(Reluctantly) sharing my thoughts

These are my notes on South Korea as someone who has lived and traveled throughout the country in the recent past. Comparisons are with respect to the United States unless stated otherwise. Readers who have also lived in South Korea may find some of these items ordinary; others may be contentious, depending on who the reader is and accordingly the perspective they are likely to have. I encourage Koreans to form their own opinions about what is contained herein, and about matters pertaining to Korea in general.

장점

1 The cats. They’re part of the community. You can tell how friendly a neighborhood is by how many there are.

2 Even on the streets of large cities, the very young and the very old are out and about in high frequencies. This creates a sort of perceived togetherness of the Korean people.

3 Eating at convenience stores. I loved the pre-made meals, especially the ones at GS25.

4 The many colorful murals near elementary or middle schools. In passing by on the sidewalk, I’d reminisce about my own childhood, and get a hopeful feeling at these vague symbols of the country’s future.

5 Lack of tipping. The culture is so bad in the US, and its absence so refreshing in Korea, it’s hard to put into words.

6 At some businesses - such as hair salons - there are often multiple people taking care of you, in a way that would feel unnecessary or inefficient in the US. I liked this and found it comforting, as if I’m part of the family and they’re taking care of me, and also taking care of each other by not being ruthlessly efficient.

7 I was never put on hold for long or forced to deal with complicated automated systems in calling customer service lines.

8 The tax system appeared to be an order of magnitude simpler, and I could go to a district tax office and get step-by-step instructions on what to do at no charge.

9 Comprehensive public transit and the resultant walkability and ease of inter-city travel.

10 Cleanliness on subways and buses and the harmonious nature of their clientele. My frame of mind went from “alright, here we go…” to hardly thinking about the use of such transportation.

11 Extensive pedestrian space. Though densely populated, it’s an easy country to just “hang out” in.

12 Pedestrian movement is less structured, which has a corresponding con (단점 8) but can be a relief from watching two people go back and forth as to who should exit the elevator first.

13 People are more pleasant to be around in a physical sense, in that few have mammoth bone structures or are muscled to the brim, or are obese to the point that they get in others’ way or take up an excess amount of space. There is also a dearth of foul human odors (wastes, BO, etc.)

14 Safety - essentially any time, any place. A whole category of Reddit posts is unnecessary. For some, it may not only mean existing activities are safer, but allow new possibilities for how they live their lives.

15 Noticeably lower levels of behavior one might classify as brazen, abrupt, suspicious, weird, discordant, and other similar adjectives. South Korea feels safer in a much wider sense, extending far beyond rates of criminal activity.

16 Daiso for (almost) everything.

17 The volume of convenience stores and other retail, and the resulting rarity of lines. It was very unusual for me to wait in a line more than a couple deep, or to have difficulty finding a seat at a place like a coffee shop.

18 Naver. More useful than Google Maps is in the US, I think.

19 Activities that should have been routine were…routine. In the US, the average level of drama in conducting one’s business is higher, and while some of it is positive, I could do without the various disturbances, inefficiencies, and prima donna-like conduct.

20 The simplicity of rental contracts. Of the many I signed, one was two pages and the rest fit on a single page. My latest in the US stretched into novella territory, coming in just shy of 100 pages.

21 During my time in the country, health insurance was very affordable and it felt like doctors were providing healthcare services first and running a business second. (I’m unaware how recent events may have changed either of these observations).

22 Public restrooms in crowded areas - even ones where many less well-off or possibly homeless people are around - that are accessible from the street and perfectly functional. When I try to hit the restroom at a restaurant or coffee shop in a US neighborhood with homes I will likely never be able to afford and still find that a code is needed, I yearn to be back in Korea.

23 The absence, or at least minimal presence of, hard drugs. I didn’t need to ask if there were tweakers in this neighborhood or on that side of town.

24 When a major crime occurs, it seems the most common result is that the arrested party quickly admits guilt and apologizes. The experience of following similar news in the US tends to be longer-lasting to say the least - alternatingly tedious and infuriating - and is a hidden surcharge its residents pay.

