The first time I went to a PC bang in Korea, it wasn’t for the internet. It was 1998, and I went with several of my students to play StarCraft, a game they raved about the way Americans talked about the Super Bowl. Like every other trend that swept the nation, PC bangs were appearing faster than a pop-up window on your computer screen. They were the cheapest way of accessing the internet in Korea, especially at the height of the Asian financial crisis. I knew what PC meant — personal computer. A bulky monitor and CPU that clicked and whirred, and occasionally froze for no reason. But “bang”? In Korea, bang means room, a simple word, functional and to the point. The PC bang we went to was located in a neighborhood of traditional shops, coffee houses, eateries, pharmacies and a traditional medicine shop with a strange-looking apparatus inside — less a pharmacy than a set piece from an old Frankenstein movie. The street was bright, with signs in Hangeul stacked like glowing dominoes. Food smells drifted through the air — dumplings, spicy rice cakes, charcoal and grilled meat — k
