The Grand Narrative

My Personal Interest in the Subject

A few days before I first came to Korea, I found myself calling an old Korea-studies lecturer of mine, mentioning my plans and asking if he could possibly give me some advice about my coming trip. I hadn’t been his student in over two years, and not exactly a stellar one at that, but to my surprise he sounded very enthusiastic and couldn’t wait to have me come up to his office. Only then did I realise that I was probably one of the very few of his students to ever actually go to Korea: his courses about Korea were never very popular, albeit more because of their narrow subject matter rather than anything to do with his teaching style, and as far as I know his courses on Korean (his main focus) were only ever possible for the 5 years or so that a grant from the Asia-NZ Foundation was available. In hindsight, he was probably also looking forward to passing on some amusing anecdotes about living in Korea, which he hadn’t really had the opportunity to do so to sleepy undergraduate students disappointed that Korean studies didn’t feature any bizarre manga porn (after all, that’s what our Japanese history classes were full of).

So you can imagine his disappointment then, when 5 minutes into the conversation I asked him whether Korean girls were as conservative as all the books made out, and if they dated before marriage. Once I was satisfied with his assurances that I would have just as much success with women in Korea as I did in New Zealand, somehow most of our half hour seemed to be up already.

Although I probably needed more assurances than most, especially as I wanted rather more success with Korean women than I was having with New Zealand women at the time thank you very much, he’d probably heard it all before and is probably still hearing it from students: after all, I was a healthy young male of 24, and open any book about Korean society and within 2 pages you’ll hear that it’s very conservative and “more Confucian than China,” and while Confucius certainly dressed like a bit of a hippy…he was into Eastern philosophy after all…he doesn’t look like he was up for some free loving. And remember that back in 2000 when I was asking the question, while the Asian Financial Crisis had put a well-overdue dent in the Asian Values argument, there was still a delay before the academic sources on East Asia that undergraduate students used started rubbishing the economic models and social value systems they’d lauded a few months previously.

In short, as far as I knew I was going to a country where some ancient crazy philosopher who said that sex before marriage was bad was simply da bomb, so you can understand my concerns. Sure, if I was going to another country of which you could say the same thing, say America, then at least all those years of sitcoms would have taught me not to worry, but then I was very fortunate not to have seen any of the abominations called “Korean dramas” before I came. As it was, I saw my first one on the plane, shortly after the first Korean guy I had ever met introduced himself by placing his hand on my inner thigh. Ten minutes into it, after the second session of melancholic music and the main character staring blankly into space for 2 mins tearfully thinking about the love triangle she was in…I was thinking I’ve just wasted the next year of my life. Come to think of it, about then is back when my new Korean friend cheerfully pointed I was beginning to go bald too.

I’m too harsh on my first overtly friendly Korean: he didn’t touch me anymore, and actually helped me out a great deal, taking a great deal of time out of his own trip home in Seoul to make sure I got on my flight from Gimpo (no sexy Incheon airport then) to Jinju. And in the end, while I didn’t get a Korean girlfriend in my first week there, as reading some ESL forums might lead you to believe, I was lucky enough to be working at the only institute teaching adults in the city, and indeed I was soon (for me - took 7 months) dating a girl a 25 year-old girl called 주희/Ju-Hee. All well and good, and at first our relationship was no different to any at the same stage back in New Zealand. But then problems with cultural differences started to emerge, but not at all like what I’d expected.

Sorry if this too much information, but no, it wasn’t with having a sexual relationship. I don’t doubt that the rate of Koreans who have premarital sex are far lower than in, say, New Zealand, but personally I’d say that they’d be at least 50%, and to someone who came here in 2000, it certainly looks like the figure would be rising rapidly. My subject in this post impacts a great deal on those rates, but the limited physical affection you can publicly display in Korea, and the innocent virginal image that women have to present, belie what goes on behind closed doors…I could expound upon many male expats’ resulting Korean versions of the “Catholic Schoolgirl” image, but you get the idea. But actually the problems developed well before then, and left me very surprised that we got to that stage at all. For during the week, when my classes finished at 10pm, we had just 15 minutes or so afterwards to find a secluded spot between it and bus stop and make out…before I would, rather frustratingly I might add, watch her run and catch the last bus home, for she lived with her family and had a curfew of 11pm.

