (rigging) 사건 (scandal)," came to light, it shook the Korean gamer community to the core. Several professional gamers were expelled from the gamers league on top of being indicted, at least eight professional teams disbanded, and StarCraft never regained its high level of popularity.

This is 마재윤 (Jaeyoon Ma), one of the professional StarCraft players who was involved in the 승부조작 scandal.

The expelled gamers received an unprecedented amount of hate from the Korean gamers, and it seemed unlikely that they will ever become professional again in any game whatsoever. However, one of the expelled gamers, 마재윤 (Jaeyoon Ma), shocked the Koreans by becoming a streamer via Afreeca (think of it as a precursor to YouTube streaming, as covered in a previous post).

When he started his streaming, the chatrooms were full of the words "조작 (rigging)," designed to insult him. For example, you could type something like

"이것도 조작이냐?" (Are you rigging this, too?)

whenever he did or said something.

Thankfully, as the streamer, he had some control of the chatroom, and he set the word "조작" as a "금지어" (forbidden "금지" word "어"), meaning that you would be banned from entering the chatroom again if you ever type this word.

So his viewers started coming up with clever ways to insult 마재윤. Instead of saying "조작," they started looking for words that sound similar to "조작." For example, a birch tree ("자작") was a popular choice, and one might have said something like:

"이것도 자작이냐?" (Is this a birch tree, too? -- meaning "are you rigging this, too?" with an intentional typo)

to avoid the auto-filter from booting you out of the chatroom. You might be even more roundabout by saying things such as:

"어디서 자작나무 타는 냄새가 나는것 같은데?" (I think I smell a birch tree burning? -- meaning "I think he's rigging this.")

Birch trees

When this caught on among his viewers, 마재윤 also set "자작" as a forbidden word. And thus began the game of hide-and-seek. 마재윤 sets a new forbidden word, and his viewers come up with yet another word that evoke the word "조작" in some way.

The most popular of these was "주작," the red bird of the south and the summer. In particular, the phrase

"날아오르라 주작이여" (Rise, O the red bird of the south -- meaning "lol, he definitely rigged this.")

became wildly popular on the internet, to the point where this phrase migrated beyond the chatroom of 마재윤's personal stream, into the general region of the Korean internet. Nowadays, it is actually more rare to see the word "조작" than "주작" when accusing someone of having made something up, or rigged something!

The font in this picture definitely has to be in 궁서체 -- see this post if you don't get the reference!

For example, if someone posts a tear-jerking story of their childhood, where they were raised by tigers and carried home by a stork when they were sixteen, people might type:

"주작을 하려면 좀 티가 안나게해라." (If you're going to make something up, at least make it less noticeable.)

or just simply:

"주작" (Red bird of the south, although it simply means "fake" in context.)

or, if you want to be particularly sarcastic:

"날아오르라 주작이여."

Interestingly, "주작" is a homonym -- it can mean a red bird (朱雀), but it can also mean "making something up" (做作), although the latter was a very old usage that was barely used prior to 마재윤's internet streaming! So, it is not incorrect to use the word "주작" for something that is fake, and this may be one of the reasons this expression caught on (but in this expression, the word "주작" definitely came from the red bird!)

The nuance of this word is definitely one of sarcastic humour. Not only are you accusing someone of having faked something, you are making fun of them by invoking the name of one of the four directional gods. Yet, as someone who spends way too much time on the Korean internet, the word "주작" almost feels more natural than "조작," and I always have to stop for a second to ensure that I am using the correct word ("조작") when I am speaking in a formal setting. I think that many Koreans would not even bother to stop and think, and just use the word "주작" in most settings!

Finally, to finish off the story of 마재윤, he also eventually set the word "주작" as a forbidden word. The Korean internet users continued to come up with new words (although none of them caught on quite like 주작), such as:

- 저작권 (copyright), 조직 (organization), for sounding similar to "조작 (rigging)";
-  백호 (white tiger), 청룡 (blue dragon), 현무 (black turtle-snake), for being the other three directional gods, and for reminding the viewers of the word "주작";
- 불사조 (phoenix), because a phoenix is another mythical bird;
- 여자친구 (girlfriend), because a girlfriend is also a mythical being among the Korean gamers;
- 전현무 (Hyunmoo Jeon, an anchorman whose first name is "현무", which reminds people of the black turtle-snake, and consequently of 주작), 노무현 (Roh Moo-hyun, a previous president of Korea, whose first name "무현" backwards "현무" is the black turtle-snake);
- 아나운서 (anchorman), because 전현무 was an anchorman, and he reminds people of "현무," which reminds them of "주작," which sounds like "조작."

This is 전현무, an ex-anchorman who now freelances as an entertainer.

All of these words were eventually set as forbidden words in 마재윤's streaming. He never gained popularity as a streamer anyway (as you can tell from the fact that his Instagram account has just 894 followers!) and he probably deserved that, first from his involvement in the rigging scandal, then from his ruthless filtering of his chatroom (although it ended up producing one of the most popular internet neologisms of this day!)

Anyway, that's the story of an ancient Korean god, whose name is still uttered by the Koreans millions of times each day. Does that please him? I am not sure, but I hope that he might be amused by the wittiness of the Korean internauts, and that he does not succumb to anger, in the true Daoist fashion where you just let things happen without fighting them.