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The New Koreans
The New Koreans by Michael Breen
Ch 1
on the Sewol ferry boat tragedy:
For the Koreans, this tragedy is a metaphor: Throughout history they had ignored the sea around their peninsula and chose instead to crouch in valleys away from the world. Then the South Koreans defied history and took to the sea as traders and in their rush to make money, cut corners and trampled over one another.
The Koreans are an impatient people and yearn to be as good as they imagine advanced peoples to be. But they are too hard on themselves when their country falls short in their own eyes.
Ch 2
The achievements of the Korean generation born between 1920 and 1955 is a truly remarkable tale. ... They are, it may be said, the greatest generation in Korean history. They deserve statues for they are heroic. But no one has told them this and they do not conceive of themselves as such.
Ch 3
The reason for the lack of options for leisure is that government still sees tourism as a means to extract money from foreigners rather than as an integral part of the domestic economy and a way for people to recharge their batteries.
In Nov. 2007, a Mr. Shin donated 39,300 square meters of DMZ land he had bought in 1975 to the National Trust. If you want to buy some, here's what I found you can expect to pay: Rough land and hills, 2000-3000 KRW per 3.3 square meters; potential farmland, KRW 10,000. That's an average of 2 dollars per 36 square feet of rough land and 9 dollars for farmland.
on modern farming:
Young people from the city are joining local farmers and trying their hand at organic farming. Another initiative involves cooperatives through which consumers commit to farmers. The largest, called Hansalim, involves 2000 farmers who produce local, largely organically grown products that are distributed to over 400,000 households via cooperatives, health-food stores, and home delivery.
on nationalism:
Korean nationalism lends itself to a love of the people as a concept, but the hierarchical system makes individuals rather indifferent to others who lie outside their circles. For this reason, their default way of empathizing with their fellows is to locate their suffering.
Ch 4
on why "things are not explained":
I see now how people raised in authoritarian environments can think they are stupid until they're in charge themselves. ... Doctors prescribe your medicine without explaining what's wrong with you; work crews attack roads without putting up helpful signs advising drivers of a diversion ahead. ... when no one is in charge, yelling contradictory orders and creating general confusion, yet the task itself is both completed and enjoyed.
on why foreigners often learn important things by chance and circumstance, and Koreans' communication struggles:
Koreans can be obscure and uncommunicative at the same time as they are being outgoing and forthright. ... This contradiction comes from the view that education involves not discovery, but the imparting of truth by the all-knowing teacher to the ignorant pupil. The lack of discourse and the lack of training in the arts of explanation and persuasion means that Koreans are poorly equipped as adults to work smoothly with one another.
Ch 5
on Confucian influence and religion:
Confucianism failed the Koreans big time, both as a scheme for cultivating the self and for ordering the family and the wider society. ... But, like communism, once they got power their religion never lived up to its promise. ... it remains evident today in ancestor rituals and in the emphasis on vertically ordered human relationships. It is also apparent in gender inequality.
The shamans believed that negative emotion needed to be assuaged because, unchecked, it could cause remote damage. ... After a Korean airliner was shot down in 1983 by a Soviet jet the spirits of two single female flight attendants were married to two single male passengers in ceremonies arranged by the bereaved parents to ease their imagined frustrations.
Ch 6
on the Donghak movement, as an example of intense messianism:
Choe Je-u, said God had asked him to save mankind. This makes him the first known Korean to claim to have spoken to the one God. ... the government perceived his ministry as a challenge: It regarded itself as the supreme authority. Choe was tried for sedition and executed. Thirty years later, a peasant revolt by his followers prompted the Korean king to call for help from China, which led to a war in Korea between Japan and China. The religion was renamed Chongdogyo.
on Moon Sun-Myung's Unification Church:
Moon taught a view of God that was quintessentially Korean, combining shamanist passion and Confucian family patterns in Christian form. Moon's God was the miserable parent who suffered in lonely agony in a world of children who lacked filial piety toward him, and who acted destructively in relation with one another. Moon said that praying for God's help was selfish and thoughtless because it only added to the cosmic suffering. The spiritually mature person should seek to ease God's suffering and care for the world.
