Country: South Korea

South Korea (officially the Republic of Korea) is a country on the southern part of the Korean peninsula, with its capital in Seoul. It is famous for its automobile and electronics production, ceramics, and is especially proud of its written system (Hangul).

The weather in South Korea varies wildly, with cold winters, humid summers, and a monsoon season. Though most major metropolitan areas are designed with heavy rains in mind there are still yearly flood warnings. Much of South Korea is composed of mountains, valleys, and coastal plains.

The population of South Korea is relatively homogenous (over 97% ethnically Korean) and the official language is Korean (though English is commonplace, it is not universally taught/fluent/understood).

Sources/further reading:

https://www.britannica.com/place/South-Korea

https://www.korea.net/AboutKorea/Society/South-Korea-Summary

https://www.roughguides.com/south-korea/

Editor’s note: the following is a submission from Lawrence, who lives and works in South Korea. He is married to a native Korean (Emma) and they are raising their son, Ryan, in a suburb of Seoul. Their names have been changed to protect anonymity, but the text.

Translation note: Korean family names like “aunt” or “uncle” are always relational. “Imo” and “Imobu” are Emma’s “aunt” and “uncle”.

Some observations about South Korea, prefaced with a few caveats:

• I like and respect tradition as much as the next guy, but this has its limits. Traditions and cultural practices that essentially put a shackle on someone or some group of people — women, the young, the old, the foreign, etc. — can/should/will change over time, and I will actively participate in that change.
• There are misogynists, idiots, assholes, and terrible bosses everywhere in the world.
• Many of the things I gripe about are features of big cities — particularly, fast-growing urban environments — throughout Asia.
• South Korea has experienced phenomenal development since the end of the Korean War... so in roughly 70 years, it's gone from ~third-world impoverished nation to a highly modernized country that has seen tremendous economic growth and wealth creation. In four living generations, you span elderly people who experienced the Japanese colonial era, the ravages and deprivations of war, and the political chaos of the post-war years; middle-aged people who saw (and often were the agents of) major changes in society; to young people and children who have never known anything but post-scarcity peace and the internet. Worldviews, outlooks, attitudes, and motivations, uh, vary wildly.

Genuine culture shock, i.e. required me to rearrange my thinking or behavior:

Hierarchy

Like most east Asian societies, Korea is hierarchical and modeled on the Confucian paradigm (Respect the elder. Love the young one. Thank you!). I was unprepared for just how pervasive and rigid the hierarchy was in Korean society though. Seniority is conferred through age, tenure, literal rank, grade level, and — in a modified form — wealth/social class (i.e. the wealthy have de facto leeway in ignoring the norms of hierarchy when it suits them). I was deeply surprised how I saw the hierarchical structure play out... from where/how colleagues sat at a business dinner, to how they poured drinks and ate (if you're low on the totem pole, you pour/receive drinks with both hands, then face away from the senior people so they don't even have to see your lowly ass drink), to even in a casual group of friends the younger people were usually a bit deferential to the older people. Beyond the social setting: older kids/students mercilessly bully their juniors, bosses at work are routinely shitheads to their employees, older siblings flex on younger siblings, coaches bully athletes (who in turn bully each other), and endless family drama stems from "position" (i.e. oldest sibling and his/her family vs. the younger or more distantly-related).

One added consequence is that everyone has a title. In families, in particular, all the kinship terms immediately identify gender, generation, age within a generation, and whether you've married in. When I first moved here, many of Emma's relatives insisted that [Emma’s cousins] refer to me as hyungbu (brother-in-law), and considered them to be disrespectful when they just called me by name. Imo and Imobu would always call me Smith-sobang (sobang denotes that I married into the family). It took a long time for them to all get used to calling me Larry, and I'm pretty sure they only do it because I'm a foreigner. If Jun Ho [Emma’s cousin’s husband] told everyone just to call him Jun Ho instead of Park-sobang, I don't think anyone would do it. Even now with some of the kids I tutor, I tell them (and their parents) that they can call me Larry or Lawrence, or whatever they are comfortable calling me. I've never once been called by name... it's always seonsaengnim (teacher), or in the case of one parent, Lawrence-ssaem (Lawrence-teacher).

Misogyny

The gender disparity in Korea is huge. Simply put, Korean society is still geared towards women being inferior, subservient, and amenable to decisions made by men. Korea still trails all OECD countries in gender wage gap (women earn roughly one-third less than men), and Korean women are generally expected to abandon their jobs once they get married. Though technically illegal, Korean employers routinely find ways to fire pregnant employees. While Korean men are expected to devote themselves to their jobs over their families, it is assumed that Korean women will pick up all the slack in terms of child-rearing and domestic life. That domestic life often includes subservience to her in-laws; daughters-in-law rank lowest in the family hierarchy, and can often be expected to cook and clean for their parents-in-law, and slave away in the kitchen non-stop for large family gatherings.

Korean matchmaking services often count advanced degrees and higher job positions against a woman's desirability; ideally, if a woman works at all, she would be a preschool teacher or something similar. Also, if she's over 25, she's practically over the hill. This is a country where it was illegal for women to smoke in public until the 1980s, and even now women smoking get the stinkeye from older people (and/or get yelled at) and are often stigmatized by men. This is a country where a male politician, during a hearing about declining national birth rates and population decline, chastised a female senior economist who was presenting about the issue that she was neglecting her duty to the country by not having kids. Granted, he got shit for it, but not much.

