How Korean Is Korea?

By Daniel H. Fernald

Contributing Writer

^It is by no means an uncommon sight: a man, woman and two children waiting in the immigration line at Incheon International Airport. This family was not visiting, though; we had come to build a new life in the bosom of East Asia.

My Korean-born wife and I had met more than a decade earlier at a church in Atlanta, Ga., the city where both of our sons would later be born. I had never even been to Asia before. Immigration, the baggage claim and finally clearing customs were the same as at the 15 or 16 other borders I had crossed in a lifetime of travel.

"Surely, it will all be different from here on," I thought.

It wasn't.

I had expected to find in Seoul a conspicuously Asian culture, with its own distinctive music, literature and architecture. As the husband of a Korean, I had had my own hanbok for years, and had grown quite fond of Korean traditional music, thanks to a Korean doctor friend in Atlanta.

In my mind's eye, Seoul would of course have crowds of people in mostly Western garb, streets clogged with pollution-belching cars and the hustle-bustle of any major city. But it would still "feel" like Seoul, somehow, in the same way that Paris feels like Paris, Rome feels like Rome, and New York feels like New York.

Instead of that, what I actually found was Baltimore, Md.; Nancy, France; or Algeciras, Spain, i.e. an unexceptional, generic major city with a few noteworthy sites but without anything like a distinctive identity. Even some of the poorer places to which I have traveled ― like Morocco and Peru ― have "felt" different from anywhere else I have been. That is part of the great joy of travel, the differences and the diversity of experience that comes with them. There is a texture to great cities, even poor ones, an ineffable quality that somehow marks them as themselves and nothing else. Uniquely among the foreign capitals I have visited, Seoul had for me in those early days no such "je ne sais quoi," and I puzzled over why.

A visit to Gyeongbok Palace was a breath of fresh air, culturally speaking. Here was a place uniquely Korean and exemplary of this great nation's millennia-long history. The nearby Korean Folk Museum was equally inspiring, for much the same reason.

The magic of that day did not survive the trip home, unfortunately, as we drove through streets that looked the same as any other streets, between buildings that looked like any other buildings, past countless, nondescript shops blasting rap music (usually as a way of selling hand phones).

If the screeching rap had not been in Korean, we could have been in Cleveland, Houston or virtually any other undistinguished, major American city.

Is this a bad thing? I don't know, but it was not at all what I expected.

My students here are bright, talented and often charming. They are a pleasure to teach. They also have many of the same interests as their American counterparts, dress similarly though better, and even watch many of the same shows. "Gossip Girl" seems to be a particularly strong cultural cross-over hit. Baseball caps, especially featuring the logos of the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, are popular on both sides of the Pacific.

The "Korean" music that my students prefer is Western-style, primarily rap and hip-hop, with "Big Bang" among the more popular choices.

My students are split roughly 50-50 on Korean reunification, and even those in favor don't usually show a clear preference for suffering North Koreans over suffering Burmese, Indonesians or Tibetans.

These are good and decent youngsters, the best and the brightest, so perhaps it is really a virtue to give little or no preference to one's own people and culture.

Even so, an ill-defined feeling keeps gnawing at me. As a student in France, years ago, I quickly tired of being regaled with tales of mighty Gaul. Here, conversely, I sometimes find myself in the odd and awkward position of reminding young Koreans of their country's greatness. I honestly don't know what to make of it.

A single plucked note from a Geomungo or the deep "toom, toom" of a Buk is a rare event indeed.

But at least the rap music that has replaced these sounds of the Joseon Kingdom is mostly in Korean. "That is some small comfort," I tell myself. Is it, though?

Seoul's unremarkable "build it fast, build it now" architecture is in part a product of the urgent rebuilding efforts of the post-war period. This also accounts for the relative scarcity of parks and other green spaces. Korea rose like the phoenix, and understandably had little time for such niceties.

However, none of this explains why I have such trouble finding traditional Korean music on the radio. Nor does it account for the fact that new buildings in Seoul are no more "Korean" than ones thrown up in haste during the amazing reconstruction of the 1950s and '60s. Am I also wrong to suspect that many of the young Koreans who passionately pursue mastery of the guitar (with its Middle Eastern and Spanish roots) may not know a Geum from a Haegeum and may not care?

Westerners who question Korea's commitment to globalization and multiculturalism are often accused of "Korea bashing" ― sometimes rightly.

What, however, does one call a foreigner who warns younger Koreans against succumbing to the siren song of the West, thereby losing touch with the melody of the four types of Piri, which filled the courts of Korean kings, and the rousing sound of the Nabal

Is there a word for that?

I don't know, but it's a question worth asking.

In the meantime, at least the rap music is mostly in Korean.

The writer is an associate professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. He can be reached at professordhf@yahoo.com.