on Yoo Jae-yul, leader of the Tent Temple movement:
Yoo claimed that Armageddon would break out when the chosen saints entered a refuge prepared by God just south of Seoul. ... Yoo was accused of fraud, after which he handed his assets to the Presbyterian Church and emigrated to the United States. An interesting footnote to this story is that Yoo is the father-in-law of the rapper PSY.
on the role of religion in Korean society:
New religious figures play a similar role to artists in a society in that the geniuses among them somehow tap the soul of their people, the heart of their age. While the artists may seek simply to articulate what they find there, the religious leader seeks to redirect it or harness it and inject society with new life. If that is the case, then the mission for today's religions in Korea or for the next new one is to address the question of happiness.
Ch 7
on Korea's suicide statistics and challenges:
The low rate of people seeking professional help is attributed to a stigma associated with psychiatric support. Another unacknowledged explanation is lack of trust in the government's promise of confidentiality.
on Korea's collective experience, often referred to as han:
Han is a kind of rage and helplessness that is sublimated and lingers like an inactive resentment. It first emerged as a topic of literary criticism in the 1940-50s. ... in the 1970s it became a key component of modern novels and of minjung (masses) theology, which could be loosely described as t eh Korean version of neo-Marxist Liberation Theology.
on Korean-suffering and han:
"Western history, you could say, is a history of disobedience," said psychiatrist Paek Sang-chang. "It tells of the struggle for individual freedom. But our history is one of the struggle to obey." Korean heroes are the loyal subject and the filial son, whose exemplary virtue is their suppression of self in the course of obedience.
on group dynamics and Koreans' preference for groups:
I don't believe the hikers in Seoul, all properly knitted out and wielding ski poles - are communing with nature so much as communing with one another. And therein lies a clue. They are almost all in groups: extended families, workmates, alumni. Some are dating groups ... Of course, they can enjoy a view, but their mind is on the group dynamic. This fits the idea inherent in the culture that predisposes people to find meaning by identifying with groups. ... This group orientation is the starting point of what makes Korea foreign for the Westerner. It is, it seems to me, also the key to the cell door of their unhappiness. ... The problem with the group, at least as it tends to work in Korea, is that it leads people to be overly concerned with the views of others. ... Koreans spend far more time thinking about people than, say, about ideas.
on competition, hierarchy, social status:
A challenge for Korea now is to vary the paths to success and to separate social ranking from the sense of worth. This is easily said, but the concept is so deeply ingrained that it seems impossible. ... In the world of hierarchy, it is hard to be spontaneous and innocent. You learn early on to be sensitive, to gather intelligence, and to plot. There is no joy in conversation. There is meaning in the level of the people you are conversing with and what they can give you, but there is no joy in conversation itself. ... One notable effect of the central presence of hierarchy is on humor. There are, for example, no sitcom shows around characters who are vicars, doctors, or judges. Not because people won't laugh but because the professional associations will complain. With people taking their social position so seriously, the comic faces many such no-go areas.
on Korean emotionalism, kibun (feelings, or state of mind)
The kibun is translated as mood, but is accorded higher importance than we would accord that word. It is perhaps best described as that part of you that extends beyond the physical body, your inner atmosphere or, perhaps, your continental shelf. This invisible part of you can be damaged by loss of face, disrespect, bad news, or unhappiness. Or by the appearance of someone who threatens you, or who damaged your kibun before.
Here lies a cultural difference that invites great misunderstanding, for it is not easy for one side to see the virtue of the other. When is one individual being correct more important than a group being happy? Obviously sometimes, but much less often for the Korean who places his emphasis on ethics in relationships, and less on the individual and his conscience. The Korean naturally seeks harmony in relationships over objective truth and goodness.
Ch 8
on the three characteristics of Korean nationalism:
- Ethnicity. What sets Koreans apart is a belief in a unique bloodline.
- Victimhood. Victimhood is sweet temptation because it confers righteousness. Even the bad things about you are some other bullying country's fault.
