American/Korean Contrasts - Patterns &
expectations in the US & Korea Susan Oak &
Virginia Martin published 2000 in New York & Seoul
by Hollym International Corp.
ISBN 1-56591-152-0 ; 294pp; won 12,000 http://www.hollym.com
Korea Unmasked - in search of the country,
the society and the people Won-bok Rhie; translated
by Jung Un and Louis Choi published 2000 in Seoul
by Gimm-Young Publishers Inc. ISBN 89-349-1178-6;
236pp illustrated; won 9,900; http://www.gimmyoung.com
There was a dreamtime in distant childhood when it was obvious
and proper that the world was how your mum and dad said it was. It
was true that the kids down the road ran by different clockwork, but
you knew they were *wrong*, and their families were warped. Later,
you still thought the neighbours were warped, but as ambition ate
away at your indignation, you made little compromises, and even
began to wonder if your old man was right about everything after
all.
Then one day you set foot in someone else's country and your
world turned upside down. These people were *weird*, really off the
wall. The neighbours back home might be slack, but at least you
could talk to them. In this new place, it was, well, eerie. A bit
dangerous too. You were 100% outnumbered, and they called you a
foreigner. You kept a low profile, and sort of adapted. Maybe you
changed a bit too. After living on Mars for a few years, when you
went home for a holiday the old family reckoned you'd gone native.
Well, come to think of it, *they* looked sort of silly now. TV or no
TV, they didn't have a clue what the rest of the planet was like...
Jeez, some of them even took holidays in Bali and managed to treat
it as a painted backdrop for boozy parties, without taking in a
scintilla of contradiction. Their heads, you decided, had been baked
like clay pots by the age of ten, and nothing was going to change
the categories in their mental database. Sadly, you'd noticed the
same baked clay brains at every global address. Only the glazing on
the pots was different..
****************
"Here's a small gift for you". I looked at the packet of green
tea perplexed. The wizened lady holding out her hand was almost
a total stranger. True, I had stayed at the minshuku she
ran in Ikekuburo for a couple of days, but we hadn't exchanged
a dozen words. The idea of an Australian hotel manager offering
a departing guest a gift was preposterous. More likely to frisk
you for the stolen silverware. The tea was all the more
puzzling since I had been repelled by the stony indifference to
others evident in Japanese
street life.
That was my first visit to Japan, in 1982, and a first
introduction to the East Asian contradiction between public
brutishness and private obligation. Now in 2003, much too much older
and beaten down by the world's perversities, I could afford to be
gracious when my new Japanese apartment neighbour in Busan offered
me a 300 won packet of noodle flavouring by way of
introducing himself .... He was giving me a toe-hold in his
omiyagi (gift-giving) network, by which human relationships
could be defined, and intimacy or obligation carefully calibrated by
the value of the gift. But I sighed inwardly, and recalled my awful,
yearly search for family birthday presents which took hours, days,
and never seemed to quite please anyone...
****************
Throw the switch to vaudeville ... It's not every day you see a
late middle-aged American type with a backpack butting into the
campus building where I live in South Korea. After he had shoved at
a couple of locked glass doors, I opened the only accessible one to
let him in. He barged past me, then stood there looking around in
confusion. After a minute or two I asked if he was after someone in
particular. For the first time he glanced at me, but in a kind of
unfocused way. "Where are the dormitories?" he asked, "on the
5th floor?". "Well yes, but you'll need to see Joo Ki -sung in the
office. Anyway, my name's Thor." There was a hint of dull surprise.
"Oh", he said, "I thought you were Korean". And that, one could only
guess, meant a non-person.
