The Korea Times

What does it mean to have made it?

The question sounds simple, but the answer seems to change depending on where you learned to ask it. For us, the answer was never entirely Korean nor entirely Brazilian. We are both Korean, but we grew up in Brazil. We learned to speak Portuguese, went to international schools, ate Korean food at home and Brazilian food outside it, and learned — sometimes consciously and sometimes not — to move between two very different ways of imagining a successful life. In Korea, there is a familiar guideline to having “made it.” Study hard. Get good grades. Enter a good university. Build a respectable career. Earn enough to buy a good home. Get married. Build a family. Give your children opportunities, perhaps even better ones than you had. Somewhere along the way, become the kind of person whose life can be recognized by others as successful. Not every Korean follows this path, of course. And more and more Koreans are challenging it. But the existence of the path itself is difficult to miss. Education is particularly powerful in this equation. Historically, it has been understood as one of

2d agoBy Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho

Were we too open? What Korea taught us about friendship

Raised by a Korean family in Brazil, we have had our share of surprises and letdowns when visiting Korea. Of course, every society has its own norms, and adjusting to a different way of life is one thing. Building personal relationships, however, means navigating a whole new set of social dynamics and expectations, which we are still learning to do. Recently, we’ve come across several Instagram Reels and YouTube videos discussing the difficulties of building close friendships with Koreans, with many creators saying they only have a small number of close Korean friends. Discussions on Reddit suggest that developing a genuine friendship can take a year or even longer. Across these conversations, one theme comes up repeatedly: Building meaningful relationships takes time, patience and consistency. Living in Korea, we have also come to realize that Korean society is very high-context. There are many unspoken social rules and nuances that Koreans absorb from an early age, often through experience rather than explicit instruction. For us, this realization has been particularly interesting

Sep 3, 2026By Chyung Eun-ju (By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho)

Were we too open? What Korea taught us about friendship

Can better tourist etiquette help address overtourism?

Overtourism is no longer a novelty issue. Ever since the end of the pandemic, global tourism has observed continuous market growth. For Korea, the popularity of local entertainment has been exported beyond the borders, so the news of the Seoul Metropolitan Government launching the Seoul International Tourism Forum, which aims to address policies tailored to restructure Seoul’s tourism landscape, intrigued us to reflect on how Seoul can continue to welcome the world without becoming another cautionary tale of overtourism. It seems like Seoul is shifting its tourism strategy away from simply attracting more visitors and toward preserving the quality of life of those who call Seoul home. It is a conversation that has already unfolded in cities such as Barcelona, Venice and Kyoto, where residents have increasingly voiced concerns about the impact of mass tourism on their neighborhoods. When we think of overtourism, the first image that often comes to mind is one of overcrowded streets, long lines and chaos. Yet, many of the frustrations expressed by local communities are not solely about

Aug 4, 2026By Chyung Eun-ju (By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho)

Can better tourist etiquette help address overtourism?

Who do we cheer for?

“Who are you cheering for?” It is one of the simplest questions in sports and one we are constantly hearing now that the World Cup is underway. At first glance, the answer seems obvious. You cheer for your country. The world of sports, after all, is among the few remaining institutions that require us to declare where our loyalty lies so openly. Flags hang from buildings, national anthems echo before matches, and television broadcasts divide the world into familiar categories of “us” and “them.” In doing so, sporting events transform abstract ideas of identity and belonging into something visible, shared and deeply emotional. During the matches we are keeping up with this World Cup, for 90 minutes, the complexity of modern life gives way to a simple proposition: choose a side. Yet the more we talked about it, the more we realized how difficult that question has become for many people. Defining what “your country” means is no longer a straightforward answer. Perhaps it was easier in another time. Many of our parents and grandparents spent most of their lives close to where th

Jul 8, 2026By Chyung Eun-ju (By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho)

The invisible labor of 3rd-culture belonging

As third-cultured individuals, there is a very particular and peculiar kind of exhaustion we have always felt in our lives that comes from constantly calibrating ourselves to fit other people’s expectations. For us raised between cultures without belonging entirely to either, our identities seem to become less of a stable core and more of a series of carefully managed versions of ourselves, where we are not simply transitioning between languages, but translating personality, humor, emotion, even silence. As Korean-Brazilians, we often grew up feeling too Brazilian for Korea and too Korean for Brazil. Whenever we are in Korea, our Brazilian directness can appear excessive, emotionally loud or insufficiently restrained. In Brazil, our reservation arising from our Korean identities may be interpreted as coldness, distance or social awkwardness. Now, as more experienced and mature adults, we realize that neither perception is entirely wrong, they are both just incomplete. It seems that the difficulty we faced and continue to face as third-culture individuals lies not in cultural differenc

Jun 2, 2026By Chyung Eun-ju (By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho)

Korea is everywhere — but do we understand it?

