Chris Tharp

Haps Magazine • 31st December 2014

Tharp On: The End of the Year

Well here we are, about to clock out of another one. 2014 is packing its bags and preparing to jump on that train and ride into the mists of history, and it’s been a real doozy. This, quite naturally, is the time of year when we take a breath and meditate on everything that has gone down over the previous eleven months; for many, this moment of reflection is a cocktail of elation, despair and relief. The very fact that you’re reading this right now means that you’re one of the lucky ones.

Haps Magazine • 8th November 2014

Tharp On: My Cyber Rep

Too many times it’s gone down like this: I come to, steaming. The day’s light slices through the window and stabs the back of my eyes. My stomach gurgles and groans as I sit up in bed, trying to figure out just where the hell I am. Home … of course. I stand, wobbly on my feet, catching myself on the wall as I stagger toward the kitchen. My lips ar

Haps Magazine • 30th August 2014

Tharp On: Pets

When I first arrived in Korea, I remember being taken aback by all the cute little stores with cute little dogs and the myriad accessories that go with them. Were these creatures being sold for dual use? It immediately conjured up that famous scene from Michael Moore’s Roger & Me where the white trash mama proudly shows off her side business for the rolling camera. Her crude, hand painted sign boldly reads: Rabbits or Bunnies. Pets or Meat.

Haps Magazine • 16th June 2014

Tharp On: Motorcycles

I knew something was terribly wrong when I heard the horn blast, so close, followed by screaming rubber. My blood turned to ice, knowing that things were totally beyond my control, that the only factor between living and dying was just how quickly that driver could manage to stop.

Haps Magazine • 27th February 2014

Tharp On: Teaching

I recently sat down to a very important lunch with the president of our college. He’s a beaming, gregarious man with the air of a diplomat--all smiles and handshakes--befitting a man of his station. Throughout the meal he held court, while the rest of us--both Western and Japanese inst

Haps Magazine • 26th December 2013

Tharp On: Regret

It was not long ago that I found myself taking in the exploits of Rob Ford--Toronto’s train wreck of a mayor--with a mixture of fascination, horror and glee. Whoever said Canadians are boring? Such an utterance may have passed through my lips on one or two occasions, but I hereby eat my words. This guy is amazing--a combination of Marion Barry, Bill Clinton, and Chris Farley. What hasn’t he done? He’s smoked crack on camera; he’s admitted to blazing Rastafarian amounts of weed;

Haps Magazine • 27th October 2013

Tharp On: Haters

When perusing the average Internet comments section one thing is glaringly clear: love is overrated and hate is where it’s at. For all it’s promise, the web is largely fertilizer for the balls tree in anonymous hater land. Every once in awhile, usually in the boozy confines of one of Busan’s drinking establishments, I am approached by a wide-eyed fellow expat who just so happens to have literary ambitions of his own. "How did you go about getting your book published?" he’ll ask.

Haps Magazine • 19th August 2013

Tharp On: Family

This is the headline that greeted me after returning from a camping trip in which I was entirely off the grid. For one solid week, neither newspapers nor computer monitors taxed my sun-blazed eyes. I was wonderfully ignorant of the happenings of the world outside my immediate sensory zone, but now, once again, I was an informed citizen. And here was my first nugget: after nine months of blissful swimming in his mother’s very posh womb (I’m told that Kate Middleton’s amniotic fluid was a mix of P

Haps Magazine • 20th April 2013

Tharp On: Money

Let’s start with the obvious: being poor sucks. There’s nothing fun about it. A certain amount of poverty may be slightly romantic for say, six months in your early 20s, but it wears thin quickly. Any bohemian charm it once had transforms into a parasitic drain, and you quickly realize how essential money is to do pretty much anything you want in this world.

Haps Magazine • 20th June 2013

Tharp On: America

The other night I was sitting at home, listening to some old cuts of recently-departed country legend George Jones. There I was, steeping in whisky and soaking in his honey-dripped honky-tonk croon, when suddenly a realization slapped me upside my sweaty, sentimental head: I am an American. That’s right: I’m an earnest, red-blooded, optimistic, two-fisted, indoor voice-challenged, tap dancin’ Yankee Doodle Dandy. Yee-haw!