Notice I didn’t italicise “lived with her family,” for that’s an unfortunate financial reality that many university students in New Zealand and elsewhere have to face, but which my generation luckily largely didn’t have to in the 1990s. I seriously doubt however, that there will be many 25 year-old women amongst them that have a curfew of 11pm that they have to stick to (it’s almost always only the daughters here that have them). Ju-hee’s time of 11pm was just a tad early even for Korea, and her parents more strictly enforced it than most, but I soon learnt from Time Magazine’s coverage of the 백지영/Baek Ji-young sex video scandal a few months later that this was perfectly normal for Korean women, and even today in 2007 in Busan/부산, Korea’s 2nd biggest city and with a population almost the same as that of New Zealand, most unmarried Korean women I know confirm that if they want to go out late with friends then they have to at least let their parents know. In practice they may well be going to a love motel with their boyfriends instead, but at least their virginal image is maintained to their (surely rather naive) parents.

As you can imagine, after two or three weeks of that even I was getting a little tired of feeling like I was dating a 15 year-old, so it may have been no coincidence that she started spending most of her afternoons in my bedroom a little later. We really weren’t at all suited for each other though, and so I didn’t need to think twice about splitting up after meeting my much more assertive, attractive, intelligent, and fun future wife a little later. Nobody will believe me of course, but I’m sure that we’d still have ended up together even if she didn’t live in a “one-room” with her younger sister a whole 10 metres from my house. Having said that, it’s true that it probably had something to do with us getting together very quickly for a supposedly innocent and virginal Korean country girl, although the two week vacation to Thailand both my workmates/flatmates took a little later, giving us the house to ourselves, probably helped a lot too.

Because Ju-Hee’s housing situation was such an issue for me, I had many lonely, frustrated nights on which to think long and hard (no pun intended) about this feature of Korean society, and the conclusions I came to back then have pretty much been the prism through which I’ve analysed Korean society ever since. Being so important, it was actually on this issue that I first half-wrote a post about when I set up the blog 5 months ago, only to give it up while learning the mechanics of WordPress, and after that I avoided trying again because of the required length, and so (probably wisely) plumped for an emphasis on Lee Hyori and Korean women in bikinis instead. But having enough of those up to ensure that the blog gets 200 hits a day just from T&A-related searches for the next several years then, it’s time to return to the blog’s original raison d’etre for at least a moment, yes? So, what conclusions did I come to?

“That’s Korean Culture” 

Like any newbie in Korea, I seemed to spend a lot of time in the first 5 years year after I came constantly pointing out what I saw as Korea’s bad points to Korean friends and acquaintances. Probably much more so than average actually, because back then I thought that with my Korea studies background that I had more insight into Korea than all the marine biology and art history majors here…hell, more so than average Koreans too. Not everything I said back then was entirely wrong of course, but Koreans are naturally a bit tired of people who have been here 5 minutes and who can’t speak Korean telling them all their society’s problems and how to fix them, and so even the most patient Korean person will sooner or later use the “That’s Korean culture” line just to make the whiny newbie shut the hell up.

Because that’s what the line is primarily used for, then the following might seem to be overanalysis, and as an immigrant to New Zealand and Australia (especially as a British one) I can say that this kind of defensive reply is by no means confined to Koreans! But in my experience it’s acquired a life of it’s own in Korea, used not just against wet-behind-the-ears newbies but all too readily against all non-Koreans to(supposedly) explain and/or defend some aspect of Korea when all else fails. And it’s used with such a sense of finality, as if to say “Just STFU. You’re not from here, you didn’t grow up here, you don’t speak the language well…because of these, you’re never going to understand a lot about Korea, so don’t even bother trying.”

