Kibitzing with a taxi driver

One of the best ways to take the pulse of the national mood in Korea is to chat with a taxi driver. Many have a sharp eye because they spend their days seeing and hearing what is going on in a society. I was lucky enough to have an informative conversation with a taxi driver during a long ride recently. It went as follows:

By Robert J. Fouser

One of the best ways to take the pulse of the national mood in Korea is to chat with a taxi driver. Many have a sharp eye because they spend their days seeing and hearing what is going on in a society. I was lucky enough to have an informative conversation with a taxi driver during a long ride recently. It went as follows:

Driver: One of my best friends is going to emigrate to the U.S. He said that he wants to give his children a better education. It happened so suddenly. What do you think?

Fouser: Hmm, Americans have a lot of complaints about their educational system. The quality of education depends a lot on where you live, so it's hard to say. It's not paradise, though. What's his complaint about education in Korea?

Driver: Oh, like everybody else, he worries about the cost. If you can't send kids to private institutes, then they fall behind and have no opportunities. Korea really has become a two-tier society, so you have to give your kids every advantage.

Fouser: I hear that all the time.

Driver: The cost is more than just money, though. Learning through family life, learning how to behave and so on have almost disappeared because kids spend all their time in school and private institutes and little time with their families. In many families, both parents work and don't have much time for the kids, so private institutes are good places for them to be while parents work. Many families spend little time together, except maybe on the weekends.

Fouser: That must affect kids in a lot of ways.

Driver: Definitely. They grow up with no manners. Koreans used to respect seniors and treat them well, but that's out the window. It's hard for parents to teach manners and values if they see them for only a couple of hours a day.

Fouser: So private institutes also function as a place to look after children while parents work. That's sort of new to me.

Driver: That's probably their main function. If kids are in a private institute, then parents know where they are and what they're doing. Older kids can stay home, of course, but it's harder to monitor them at home. They watch TV or play computer games. At least with a private institute, parents can check attendance and know where the kids are and what they are doing.

Fouser: What about grandparents? I remember that it was common for them to live with their children.

Driver: That's gone out the window, too. Wives don't want their mothers-in-law around, and, besides, apartments are crowded, so it's hard for grandparents to feel comfortable. If the grandparents live nearby, they visit on the weekends, but if they live down country, then they see each other on holidays a few times a year.

Fouser: I see. I didn't know that.

Driver: Koreans are super busy, but why? Because we have to keep up. Housing, or at least rent, keeps going up, food keeps getting more expensive. It used to be that if you worked hard, that you could get ahead, but now you have to work hard just to keep up. But it's hard to feel much satisfaction in working just to keep up. Maybe that's what got to my friend, I don't know.

Fouser: Oh, I think we're almost there …

So there you have it: A hands-on, street view of Korean society in the middle of 2011. The picture is not pretty, but it has much in common with the national mood in the U.S., Japan, and, most likely, most other advanced industrial democracies. The mood can best be described as a deep frustration with seemingly insurmountable limits on what people and their children can achieve.

Politicians extol the idea of growth and opportunity, but people feel that they are treading water and that any let up will risk dropping from the ranks of the middle class. The gap between what people are told and what they feel only exacerbates the sour mood. In Korea, frustration over the economy caused widespread dissatisfaction with the former President Roh Moo-hyun administration and the same sense of malaise is now weighing heavily on the current President Lee Myung-bak.

Seen from a global perspective, of course, Korea is an amazingly successful country. In a generation, it has transformed itself into a democracy that provides, by global standards, a high standard of living for an overwhelming majority of its people. Older taxi drivers often provide fascinating insight into this transformation.

And yet the dissatisfaction ― the great expectations gap ― remains. For all their achievements, Koreans are oddly unhappy. This leaves current and future political leaders with the difficult task of finding a new discourse to discuss quality, not the quantity, of success and prosperity.

The writer is a professor at the Department of Korean Language Education at Seoul National University. He can be reached at fouser@snu.ac.kr.