By Kim Ji-soo
Culture Editor
People have their quirks and for me, it's a tendency to identify a city by a certain smell or certain color. Take for example a visit to Israel in the late 1990s. The city of Jerusalem, a city of stone, turned the color of beige in the late afternoon, making it one of the most beautiful places I have seen. For me, gray is the color of the mega city, Seoul.
In December 1980, after living a few years in New York, I returned to a Seoul that was gray in every sense of the word. There was no Internet, no CNN, foreign travel was banned, and the city seemed very confined. In hindsight, it was understandable; a former military strongman had just come into office at Cheong Wa Dae. The AFKN channel was one of the few things that reminded me of New York. The AFKN was an outlet to the outside world.
So my sisters, and I devotedly devoured the afternoon soap operas such as ``General Hospital'' and ``Ryan's Hope,'' which I used to watch after school in New York. (I must confess, some of the content was slightly advanced for my younger sister and myself.) There was also the evening family sitcom shows like ``The Cosby Show.'' It was also a good way to make sure that my English didn't get rusty. There must have been more people like me in those days. Ask many leading cultural figures such as director Bong Joon-ho of (``The Host'') and English gurus, like Lee Bo-young, in Korea, and they all say that they gleaned off cultural and linguistic content from the channel when they were teenagers. There is even a book, titled, ``Looking Into America by an AFKN Kid'''
Time passed by, and I would watch the Korean channel more for its hallyu dramas and entertainment. But from time to time, I would flick to channel 2, to gauge how different their dramas, shows, news (including military news) and humor (David Letterman and Jay Leno) are. Thus, I was sad to hear that the channel would no longer be available starting this year. (Not unless you live near a U.S. military base and have certain equipment that can receive UHF channel programs). They said that allowing cable television networks to air them to Korean households constitute a breach of copyright. That is a belated legitimate claim.
With major cable companies servicing popular American dramas, known as ``midu'' here, the channel's content-the programs, commercials, public ads-provided free, seemed all the more alluring.
The American Forces Korea Network, which in 2001 changed its name to AFN-K, dates back nearly six decades. AFKN began in 1950, its root being the AFRS radio. It first aired the news during the Korea War, or on Oct. 3, 1950, that General McArthur urged North Korea to give up its arms. Then the television services began in 1957, which people say is four years earlier than the birth of the state-run Korean Broadcasting System. Beginning in 1983, AFKN switched to satellite broadcasting services, which meant some major programs were available in Korea at the same time as they were in the United States. Then in 2001, the network changed its name to AFN-K, but the lay watchers still know it as AFKN.
For a while, there was criticism that the channel was orienting the Korean audience too much toward American culture. Reportedly, the channel had to refute Korean government's attempt to regulate it by saying that information must flow freely. Also, it was occupying a VHF channel; a channel that required only a television to watch any program and lucrative one private broadcast hopeful were eying. In 1996, it changed its frequency to UHF, requiring households to set up separate receivership in order to view the channel.
Perhaps in this global era where the Internet allows free flow of contents, the fact that one channel has now become obsolete (as in not free anymore) may hardly register. But the channel or rather its absence is a reminder of how it served to let different cultural content flow freely to give our imagination some room at times, much different from our global digital era.