South Korea is a nation obsessed with social media, popularly known here as SNS. Young Koreans are busy texting, tweeting and updating their Facebook statuses all day long. The mobile messenger app KakaoTalk, KaTalk in short, has become an indispensable communication tool in Korea. Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones, even old people now connect with one another on social media. Amazingly, out of Korea’s population of 50 million, as many as 40 million use smartphones.
Lee O-young, the inaugural minister of culture, points out that Koreans had a tradition of frequenting establishments called sarangbang that had a function similar to today’s social media. In premodern Korea, a sarangbang was a place where villagers, visitors and passersby gathered to socialize, communicate and exchange news, not to mention make friends — basically, an offline version of social media. No wonder that modern-day social media suits the Korean people’s tastes perfectly.
Paradoxically, Koreans often come across as unsociable offline. Foreigners often feel that Koreans are not as adept at mingling with foreign people or outsiders. In fact, Koreans are often associated with an altogether different kind of SNS: “Short-tempered, Narrow-minded and Sticky.”
That we tend to lose our temper and flare up easily over trivial matters is undeniable. Perhaps that is why we are known to be easily provoked and manipulated. Some Koreans become highly emotional and are so blinded by rage that they even set fire to their own homes.
A few days ago, an angry customer publicly smashed his Mercedes with a golf club because his auto dealer would not exchange the malfunctioning vehicle for a new one. Perhaps, the Guinness Book of Records will list him as the first man who was audacious enough to wreck his own Mercedes, the price of which was more than $200,000 in Korea. The incident proved one thing to the world: When a Korean gets upset, money is no issue. He can smash pricy stuff.
That we are not big-hearted and cling to small things, losing out on so many precious things in the meantime, is also true. Oftentimes, we are not generous enough to forgive others and want to retaliate. That is why incidents of road rage are quite common in Korea. When a car abruptly cuts in ahead of us, our psychological gear immediately shifts into retaliation mode, driving us to bay for blood. We cannot just let it go. We cannot bring ourselves to bury the hatchet and thus keep raking up the past, instead of letting bygones be bygones. That is why some people are still eager to draw up lists of collaborators during the Japanese occupation who they think need to be condemned, even though they are all long dead. Alas! We are always inclined to the past, never to the future.
By “sticky,” foreigners seem to refer to the tenacious temper of some Korean men. Many Korean men find accepting breakups difficult. When a woman wants to break up with him, some men stab the woman and others set the woman’s house on fire. A few weeks ago, a man even threw acid on his girlfriend’s face when she told him that she wanted to leave. Those men should learn to be cool like Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca.”
In the eyes of the foreigners, Koreans are sizzling with fury inside, ready to explode at the pull of a trigger. Another characteristic of the Korean psyche is that Koreans become instantly enraged when they feel they are being ignored or disrespected. When you cut in on the road, therefore, you should blink your emergency lights a few times in order to show respect to the driver behind you. Otherwise, the driver might take affront and immediately pursue you for retaliation.
Foreigners also often remark that Koreans tend to play the victim card. Foreign people presume that long-term oppression, both domestic and foreign, must have kindled the Korean people’s subconscious rage and ignited a sense of victimhood. In my opinion, however, Koreans are angry and discontented because they have a tendency to constantly compare themselves to those who are better than them. Then they blame society and the government for all their miseries.
In the 1950s, the “Angry Young Men,” a group of writers who felt disillusioned with conservative, conventional British society, rose to prominence in the U.K. The angry young men in today’s Korea are frustrated and disillusioned with their society which does not provide them with enough jobs. In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare refers to life as “a tale / told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / signifying nothing.” Today, many Korean’s lives, too, seem to be “full of sound and fury.”
No matter how angry and upset we are, we should hide our feelings and keep our emotions in check. We should strive to build a society of SNS — that is, a society, not of “short-tempered, narrow-minded and sticky” people, but of “serene, nice and sweet” people.
By Kim Seong-kon
Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. — Ed.
