Writing in the Korea Times, a college student by the name of Shin Seul-ki importunes the reader to “follow your heart,” opening with a “thought-provoking passage” from Demian, in fact the novel’s own opening sentences: “I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?” She answers that question with an accusatory finger pointed toward the Korean education system, which “requires students to spend nearly every waking hour figuring out not what they want to do but just studying for their college entrance exam. School doesn’t offer students a chance to find their true calling. School just pushes them into an ‘education arms race’ before finding their vision. Students study something hard for their bright future; however, paradoxically they don’t know what makes their futures brilliant.”
Korean education — along with Korean social hierarchies, Korean corporate culture, the Korean political sphere, and so on — has certainly stifled more than a few true selves, but under Shin’s argument lies a common Korean misperception: that Westerners somehow have the whole calling, vision, and future thing figured out, having long since cast off mere “routine” in favor of genuine “life.” She ends her article with a reference to Steve Jobs, the subject of a national obsession due to his vivid embodiment of the very creativity, nonconformism, effectiveness, and sheer wealth many Koreans still see their country as lacking. Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs must not rank far below Demian (maybe somewhere near the strange, much-abridged localization of the Talmud) as a holy Western text to which Koreans, frustrated and frightened by their lives for reasons they can’t quite pin down, have flocked for answers.
In response to a Quora thread entitled “What’s the deal with South Koreans and Herman Hesse?”, a longtime Korea-resident Westerner named Gord Sellar describes the novel as “about someone who (transgressively, but in a way celebrated by the novel) moves beyond the world of appearances towards the world of the self,” touching on the theme of people who bear a “Mark of Cain’ that prevents their fulfillment “by ‘normal’ social interactions.” And “for those having grown up in South Korea — a place where appearance and form are often conventionally prioritized over essence or content — this particular theme probably has a special appeal.” As does the kind of 19th-century European setting with “parents objecting to love marriages or forbidding relationships or marriages, women seeking out husbands on the basis of their career potential or income, and people (often women) ending up in desperate trouble or in penury because of a cruel parent or a tragic family accident.”
Any story of “old Europe struggling with modernity” will resonate with a Korea doing plenty of modernity-grappling of its own. Demian in particular, Sellar writes, also taps inadvertently into the particular Korean storytelling sensibility: “They are much more enamored of sad endings, and they tend to be much more patient with stories that unfold in such a way that the protagonists never had a real hope of changing the outcome.” This has introduced certain difficulties into the marketing of Korean literature to Westerners, who “have little patience for stories that feature characters who can’t take some hand in their fate” and “tend to be less patient with melodramatically sad turns of plot,” but it means certain strains of anguish-oriented German fiction, best exemplified by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (from the object of whose unrequited passion one of Korea’s biggest conglomerates took its name), have grown popular indeed here.
I concede what little I know of Korean or Japanese society, second hand and from commentary like that, leaves the impression it would be too structured for me.
On the other hand, it’s a pity to see them all follow the West’s Faustian path to the grave.
Perhaps there is a middle ground we are all doomed to miss, or glance at while passing it by.
Korea is a fascinating culture. It’s not Japan and it’s not China, obviously, but there is a uniquely Korean fusion of Confucianism with whatever it was that drives the Japanese urge to systematize and ritualize everything.
Neither the Japanese nor the Koreans are pragmatic “captains of their lives”. There’s a strong vein of romantic fatalism throughout both cultures that’s hard to fathom. Most of the Japanese knew they had no chance of victory in WWII, when they stopped to think about it, but… Nonetheless, they persevered at it until we dropped the A-bomb on them, and the Soviets took Manchuria. Why? They’re basically, essentially romantic fatalists. That’s so fundamental to their cultures that it’s written into the mental DNA, and might even be ingrained into the physical genetic codes, as well.
In Korea, there’s a very odd (to Western eyes) tendency to adopt the identity and behavior of whatever role you’re cast into in Korean society. Here in the US, you see a little of that, but in Korea? LOL; I watched an in-law of a friend of mine, a former student protester, morph overnight into a Hyundai “salaryman” as soon as he got hired as an executive. Some months earlier, as a student protester, he’d been out on the streets rioting with and in support of striking Hyundai employees. As soon as he could put his electrical engineering degree to use, however? Straight corporate hack, complete with grey suit and briefcase. It was bizarre — his body language even changed.