Naturally this irks me, partially for personal reasons: as an outsider in 3 countries now, I’m just a little tired of hearing sentiments that emphasise the supposed differences between me and the natives of the place I choose to call home, particularly in the one country where I’ve made a personal decision to settle for a while (as opposed to one in which my parents dragged me kicking and screaming to as a teenager) and in which I’ve married a local and fathered a child. But primarily it’s just because I come from a Western academic background which embraces critical-thinking, so I instinctively reject notions that are taken to be self-evident merely by their bland, dogmatic assertion. I’m sure there’s a word in philosophy for arguments like this…but I don’t know it…so to show you what I mean, let me quote you this passage that it reminds me of from page 299 of The Goldilocks Enigma by Paul Davies, a scientific and philosophical discussion of why the universe seems so well suited to life. Here, he’s beginning his summary of his chapter on intelligent design:

“The traditional monotheistic religious view is that the universe is created by God and designed to be suitable for life because the emergence of sentient beings is part of God’s plan. This has the advantage of being a simple explanation of the cosmic fine tuning and biofriendliness, and of being a ‘natural’ explanation for those people who have already decided on other grounds that God exists. It also attributes the design-like qualities of the universe to a designer, which seems reasonable enough. However, it suffers from the obvious disadvantage of being a conversation-stopper. The simple declaration ‘God did it!’ provides no actual explanation for anything, unless one can also say how and why God did it. It also runs into the problem of who designed the designer…” (italics in original)

Of course, Koreans staying at home until they’re married is indeed ”Korean culture,” and 99% of Western and Korean observers would find my annoyance at this assertion very strange: after all, Korea is well known to be a conservative country, more Confucian then China…yada yada yada….of course they would stay at home until they’re married. But no, why “of course”? Confucianists would certainly take a dim view of the sexual liberation inherent in leaving home in your twenties, but then they presumably wouldn’t exactly condone the routine of salarymen drinking together to excess and then going to room salons either. While the latter is certainly Korean culture in that no-one says that it’s characteristic of Western workplaces, that bland assertion doesn’t explain why premarital sex (which is the real issue with living away from home) is so taboo in Korea, but having one of the largest sex industries in the world isn’t. Ergo, there’s no “of course” about it, and just like “God did it,” the assertion that something is Korean culture explains absolutely nothing, and I’m tired of it.

Koreans are not unique in having some invented traditions that help them to define themselves, and something like this point, on which Korea and Western societies clearly differ so much, would be a good Occidentalist place to start. But by definition, on the one hand invented traditions present themselves as timeless, unchanging, core elements of a given society, but on the other, can’t stand up to rigorous analysis…and that’s what makes claims that Korea has such low cohabitation rates to be culural ultimately so bizarre, as someone with even the most superficial knowledge of daily life in Korea can figure out the real non-cultural reasons for themselves in 5 minutes. In a nutshell, young Koreans can’t afford it, for two main reasons:

1. Low Wages in the Service Industry

Recently, KoreaBeat translated a short Korean news article on the average wages of various part-time jobs in Korea. Here are the basic stats from that:

The part-time job offering the highest salary is modelling, able to make as much as 30,000 won per hour.

For modelling, there were various kinds of models including hand models, face models, and clothing models, with the average wage being 4,000 to 8,000 won per hour and clothing models make from 10,000 to 30,000 won per hour.

Following that was physical fitness instructor, offering 4,000 to as much as 25,000 won per hour, and staff at consumer trade shows, offering 20,000 won per hour.

Next were hagwon instructor and private tutor (4,000 to 15,000 won), research staff (3,500 to 15,000 won), translator/interpreter (5,000 to 10,000 won) and event coordinator and PR staff (4,000 to 10,000 won).

The lowest-paying part-time job was convenience store worker, at a fixed wage of just 3,480 won.

Since I’ve made some American friends here in Busan, I’ve had in my head that 1000won = 1 US$, but I’m not sure how accurate that still is, and besides which simple conversions give no sense of the relative value of those wages here (much like comparing Korean and Western cohabitation rates without reference to the costs of living, yes?). Here’s the cost of some things in Busan to get a sense of perspective: one stage on the subway 990 won; one roll of tuna kimbap/김밥 2000 won; a tall Soy Latte at Starbucks 4300 won (see here for a comparison of Korean prices to branches overseas); a Black Russian 7000won; Bibimbap/비빔밥 in a stone bowl 3000-4000; a bottle of soju 900 won (I’ve heard, and jeez)…I’ll add to this as section as more things come to me later.