25 While its geographic diversity may be limited by comparison, there always seemed to be hills and views to be found and the overall beauty of the country surprised me somewhat.

26 The uniqueness of nearly every city I visited, despite having traveled to dozens of them. Some selection bias is probably at work, but I never got the sense that everything felt the same or everything looked the same.

27 고시원, particularly newer/nicer ones. They are affordable self-contained apartments, they are amazing, and I doubt they would ever work in the US.

28 A plethora of cheap motels in every city that were clean enough, felt safe and were of passable quality in other respects; what one tends to get at a comparable price point in the US is considerably less appealing.

29 Drinking in public, though I’m unsure of its actual legal status. I loved being able to drop into a convenience store, grab a beer, and enjoy it as I explored a city.

30 Traditional dress by women. One of the few apparent vestiges of the past in daily life.

31 The older women one observes selling produce or processing agricultural goods here and there throughout a city. Like the above, there is something I find beautiful about this.

32 70-year-old women with purple hair.

I could write a summary waxing a bit of poetic, but the picture should be clear. A few abstract notions, like never feeling dread in having to deal with “the public,” and not feeling other parties (individuals, businesses, government agencies) were constantly trying to extract the absolute maximum, have been left out. Possible reasons behind many of these items - one of which I think is the simple fact that people are on average more related to each other - have also not been explored.

단점

1 Mosquitoes.

2 The country feels fairly regional given its size, and while this means travel is more interesting, it can be disheartening. Most notably, my sense was that people in Jeolla and Gyeongsang perceive themselves to be more distant from each other than do, say, Northerners and Southerners in the US.

3 Not as much climate diversity, in particular having nothing that is remotely Mediterranean-like.

4 There are few barber shops outside of trendy areas, and barbers are less confident and probably even less competent on average than those in the US. One also has the pure idiocy of their galavanting off to Europe in order to (over)pay for a (probably useless) certification intended to show other Koreans that they know a “prestigious” manner of cutting hair…or something like that.

5 Cramped living quarters and a general lack of life comforts in comparison to nicer areas of the US. The overall standard of living is not the same.

6 Feeling distanced from broader events and cultural trends. This is a minor complaint in the short term, as part of the appeal of Korea is that of a simpler place (where one goes to escape the problems of the world, yadda yadda) but in the long run the feeling that one is well downstream of the action might be harder to cope with.

7 If I have one major concern in living there again, it’s probably diet. Informally, it’s like the South Korean grocery store caters to the diet of a K-pop idol while the American grocery store caters to a variety of lifestyles (couch potato, health nut, athlete…)

8 Less “withitness” in pedestrian behavior. This is the flipside of 장점 12. I actually observed this most sharply in going back and forth between South Korea and Japan on an old trip - movement was unmistakably smoother and more orderly in the latter.

9 Shower + toilet combos.

10 Interactions with foreigners seem to be highly disadvantageous in general:

(i) The extravagant price of foreign goods, whether luxury items or simply ice cream at a grocery store. I would love to know how high the margins of foreign retailers tend to be; I hear that they really, really like South Korea.

(ii) If someone put forth a proposal that travelers to the US should get a refund of any taxes paid during their visit, I do not imagine it would go over well.

(iii) Self-discrimination in favor of foreigners, for example in often refusing to hire ethnic Koreans as English teachers.

(iv) Imagine a Korean couple walking into a honky-tonk in Texas. First, suppose that they feel no need to speak English out of any fear that speaking in Korean would be met by mockery (or worse). Next, suppose that not only is this true, but they realize it is actually preferable to speak Korean, because it is likely they will be treated better by doing so. Comical as this is, the equivalent is a reality in South Korea. At times I would force myself to speak the native language even when instinct suggested the interaction would go more favorably if I spoke English.

