Fieldwork

Antti Leppänen is a Finnish anthropologist studying neighbourhood shopkeepers and entrepreneurs in Korea. He has just been blogging about Grandfather Kwôn, a widowed laundryman whose frank account of his life brings home how differently people can live. He has had many jobs in his time, and many women. His was an arranged marriage. It is hard to imagine their relationship:

She was so sunbakhada (simple, honest, unspoiled etc.) that she could even have a room prepared in their home if he got to know a nice girl. It actually happened once. At that time a woman couldn’t pack her things and leave (pottari ssaji ank’o), a woman couldn’t make even a sound.

Antti's blog is worth reading regularly for the light he sheds on ordinary lives.
(I wonder what an anthropologist would make of the entrepreneurs in the village where I live: the cobbler, the baker, the butcher who opens at 7am every day but Sunday, the Indian, Chinese and Turkish restaurateurs, the Pakistani newsagent, the successful car dealer whose father was a wartime Czech refugee?)