The Craze for Bamboo Wives
There has been social taste for bamboos. Bamboo trees, along with pine trees, have been known to be symbols of purity, integrity, and loyalty in the Korean society. Bamboo plants and their byproducts have been long favored by the common and the high society people as well.
Major broadcasting stations have reported about an eerie trend one of these days that the young people have opted for zookbooin (죽부인:竹夫人: bamboo wives) during hot summer seasons. Eerie because bamboo wives had been designed out of consideration for the elderly, not for the young. They had usually been "filial gifts for their widowed dads" as comfort coolers for the elderly people to fight the humidity of the season. Today they have turned out to be nothing other than alternatives for air-conditioners during hot summer nights.
How does it look like? It's a cylinder-type bamboo frame with 120 to 130cm height and 50cm to 60cm width. It's tightly and delicately netted with bamboo pieces torn apart from the tree trunk with enough hexagonal holes onto it to facilitate the draft of fresh air. It looks like a human shape with no limbs if it is looked at with gawkish eyes.
I am not being facetious. But, they have had hilarious yet serious aspects about them, that is, their uses and taboos and treatment after the owner and master's death. I am duly afraid that people might not be able to parry your questions, stumbling for apt words, if you asked them questions about, say, their concrete functions.
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