I am currently teaching English in the countryside of Gyeonggi province, Korea. It’s not always convenient, and there are some challenges, but the people here are so nice, and it’s really fun running into my students at the bank, the grocery store, etc. There are lots of benefits to working in the countryside. 🙂 I also love that I’m working at a small school with not too many students.

thank you. I will delete the other comments and start afresh.

sorry i deleted my first comment because i like your blog and i didn’t want you to dislike me since i expected i would continue reading your comics. but it escalated more then i thought it would. i’m sorry for bothering you about your friends. i’m not a hater. 🙁 i do think simon and martina are good people and i can see how they could be fun friends, but they do stuff that i personally think is wrong.

And they never did black face anyway. It was a Korean face mask they were talking about that happened to be black. See how the haters twist everything? See how from the beginning that person had no interest in hearing anything that might change their views. Even if it’s from someone that actually knows EYK. The most ridiculous thing about EYK haters is the accuse EYK fans of being unreasonable when some of the most unreasonable people I have seen online are the haters and the people that do those hate blogs. Normal fans of EYK point out things they don’t like and Simon and Martina take that into consideration

Those haters are so self righteous that instead of just moving on with their lives they want to find every single thing that can reaffirm their belief so they live in a world of negativity.

From your first comment “I’ll never understand why you guys like Eat Your Kimchi so much. :/” YOU are the one who has been unreasonable. You come on here as a guest and don’t use a real name, and you have said all the twisted crap about EYK. Like come one… they did NOT do black face. You have no interest in hearing the truth because you already have your opinions formed.

You are talking about my FRIENDS, don’t you think I maybe know a little bit more than you? If someone says crap about your friends do you believe the rumors instead of talking to them directly?

1) I never called you a hater, I was talking more generally about people who know absolutely nothing about EYK but who still insist they “know” everything about them.
2) I definitely don’t agree with everything EYK says (it’s why I don’t always watch KMM b/c I can get really irritated sometimes when they haven’t bothered to look up info on a band I like). But they can’t be expected to be experts on everything. Then again, I take most things with a grain of salt. And I am certainly not going to become someone who is so bitter at what is happening to EYK, that I have to go an vent about it all over the Internet.
3) There is a difference between criticism and turning them into monsters, which a large group of anti-EYKers are.
4) Yes, there is most definitely an English-speaking privilege issue, but unless you actually know them personally and their level of Korean (which you don’t), you cannot say they are using it. (a) It is more difficult to learn Korean than English (yes, it is) (b) not all people learn languages as easily as others. And being fluent in a language just doesn’t happen for everyone, no matter how hard they try. You really have no idea how much or how little Korean study they have had. (c) I know plenty of Asians who moved to English speaking countries and have lived there for decades and still don’t speak English. So you can’t make them out to be these horrible people because they’re not experts at Korean. You are being just as elitist as all the Americans who demand that everyone speaks English in America and that no one should offer language help to immigrants. (d) K-pop has some terrible English, and while it might bother you that they talk about “Engrish”, I think it would be better that K-pop not use English because I think they are just using it to try and be “cool” and to “reach out” to their international audience to get more money. If they’re going to do that, then they had actually better make an effort to do it well, and not do it so poorly. If you want to “criticize” EYK, well then, you have to allow them to “criticize” K-pop’s egregious use of English. And I’m not even a grammar prescriptivist, and sometimes the awful English irritates me!
5) I hate it when people do blackface as well, but I am sorry, K-pop and Korean dramas (and others too) do blackface all the time. There are plenty of people in the bloggershere and twitterverse who speak out against it. And there is a difference between saying, Simon & Martina, that was racially offensive, please don’t do that, and EYK, you deserve to die you horrible and evil people. That is just as bad. I am not saying you say those things, but they do receive death threats on a regular basis.
6) You are the one doing the namecalling here, but insinuating I am an “unreasonable nasty”. Who ever said I was a “nasty”? And I am for certain not unreasonable.

disliking someone and disagreeing with a lot of the things they do doesn’t make you a “hater”. i believe i have legitimate reasons for disliking eyk. just because eyk and their fans can’t take some criticism doesn’t mean that i’m a “hater”. when i was younger i immigrated to canada from china. i had to learn english, within 5 years i was pretty much fluent. eyk aren’t trying to learn korean as much as they should for people who run a business in korea (white privilege and english-speaking privilege are actual things. not just stuff from “skin-crawling tumblrs”). they slut-shame idols (“hyuna the stripper” was a tag they used on one of their videos), make fun of idols english (or engrish as they love to call it), they’ve done blackface (the facemask itself was not racist, it was black because of charcoal. but what they did made it blackface), there is so much more they’ve done but i’m not even going to list it because i know “nasties” are unreasonable.

Amen Nic! Man, the haters are so depressing. :/

You know what? If you believe all that stuff about them you will probably start hating us as well. Because when you are producing that amount of content there will always be things people can twist it in the most negative way. Of course they aren’t perfect and everyone says or does the wrong thing at time, but the difference is here that people already have an agenda and are on the lookout for anything that can be singled and made to seem worse out of context. And it will start to happen to us – in fact it is already happening to us. So while people may think that we are lovely people and how could someone not like us… people will take one thing we’ve said and take it out of context and then they will start a negative tumblr about it and then everything that we say can be interpreted to make us seem in a bad light. We will be called racist, sexist, homophobic even though anyone who knows us personally knows that we aren’t at all. Try to see Simon and Martina’s view where everything they say is going to be wrong anyway. Isn’t it better to just not give a crap?

The type of ridiculous stuff people believe is overwhelming and I will address 2 things that pop out at me now, because honestly those type of tumblrs that you linked make my skin crawl, the way they are written and the twisting of the facts is disturbing. I hate spending any time reading them and I’ve seen it all before.
“solicited money from a bunch of teenagers to buy a studio to make these problematic videos in, a studio which seems more like their own personal fun house than a workplace” – not true. Firstly there are many adult EYK fans and secondly kickstarters are completely normal and one of the major reasons for doing this was to have a place to film and interview people which is what people were wanting. It’s completely logical. People wanted more of this content, EYK couldn’t produce enough content from just their apartment, EYK fans wanted to help, having a kickstarter to raise money for a studio was the best way. I gave money for it as well. Now I have actually visited the studio and know it’s not just some “playground” and this is one of the most frustrating things about blogging and youtubing. People only see the end product that looks so fun to make. They don’t know how many hours goes into it and how many sacrifices are made. But if someone is already a hater – they don’t want to know about that.

The other issue of them not knowing Korean. They know more Korean than me. I’m MARRIED to a Korean man. I should know more but I don’t. They have a tutor. But because their videos are in English, people don’t know that. I get the same prejudice – I can understand a lot of Korean but I mispronounce it and don’t say much and it makes people think I know less than I do and make a judgement like that about me.

My problem with EYK hate is that most of it is misinformation that gets passed around. Actually EYK have influenced so many people’s lives in a positive way but if you are a negative person you will only see something that you think is negative. I’ve seen in person how they have influenced people positively especially at the Sydney fan meet where we where next to them for hours as they greeted fans. And actually… we are friends with them now and I’m so happy to be friends with them because they are awesome people. If that means that I will lose fans because of it, well I am okay with that, because I would rather have a positive relationship than try to keep a few fans that can only see the negative.