How does this impact me? When we moved to Seoul, Emma had trouble finding a job (even at large, nominally-multinational companies) because she was a woman in her late 30s. She was considered too old, too strong-willed (foreign educated, lived abroad, communicates quite directly), and too likely to get pregnant and start a family (recently married, etc.) for any employer to want to deal with. All the HR practices that are illegal in the US, such as explicitly asking candidates about marital status, family planning, health condition, age, etc. as well as requiring a picture to be submitted with each resume, are par for the course here. In the meantime, Emma's female cousins (who are without fail the most interesting, capable, and educated members of Emma's family) routinely have to put up with all kinds of bullshit at work, including harassment, limited opportunities, lower pay, etc. It's getting better, particularly for Bella [Emma's cousin] since she works for a tech/gaming company with a more progressive culture, but there's still a long way to go. It's no accident that Emma's main source of employment is from a female-run company started by Emma's friend and her sister.

In the meantime, most of Emma's friends (also largely highly-educated and progressive/open-minded) have confided that they are either unhappy with their jobs and/or their marriages. Korean norms are changing (slowly), but for the most part Korean society wants to put these women in situations/power dynamics/etc. that they don't want any part of. Both Emma and I are atypical by Korean standards, but we generally hear from Emma’s Korean friends — especially women — that they envy us for our marriage, our dynamic, the way we raise Ryan, etc. We hear it too often and from too many different people for it to be coincidence or flattery. Or as Emma’s mom told Imo the other day, "Ryan has two moms." I take that as a compliment.

Old People

Old people here don't give a fuck. That is to say, they are ornery, outspoken, extremely set in their ways, and have substantial social clout. On the one hand, this makes them indistinguishable from old people the world over. But on the other, the way they go about not giving a fuck is uniquely Korean. Old men will smoke wherever they please; they will ride their mobility scooters at 1 kph through traffic; they will sit all day with their friends on the furniture displays in Emart [a retail store roughly equivalent to a Target]. God have mercy on you if you're the young person or employee tasked with telling them to stop what they're doing.

In particular, Korean ajummas are amazing. Women of a certain age — usually empty-nesters, sometimes widowed, sometimes not, old but not exactly elderly — morph into this crazy force of nature. They are everything old men are, but to the nth degree. They are fearless and uniquely powerful. They will talk shit to anyone, they will break up fights (and then lecture the erstwhile fighters), they will bend anyone's rules by the power of their stubbornness, and they will shock and delight you with their directness and humor. They are almost a third gender, as they are (at times) unconstrained by Korean norms and expectations of men and women.

Perhaps as a holdover from post-war scarcity, and perhaps as an extension of long-established Korean food culture, you will see legions of ajummas foraging for wild seasonal greens and mushrooms throughout the year. They gather mugwort in the spring from parks, hillsides, mountain preserves, road medians, and riverbanks. Yes, mugwort soup tastes good, but I feel like the compulsion to forage comes from a living collective memory of deprivation. This extends to other aspects of Korean food culture... yeah sure, make a fish stew with the boniest, most difficult to eat fish... eat all the tripe and pork belly you want... but it's a historical fact that most of the "good" cuts of meat and fish were exported for sale in post-war years. Korean food, as with old people, exists with an attitude of getting by with less.

Not culture shock, per se, but still requiring an adjustment period:

Personal space and public interactions

When I lived in NYC, there was a logical, generally predictable flow to the way pedestrians moved, even in very crowded or busy places. People would position themselves or move with the knowledge that others were trying to walk, find a seat on the train, get through a door, etc. and (sort of) try not to impede the flow. No such awareness, anticipation, or regard exists here. People stand in each others' way all the time, barely get out of each others' path when walking, push their shopping carts into impossible gridlock, and generally drive me fucking crazy.

The thing is, none of this bugs Koreans (beyond baseline aggravation). This is just normal and unsurprising, and an extension of the Korean attitude towards strangers in public... namely, no one gives even the most basic shit about anyone else. All the tiny courtesies we experience in the US, such as people holding a door open if you're walking into a building behind them, or saying "excuse me" if you bump into someone on a crowded train platform, or even a little nod of acknowledgment when someone gestures for you to go first.... they don't exist here.

Shitty driving

This is a direct extension to my public interaction gripe above. People drive with little regard for anyone but themselves, and with almost none of the sense of anticipation (or attitude that their own driving should be predictable) that informs US notions of "defensive driving."

I've traveled to a lot of places where the driving culture has surrendered to a kind of controlled chaos... Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Italy... and the craziness has never bothered me. The thing that gets me about Korea is that the road design and modern cars have all the trappings of safe, responsible driving. There are clear signals and school zones and cameras everywhere, and yet people drive with a willful shittiness that I can't explain. It goes beyond just driving aggressively or impatiently (though there is plenty of that). I am tempted to say it's a holdover from Korea's dramatic expansion of personal wealth from the 1970s through the 90s... during this period, the number of cars on the road exploded, and with the ability to drive (and an infrastructure that barely kept up) came an entitlement to do whatever the hell you wanted. It's no coincidence that South Korea had the highest per capita road deaths of OECD countries for most of the 1980s and 90s.

Anyways, I think it's the shitty driving in the context of a driving environment that maintains the pretense of good driving that gets to me.

Indirect communication

No one tells it like it is, particularly for bad news or "constructive" criticism. Unless the power dynamic and the nature of the news absolutely favors the speaker — i.e. the speaker will experience no embarrassment, judgment, or social risk — then no one will speak plainly. But outside of this scenario, no one will criticize their social superiors or acknowledge uncomfortable truths about themselves. There is very little idea that you can speak truth to power; if one does, then there are two usual outcomes: 1) the speaker is ignored, or 2) people kill the messenger.