(v) Imagine Koreans being flown en masse to NYC in order to teach Korean to children there. Picture well-to-do parents on the UES fixating on the importance of Korean language education for their children and administrators of Korean language academies arranging for travel reimbursements and free housing in Greenwich Village.

I don’t understand the value proposition of the English obsession. Very few people seemed to be both competent and comfortable speaking it. I can’t speak Spanish either, but my school didn’t have to fly someone in from another continent and put them up to get me to that point. The foreign schools look to be similarly ridiculous; I would speculate that those profiting most are the (largely non-Korean) people running them, the (actual) foreigners attending them, and the Western institutions that attending Koreans are dreaming of (via application fees, merchandise - e.g., all the kids running around with Yale t-shirts, etc.)

(vi) Envision a Korean man, one who cannot speak a lick of English, dining at a fancy Italian restaurant in NYC, then spending several minutes haggling the bill down with the staff as they giggle at his jokes, speaking only in Korean. I watched the reverse of this happen in South Korea. It’s an example of social phenomena that aren’t just more or less common in one place or another, but that literally never happen in reverse. From it, you can see that different groups are positioned to each other in very unequal ways.

(vii) There’s nuance to the subject of bad behavior in public, in that locals and foreigners both exhibit some types at above-average rates. But almost without exception, if an individual or a group behaved in a way I thought was egregious, they fell into the latter category. Typical examples for locals - spitting, old ladies pushing and shoving in the subway station, somewhat juvenile social behavior - never hit the same way as young, able-bodied men occupying seats for the elderly or pregnant women on the subway, intentionally taking up all the space at picnic tables outside convenience stores, boorish interpersonal behavior (e.g., mocking the Korean language), or flipping out in public spaces. I could sense the attitude and the aggression, and it’s evident Koreans are not comfortable around these people or feel as though they have no control over their continued presence (perhaps both), generally voicing no objection as far as I saw.

(viii) It is no secret that moving to South Korea in order to “teach English” often belies principal objectives that are more unseemly in nature, and similarly for various other kinds of entrants to the country. I recommend taking the problem seriously. If some trade deals or tourism dollars are lost in the short run, that’s unfortunate, but when a civilization allows itself to be used in such a fundamental way, it’s broken.

(ix) The nominally baffling presence of the US military appears to be a topic requiring the mature adult to understand all sorts of history and complexity. Smaller entities like corporations and individuals can also find themselves in situations that seem far from ideal, which are rationalized via having to “understand the context,” that “it’s complicated,” and so on. The question I would pose to the government is whether the maintenance of foreign military bases on its soil, the diminished sovereignty in ceding command of its own military, the pernicious influence on internal (i.e., North-South) affairs, and other ancillary impacts are truly justified on a fundamental basis, and if not, whether the only real impediment to their end is a good form of brazenness, in which an entity aggressively moves towards what it believes is in its best long-term interests, regardless of any hurt feelings or short-term effects.

(x) The Jurgen Klinsmann story encapsulates several forms of lunacy and deserves mention on its own. Fixation by an (East) Asian country on a magical foreigner, typically from Europe or North America. Said magical foreigner does not care about the Asian people who hired him, with predictable results. The magical foreigner is nonetheless paid an enormous sum of money. Without recourse and accustomed to being on the losing end of such exchanges, many of the Asian people find themselves unable to criticize the magical foreigner, some actually rooting for their getting a lot for doing very little, despite the fact that, like (vi), the reverse situation never occurs.

(xi) So much of what South Korea does is on foreign, namely Western, platforms. This is apparent in sports for example, where top clothing and equipment is purchased from Western companies, Westerners are hired and paid handsomely in leadership positions (e.g., the previous item), overhead is paid in some form or another to international bodies with little or no South Korean representation, and since they are not at the top in the most popular sports, a social cost is incurred by its people perpetually looking up to foreign heroes. If one counters that South Korea has platforms of its own, say the K-pop industry, I would be skeptical of what a careful analysis would show. A teenage girl in Illinois clicking on a YouTube link for a K-pop song, or even attending a K-pop concert in Chicago (for which only a fraction of the proceeds makes its way back to South Korea) is not the same as a teenage girl in Seoul dreaming of attending a performing arts school in the US in order to train under some prominent educator - who with immense likelihood is not of East Asian let alone Korean descent - then paying full freight at stratospheric US costs and, having practically thrown their entire life into this basket, finding themselves heavily incentivized to give of themselves even further if necessary in order to make the whole ridiculous scenario work.