In the Korean KATUSA program, where we place conscripted Korean troops into US units, it’s an interesting thing to observe. We’ve only got them for two years, and they get automatic promotions from recruit to Sergeant at set steps along that two-year program, and you watch them get promoted with a certain amount of wonder, because the shy, reclusive recruit you had for six months is suddenly a bolder, less shy young soldier the moment he pins on his rank. Make him a Corporal and Sergeant, and there’s very little of that “new NCO” growing into his rank that you see with US troops. The newly promoted KATUSA Sergeant is suddenly a far more assertive and aggressive individual, and the change is literally observable overnight. Usually, with a newly promoted US soldier, the shift from “one of the guys” to NCO is a lot more gradual, and usually requires several boots thoughtfully placed up their asses before they start actually conducting themselves as NCOs. The KATUSA NCOs? As soon as you tell them “You’re an NCO now,” it’s like, bang, they’re doing the job as they perceive it. And demanding the requisite respect and the perks of authority.
To Western eyes, there’s a quality of “conformity to perceived social norms” in Korean culture that is hard to miss, once you start looking for it. Tell a Korean that they are a student, and they protest: that’s the traditional role of a university student, in Korean culture, to be the “social conscience” of the nation. Once you’re past that, then, well, protesting just ain’t your bag, dude. You’re supposed to be whatever it is you are and do that to the best of your ability, whether it’s as a corporate grey man, independent businessman, or farmer. I don’t think that even a lot of Koreans really realize the degree to which this is true, either. It just is, and is unconsciously adhered to and enforced. The degree of role-consciousness in Korean society cannot be underemphasized, so far as I observed.
I think I mentioned the incident where one of our staff Majors was observed driving his own vehicle by the ROK Army elements he was supposed to be liaison officer for. It didn’t take but an afternoon before we got word filtered down to us that he’d unavoidably “lost face” with the ROKA, and would need to be replaced — and, all because he wasn’t “acting like an officer” in their eyes.
I wish I knew what the hell makes these posts cut out entire words. That second paragraph should start out with “Neither” as the first word…
[Isegoria: Fixed it for you.]
Regarding being the role assigned to you at that time and place in Korean society, there is an old idea that used to be expressed back when the USA was more of a high-trust society, that professionalism meant doing the job you were assigned even if you disagreed with the decision of your superior (officers). If you disagreed you were to quit and express yourself later. I suspect it is more characteristic of both militaristic and high-trust societies. In a sense perhaps being in a high risk military situation for decades tends to place a high premium on the social value of being a trustworthy person. Doing some quick searching just now on the term I was getting a lot of noise — specific industries, shallow moralizing, all that sort of thing and not the sort of meaning that seemed to be shared among most of the WWII USA generation up through the late 1960s.
Harper’s Notes, mmmm… not so much. At least, in my eyes.
In the Korean culture, it’s not “do the job” so much as it is “be the job”.
It’s a qualitative difference, and a huge one. It’s not professionalism; it’s wholesale adoption of the role, in every aspect of your life, and the subsumption of personal identity into the perceived behavioral characteristics of a particular role or job.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this experience before, but I had a KATUSA working for me on my first assignment there, in the late 1980s, whose brother was high-up in the student protest organizations. When I ran into that KATUSA again on an exercise towards the end of his conscription term, we caught up with each other, and he related to me the family misfortune of his brother, the student protestor, being imprisoned.
Not so odd, you might think? Wrong. Brother dear was in prison awaiting trial for police brutality as a riot policeman, where he’d nearly beaten to death some of his former peers who’d been throwing Molotov cocktails at the police. He and his squad had run down the throwers, and then nearly beaten to death a couple of them. If you have any concept of how little attention the Koreans pay to things like police brutality, you’d understand just how bad this case was.
Couple years earlier, this guy had been on one of the student protest councils, and a fairly high-up officer. They made him a riot cop when he got drafted, and he then got slammed for beating some of his former fellow protestors nearly to death.
My old KATUSA expressed puzzlement at how I was surprised at this turn of events; after all, was it not the duty of the student to protest, and the duty of the riot policeman to suppress…?
He ruefully said that his brother had always had a habit of going overboard with things…
Yeah, Korea is a different culture, that’s for sure.