Is Your Physical phenomenon Buff Trying to Kill You?
Fan death in Korea, the dangers of wearing red in the Republic of the Philippines, and other momisms from around the world.
Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer.
"Is information technology really true that if you clip your fingernails while your relatives are flying somewhere," the radio producer asked, "their plane will crash?" I was being interviewed about my new book, Because I Said So!, which fact-checks 125 standard parental clichés: breakfast is the about important repast of the day, don't sit so about the TV, don't swim right after you eat. You get the idea. During the commercial break, a producer asked me about this particular bit of wisdom, passed along by her mom.
I took a lengthy look at her; she seemed to comprise in dead earnest. "Where does your mom, uh, happen to personify from?" I asked As innocently as I could.
"She grew astir in Russia."
I told her I'd ne'er heard that one ahead—maybe it was more of a Slavic language thing. I wasn't surprised at entirely to find out that Mom, in this case, had been raised outside the United States. In writing the Holy Writ, I'd spent the past two years soliciting parental nags from friends, acquaintances, and Internet strangers, and I'd learned very quickly that these bits of folklore tend to Be extremely finish-specific. A classical Mexican momism power bear zero more resemblance to a Scandinavian ane than huevos rancheros do to lutfisk.
In China, for example, it's widely believed that sitting happening a seat new warmed by someone else's buns can gift you hemorrhoids. The Brits, but then, property hemorrhoids to sitting on cold surfaces. Only sitting on that same shivery concrete would lead to a different lecture from a Land mom: She'd make up sure it would make you sterile.
Some Peruvians are told that lingering too long in front of the fridge can cause malignant neoplastic disease. In the Czech Republic, everyone knows that drinking water subsequently eating fruit leads to painful bloating. Filipino kids can't wear flushed when it's stormy forbidden, since that would draw i lightning. Germans and Austrians sleep in earthly fear of drafts, which catch damned for everything from pneumonia to blocked arteries, so summer commuters routinely swelter connected 90-degree trains and buses rather than cracking a window through which a cooling—but lethal!—breeze might hap.
In Republic of Korea, however, the concern about airing is on the button the diametric. Koreans bequeath only usance electric fans if a window is kooky, because leaving a buff on in an enclosed room, it's almost universally believed, can be deadly. The chemical mechanism behind the threat is a little vague: Sometimes it's same to be a lack of oxygen that kills you, sometimes it's a chill. But either way, you won't care. You'll represent dead.
I in reality grew up as a child in Seoul, South Korea, and fans were atomic number 102 laughing matter. Everyone took the Great Buff Menace for granted and had a hard-fought meter believing that other cultures were ignorant of it. An apartment of Americans I knew teased their lone Korean roommate aside going to bed one summer night in an enclosed room with six electric fans sour connected. He pleaded with them not to have their lives away and slept in the hall. When, in the sunup, all three had survived the ordeal, the Korean roommate was still not convinced. Manifestly, he aforementioned, they had been playing a applied joke on him and had loopy a window as soon as he was out of the elbow room.
Back then, fan death was an obscure curio known sole to Westerners who had fatigued time in South Korea, but nowadays the Internet has spread IT world. "Fan death" has its personal lengthy Wikipedia entry and has become a love comedy meme on websites like Reddit.
The popularity of the Korean fan last meme probably arises from its cardinal sarcasm: that one of the world's most technologically progressive countries has hard-to-explain issues with a simple mechanical gimmick invented in the 1880s. But sometimes the world's new obsession with fan death veers into crypto-discriminatory sneering at the eccentric person, backward Asians. One of the number 1 Web pages to publicize Korean fan-xiety was FanDeath.nett, connected which "American robin S.," a Canadian who stirred to Capital of South Korea in 1999 to teach West Germanic language, marveled at "the lack of vital thinking" displayed by the "loyal natives" atomic number 2 confronted about the issue.
This casual West scorn has led, charmingly, to the rise of fan death trutherism. "Fan end is real," announces "T. K. Park," a Korean-American Washington, D.C.-area blogger, on his popular "Ask in a Korean" blog. Parkland wasn't a fan-death believer himself, not initially, merely—annoyed to see his culture becoming an Net punchline—he started researching the affected and was thunderstruck to find that U.S. government agencies ilk the Environmental Protection Agency and Centers for Disease Control have also recently come out against electric rooter use in embedded suite. Could Koreans in reality throw been right all along about fans?
Fit, yes and no. The new fan warnings arose from epidemiologic studies of heat up waves in the 1980s and 1990s. Cities then would try to prevent heat-related deaths by distributing electric fans in low-income areas. Only when these fans were used in fenced in apartments, they didn't cool anyone forth very advisable and might even stimulate been making things worse. The research is mostly anecdotal on this point but Dr. Laurence Kalkstein, a University of Miami climatologist who helped write the EPA's heat guidelines, told me he thinks fan use could be a "minor" factor in causation heat stress and dehydration, since fans can create a convection outcome when heat indexes gravel past the mid-90s. "If an old somebody sticks a little table sports fan opportune in front of their face to stress to settle down, and it's just blowing 105-stage air around, it creates what's called an evaporation opportunity," he said. "Wet from the body evaporates a lot faster, and therefore unless you fill again information technology quickly plenty, it bottom create a heat job for you."
Kalkstein was invited to Korea in 2008 to brief its meteorological administration on heat warning systems, and while there he told a queer newsman that yes, people should be overcautious about buff utilize in fenced in suite. His unknowing patronize of winnow death made the national papers, and today he's careful to explain that his guidelines and the Korean "fallacious belief" differ substantially: Fans only necessitate caution subordinate certain conditions, and the effect would experience nothing to do with suffocation or hypothermia.
It's tempting to equate lover death with the past old wives' tales I wrote my book around. But fan death is a little different. Notably, IT's supported by Korean medical authorities and even the Southeastward Korean government, which American Samoa recently as 2006 called fan death "asphyxiations" one of the nation's most five risky summer hazards. Cyberspace conspiracy traditional knowledge sometimes blames the legend on a 1970s-era governance campaign to maintain electricity, only in fact these warnings are generations older, dating all but back to the introduction of electric fans to Korea. A July 31, 1927, story in the now-defunct Jungoe Ilbo ("Domestic and International Unit of time") inflated the specter of "Gothic Harm From Electric Fans," including sickness, asphyxiation, and nervus facialis paralysis from this "new technology." "The rotating fan blades create a vacuum directly before, and the loudness of the resulting air flow always results in an insufficient supply of oxygen to the lungs," the newspaper warned. To this Clarence Shepard Day Jr., many fans sold-out in Korea come with stern warning labels and even timer knobs for automatic shutoff.
What led to this early fear? Was there some ur-event, some single dying erroneously attributed to an electric fan, that kicked off the whole thing? That's what happened with poinsettias in America, which are still widely (but incorrectly) believed to be toxic due to one misdiagnosis by a Honolulu physician in 1919. But at any rate, once the belief took declare, it was relentless. Hierarchy and deference to authority are important in Korean civilization, which can make myth-busting a challenge.
But non impossible! A new email survey of contacts in Korea suggests to ME that, among the jr. generation anyway, the fan-expiry consensus has recently at rest from "Of course!" to "Can you consider my parents wont to differentiate us that?" A X of Internet incredulity seems to have accomplished what the preceding 75 days could not: convinced a nation that Peninsula fan death is probably hot aerate.
Do Korean's Think Sleeping With a Fan on Could Kill You
Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/fan-death-korean-moms-think-that-your-electric-fan-will-kill-you.html