Obviously most of those jobs would be unavailable to university students (my real focus in this post), and as far as I know, for them the most sought-after part-time job is tutoring high school students, and you don’t need to walk very far in a city suburb to find a student’s ad for tutoring stuck to a lamppost, but the vast majority of students’ part-time jobs would be in bars, restaurants and convenience stores. That fixed wage of 3,480 mentioned for the latter may give the the wrong impression about it’s desirability though: sure, it may well be “fixed” because it’s actually the legal minimum wage, but at least a large, visible company like Family Mart would be more likely to pay it than any of the fly-by-night individual bars, restaurants and stores that pop-up and close down very quickly in this part of the world. Less than a year ago, my favorite Korean tutors told me that they made 5000 won an hour in their bar, but would make 2500 everywhere else, so I seriously doubt that less than a year later that all part-time employers in notoriously corrupt Korea are sticking to a (for them) big increase in employee wages.

I’m not sure if wages for narrator models are included in the “modelling” category, but they would certainly be one of the best-paidpart-time jobs for young women in Korea. While the job looks like fun in the first video below, especially for spectators, 12 hours of breathing in traffic fumes results in the somewhat listless reality like in the second video, and hardly compatible with compulsory attendance at classes (note I didn’t say “studying,” because like I explained, Korean university students in particular don’t really go to university to do that).  

When I began writing this post, I was planning to compare these wages with the part-time jobs I did myself as a student in New Zealand 10 years ago, but you don’t need another trip down memory lane to realise that in Korea they’re a pittance. Naturally this would have a big impact on students’ potential independence from their parents, but would be manageable if renting in Korea was cheap. Unfortunately for young Korean adults living with strict parents, it’s much more expensive than in Western countries, so much so that living away from home while studying is effectively impossible without parental support.

2) The Real Estate System: Unbelievably Expensive “Key Money” Requirements

Again, I intended to spend much more time on this section, but I’m quite certain that all five or so of the people that are still reading this post by this stage will already be thoroughly familiar with Korea’s key money systems of Wol-se/월세 and Jeon-se/전세, so I don’t need to explain them. If not, read about them here before going on, but amongst all the practical details that that site mentions the main point about the size of “key money” required that I want to get across can get a bit lost.

Rents, and quality of accomodation may be broadly similar to what you’d expect to pay back home, at least at my income level (I’ll return to that), but the 2 weeks worth of rent you pay when you move into rented accommodation (in addition to the 2 weeks rent in advance) in New Zealand is a security deposit, self-explanatory. It is tempting to think of key money on a Korean apartment as being equivalent to a security deposit back home, particularly for a harried Korean friend who’s translating, but the key money for my Wol-se apartment is (in my case) 40 times greater than the cost of two weeks rent. That’s a lot to cover a few wine stains on carpets and broken windows….so no, it’s not a security deposit: it’s a large sum of money that the landlord can invest and make profit on, and clearly much more lucrative for him or her than what is also gained from your monthly rent. In short, this is how real estate operates here, and for youngish tenants it means that they have to save a lot of money before they can think of living away from home…for 99% of Koreans, it would be impossible until they’ve graduated and have their first “real” job.

Of course, in New Zealand living solely on part-time work while studying wouldn’t exactly be much fun without any financial support from your parents, but it’s certainly possible. And of course, there are various kinds of student grants and loans available. But according to my wife, in Korea there are only loans available (with exorbitant rates) for your course fees. Students may use still use personal loans and credit cards to live on, but I wouldn’t recommend it (I speak…ahem…from experience) and while any student and their dogs could get a credit card here after the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, I’m not sure how easy they are to get after the credit card bubble (rather predictably) burst in 2002-03.