Hmm. A message from the sponsor at this point. Firstly, as a
rare foreigner in a city of four million Koreans, I was invisible to
the gentleman. Even given his own evident self-involvement, this was
hard to swallow. I struggle to wrestle down my giant ego. This
affliction of invisibility has taken me years to recognize, but has
undoubtedly been manifest from about the age of five. Being a slow
learner, I've never really accepted that being invisible is a huge
advantage, and tried for eloquent verbiage like a bunch
of coloured balloons over a run-down department store. But you can't
win. When they are tricked into the shop, the mug customers hardly
ever like what they find.... Now there's a new variation, When they
get to the door of the shop, some of them decide that the
merchandise is faux Korean. Not just this confused and ageing
Anglo either. A lady journalist from Kookje Shimun recently
protested when I sent her a requested snapshot. There was some
mistake, she whined -- surely this was a Korean's photo. Heck, I
have grey eyes and brown hair and a big nose, with ears like
an elephant. All of which goes to prove that what you see is not
what you get -- some of us really do slither around in cloaks of
illusion to trick the world. Mine comes free and is 24/7.
Presidents and suchlike have to buy theirs.
****************
Now what do the minshuku lady, the blundering American
and Yours Invisibly have in common ? Legs, clothing, various
attachments of the homo sapien type ... We invade each other's space
in a way that cockroaches and polar bears would not be terribly
welcome to do. The closer we get though, the less impressed we are
by these commonalities, and the more obsessed with searching
out tattoos, garlic breath or the habits of signalling friendship to
separate ourselves from all but a small circle of like-smelling
bipeds. In particular we want other human pretenders to hang a
tribal sign around their necks saying
'Country-Culture-Religion-Football-team' .
What follows is a kind of review of two books which take a look
at 'Country-Culture' tribal labels. Their styles are very different,
and their answers not always coherent, but like sex and money, their
topic is something that lot's of people have an opinion about, and
will probably pay to read about..
****************
Susan Oak & Virginia Martin's American/Korean Contrasts
- Patterns & Expectations in the US & Korea has the
flavour of an academic study which has been adapted for popular
reading. This gives it the strength which comes from systematic
scholarly research, but also the slight woodenness of abstracted
information. It is nevertheless quite readable. The authors admit
that they are dealing with 'cultural ideals', but reasonably argue
that before you can understand variations you have to know what the
norms are. You could study the material from cover to cover as I
did, or your could dip into the book for areas of specific
information. At the end of each chapter there is a summary, a
glossary of Korean and English terms, and a list of footnotes.
Here are the seven chapter headings : 1. Understanding
Influences on American and Korean Society; 2. Common Courtesy; 3.
Greetings and Farewells; 4. Family Life and Expectations; 5.
Celebrating Family Rituals; 6. Food and Drink; 7. Money, Employment
and Business. Each of these topics is analysed by way of an
introduction, then a series of blindingly obvious questions such as
"what is common courtesy?" Occasionally the questions have
surprising answers.
Australians like me tend to be a bit blase about America,
figuring that it is just another collection of supermarkets on the
far side of the Pacific. We assume ( in the baked clay brain
tradition) that no American is capable of seeing any joke more
subtle than a custard tart in the face, and their ignorance of other
places is legendary. Generally we don't think the USA is worth the
price of a holiday airfare just to see more of the same dreary
suburbs we know back home... On the other hand, this particular
Australian happens to work in South Korea, where he is usually not
only assumed to be American (the poor critters can't tell one accent
from another), but often has to wear the cloak of a crypto-American.
That is, only Americans are widely known to speak English and he is,
well, an 'English' teacher. With that comes the obligation to teach
American culture, whatever that is. Now Oak & Martin's book set
out to state what is boringly plain to Americans but mysterious to
Koreans, and vice versa. I might be hiding in the American boot
camp, but some of this Yankee stuff turns out to be as foreign to me
as any Mudang spirit song.