There was a time when Korea felt like a question mark. Growing up, we remember how often people would ask if we were from North or South Korea, as if the two were interchangeable, or mistake Koreans for something else entirely. In Brazil or the United States, the confusion took different forms, but the underlying feeling was the same: Korea existed somewhere at the edges of global awareness — visible, but not fully seen. Today, that has changed. Korea is everywhere. From the global rise of K-pop to the influence of Korean beauty, the country has moved from the margins to the center of cultural attention. Scroll through social media and you will find endless interpretations of Korean life — foreigners documenting their routines in Seoul, commenting on work culture or decoding social norms. Korea, it seems, has become legible. But being visible is not the same as being understood. Last month, one of us participated in a book club in Brazil where the novel in discussion was “We Do Not Part,” by Korean author Han Kang. This was such an interesting coincidence, as the choice for the b

May 6, 2026By Chyung Eun-ju (By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho)

Exhaustion that sleep can’t fix

We tend to think about burnout as the result of doing too much. But lately, it seems that even doing less doesn’t seem to fix it. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that seems to linger in our lives. It doesn’t lift with sleep or a lighter schedule, or even with time set aside to rest. You can step away from work, cancel plans, stay in for the evening and still feel as though something in your mind hasn’t quite powered down. It’s a quiet, persistent fatigue — and it’s becoming increasingly common. This sense of lingering exhaustion is not just anecdotal. A 2024 report on youth quality of life in Korea found that nearly one in three young people (32.2 percent) has experienced burnout. Notably, the leading cause was not overwork, but uncertainty about the future — an underlying mental strain that does not disappear by simply doing less. For a long time, we’ve framed tiredness as a problem of overload: too many responsibilities, too many expectations, too much pressure to perform. The solution seemed obvious — reduce the load, create balance, rest more. But what if t

Apr 15, 2026By Joel Cho (By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho)

What it means to age in South Korea right now

For a long time, South Korea’s health care system was treated as one of the nation’s quiet successes, something solid enough to fade into the background of everyday life without much to worry about. It was efficient, relatively affordable and reassuringly accessible for most people. You could walk into a clinic, see a doctor and receive treatment the same day. It felt like a system that worked. That sense of quiet confidence made it easy to look away when cracks began to appear in the system. Lately, confidence in the system has begun to erode. Since last year, the country has seen a medical crisis erupt and fill the headlines. Medical school quotas, student boycotts and residents resigning from their posts has made it evident that South Korea’s health care system had taken a hit, with the crisis making its way into the national consciousness. Recent disruptions caused by the mass resignation of medical trainees were often framed as a dispute between doctors and the government. But to see it only as a labor conflict is to miss the deeper story. What we are witnessing is not just a

Feb 9, 2026By Chyung Eun-ju (By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho)

What it means to age in South Korea right now

Stories we no longer ask for

As a new year begins, debates about artificial intelligence (AI) often focus on what machines will replace next. Actors, writers, even creativity itself are framed as being under threat. Yet the rise of AI-made short dramas suggests a different question that may be more urgent, which involves understanding not what AI is taking from us, but what kind of viewers we have already become. In an era where quantity of content seems to prevail over quality, what makes the rise of AI-produced short dramas particularly striking is not the sophistication of the technology itself, but the audience’s reaction — or lack thereof. Stories created with minimal human performance, synthetic expressions and automated production pipelines have entered mainstream platforms with little resistance. This quietness of this transition, whether deliberate or not, suggests that the shift may have less to do with artificial intelligence becoming more convincingly human-like, and more to do with viewers growing accustomed to consuming narratives with less attachment, less engagement and fewer expectations. In r

Dec 25, 2025By Chyung Eun-ju (By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho)

We got AI in education all wrong: Here’s the fix

For decades, Korea’s top universities have relied on a familiar system for judging academic excellence: high-stakes exams, tightly supervised assignments, and essays meant to showcase a student’s individual mastery. Academic integrity, long protected by strict rules and intense competition, was assumed to be easily verifiable. Now, generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can produce research papers, essay answers, and even personalized reflections in seconds — often more polished than a student’s own writing. A first-year student can ask a chatbot to analyze a poem or summarize a week’s lecture and receive a convincing, submission-ready response almost instantly. This raises a fundamental challenge: Why struggle to reason through a concept when AI can deliver a passable answer without understanding? Recent reports show that even Korea’s top universities are struggling to adapt. Students at Seoul National University, Korea University and Yonsei University were found to have used AI tools like ChatGPT to cheat on exams, exposing the limi

Dec 1, 2025By Chyung Eun-ju (By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho)

Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho