Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mack4289]

Like most of my posts, I don't expect this to generate much discussion. I think it's just funny to read that a correspondent for such a respected magazine has an experience in Seoul not much different from our own:

http://www.economist.com/daily/diary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9351850


The Love Motel

"MY DAY begins at midnight in my love hotel among the college bars of the Hongdae. The hotel was a recommendation from my otherwise infallible guide, Yon. I know it�s a love hotel for two reasons. First and more obvious: housekeeping has left prophylactics on the bedside table. Second: my basic Korean grammar explains that �yes� can be expressed �ye� or �ne�, depending on context. On TV and on the street I have heard only �ne�. After ten nocturnal minutes in a hotel in the Hongdae I can now tell you at least one context in which Koreans say �ye�.

Trying to Figure Korean culture, from a Korean

.... South Korea, for all its success�after the war it had a lower GDP per capita than Ghana�has not been able to shake an obsession with catching up. Korean soaps begin at eight in the morning, which means that Korean housewives (and presumably their husbands) are at it a full two hours ahead of their American counterparts.

The designer explains to me, after I have apologised six times and rescheduled, that Koreans value efficiency and thrift. Cell phones and PDAs advertised in America as agents of freedom and self-reliance are sold to the South Korean market as a way to get things done quicker.

Crossed wires, Korean-styleHe also says, echoing my conversation with Yon earlier in the week, that a half-century of colonisation and war destroyed the past so thoroughly that Koreans nowadays want only the new and the different. In America, he says, refrigerators and washing machines have always been and can only be white or off-white. He recently worked on a product launch for a refrigerator that started white until he realised that, in Korea, there was no reason he couldn�t paint it red. Or orange.

Trying to Figure Korean culture, from a foreigner (who's wearing a hanbok- good God)

Robert is, by his own reckoning, a lifer. I have asked him to help me understand South Korea�s relationship with the mostly oblivious America. Korea, he explains, used to view China as its older brother, a recognition that China was the centre of the world, the giver of civilisation. In Confucian society both younger and older brother carry rights and responsibilities; the older brother is supposed to be kind to the younger brother, to treat him with respect.

Now, in America, Korea has another older brother, but one with its own Western political inheritance of sovereign, equal states. When negotiating trade agreements, for example, America expects Korea to play by the same rules; Korea is waiting for its big brother to step in and help out. (I rate my own older brother on this scale as pleasantly Confucian, even now when we are grown and should actually treat each other like sovereign states. I decide to tell him this when I get home.)

... ask what pulls in the most comments at The Marmot�s Hole. Robert is cautious but has a clear answer: interracial relationships. Demand for English instruction in South Korea is such that less scrupulous schools have been allowing Westerners to teach on tourist visas off the books. The teachers are almost all male, less committed to their craft than those with visas, and more likely to be interested primarily in, well, in girls. A Korean tabloid ran a story recently under the subhead, �Beware the ugly white English teacher.�

Robert�s wife is Mongolian, and he�s quick to point out that he�s never had any difficulty appearing with her in public (despite the hanbok, it is hard to imagine a more obviously American figure). He understands, to some extent, Korea�s cultural frustration. �They watch American movies,� he says, �You see white guys with Asian women all the time. When does an Asian guy ever get the white girl?�

Making a fool of yourself with the locals

I have no talent worthy of the birthday of a soap star or the attention of two million South Koreans. And so, in a fever of panic, striptease-style I remove my tie and dress shirt.

They are amused, in the way that you have no choice but to be amused when a foreigner removes his clothing.

Trying to get around in Seoul + figuring Korean culture again, from a Korean

THERE are few street signs in Seoul because there are few street names in Seoul. Location is relative, described through corners and landmarks. Google Maps has no purchase here. The barriers to entry here are not only linguistic and cultural, but spatial; if you are not from Seoul and wish to make an appointment, your only hope is to climb into a cab, dial the number of your appointment and hand your cell phone to the driver.

You did rent a cell phone, right?

Socially, then, in Seoul, I am reduced to the role of a four-year-old. I have to be driven everywhere but can be taught entertaining phrases to repeat on demand, such as �Chu gun da!�, which means �Rock!�, but translates literally as �That kills!�, and is not, I am warned, to be repeated during a business transaction.

I am visiting Seoul with Jake Shapiro, an American who in South Korea and South Korea only is an honest-to-God, recognised-on-the-street rock star.

On our first day in Seoul, Jake and I sit in the back of a Land Rover piloted by the manager of Namgoong Yon, who is a drummer and a late-night radio host. The manager appears wherever Yon does, producing on demand a digital camera, a ride or a cold six-pack of canned Starbucks latte, apparently the country�s national drink.

We drive to four different restaurants, Yon jumping out and inspecting menus at each, until Jake and I realise that we have casually asked for two different things�Korean barbecue and bi bim bap�and Yon is looking for a place that excels at both.

A note on Korean hospitality: it is aggressive and overwhelming. Some day Yon will visit me in Boston, and I shudder to think what I will have to do to repay him.

We tell him just barbecue is OK.

Shoes removed, beef hissing, Yon borrows my notebook and draws a timeline. It begins with the Japanese occupation of Korea; it pauses at the end of the Second World War, the beginning and ceasefire of the Korean War and the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Yon, who can recommend restaurants in London and New York, is explaining in comfortable English why he believes that too many South Koreans study abroad. He points at the notebook.

�Speak frankly?� he asks. We nod. Many of his paragraphs begin this way. �We just Westernised one hundred years ago. Thirty-five years we were occupied; then five years another war. It is not so long ago. It's too easy, I think, to make a brand-new culture.� To my right, his manager dips a hot pepper in hot sauce.

�Our country is broken,� he continues. �Older than 35, you understand power, you understand work. Younger than 35, you are focused on yourself. The older generation, it thinks �we make this country because we sacrifice our good years.�� Yon is 41.

He tells us that China, aware of the coming scrutiny of the Olympics, has created a publicity campaign to remind its citizens to close the door when they go to the bathroom. South Korea changed, he believes, after the Seoul Olympics. There were too many correspondents, too many opportunities to talk to the West, to speak frankly. It�s hard to put that back in a bottle; it�s hard to tell an 18-year-old, after that much freedom, that much exposure, to put his shoulder to the wheel and keep building a country.











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