The visibility of religion is a major difference between broad
American and Australian culture; (for that matter it marks off the
United States from much of Western Europe, and from a large part of
the South Korean population). Especially the 100 million or so
Americans who go in for charismatic Christianity leave a mark on
public life which makes many of the unwashed a little uneasy. It's
not that Europeans and Australians as a group are less spiritual
privately (not necessarily via the supermarket of established
religions). Maybe history has made them more wary strident claims to
certain knowledge. It is so divisive. Maybe they are just at a
different waystop on the great wheel of Time. Anyway, religion is a
clear style marker in the American psyche which Oak & Martin
regard seriously, even too seriously. Taking God's name in vain is a
no-no: "One of the worst curse words in English is 'Goddamn' .
Although you may hear this word ..[it].. should not be used",
they tell Koreans. Heck, even my Australian grandma said worse than
that, not to mention all those varmits in Hollywood Westerns.
Is Hollywood only for export after all?
Just as Oak & Martin see American culture as founded on
Judeo-Christian principles, they take pains to explain the main
Confucian tenets as a foundation for Korean values and behaviour.
Certainly, in both cases, the evidence is easy to find. Without some
basic knowledge of Confucian values, Americans will certainly be
confused by the reactions of many Koreans to everyday situations,
and likewise of course, Koreans by American attitudes. In a book
such as this it is right to point out the highway markers, for it is
often dismaying how few travellers in either direction know even
major traffic signs. However, it is a bit naive to take that as the
whole story.
The big creeds and ideologies are official icons. You need to
know about them, but they are often poor predictors of real
outcomes. There are always other values pulling against them. A
casual visitor to China in, say, the 1950s could easily have come
away certain that Maoist Communist ideology was an infallible
predictor of both public and private attitudes in the PRC. They
would have been utterly wrong. A traveler in 13th Century Europe, or
Iran of the 1970s might have been equally impressed by the power of
official Christianity or Islam. Yet in every case a closer view, or
a longer historical view, would reveal that there were other
submerged values competing with the public template. In the case of
Korea these competing tensions are especially interesting. Firstly,
the iconic state religion, Buddhism was displaced at the beginning
of the Yi Chosun dynasty (1392-1910), but continued to retain a
powerful influence in many sectors of society. Secondly, although
their presence has endured over many centuries, both Buddhism and
neo Confucianism (now Christianity also) are imported value systems
in Korea. The indigenous Korean shamanism, together with a swirling
slurry of ancient half remembered clan values & beliefs, has
never been entirely submerged. Rigid social divisions until very
recently have helped to separate the upper crust of official values
from the old stew bubbling underneath. Oak & Martin really give
us no hint of this.
*****************
Perhaps the most useful summary in Oak & Martin's book for
non-Koreans is the explanation of six controlling concepts :
chemyeon, neunchi, kibun, bunuiki, jeong and han. The matrix
of these elements determines the relationship of the group to an
individual; (note that in this traditional Korean equation
individual importance is inferior to that of the group).
Successfully managing the six elements is the key to satisfactory
living, the authors say. ... Well again, we are talking about broad
tendencies. When you apply almost any metric in nature to a
population, you get a bell curve. If you measure the height of trees
in a forest, most trees will cluster around a median height, with
smaller numbers tapering off for the taller and shorter trees. Does
this mean that the large number of trees around the median are the
most successful (whatever 'successful' is taken to mean)? Not
necessarily. Similarly, some people are very bad (whatever 'very
bad' means) and some very good (whatever 'very good' means), but the
majority (the top of the bell curve) are neither very good nor very
bad, being easily swayed in either direction. It is a fair bet that
the Korean who impeccably manages his chemyeon will get high
marks from those of his peers who attach great importance to
chemyeon, but he might still not successfully manage his 7/11
store, write a ground-breaking PhD, or raise a contented family. It
all depends...
Still, we need to know what these magic names mean.
Chemyeon is closely related to the Western concept of face
(myeon translates as face). However, chemyeon
is vastly more important than the mere problem of saving personal
embarrassment. Any personal failure is a loss of chemyeon
both to the individual and to those groups in which he is embedded.
Your sensitivity to preserving other people's chemyeon
according to their position and values is a critical test of your
civilized behaviour. Thus, to refuse a drink, for example, might be
seen as an attack on the hospitality of a host. The name of the game
is balance, or harmony : all participants should contribute to
maintaining a kind of emotional comfort zone. Of course, if you have
no relationship with another party (Oak and Martin curiously do not
discuss this), you have little risk of either losing chemyeon
or causing them to lose it. The countless Korean drivers who park
anywhere, blocking roads, walkways and locking in other cars seem
outrageously selfish to an insensitive foreigner like me, but they
clearly conceive of no civic obligation to an anonymous community
which does not engage their chemyeon.
Neunchi is a formalized ideal of the sensitivity we
probably all hope for but often fail to achieve. Neunchi is
the ability to read the sub-text, the implicit messages in a social
situation, and then (this is the Korean part) react in a way which
preserves the chemyeon of the other person. Oak & Martin
cite the example of a teacher who asks a question, then perceiving
that the student can't answer it, deflects the question to another
student. This not only saves the first student's chemyeon,
but boosts the (Confucian) authority of the wise teacher and
win's student loyalty to their superior. Hmm. I have to admit that
I've become a dogged chemyeon cruncher for a whole stratum of
students who squeak "sorry" whenever they are pushed to perform in
any way. Could it be that real Koreans too play the barbarian or the
courtier according to the moment..?
Kibun is variously translated as the mood or vitality or
life-force of a person. When the kibun is sour, body and mind
are felt to be adversely affected. You have an obligation to be
sensitive to the kibun of other members in your group, even
if your own kibun is frail. Thus you do not refuse that shot
of soju which is going to put you under the table. You keep the
jolly spirit of the party and preserve your host's chemyeon
by accepting it graciously. But then, being desperate, you don't
drink. The host, using his neunchi to understand your
situation, is deeply grateful for your help in saving everyone's
kibun.
A close relative of kibun is bunuiki, which
is the business of preserving atmosphere or mood in a social
relationship. Nothing uniquely Korean about that, but again it is
the consequence of being a party-pooper which gives these two ideas
a pivotal place in the Korean worldview. In a perfect Korean
relationship, nothing should threaten the integrity of the group,
for the group (not the individual) is ideally the measure of all
that is humanly valuable. The goal of bunuiki is generally to
be convivial, but perhaps because it is a conscious obligation, the
outcomes are planned. You don't hunker down in little circles of
friends at a party. Everyone sticks together in one big group and
plays the programmed games. Spontaneity is not expected.
OK, OK, back to the real world (I'm a pathological
party-pooper) : at least for an outsider, there often seems to be an
extreme duality in Korean relationships. As the new
friendship/association/party/job starts off we are all out there in
the wide, sunny blue yonder. The bunuiki positively bubbles
with generosity/optimism/boundless ambitions. But the strain of
smiling so widely seemingly can't last. Someone stubs their toe on a
small problem, and suddenly the whole mood turns upside down.
Bitterness, recrimination and paranoia are in the stars. Korean
politics, for those who can bear to look, is a perfect pantomime
stage for these sagas of love and hate.
Koreans are not alone in living out a duality between the real
and the ideal. Creeds, philosophies and customs often have trouble
in admitting the flip side of their golden rules. Sometimes it is
expressed as a conflict between good and evil, but that kind of
labeling is not always helpful. For example, some cultural
traditions seem to run in reverse to the Korean pattern just
outlined. There's an old Irish belief that the best way to make a
firm friend is to have a knock down fight with him. Then you both
truly know each other's limits. Indonesians have an almost
desperate attachment to politeness (the Korean game taken to the
nth degree), but also have a deep and fearful cultural
recognition that politeness too has an underside. The underside is
called amok, when a man cracks and starts cutting people up
with a machete. On another plane, the strong Catholic sense of sin
is said to give it a special allure, even a sexual allure, and the
inevitable failure of virtue is accommodated by the institution of
confession to a priest.
