David Tizzard is a professor at Seoul Women’s University, holds a PhD in Korean Studies, and hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast. He has lived and worked in Seoul for more than two decades. Reach him at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.
The walnut cake theory of Korean hospitality
Courtesy of Namuwiki
By David A. Tizzard
There are days, most days, if I’m being honest, when Seoul feels less like a city and more like a high-speed assembly line I’ve accidentally stepped onto sideways. Everything moves with this synchronized, conveyor-belt urgency, and I’m the defective product drifting against the current. Cars don’t so much drive as lunge: sudden, angular movements that make me consider slamming my horn with righteous theatricality. I almost never do, because in Korea the horn is not so much a warning as a declaration of open hostilities.
Doorways swallow people whole; nobody waits behind to hold anything open. Coffee cups — still upright, still warm — are abandoned on sidewalks like tiny exhausted soldiers who have fallen in battle. The whole landscape starts to feel like a collage of micro-indifferences, each one trivial and yet collectively forming this impression of a society in which everyone is pathologically sealed in their own sleek ergonomic capsule of self.
Screens are part of the problem, obviously. We carry these glowing rectangles like secular rosaries, caressing them for spiritual reassurance. Reasserting our faith every minute. But it goes deeper. There’s this cultural moment we’re living in where each person is simultaneously the prophet and the entire congregation of their own personal religion. A kind of mainstreamed solipsism. The silence on subways isn’t tranquility; it’s a mass soundproofing of interior monologues. Being surrounded by so many people, all vibrantly alive and yet unavailable. We are standing in a crowded room where everyone has donned invisible noise-canceling headphones.
And it’s absurdly easy to join them in this silence ballet. You order coffee from kiosks with no human contact necessary, mere finger choreography. You tap at screens in restaurants. You perform late-night consumerist rituals with one-click purchases delivered at speeds that violate several known physical laws. Even the government occasionally steps in as a kind of stern parental figure declaring that past midnight we should all stop buying things, as though impulse purchases were a moral failing and not the glue holding the economy together.
Everywhere: main-character syndrome. A phrase I once dismissed as Gen Z weaponized snark but now acknowledge has unsettling explanatory power. I want this, therefore produce it. I feel this, therefore adjust yourself accordingly. You, world, must accommodate me because I am the fragile protagonist of everything.
And in that closed loop of self-reinforcement, it becomes frighteningly easy to lose the sense of other. Those millions of parallel lives brushing up against ours with their own fears and hungers and stories we’ll never hear.
Nowhere is this tension clearer than in Korea’s strangely rigid, if invisible, social architecture. There is an inner circle. These are the people to whom you owe warmth and obligation. Then, there’s everyone else outside it. Not coldness, necessarily, but an uncertainty, a hesitancy born of cultural codes that operate like software nobody bothered to document. As a foreigner you quickly learn that you’re not so much outside the circle as hovering somewhere above it, like an unresolved variable in someone’s algebra equation. People don’t quite know what to do with you. Small talk is rare. Jokes are dangerous. Your ignorance of unspoken norms is assumed.
There’s also the staring. The very literal pointing. The slow up-and-down appraisal that suggests you’re either fascinating or a minor violation of zoning regulations. To be fair, Korea’s collective gaze (nam-ae siseon) predates foreigners and is applied liberally to Koreans as well. It’s democratic like that. And yet, and this is where the cognitive dissonance starts humming loudly, beneath this hyper-visibility is an unexpected and, frankly, disarming kindness.
An old woman taps my arm in a market and says “well done” with the enthusiasm of a coach congratulating a child athlete. What exactly I accomplished remains undecided. Standing upright? Existing? The mystery endears her more than any explanation could. A teenage hairdresser marvels at the size of my head (“so small!”) as though she has stumbled upon a rare geological formation. A stranger tilts his head at me, visibly debates asking a question, then decides on a solemn nod instead. That nod contains an entire novella’s worth of suspended curiosity and reluctant politeness.
At a motorway service station, a man selling walnut cakes performs what can only be called a comedic opera of generosity, dramatically placing three extra cakes into my bag with full-body gestures, as though ensuring that patrons in the last row of the theater can appreciate his benevolence. It’s called “service” here, this practice of giving more than what was asked for, and it’s both charming and slightly overwhelming. I bow, lower my gaze, adjust my honorifics like a careful gardener pruning his language. The moment is a small oasis of warmth in a world that too often feels engineered for efficiency rather than communion.
Koreans have ushered me into the best seats at restaurants, escorted me to the front of queues, insisted on giving me the choicest cuts of meat at barbeque, and fussed over details as though I were a visiting dignitary rather than someone who routinely confuses verb endings. I become humbled. Embarrassed. Occasionally terrified. But at the center of these gestures was something very simple: pride. Pride in the culture. Pride in the food. Pride in being good hosts to someone who seemed genuinely curious.
And the more I opened myself, studying the language, asking questions, making mistakes with reckless sincerity, the more that kindness amplified and reflected back, like sunlight bouncing between two mirrors.
Decades after having arrived, this is the part that hasn’t changed. The city pulses, the cars still lunge, the cups still stand at attention on the pavement like abandoned tin soldiers. But the kindness, unguarded, uncalculated, and at times almost embarrassingly earnest, is the part that endures. It’s what makes living here not just tolerable but miraculous. A reminder that even in a world full of self-obsessed protagonists, someone might still hand you three extra walnut cakes just because they can.