Speaking of which, I’ve found most of my 19 year-old students to fully agree with my sentiments on that, and the women especially seemed interested in my discussions of the reasons. I’ll mention it more in part 2, but it’ll be interesting to see how those sentiments hold up when they are in their twenties against the economic reality I’ve described.

Finally, it would be kind of ironic that Seoulites, for the reasons you say, had the most conservative living arrangements in the country! I wonder if that would be countered by what I hope are Seoulite’s relative progressiveness?

And it reminds of when I was a student doing some sociology course in the late-1990s, Germans were always described in the literature as being quite traditional when it came to child-care, with mothers discouraged from working and a special term, something like “crow-mother” in English used for them for those that did work while their children were young. I wonder if that was accurate 10 or so years ago, and what it’s like today?

The literature always compared Germany unfavorably to France in this regard, and accounted for France’s relatively high birth rate (something like 1.8 I think it was) to the ready accesibility of childcare facilities and the public’s positive atitudes towards working mothers.

(from now on I will login as Jens-Olaf, not as Surin what is confusing)

First up, thank you for reading all of the post! In the end it was 5248 words, quite a feat even for me. It could definitely be at least 1000 words shorter, although not too much more than that, and in future when I have mini-theses like this I’ll try much harder to structure them into more manageable chunks. Parts 2 and 3 will be much much shorter, primarily because so much of what should have been in them ended up here instead.

Secondly, like I said my wife lived with me for over 3 years before we got married, and some of you know that she comes from a poor farming background, so some of you may put two and two together and figure that her parents were more than happy for her to leave home before we got married. Actually, her parents didn’t know and still don’t know about us living together (her 2 sisters do, not uncommon for things like that), and they think we started renting our first place after we got married.

But while that might explain a few things about my own take on cohabitation in Korea, it doesn’t detract from your point Gord about the relative freedom that lower classes have here when they’re no longer worried about their family’s status and reputation, which I completely agree with. As I type this I’ve suddenly remembered what I read about this already in the 1988 book Yogong: Factory Girl produced by the Royal Asiatic Society in Seoul, which is about women’s factory workers’ lives in Korea in the 1970s. Many women in their early-20s then had to go to other cities to work, with most of their salary going to their family, and while most were too conservative and/or too tired from their work to even consider having a relationship, many did, and in hindsight being forced to live away from home to work did allow them this freedom their middle-class counterparts lacked.

I don’t know how readily available contraception was then, I know that at the time the Korean government was really concerned about family sizes and so was really encouraging it’s use (and was too sucessful!), but even in 2007 pharmacists often refuse to sell the pill to women whom they think are single, but regardless this may also be where the practice of Korean women leading quite seperate lives behind closed doors began that I mentioned.

Like I’ve complained about to many people, there is still no single English text on Korean sociology, and to get a full picture you would have to use chapters here and there from over 20 books. This book is must-have for that, especially if you’re interested in the social aspect of Korean development (Troubled Tiger is brilliant but is very much focused on governmental and business elites), and I recommend popping along to Royal Asiatic Society in Seoul to get one before they all disappear. If you’ve never heard of the RAS, I’ll mention it in the post after next which will be about some of the books I bought in Seoul.

Thirdly, surin2sayan, you’re quite right, I am completely generalising. I’m sure there are many many Korean people who lived at home until they were married, but are still very independent-minded, assertive, questioning of authority and/or otherwise on the fringes of mainstream society. Amongst university students here, the rebels wearing goth-like clothes or riding around on bikes with yazuka-style haircuts are easy to spot because they’re so rare, but as for Koreans at my age I’ve never met someone so willing to so blatantly stand out. Maybe I need to hang out more in Korea (and especially Busan’s) very limited underground arts scene. In the meantime, I find the cohabitation issue quite a good indicator of our compatibility as friends if not their levels of maturity per se (which could be debated about endlessly like I said), just because our interests and daily concerns are so different. Presumably, this won’t be so much of a problem once most Koreans my age are married.

Finally, thanks very much for the compliments Timen, and I would be very interested in what your girlfriend makes of my opinions. I haven’t actually discussed them with my friends (or any Koreans at all come to think of it) for many years, and as I don’t teach adults anymore then in reality I know less and less about the young Koreans I claim to know so much about. It would be great to get as much feedback from Koreans as possible, especially as the dangers of being an old Korea hand are that many of your opinons are formed in your first few years here, and while they may have been penetrating insights 5 years ago, they may be a bit outdated by now (especially in somewhere constantly changing like Korea).

The #1 and #2 points are actually *exactly* the ones I’ve made in discussions in the past — nobody can afford to move out because jobs pay too little, and because rent is insane.

However, I also think that the “Korean culture” argument also is betrayed by one other thing: the Koreans I have known who cohabit before marriage tend to be from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than those for whom it is impossible. That is, the more well-off a family, the higher the stakes of “values”… or, rather, and this I suspect is what it really boils down to, appearances.

The Koreans of means whom I’ve known have been far more subject to their parents’ wishes — and their parents have been far more distrustful of them — than the Koreans I’ve known of poorer backgrounds. Like, radically so. The daughter of pumpkin farmers that I know, her parents encouraged her to live with her fiancé before marriage for financial reasons. This would be unthinkable for the Koreans I’ve known of better-off backgrounds. Their parents were, generally speaking, the strictest I heard about. Same goes for wives in well-to-do families: they seemed to be even more solidly locked in gender roles. I remember one rich lady in a class of mine who came over for dinner with the class. After she ate the Indian food I’d made for them, and started to have a good time with her classmates, she suddenly (to everyone’s chagrin) had to rush home to make her husband’s dinner. (As if he could not use the phone for one night and order something.)

Which I suppose supports your argument: financial pragmatism trumps “culture” or “tradition” among the poorer classes first. The place I was going with that was to suggest that American counter-culture also rose up from poverty, and it did, but it mainstreamed when young middle-class people appropriated what they thought the poor nonwhites were doing. Hmmm. Lacking a sizeable poor non-Korean population with a different culture to draw upon, perhaps the Korean equivalent of this “exotic chic” is Hollywood? A few Korean women have told me that certain aspects of traditional culture and attitudes that they inherited, they chose to discard after Hollywood movies convinced them alternity was possible, and one of the more common subjects of change was attitudes towards sexuality.

By the way, I forgot to mention: what you describe in terms of leaving home at 19 really resonates with me; I was 20 or 21, and the extra year or two probably caused some irreparable damage to my relationship with my old man. Some sons and fathers cannot get on in the same house, I suspect.

I’ve been dating a Korean girl here in Vietnam for almost two months. Hence me finding your blog. I’m a Dutch/American living in Saigon and she’s Korean from Daegu also now living and working in Saigon for an American company.

She’s rather unique, I’d say. She’s 26 now and, although this is her first time living away from her parents, she’s rather independent and self-confident. I am a bit younger than her but it doesn’t really reflect so much in our day-to-day business. This might be a result of the issues you discuss in this piece… I’m not sure.

In any case, I really enjoy reading your stuff. I’ve been reading it with her a few times and I’ll get her to read (some) of this post as well as I am interested in what she has to say about it.

Thanks.