I Just Dont Get It

By Jason Lim

I thought that I knew Koreans. After all, I am ethnically Korean and was born and raised in Seoul until I was nine years old. I even speak and write the language with native fluency. And, needless to say, I look like a Korean, albeit an older model that's losing trade-in value pretty precipitously.

But it turns out that I don't know the first thing about Koreans because I just don't get it. I don't get it when more than 5 million Koreans make the daylong pilgrimage in early summer heat to lay flowers at the wreath of their former President who committed suicide under the cloud of a corruption scandal.

I don't get it when a high-profile Catholic priest officiating a funeral mass blatantly equates former President Roh to Jesus of Nazareth and current President Lee Myung-bak to Pontius Pilate. I don't get it when the whole of Seoul is seemingly covered by a sea of bright yellow undulating in eerie contrast against the collective, somber grayness of the funeral. I certainly don't get how quickly a former president who left office with a pitiful rating became a rallying cry for everything that is noble and good in the Korean spirit after he killed himself.

But I know why I don't get it. It's because I don't subscribe to the same underlying pubic narrative that Koreans obviously do. According to Marshall Ganz of Harvard Kennedy School, ``We interpret the world in two ways ― as narrative and as analysis. Narrative articulates how we feel about things better than what we think about them. The 'truth' of a story is in how it moves us."

This means that the ``truth" of the Roh's story moves me differently from how it moves the millions of Korean people who came out en masse to mourn him. In fact, it's an altogether different ``truth" that we experience from the same objective reality of Roh's suicide death because we come at it from different directions. This is only natural because, as Ganz explains, ``the way we feel about some things often has little to do with the present, but rather is a legacy of the emotional lessons we learned long ago."

Or, in the case of Koreans, the legacy of emotional lessons that they learned ― perhaps inherited is a better word ― while growing up as Koreans in Korea. And it's pretty obvious from reactions to Roh's suicide that the central emotional legacy of the Korean people is the resentment against marginalization and abuse by powerful elites.

Perhaps such an emotional legacy is inevitable for a country that has been invaded an average of once every two years by foreign invaders for the last 2,000 years. Perhaps such resentment is only to be expected for country that had to survive thousands of years as an independent entity in between two world powers in China and Japan and had to often act as an unwilling springboard for one attacking another. Perhaps such surprising bitterness is natural for a country that was forcibly and brutally subjugated by Imperial Japan for 36 years in the early 20th century and then divided into two by emerging Cold War politics of the superpowers, literally cutting it off at the waist.

This is the national emotional legacy that drove the public narrative that millions of Koreans coauthored to understand Roh's suicide. Roh became Korea's Evita. He was one of the everyday people who fought against the elitist, corrupt system with his last, dying breath until his tragic fall. Literally.

Roh was the prophet for democracy, fairness, and justice who was abandoned by his flock at his hour of greatest need. His death wasn't just another suicide. It was a purposeful statement against the corruption and abuse by the collusion of the elites ― politicians, prosecutors, police, major press and media outlets, business conglomerates, etc. ― that were handpicked to run Korea by the Japanese overseers and, later on, by the American forces.

In a way, Koreans view themselves as the perpetual David who never wins against Goliath within and without. And Roh was the ultimate David who dared to win against the institutional Goliath for one, brief shining moment but tragically succumbed against the weight of their conspiratorial outrage.

Like any good narrative, a protagonist needs a villain to define his nobility. Unfortunately for President Lee Myung-bak, he fits the bill perfectly. Accordingly, Lee has been involuntarily cast as Goliath against David or Sauron against Roh's Frodo.

So, how does Lee break out his villainous role? By engaging the Korean people in a different dialogue that speaks equally compellingly to another deeply seated emotional narrative that they all share: the story of Miracle on Han River. In fact, this was the public narrative that originally helped Lee become the President by the largest margin of victory in the history of Korea. In this story, Lee is not the villain. He is the competent, industrial, and visionary hero saving the day against the daydreaming, incompetent bunch of idealistic bunglers.

Leadership is all about shaping the public narrative that drives your agenda. This means that, once again drawing from Ganz, ``engaging people in an emotional dialogue drawing on one set of emotions (or values) which are grounded in one set of experiences, in order to counter another set of emotions (or values), grounded in different experiences ― a dialogue of the heart."

I guess it's time for a heart-to-heart talk in Korea.

Jason Lim is the managing editor of the Korea Policy Review published at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He can be reached at jasonlim2000@gmail.com.