While chemyeon, neunchi and bunuiki are played on
the wing in social games, what a Korean takes home is his abiding
knowledge of attachment to other people, and his seething resentment
for all the injustices the world has inflicted on him. The first
idea, that of attachment, is called cheong, and the second,
the bad vibes, is called han.
The balance of cheong attachments may be best reserved
for those which involve affection, but it can also include work
colleagues and others who may even be disliked, but to whom there
are nevertheless extended obligations. While cheong has some
cost, it is also a source of security and satisfaction. Your
cheong partners, notably your family and close friends, are
those whose company you will seek, and who will extend you help in
times of difficulty. Although cheong is a Korean label,
it's substance is of course found in every world culture to varying
degrees.
Chinese and other East Asians easily recognize the Korean idea
of cheong, but are apt to complain (like most other
"foreigners") that in business or pleasure it is frequently
impossible to enter a Korean cheong relationship -- Korean
ethnicity is too often an absolute qualification. In the West we
talk about acquaintances, and friends of varying intimacy. In modern
urban societies, the actual rules for forming these friendships are
anything but clear, and they can be quite unstable over time. Some
people never master the trick at all, so anomie is a
recognized social ailment. Also, some individuals are so adapted to
non-attachment that they are fairly contented 'loners' (I probably
qualify). Non-attachment is pretty close to a Confucian idea of
evil, or at least extreme selfishness. Yet one suspects that the
reality of life for the new Korea's intensely urbanized population
may not be so different from New York or Dusseldorf. Korean ideology
may not have the words to talk about anomie and the single
life yet, but daily existence for many is surely already ahead of
the language.
Then there is the bad news, the devil in the cellar of your
soul, the han. Perhaps han is an ego trying to get out
of its box. For a stereotyped Korean at least, when chemyeon
goes into deficit, there's a lot of han about. Inevitably in
a collectivist society, the individual gets trodden on, and has to
suppress personal hopes and priorities. This generates resentment,
but the social architecture does not sanction a constructive way for
the resentment to be dissipated. The black bile of han brews
in it's witch's pot, and has been blamed for everything from
explosive driving habits to the chronic alcoholism endemic in the
culture. Korea's history itself, a small nation caught as a buffer
state between ravaging giants, gives Korean nationalism han
on a grand scale (which makes the objective telling of history
extremely difficult even for supposedly independent Korean
historians). Much Korean literature is built around the dramas
generated by han.
*************
While chemyeon and it's drinking pals are just the
doorkeepers to Oak & Martin's extended discussion of Korean and
American habits, this little review is not the place to write a
comprehensive summary. If you want to know what to do at a wedding,
how to congratulate someone who has a job promotion or what to
expect for an American breakfast, buy their book and check it
out.
Well, the American diet ... we can't leave that entirely
unscathed. This is heart attack territory. Although kimchi
for breakfast, lunch and dinner may seem a trifle short on variety,
I for one departed long ago from the American dream of sugar and
grease for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Maybe you are better
qualified to evaluate Oak & Martin's statement of the
ideal :
BREAKFAST
1) scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage or
ham; toast with butter and jam, and a glass of orange
juice; coffee
2) pancakes with butter and syrup;
bacon; a glass of orange juice; coffee
3) a donut and coffee OR a bowl of
cereal with
milk
LUNCH
1) soup and sandwich; fruit and cookies;
milk or soda pop
2) hamburger; french fries; milk
shake
DINNER
1) meatloaf /a meat dish; mashed
potatoes & gravy, sweet peas; rolls; green salad;
ice cream; milk or soda pop
2) spaghetti with meat sauce; green
salad; garlic bread; cake or ice cream; milk or soda
pop
3) pizza; soda
pop
******************
Korea Unmasked by Won-bok Rhie is an entirely different
kind of book from the sedate analysis of Oak & Martin. While
they pick up generalizations with the fussy clinical care of doctors
in surgical gloves, Won-bok Rhie goes into the guts of his patient,
up to the elbows in blood and gore, and invites you to look over his
shoulder. At first it is a little off-putting. The initial encounter
with Won-bok Rhie left me wondering if he wasn't one of those sowers
of mass prejudice who infest every community -- the talk-back radio
jocks, the pork-barrel politicians, and the tabloid journalists.