Naturally, when I left home when I was 19 I couldn’t afford my own place, and so until I came to Korea 5 years later I rented houses or apartments with others, and split the rent with them according to the size of our bedrooms…but the exorbitant costs of key money here rule that out too. You’d be surprised at how far some universities here send their buses to allow students to live at home in a different city but attend their university, but even in relatively small South Korea some students have no choice but to live away from home. All universities would have dormitories, but while I’m sure they’re (relatively) a complete partyfest for their inhabitants their parents would still be paying for them to stay there, and considering the restrictions placed on students at dorms in America or even New Zealand then you can imagine how “independent” students are that live in a Korean one: I’ve rejected a university job here once myself because the accommodation provided for teachers was on the top floor of a student dorm, and the director of the English department insisted that the same restrictions that applied to the freshman there would apply to my 27 year-old self and my then fiance….he kept repeating and emphasising that it was a women’s dorm, as if to imply that if it had been a men’s dormitory then it wouldn’t have been quite so bad…but I digress.

I recognise that it’s very common to do so, and maybe in America in particular as many as 50% of students live in dormitories at university, and/or for parents to pay for their children’s course fees and living expenses, so you may wonder why I sound so critical of Koreans doing the same. That’s a good point, and while I haven’t finished mentioning all the options for living away from home in Korea yet, it’s sufficiently important that I should deal with it before I go on.

Why are Low Cohabitation Rates in Korea Such an Issue? 

As I have discussed in great length here before, the Korean education system produces high school graduates that their Western counterparts would find very immature. If you didn’t know that and/or disagree then you a) don’t live here and b) need to read that before you go on, because I take it as a given. Now, being 18 or 19 and immature is not life-threatening in my experience, and while on the one hand Koreans of that age are generally so scared of the opposite sex that that they can only meet via blind dates, and are also not able to think for themselves because they’ve had nothing but rote-learning for the past 10+ years, on the other hand they are disciplined, polite, neat, tidy and very hardworking…so who is more “mature” than whom is a moot point: I can’t stand anyone of that age, Korean, Western, Argentine…whatever. But like I said in that earlier post, while an academic tradition of fostering critical-thinking in schools and particularly at universities exists in Western countries…in short giving students the ability and desire to think for themselves…surely crucial to being an adult…the emphasis at Korean universities is not learning but the mere fact of having gone to “right” university,and the (relatively) limited teaching that is given continues rote-learning methods. Considering that there’s also compulsory attendance for almost all classes, then in short, Korean early 20-somethings are still treated like children. Not knowing anything else, and being able to get enough sleep and have fun for the first time since middle school, they couldn’t care less.

But I’ve already discussed the importance of this period in a young adult’s experience…or rather, the absence of it in Korea. But of course not every Westerner who attended university an “adult,” nor is everyone that didn’t attend not one. In my mind, financial independence and leaving the family nest are equally if not more important…hell it’s my blog, so no, it’s crucial: if you live at home, when you have the option not to, then in my mind you’re a fucking teenager, and regardless of how smart and knowledgeable my close Korean friend in her mid-30s is, for instance, until she left home when she got married a few weeks ago I simply could not consider her an adult for that reason.

This blog post is already at 4000 words, so I’ll acknowlege that I’m well aware that what constitutes “maturity” and “being an adult” are very open to debate, and I could easily spend the next 4000 more words on the subject. And people can be mature in one aspect of their lives and not others, and living away from home doesn’t make one mature per se: I left home when I was 19, but was ratching up the student loans and borrowing money off my father until my first paycheck in Korea 5 years later, and I’d certainly sound a lot less high and mighty if readers knew that I still can’t even drive at 31. Enough said.

But notice that just before I italicised living at home “when you have the option not to.” This is also important, because Korea is full of university graduates in their mid-20s with jobs and financial independence, but who choose to remain at home. And returning to types of accommodation again briefly, it is financially possible, albeit just barely, for university students to live independently without any parental support. So what gives? Why don’t they? If not doing so isn’t Korean culture, then what is? Well, to cover the latter first, I planned to give a much more detailed account of all the different types available, but not only do even I want to finish this post eventually…no, really…I also lack experience of any of them, so click here for a rundown of what a 고시원/Goshiwon is, the most common type, and there are links there to information about other types of cheap accommodation available in Korea. Here’s a video tour of one:

