Cool Things Korean (part 8)

Without a doubt, among the most misunderstood cool things about Korea is the methods people use to create and cultivate interpersonal relationships.  Foreigners have been commenting on Korea’s orgiastic party scene for four hundred years, usually failing to find much fun in the rounds of drunken singing and silly dancing.  I will admit that it is tough to appreciate, especially when your first exposure to the custom is as an icebreaker or upon first meeting with Koreans.  What’s fun about making a willing fool of yourself in front of people you don’t know that well?

There was a time when I failed to find the coolness in this essential Korean activity, but I have a habit of trying to turn what I believe on its head, and this is no different.  Let me lay it out for you.  Meeting people is embarrassing.  If you try to hard to impress you come off looking like a jerk.  If you don’t try hard enough you fade into the background and wind up meeting no one.  This is an unavoidable state of humanity, and Koreans tend to be even less outgoing than your average human being.  At the same time, personal relationships are more important to Koreans than perhaps they are to you and me.  The solution that they’ve come up with is to institutionalize friendship.  This is achieved by one gallant moodmaker taking the initiative and playing the sometimes embarrassing role of the person who forces everyone to socialize. 

In a company this role is filled by the boss.  He forces his workers to drink and make merry, which they complain about all the way.  And while they keep telling each other they’d rather be at home with their families, that experience of shared suffering at the hands of their overzealous boss bonds them together.  I suspect that this crucial aspect of Korean social life is increasingly misunderstood by young Koreans themselves, who fail to grasp the crucial role that these drinking sessions once played.

That said, alcohol helps.  In fact, it’s fair to say that alcohol is absolutely essential to Korean society.  It is the social lubricant that keeps the well-oiled machine that is Korean social life chugging along.  But while alcohol is fine for lowering the inhibitions and bringing out one’s inner garrulous social butterfly, it still lacks cohesive power.  Get a room full of relative strangers drunk and you will find them clotted up into little bands, bonding with a small ‘b’ but not Bonding. 

Korea’s solution to this human foible is to make drinking a group activity, led by the boss or senior (upperclassman) or oldest member of the group.  But we’ve already established that group bonding activities are awkward and embarrassing, right?  Whereas Americans are too cool (read: uptight) to subject themselves to even temporary embarrassment, Korean culture mitigates the embarrassment by spreading it around evenly.  Why worry about having to sing in front of people you barely know when they have to sing in front of you.  It levels the playing field and allows everyone to let their freak flag fly, in a manner of speaking.  This is the reason that Koreans and people of Korean descent tend to love drinking games.  Eunice, a Korean-American friend of mine from Boston University once took control of a night of drinking and played that social master of ceremonies role with authoritarian relish.  At the time I complained ‘Why don’t we just drink and chat?’  But eight years later that night stands out like no one night of drinking and chatting does.

There are some common mistakes that foreigners tend to make when they are taken to the noraebang (song room) to sing karaoke.  First and foremost, they tend to sing songs that they like.  People don’t go to the noraebang to sing songs that they like.  Noted friend of the Joshing Gnome and the mastermind behind Litepost email Nathan Braun has introduced me to an amazing life mantra: ‘Good DJs don’t play the songs they like.  They play songs that everybody recognizes from high school.’  And Koreans go to the noraebang to sing songs that everybody knows.  The second mistake commonly made by foreigners is to try to be cool at the noraebang.  I would say this is one of the worst things you could do.  The noraebang is not for being cool.  If you want to be cool, do it on your own time.  The noraebang is for bonding, and that means making a fool of yourself.  Embrace it.  Don’t be cool: be fun.

I consider this a major weakness of the (American) culture in which I was raised.  People are encouraged to forge their own identity and avoid situations that undermine their carefully crafted images.  That means calcifying one’s identity relatively early, making mental lists of things that you do and things that you never do.  In Korea, the idea that someone would be too cool and reserved to sing karaoke or too macho to do a choreographed dance to the latest pop song in front of the whole school is sort of unthinkable.  You do what others are doing because it’s fun, and those are the events that memories are made of.

Most foreigners who experience Korean bonding pooh pooh it, but they fail to appreciate its power. Koreans regularly meet with their former coworkers, college friends, high school friends, and even middle school friends, maintaining these friendships for life, which is a lot better than anything I’ve ever seen back home.  Keep in mind that this includes not only one’s bosom chums and soulmates, but a large group of friends.  Think about it.

~ by Joshing on March 14, 2008.