Their common weapons are a bag of carefully chosen factoids, a
crystal clear moral solution to every problem, and above all a keen
sense of tribal superiority to the barbarians at the gate. Won-bok
Rhie tends to lean in this direction, especially for the casual
reader. He is quick to claim that Koreans are entirely unique at
this or that, the greatest, the best, the most extreme or whatever.
Just to make sure that the plebs get the point, each snippet is
dished up cartoon style in panels (three across, four down per page)
with dinky little drawings. My own cultural suspicions of the
cartoon style, I realized later, came directly from a childhood
world where "classic comics" reduced the world's great literature to
a set of cartoons for the illiterate, and excited the scathing
contempt of my parents and teachers. Maybe readers from the video
age won't have this problem.
Anyway, as I held on and hop-scotched from panel to panel, the
style began to grow on me. Won-bok Rhie has the grace to admit at
the outset that he deals in wild generalizations; (maybe he has
learned to deflect flack from the sidelines with such candour).
Gradually, if you persist, you will realize that the author is
actually trading in a discourse style that is particularly Asian,
interwoven with colour patches of the more linear, logical method of
argument we are familiar with in the West. (One good analogy
for this intellectual style is a description I once read of the
Chinese (PRC) spy network : it is a "junk mail" system, gathering
huge amounts of often trivial and unrelated information, which en
masse slowly conveys an "impression" of an individual, organization
or country). Thus, by the time you get to the end of Korea
Unmasked, some of its more extreme hyperbole has
self-cancelled on internal contradictions, and you begin to have a
strong sense of at least one Korean's world-view. The accumulation
of impressions is a sort of organic growth which eventually
overwhelms and absorbs your doubts.
Korea Unmasked is broken into four sections :
Neighbours but Strangers : Korea, China and Japan; The
Korean People; The Success and Tribulations of the
Koreans; and The Long & Treacherous Road to
Reunification. There is also a translator's note, where
the translators indicate the particular difficulty of rendering into
English a work in which both pictures and words (often with
colloquial references) combine to give a texture of meanings. The
book in other words has been written with a Korean readership in
mind. Koreans are looking in the mirror, giggling at their own image
but fully aware of a real people's life and memories beyond the
glass. We, foreigners and strangers, must be content to have faith
in those reflections which Won-bok Rhie offers us.
The section, Neighbours but Strangers : Korea, China and
Japan, lays a groundwork of basic statistics and contrasts in
cultural disposition. The author claims expertise in this, having
written eight other books which "unmask" the core of various
countries. England, France and Germany, we are told, are extremely
similar since all three nationalities use knives and forks, and
"believe in the same God"; (I thought droves of them had stopped
believing in any god..). China, Korea and Japan on the other hand
couldn't be more different since they have chopsticks of different
lengths. Moreover, the Chinese communists buried Confucius, the
Koreans deified him but nowadays have become 35% Christian, whereas
the Japanese couldn't give a stuff about religion at all. Now even
allowing that I'm a mutated European Orc looking in on these Middle
Lands, it seems to me that here Won-bok Rhie is encouraging his
Korean readers to play that old human game of
spot-the-difference. Fellow Orcs will have no trouble remembering
that English, French and Germans also easily tell each other's body
smells apart.
One thing the Asians do have in common, the author says, is a
strong sense of homogeneity and camaraderie within each culture,
compared to most western countries. Oh dear, here we go again ...