Haps Magazine • 4th February 2013

Tharp On: Coffee

Contrary to what you have all been told, the beverage known as coffee was actually invented in Seattle in 1872 by a Civil War cavalry veteran named Obadiah Coffee. He was working as a cook in a logging camp at the time. After a massive pancake fire (we know how lumberjacks love their flapjacks) reduced the log cabin kitchen to ashes and singed some beans black, Mr. Coffee--a thrifty man--boiled them in hot water in an attempt to clean them off.

Haps Magazine • 11th December 2012

Tharp On: Marriage

It’s done. After 41 years of debauchery, debasement and delirious distraction, I finally closed my eyes, took that deep breath and leapt from the cliff into the surging ocean of respectability. Let me pinch myself and set the record straight: I, a schluffy, overripe loudmouth, managed to get hitched to a fantastically gorgeous Korean girl. I’m punching well above my weight with a woman who possesses less than half of mine.

Haps Magazine • 10th October 2012

Tharp On: Baseball

Ah, fall in Busan. Is there any better time of the year? The brutal, sweaty summer--with its endless volley of typhoons--sputters and dies, and cool air and clear skies prevail. BIFF comes to town and transforms our gritty port into Asia’s most glamorous October destination, while the mountains are packed with happy ajummas and ajeosshis ambling along the trails, eating pajeon and drinking makkeoli until they go red in the face, stagger, and eventually fall down.

Haps Magazine • 6th July 2012

Tharp On: Summer

It’s summer here on the peninsula, or as I like to refer to it, "The Great Gush," that time of year when sweat pours forth through my pores like a fat guy trekking in the Congo. It’s ridiculous, really. Just the mild exertion of picking up my attendance book from my office and marching into class causes circles of dank shame to emanate from beneath my armpits and neck. My students look on with a mix of curiosity and horror, cocking their heads like quizzical puppies, until one of the braver

Haps Magazine • 1st March 2012

Tharp On: Korean Food

Let me proclaim this loud and clear: I absolutely love Korean food, in all of its pungent, prickly, zesty, pickled, be-tentacled goodness. My heart goes into spasms as those side dishes are carefully laid out in front of me, and I dig in with the desperation of a P.O.W chowing down his welcome home meal. I mean, what’s not to love about it? It’s fresh, sour, sweet, savory, wonderfully textured, and low in calories.

Haps Magazine • 22nd December 2011

Tharp On: Leaving

When I first came to Korea, I was in heaven. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. This is truly awesome, I thought. I loved it so much that I’d have regular nightmares about going home. There I’d be stumbling off a plane in America, suddenly gripped around the neck by the scaly, clawed hand of a demonic, glowing-eyed immigration officer, who’d lift me from the ground, open his reeking, sulfurous maw and bellow: "YOU, WORM. BACK TO THE TEMP AGENCY!"

Haps Magazine • 17th August 2011

Tharp On: Drinking in Korea

When coming to Korea, you are struck by the contradictions that slap you in face on a daily basis: strangers politely bow to each other, yet spit, jostle, and throw hard elbows on the street or subway; in many respects the culture appears to be rigid and sexually conservative, yet flesh-baring girl groups regularly thrust and grind on TV, and the young women publicly sport tiny hot pants and miniskirts that can be a painful distraction to any hot-blooded male walking down the street;

Haps Magazine • 22nd June 2011

Tharp On: Travel

I came to Korea to savor Asia and see more of the world, and I must say that I’ve succeeded marvelously, though what began as a benign passion has now raged into a full-blown addiction. I’m hooked. I got the travel Jones real bad. It consumes me, coursing through my veins like hot whisky. I am compelled to throw wads of cash at airline tickets with every extended break that comes my way.

Haps Magazine • 27th December 2010

Tharp On Holidays

It’s that time of year again, when the temperature drops and Siberian winds slice down onto the Peninsula. Everywhere you go you hear a chorus of young women repeating the phrase Ah chew-eo! Chew-eo!, in that plaintive whine that only can be produced by the mouth of a shivering, 40 kilogram Korean girl. Canadians, in defiance of Mother Nature, walk shirtless down the city’s sidewalks, gleefully bludgeoning anyone who complains about the cold with wooden hockey sticks.