Lawmaker anger at Coupang over English at the National Assembly

Coupang’s top executives came under fire last week when they appeared before a National Assembly committee to answer questions about a recent data leak.

The criticism, however, was not so much about the leak itself as about the fact that the company’s leaders do not speak Korean.

Just to recap, in case you’ve been on vacation, a former Coupang employee has allegedly hoovered up the phone numbers and delivery histories of 33.7 million Coupang customers. God knows what they were doing with it. This is bad. At least I think it might be.

But finding out was down in third place on the list of things lawmakers were concerned about. The second was why Coupang’s new CEO Harold Rogers and Brett Matthes, its chief information security officer, were there instead of founding chairman Kim Bom-suk.

“Chairman Kim Bom-suk’s absence is a blatant disregard for the Korean National Assembly,” Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok said after the hearing. He was right. It was a bit of an up-yours, assemblypersons. But to be fair, we are all guilty of a measure of disregard for the National Assembly.

The main thing on lawmakers’ minds, however, was English. Ruling Democratic Party spokesperson Park Chang-jin summed up the bipartisan mood. “Today’s hearing, which consisted of things like ‘I can say hello in Korean’ and ‘I can’t understand what the lawmakers are asking,’ was a calculated farce intended to hide behind the need for interpretation, to buy time and dance around the real issue,” he said.

He then added, “This did nothing to alleviate the anger felt by Koreans.” In case the deeper meaning here escapes you, lawmakers do not hold hearings to get to the bottom of things or to craft regulations to ensure problems don’t happen again. Rather, they are there to assuage the anger of “the people.” That’s why they perform a little — putting on angry faces and shouting.

The trouble is, you feel a bit of a jerk when the person you’re shouting at doesn’t understand Korean.

There was also a practical reason to be upset. Under Assembly rules, lawmakers get only seven minutes to ask their questions. When half that time is eaten up by interpretation, they have to get straight to the point and hope the witness doesn’t waffle for their moment in the limelight to make a difference.

But even this was not the deepest reason for the bipartisan criticism. The real objective was to distract viewers — and voters. But from what?

Think about it. Korea is not some country tucked away in the middle of nowhere. It is a major force in global trade and boasts one of the world’s most admired cultures. Unfortunately, one thing that has never been successfully exported is the language itself. (There is only one other country where it is spoken, and, well, we don’t talk to them). For that reason, Koreans all speak English. Education starts in kindergarten — actually, for some, it starts in the womb — and by the time students graduate from high school, they are often better at English than native speakers.

You can see this from the difficulty level of Korea’s College Scholastic Aptitude Test. There’s a Yonhap video of English journalist Alex Jensen sitting the latest exam and scoring only somewhere in the mid-80 percent range.

Given all this, lawmakers could easily have said, “We will conduct this in Korean for the record, but please feel free, kind sojourners from afar, to respond in English. There is no need to interpret your answers.” That level of dignity would have been commensurate with Korea’s standing in the world from the voters’ point of view.

But they didn’t do that because — and here’s the little secret — they don’t speak English that well. Not even well enough to observe that Rogers spoke with an American accent, while Matthes had an Australian accent. Everyone else watching could see that. Hence, the need to distract us by taking offense on behalf of the people. When cornered, take the exit that makes you look most virtuous.

The exception was Lee of the Reform Party. He speaks English well enough to have said, “G’day, mate” to Matthes. He spotted an immediate opportunity to one-up his colleagues while pretending to be on their side. Frustrated by the delays caused by interpretation, he interrupted and said, “I’ll translate for you.” There’s our next president right there.

Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans.” The views expressed here are his own.