For those of us who've watched Koreans fighting like cats &
dogs, or seen a bunch of Chinese careerists scrambling for
advantage, it's all a bit hard to swallow. That's the trouble with
stereotypes. They are so easy to satirize, but somewhere deep down
also contain a grain of truth. What Won-bok Rhie is probably getting
at is that East Asian peoples (at this moment in their history) like
to keep their family squabbles out of sight and present a solid face
to the outside world. I have great trouble in getting most Chinese
or Korean acquaintances to make wry, dispassionate observations
about their own countries in the presence of a foreigner. They also
have personal networking and nepotism down to a fine art, and that
perhaps is a kind of solidarity. Having taught in Chinese and Korean
universities, I do have to agree about the "strangers" epithet. Pop
idols excepted, the general ignorance and disinterest in
neighbouring countries amongst my tertiary students has been
distressing.
Won-bok Rhie decides that the most important value for Chinese
is "one" -- one country, one value, one people. But also,
paradoxically, "one" in the sense of "solo" : "the Chinese tend to
look out only for themselves ... [they] only trust themselves and
their families .....They couldn't care less about what happens to
others ... the 'me only' mentality pervades the lives of the
Chinese..." (Rhie p.30) . Well yeah, but that's an impression I have
about many a Korean on the loose too. The critical issue here is
that Won-bok Rhie (like me) meets Chinese as an outsider to whom
they owe no obligation. He meets Koreans within his own cultural
network, but I do not. There is also a socio-political mood at
present where an ambitious young Chinese will often aim to establish
his own business, whereas his Korean counterpart thinks small
business is for losers, and will do anything to get a secure job in
one of the big chaebols like Samsung, or a government position. As
for public selfishness, that too has a flip side. For the record,
most of us who have lived in Korea or China will recall instances
where complete strangers have shown great kindness and sometimes
made considerable personal sacrifice to help out a foreigner, with
no hope of any recompense. The designs of cultures can favour
particular behaviours, good or bad, but those are just tendencies.
On the ground you always encounter the full range of human
character.
And what of the Japanese? Wa, he says, is the key to
them. Wa, translating as "peace and harmony" is a component
of many Japanese words. Why? "Nearly all island countries consider
peace and harmony to be very important.." (Rhie p.32). England and
Japan, he says, have a near divine, but powerless ruler at the top
to play referee and break up fights. This is nonsense as an
explanation of course. Nearly everyone over thirty, everywhere,
considers peace and harmony to be very important, but that hasn't
stopped interest groups incited by ideologues from fighting
themselves to a standstill in countries big and small -- including
the islands of Japan, England, Ireland (!!), Papua New Guinea (where
my students used to take time off for annual tribal wars), and Fiji
(where the locals not only fought, but ate each other until the
English turned up and stuck a flag in the mud). If Rhie's
explanation of wa is eccentric, there is no doubt about the
value placed on displays of courtesy in that culture, which he
contrasts with a Korean relish for curse words.
The crux of the cultural loathing between Koreans and Japanese
(invasions and colonialism apart) seems to have something to do with
this difference in style. "Japanese", numerous Koreans have told me
darkly, "are snakes in the grass. They never mean what they say."
Exasperated Australians say the same thing in Indonesia. But if we
recall Oak & Martin's solemn enumeration of the Korean virtues
of chemyeon, neunchi, kibun and bunuiki, it all sounds
a bit rich. Ideals are one thing; calibrating your language and
decoding the enemy is something else again. While foreigners are
impressed by the similarities between Japanese and Koreans, they
themselves are apt to see a yawning chasm. They are more comfortable
taking a plane to New York than a three hour hydrofoil trip between
Busan and Fukuoka. As Won-bok Rhie sees it, Koreans are hearty
back-slapping extroverts, and world leaders in multiplayer online
games, while the Japanese are neurotic loners, obsessive about not
invading other people's space, and world leaders in one-person video
games. Hmm, well for loners the Japanese too can show remarkable
group solidarity when faced with the outer barbarians ... Maybe we
all need enemies.
