Korean's great excuses

The Republic of the Workaholic There is no denying that average Korean people are hard workers. In the long-loved sitcom, Modern Family, Alex who is incredibly smart and competitive high school student in episode 5 said to her psychological therapist one day. “Did you have SAT or Asian kids in you school?” It indicates how hard it is for Alex to compete with Asian kids in her school. Korea and other East Asian countries have been accustomed to doing hard work by rice farming, which is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent size corn or wheat field (Ref. Outlier by Malcolm Gladwell p261~275). The heritage of our ancestors’ strong willpower and attitude runs in all Koreans’ veins. This heritage intertwined with Korean people’s desperation not to starve to death after the Korean War and collectivism to reconstruct our country. Our previous generation literally worked their fingers to the bone to feed their family. Working hard has seated on Korean p...

Drinking culture in Korea is no joke. Before I post this article, I want to be clear that as a woman and a Christian, I can’t help but  have a negative feeling about Korean drinking culture, although I drink sometimes. According to a 2014 study by Euromonitor, South Koreans drink 13.7 shots of liquor per week on average which is the most in the world which means Koreans drink twice as much liquor as Russians does and more than four times as much as Americans. Drinking culture in South Korea is a big part of life. Many foreigners are surprised to see how incredibly accessible it is to get liquor in Korea and how liberal Korean people are when it comes to drinking liquor in public places. It is very common that a lot of celebrities such as TV and movie stars and famous singers, brag about how many bottles of Soju(Korean popular alcohol) they can drink, regardless of their age in talk shows. Many times they have enormous fun sharing about their particular behavior...

8 ways of torturing Korean. 1. Make them eat ramen without Kimchi. 2. Reduce the internet speed to 10 Mbps. 3. Don't let them drink coffee after a meal. 4. Don't let them eat Samgyupsal(port belly) with Soju(Korean alcohol). 5. Don't let them lick the yogurt lid. 6. Don't let them bring their phone into the bathroom. 7. Don't let them stand up until the bus stops completely. 8. Don't let them push the close button when using elevator.

Hurry hurry culture in Korea Generally, all kinds of things in Korea operate at a faster pace than they do in other countries. You surely have heard of the phrase “ppalli ppalli” which translates to “hurry up, hurry up.” You also probably have seen many Korean people running in the subway station or in the street, especially in the morning time. I dare to say that you will be touched to see how Korean people do their jobs in a fast and efficient manner in the hospital, public office, bank, post office and all kinds of service industries to save customers’ precious time. Koreans believe time is money and it is not too much to say that the way they do is like an art. I think Koreans get this disposition from the rapid economic growth the country went through within such a short period of time after the Korean War. Plus, technology development and a high-speed communication network have instigated this tendency. Thanks to the technology development, you can do anything you ca...

Churches everywhere in Korea You cannot fail to notice the red neon crosses at night sky in Korea. They are almost everywhere on top of buildings. If a church in Korea shares a building space with other tenants, a red neon cross is placed on top of the building which lights up Korea’s night until the midnight or later. There are also many huge scale churches which have their own buildings with an architectural form of a typical church as you can see in Western countries. A lot of foreigners as well as Korean people get annoyed by these light pollution from the neon crosses at big cities in Korea. "Looking from above, the night scene of Seoul looks like that of a graveyard," one Internet user complained in a posting. According to the number of neon crosses, people might think that a lot of Koreans are Christian. Some research show that 35% of the South Koreans are Christian and there are over 50,000 churches around Korea, over 10,000 in Seoul alone. As a Christian, it...

Why Koreans have a xenophobia I admit that some Korean has a touch of xenophobia which comes from the background of Korean history. Korea is one of the most homogeneous nations on earth because of its geographical position. Since the Korean peninsula is surrounded by water on its three sides, going abroad means you must take a ship which was not easy in the past when air planes didn’t exist. Therefore expats can be easily spotted and identified as a foreigner and a curiosity.  Historically, as a small country, Korea has always been suffering from foreign invasions throughout our long history. It is no surprise that Korean people are hostile towards the outsiders once you learn Korean tragic history. It is no exasperation that there hasn’t been a day when Korean people didn’t have to worry about being invaded and looted by other countries in the past. Our fore-bearer's major means of making a living is rice farming that made people settle down in one place for a long ti...

Korean’s great obsession of questioning people’s age. As we are learning English and international manners, Koreans find out that asking personal questions may sound rude and make you look nosey. As long as a Korean speaks English, there is no problem with not asking people’s age. However, when it comes to speaking in Korean, it is a different story. Korean is one of the most super hierarchical languages in the world. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of ‘Outliers’ wrote in his book that the Korean language has no fewer than six different levels of conversational address, depending on the relationship between the addressee and addresser : formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain. If we don’t know the other party’s age, it makes us have a difficult time in choosing the level. Mostly, we choose the formal deference level between adults when we don’t know well each other though, asking and knowing people’s age make us feel comfortable which help u...