Given the conditions in the kitchen and bathroom there, and maybe dorm-type restrictions, then that place would rank well below the worst flat that I ever lived in as a student in New Zealand. And bear in mind that that site I link to is aimed towards expats, with much more money than the average Korean student: I do know that the vast majority to students staying in places like that rely on money from their parents, and that site shows the good ones…can you imagine the cheaper ones? If I was a Korean student, especially a woman, if I had the choice of living there and working like a slave for the next 4 years to support myself, or living at home, working much less if at all, having of my housework done (although as a woman my mother would expect a lot more help than from a son), my bedroom cleaned, healthy meals provided, and quite a bit of freedom so long as I wasn’t openly promiscuous, merely having to call home to say I’d be late when I went out drinking and/or to a love hotel…then, hell I’d certainly choose to stay at home too. It would have to be pretty bad at home to convince me otherwise.

As for the 25 year-olds who can afford decent accommodation, well, I left home myself when I was 19 because my father and I were at each other’s throats, and our relationship improved a great deal because I did. I did that because I could easily afford to and the place I was moving into was actually rather nice. If neither had the been the case, what could I have done, a young, red-blooded adult chafing at my father’s (natural) overbearing restrictions and condescending attitude towards me? I would have had to continue living with my father, and in so doing somehow developed psychological mechanisms, consciously or otherwise, to cope with my situation. If I lived in a country which venerated hierarchy, obedience, and a culture of staying at home until marriage, then that would have been correspondingly easier. Naturally, after doing so for 6 years, then I too probably wouldn’t see much point in defying my parents wishes and moving out in the few short years I had remaining before I was expected to get married.

To recap, this part of the post was about why I regard low cohabitation rates in Korea to be so important. Well, I was very tempted to entitle this post “Why are Korean 20-somethings so damn immature,” or something to that effect, but while I would have probably gotten more hits that way I was probably wise not to. But it would have been more to the point. The Korean education system produces somewhat immature high-school graduates, but like I said that is no big deal, then they are treated pretty similarly (ie, like children) at university, important but also not terminal, but on top of that they do not live away from home until they’re married…in short, how, if at all, can they become adults before then? I’m sure they consider themselves adults, as do maybe a lot of readers…I don’t. Period. Personally, my closest Korean (and one of my closest ever) friend is a very confident, assertive woman, who never puts up with any crap from people merely because she is a woman and/or younger than the other person…quite a find in Korea. She hasn’t lived overseas, but of course she did live away from home before she got married (with her mother’s blessing, quite a pioneer herself).

But despite the impression I may have given, I don’t think living away from home before marriage here or anywhere automatically makes you an adult, it’s not an easy option for many in Korea…but I find that doing so as a Korean says a lot about you. My other Korean friends, we are close, but there can be a palpable distance sometimes as well: as I type this I realise there’s this whole subject area of home-life and family relationships that avoid I talking about with them (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) because when I have I have just gotten so frustrated with hearing them complain again and again about their mother’s nagging, for instance, but then learning that they are doing nothing about it, vaguely mumbling something about being a “good” daughter. Being unable to grab them by their shoulders and slap some sense into them, I just give up, and save more adult conversations for my Western friends.

This is by no means where I planned to stop this post, it seems a bit sudden and out of place (okay, after that last paragraph, maybe not!), but this has so far taken me 4 days, text-wise there’s still about a half to go, and I’m going on a trip to Seoul tomorrow…and this post has taken me soooo much longer than I expected, and to be frank, it’s driving me insane…it’ll feel damn good to have it up on the blog, and objectively speaking I’ll benefit from looking at it with a fresh mind next week before I go on. In Part 2 I’ll talk about how and why flatting in Western countries came about, and compare Korea’s situation now to Western Europe in the 1970s (you’ll be surprised at the similarities in people’s attitudes then to Koreans’ now), and in Part 3 I’ll discuss some theoretical issues. Naturally I’d love and also benefit from comments, but please bear in mind that for the sake of my sanity I’ve needed to stop smack bang in the middle of the post, so there’s a lot of loose ends and typos, and a lotmore information to come, so please don’t be too harsh. And please forgive me for the 5-day hiatus between this and the last post, when I started it I really did have no idea of the gargantuan proportions it would grow to!

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