Now that the Chinese and Japanese have been neatly labeled, the
big question for Rhie and his Korean readers is what coloured badge
they should pin on their own T-shirts. Again the writer finds his
magic key in geography. This penchant for folk-science is
widespread, but a bit worrying in a popularized work by an academic
(Won-bok Rhie is a professor). Early efforts in my own field,
linguistics, is full of this kind of stuff -- good for a laugh but
alarming when a well-intentioned public quotes it as gospel; (yes,
Australian English has a flat intonation profile "because" 19th
Century European settlers in Australia were afraid of all the cattle
flies buzzing into their mouths ... didn't you know, really?). Well,
by this thesis, Koreans have been moulded, stamped and cast forever
by living on a peninsula. No doubt peninsula living was more than a
pinch of salt in the kimchi mixture of Korean character, but
it may be drawing a long bow to equate them on this criteria alone
with Italians (1500 years of invasions after the fall of the Roman
Empire) and the Balkan States (fiercely preserving racial identity,
Rhie says, by refusing intermarriage). The 'culture under siege from
foreigners' theme is widely quoted by Korean academics and the
popular media alike as a constant in Korean history. The evidence of
Chinese and later, Japanese incursions is well-recorded. However,
the discussion is inclined to overlook that Korean clans too were
not adverse to local and international aggression themselves.
Paekche, Silla and Koryeo for example spent 700 years in mutual
suspicion, betrayal and conflict;(and on bad days, we sometimes
think they are still at it...).
Anyway, from wherever it came, a history of constant conflict
has induced Koreans to put the preservation of life and property
above all else. Rhie says that their formula to achieve this goal
has revolved around cheong. Won-bok Rhie probes cheong
in more depth than Oak & Martin. The word is a combination
of Chinese characters for 'middle' and 'heart', yielding "... a
mindset that stresses justice, fairness and sharing" (Rhie, p.46).
The communal ingredient is especially strong, so that "Koreans do
not accept methods that deviate from the societal norm.." and "...
cheong dictates that there should be an egalitarian
distribution of the fruits of prosperity", (Rhie, p.
47). No wonder the heartburn of han lies so heavily
across the land. Whether it has been the rigid and exploitative
bone rank caste system of the Yi Chosun and earlier
dynasties, the brutal Animal Farm of Dear Leader Kim
Jong-il's North Korea, or the brazen ranking by wealth in modern
South Korea, this has never been a place of notable justice,
fairness and sharing. What this interpretation of cheong does
give us is one handle on the turbulent social currents which sweep
public and private life in Korea. It helps to remember though that
Rhie's nuanced reading of cheong does not resonate with all
Koreans. A few weeks ago I pressed a group of advanced English
conversation students to discuss it. The disinterest was palpable,
and after ten fruitless minutes I retreated to a topic of real
passion -- fashion...
****************
By now the value as well as the limits of Korea Unmasked
should be evident. A skeptical mind encountering Won-bok Rhie's
grand arguments will be constantly driven to counter-attack. Yet
that is a kind of compliment, a sign that he has engaged our
opinions and prejudices for better or for worse. I have offered only
an aperitif here. There is much more, more to consider and more to
dispute. You will be driven to examine the wellsprings of your own
cherished beliefs. And at the end of it all, even if you have fought
the author for every centimeter (or perhaps especially if you have
fought him), you will emerge with a new scaffold of ideas to
build around that exasperating and often likeable character, the
Korean.
All opinions
expressed in Thor's Unwise Ideas and The Passionate Skeptic
are entirely those of the author, who has no aim to influence,
proselytize or persuade others to a point of view. He is
pleased if his writing generates reflection in readers, either
for or against the sentiment of the argument.
"Korean, American and Other Strange Habits
- You Do It Your Way"... copyrighted to
Thor May 2003; all rights reserved
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