Anyone who reads the words "fan death" nowadays will probably assume it has something to do with Michael Jackson groupies slaying themselves for grief. It is in fact completely unrelated and more interesting. It is the reason that no well brought up Korean would ever dare sleep while a fan or air conditioner is running.
I heard about it from Lewis first, who had heard it mentioned by his co-teacher (aka Candy). I asked my co-teacher and she confirmed this fear with such heartfelt faith I suspect she would prefer sleeping in a room full of roaring lions to one with whirring fans.
Now, it's not that Koreans have an unusual tolerance for heat and humidity and developed these superstitions in disinterest. They are very unable to handle the heat. Since they can't sleep they go down to the rivers, drink 소주 and complain about the weather. The risk of sleeping with a fan or air conditioner is so perilous it's simply not an option.
Being the child of the enlightenment that I am, I questioned these beliefs. (Initially I also questioned the Korean tradition that 삼갑살 -kind of like a thick marinated bacon- clears pollutants from your respiratory system, but I decided I should eat it just to be safe).
The reasons given me by my co-teacher were almost identical with those outlined in Wikipedia article on Fan death. The first and most plausible sounding cause of fan death is dehydration excelled by use of a fan at already high temperatures. But in Korea this is not the most popular reason to fear fans. I too prefer imaging a fan-made vortex of air choking me with its anthropomorphic hands.
It doesn't add up that a country exporting hundreds of billions worth of electronics could be so uniformly sold on such an empirically unsound conviction. Maybe there's something to it? Maybe fan death really does happen all the time and we've just been lucky fools. But seeing as I already bought a fan, I think I'll just take my chances.
3 comments:
This is not a fear limited to Koreans.
The air conditioning in my apartment does not appear to work, so when the heat index briefly hit 107 degrees, I broke down and bought a fan. Joel and I assembled it last week using the directions full of double entendres I can't even repeat, then he put it on the desk in my room. In this arrangement, the desk, in my tiny room, is about six inches from my bed and approximately the same height, meaning the fan is pointed directly into the pillow. And my first thought also was, "Is that OK if you put that there? I mean, it's not going to suffocate me in my sleep, is it? I heard you can die from a fan blowing in your face while you sleep."
Joel said that would mean wind would kill you, and I admit that makes fan death seem silly, but I don't know. I'm pretty sure I learned this in college. I don't know WHAT you guys were learning at The Moody.
Dude...they have timers on the fans there! Nothing to worry about.
wow
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