- Lack of confidence. "Our thinking and way of life were borrowed," said one Korean official who asked not to be named to avoid being seen as criticizing his country. "It's like we're wearing shirts and pants that don't fit. Take education. Most majors we study were not created by us. Nor are the sports we play, the music we listen to, the movies we watch, or even the food we eat. Most specialists and experts study abroad. In their minds, the ideal destination is not here. They always refer to some other place, like the USA, where things are done better. When I meet a foreigner, I presume you know things better than me and that you have more experience than me."
Ch 9
on Korean parenting:
Korean infants are more indulged than ordered about. You can tell the boys who were not taught to defer pleasure. As adults, they still want everything right now. They are impulsive and focused on the short term, and they throw tantrums when they don't get their way. A Western observer will consider Korean parents overtolerant of their children. They don't lecture them. In fact, they don't even explain much. As a result, children learn by imitation and by knowing what makes grown-ups mad. Instead of being taught abstract principles - like, no, you can't have that, because it's wrong to eat between meals - the tendency is to learn that some things are wrong in certain situations. You can't have it, because Dad's in a bad mood right now. The presence of older siblings, grandparents, all in the same house, used to provide a natural form of discipline. But this is often lacking in modern families, with the result that many adults complain the nation is raising a lot of spoiled, flabby-assed game addicts.
on parent-child relationships:
Many Koreans are most deeply motivated to succeed in life or do what they do out of a sense of repaying the suffering and sacrifice of their parents.
on sex, prostitution:
The consequence is a twenty-billion-dollar industry involving two to three hundred thousand women. When her jurisdiction included the Miari Texas red-light district of Seoul, Kim found two types of prostitute: "I figured around seven out of ten of the women could live without engaging in prostitution. They lived with their parents or were married and did it to earn money to pay for plastic surgery or things they wanted. The others needed the income. It was their only way to survive."
on same-sex marriage legalization in Korea:
As politicians consider it political suicide to take on the Christians, and other groups with votes, like taxi drivers and farmers, this will be a hard-fought battle, especially as there is a more committed opponent than the stereotypical conservative: the Full Gospel Church includes many former sex industry workers and believers who say Jesus has helped them turn away from homosexuality.
on lineage, adoption, local and international:
Given their concern for lineage, Koreans are not big on adoption. Even modern Koreans exhibit an unconscionable disregard for discarded babies. It's been foreigners, Christian missionariies and American soldiers, who have stepped in. Since the Korean War, only four percent of abandoned babies have found homes in South Korea. Around two hundred thousand have been adopted overseas, over seventy percent of them by Americans, and over two million raised in orphanages.
on Korean education:
The great irony is that the quality of the education they are torturing themselves to receive is questionable. In school, young Koreans are taught a number of things about life that we would find objectionable. For example, that in the world there is one way to success. This is not a culture in which diversity is seen as a value or an ideal. Koreans see virtue in unity: one mind, one people, one system, one race, one path. The education system reinforces this idea. The artistic but ill-disciplined student, or the creative thinker who wants to challenge established thinking, may have nowhere to go. Education in Korea is all about what appears in the textbook and in the exam; life experience, critical thinking, and creativity receive little attention.
Ch 10
on the origin of Koreans, and when the Altaic tribes prevailed over the Neolithic Koreans:
Two points from this period are apparent: First, there's been no ethnic mixing since that time on any significant scale with the possible exception of the Mongol invaders of the 13th century, which makes Koreans among the most genetically homogeneous on earth; and, second, the original Koreans were ethnically and liguistically different from the Chinese tribes.
on the source of the Dangun (the mythical founder of Korea) story:
Shrines to Dangun are believed to have been built around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. However, the idea of him as a common ancestor with heavenly connections is embarrassingly modern, twentieth century in fact. The religion Daejong-gyo, which kicked off Dangun worship, began in 1909. Nationalist historians i the 1930s, when Kroea was ruled by Japan, reworked the myth into its present shape as a counter to Japanese efforts to work Koreans - as "adopted" citizens - into their own fictional sun-god genealogy.
Ch 11 "The Quest for Purity"
On Outdoing and the zeal to Out-Chinese the Chinese:
They took steps to centralize power. Land taxes, flowed directly into the central government's coffers, while the population was subject to military and larbor service.