Generation G Gets Mixed Review
By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
If you were born around 1988, have lived in North America for a year or two, use Facebook or Twitter, and are feeling hopeful about your future and proud of your country, then you may call yourself a member of "Generation G."
This is the latest of English nicknames brazenly manufactured by the Korean media in recent years for a specific age group.
According to the Chosun Ilbo, the nation's best-selling newspaper, Generation G refers to some 3 million young Koreans who were born within two years of the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, with G meaning "Global."
This is a loosely bound cohort, who are equipped with comparably better English and computer skills than prior age groups such as the boomers, the Xs and the Ys, and they "are the first generation in Korea with no collective experience of poverty," the paper says. Because they are optimists by nature, "Generation G is Korea's Hope," it said.
Such an assertion may sound naive and sentimental, but it is not entirely groundless. The Olympic Games took place in 1988 and that was when sports nationalism began to transform into national pride, as South Korea began to be acknowledged as a force in international sports.
It was also the year that McDonalds opened its first branch in Seoul, opening the era of globalization. The next year, restriction on international travel was lifted for the first time in history, allowing people to freely travel without prior permission from the authorities.
Western education, or at least an eagerness for it, is another common characteristic of this age group. According to data from Open Doors, South Korea sent 75,605 students to colleges and universities in the United States in 2009. This is not far off India's 103,260 and China's 98,510.
This means that the so-called Generation G was born in a time of national optimism and raised in English-friendly environments. Such optimism, self-confidence, English skills and global mindsets are what are needed in modern-day Korea to grow into a great nation, claims Chosun with its own version of optimism.
The paper also estimates that about a half of Generation G has been abroad either as students or tourists at least once. But what is happening to the other half?
Generation Big Mac
Criticism soon followed that attending a U.S. college and eating McDonalds or drinking Starbucks does not necessarily mean that young minds are being globalized. It is more apt to be called Americanization, antagonists of the Generation G theory say.
Cho Gab-je, a well-known, ultra-conservative columnist, is one of the least impressed. He is more concerned about the lack of common sense and Asian values among young people. A day after the article, Cho cited a recent statistic from the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs that one in five in this age bracket could not answer who started the Korean War.
The answer is North Korea. Some of them even believe it was Japan. And some 70 percent could not write their or their parents' names in Chinese, which would have been very embarrassing for people 10 years senior to them and is also not likely to help them in the coming age of a super China.
"I see hope for some of them, but despair for most of them," he said about the 20-somethings in an online column. "I am also disappointed by the older generation who gave up on proper education for the youngsters."
Others think this buzz about globalization and prosperity is nothing more than fantasy, and the Generation G cannot be a true representation of young Koreans. OhmyNews, a progressive online news site, ran a feature story about many college students working as part-time waiters in five-star hotel banquets. These students are paid 4,500 won ($4) per hour during their winter vacation, and save the money for private English lessons.
The working conditions at the hotels are sometimes harsh and not always hygienic, and they are constantly exposed to verbal abuse from managers.
They do not complain much, but are not happy about the situation either. On the contrary, the youngsters interviewed by Chosun were cheerful by nature. One was a Harvard graduate on a government scholarship who came back to Korea with double degrees in computer science and economics.
The other is a singer in a popular boy dancing group, graduated from a U.S. high school as a member of the National Honor Society, a club for high-achieving pupils - both hardly average Korean students.
The contrast in the Chosun and OhmyNews articles highlights that the disparity between the haves and the have-nots is becoming more apparent even among young people. Last week, the Korea Development Institute (KDI) published a shocking report on the increasing gap among educational spending between rich and poor families.
In 2003, households in the top 20-percent income level spent 5.24 times more money on educating their children than the bottom 20 percent. But in 2009, the ratio expanded to 7.9, and is likely to continue to increase if there is no big change in policies.
As a result, the correlation between the wealth of parents and children is becoming stronger year by year, KDI said. This means that if a father is rich, then his child is likely to be rich as well.
The reports added that over the past 20 years, this correlation in South Korea has almost reached the level of developed nations such as the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany. Globalization is evidently going on in South Korea, but not in the way the term Generation G was supposed to mean.