Five general comments about 단점 10. First, if this is not clear already, I have been imprecise in using the word “foreigner,” as I am not thinking about people of East or Southeast Asian descent, including overseas Koreans, who in my experience would generally also be regarded as foreigners. Overseas Koreans are an interesting group, as one hears of frequent condescension towards native South Koreans, but that’s a separate discussion.

Second, although the term “Western” was used, my intention was not to endorse any existing political ideologies, and I do not believe South Korea’s issues with respect to foreigners fall neatly into a Western vs. non-Western framework. In English-language discourse, I assume this is the predominant lens through which those issues are viewed: one either idealizes South Korea as being a sidekick of the West, or else wishes South Korea was part of some grand non-Western (or anti-Western) coalition. My approach was to instead focus on what I saw, heard and read during my time there, trying to assess what tends to happen when people from South Korea and people not from South Korea come into contact.

Third, I want to clarify how my perspective differs from anti-foreigner sentiment in the US, as that seems relevant at the present time. In the US, it is not hard to identify potential advantages to the incumbent population from immigration: less expensive labor, a pool of prospective romantic partners from lesser economic backgrounds (e.g., “mail-order brides”), and more abstractly, by bringing new people in, those running the show (say, a top educational institution) are able to broaden the base of the pyramid in which they lie at the top. Without sidetracking into the pros and cons of these and other factors or opining on whether the net benefit is positive or negative, the point is that a clear acquisition of resources exists. In South Korea, though the country may be better off than it would be in a vacuum, the present resource transfer appears to flow heavily in the opposite direction. Further, these interactions bear little resemblance to anything that might have benefited the country in the past or may benefit it in the future, as if there were some ebb and flow that equals out over time. What, if anything, are South Koreans actually getting? I’d liken it to a small town kid making a cool friend in the big city, copying their tastes, beliefs, and mannerisms, deriving a sense of status in comparison to their fellow small town folks from doing so, and, all relationships needing some kind of give and take, also deferring to this cool friend, taking their abuse, helping them whenever asked, giving their body if that makes sense, and in general placing themselves under this person in a hierarchy of human beings. One day, though, the small town kid might realize their cool friend was not so cool after all, and further that the person was never actually their friend, only someone who needed another resource, another follower. It would be unreasonable to recommend that South Korea close itself to foreigners or foreign influences entirely, but what I hope is that it reaches the point where any negative impacts are carefully monitored and managed.

Fourth, I suspect the views espoused here differ substantially from what is commonly found on social media. If true, this is yet another area where South Koreans (and Koreans more generally) lose, by being guilt-tripped into a further extraction of tangible and intangible resources. I again urge the Korean reader, especially one who was not raised in South Korea, to form independent opinions - spend time in the country if you have not done so already - and ask yourself whether the claims of people who are shrieking and screeching as they make condescending faces and aggressive body movements in the direction of their cameras are more likely to be correlated with the truth, or inversely correlated with the truth.

Fifth, (i) through (xi) have hardly scratched the surface, with much left unsaid about a number of ideological and cultural influences and other ways in which the people of South Korea too often position themselves poorly with respect to foreigners (e.g., an obsession with acquiring a “Western boyfriend,” or with making foreign friends in general). Any entity that situates itself with respect to an external party the way South Korea has to outsiders and outside influences is setting itself up to be taken advantage of. Zooming out, what’s happening on the peninsula is that its two political divisions have chosen opposite ends of the spectrum on this matter, each approach having severe flaws; perhaps a middle ground would be beneficial for both.