In The Communist Postscript (2010), Boris Groys writes:
Modem capitalist society is defined by the fact that the things in it are as they are because there is not enough money to fashion them differently. And indeed, if today one visits the home of an acquaintance, or a school, a church, or a bar, and asks why it is that what one sees is the way it is and not otherwise, one invariably receives the answer that it has long been planned to arrange things completely differently … but that unfortunately the money for this is still lacking.
I thought of this the other day while reading in the Korea Times that despite the Hallyu wave, Korean studies is still an “underdog and straggler” on the academic front. According to Professor Ross King at the University of British Columbia,
“The Korean government and companies should make long-term investments in the infrastructure for Korean studies…. We need more endowed teaching positions, scholarships and bursaries for students and programs.”
Whereas I believe that Korean studies (like most fields) is big enough already, and should think more about consolidation than expansion. If it must keep up with the Joneses, it should first close the gap in academic standards that became so apparent — speaking of endowed teaching positions — during the Armstrong affair. I’m not implying that Prof. King cares less about standards than I do, only that he seems more optimistic about the prospect of simultaneously increasing size and quality. But I agree with him when he says:
“A lot of people seem to believe that foreigners will happily pay their own money to learn about Korea because they enjoy its cultural content, but this is not true, especially for those hailing from the countries that have a higher gross national product (GNP) than Korea.”
Many a university here has learned this the hard way. I assume that a higher proportion of Westerners are willing to pay their own money to learn about China or Japan, because such a degree promises enhanced access to a much bigger economy, therefore better job prospects. I doubt if Hallyu fandom and demand for Korea-related courses are even a reliable indicator of an all-surpassing interest in this country. One can be crazy about BTS, and even crazier about Japanese anime.
The question is whether the measures Prof. King proposes will help incentivize young Westerners to pursue a Korean studies degree. Although not in a Korean studies department I have some relevant experience. About a third of my students are from foreign countries. Some stay in Korea for one semester, some for four years, and some settle down here, usually in an enclave of their countryfolk. Most seem to lose interest in studying the host language and culture within a year or two.
Funding is not a factor. Virtually all of my foreign students get at least half their tuition paid for; some are on full scholarships. They tend to become disaffected with the study of Korea because they become disaffected with Korea itself, and its perceived nationalism or xenophobia in particular. To give just one anecdote: recently some of my best foreign students, including one in an advanced stage of pregnancy, were asked to leave a coffee shop lest their alienness unsettle local patrons worried about COVID.
I must emphasize that my Korean students, the women in particular, tend to return from exchange semesters in Western countries with at least one story worse than that. Worse as in frightening.
The difference is that foreigners here tend to treat such occasional incidents (as the Korean kid in Finland, say, does not) as reflections of a generally unwelcoming or hostile culture. One reason they do so — and wrongly, in my opinion — is because the very interlocutors to whom they turn for reassurance and insight often espouse ethnocentric views. For example, many language instructors still teach that the Sino-Korean word jeong refers to a distinctly Korean sort of altruistic loving kindness, or to a loving kindness Koreans possess in unique abundance.
I remember this myth encountering the raucous skepticism of my zainichi Korean classmates at Yonsei’s language institute in 1986. German friends at the Ruhr Uni were equally critical of the notion of a special ethnic bitterness or han when it was asserted by Korean exchange students, along with claims to a racial homogeneity stretching back five thousand years. Minoring in Koreanistik for the easy credits, those grim, thirtyish exiles from the protest movement comprised half the students in some of our classes. Of the very small number of young Germans who bothered to dip a toe in the field, about half seemed to end up down the hall in Sinology or Japanese studies.
Was it just a coincidence that Hallyu began to take off circa 1999 (with the movie Shiri) only a year or so after the campus protest movement breathed its last, and Korean youth culture stopped being presented overseas as a matter of faux-proletarian woodcuts, shamanist rites for dead martyrs, and sloganizing poetry? The unfortunate result, however, is that foreigners now arrive with much higher expectations than I did. The more intense the newcomer’s K-fandom, I find, the greater the disillusionment with Korea after a few months.
Many other countries disillusion foreigners in similar ways, yet the fields devoted to studying them thrive. I think this is partly because they maintain enough critical distance to the relevant culture, as Korean studies has never done. In the introduction to my first book (1994), which I must quote from memory, not having it at hand, I complained about the prevalence of an “advocatorial tendency, usually expressed in terms of a desire to help Korean culture get the attention it deserves.” One reason I focused on North Korean literature was because it promised an escape from the pressure to over-praise that I saw reflected in papers on South Korean fiction.
Not that the North Korea discussion has been free of the apologetics and ethno-mysticism pervading the field as a whole.
The term [Juche] is really untranslatable; the closer one gets to its meaning, the more the meaning slips away. For the foreigner its meaning recedes into a pool of everything that makes Koreans Korean, and therefore it is ultimately inaccessible to the non-Korean. (Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 2005, p. 414.)
I doubt if that sort of thing (mutatis mutandis) has passed inspection in the American reaches of Chinese or Japanese studies since about 1960, but the book from which it’s taken remains on KS reading lists. It’s hardly the only one in the field’s canon drenched in “revisionism,” meaning Korean nationalism. What other post-colonial state do Western historians take to task for not “purging” itself of colonial “collaborators”? (But note that it’s often a white man’s Korean nationalism; the above declaration of reverent helplessness in the face of a perfectly straightforward word, one imported from the Japanese no less, would baffle most South Koreans.)
Before anyone tries telling me how much things have changed in recent years, this is from the Korea Times article quoted above:
“Interest in Korean popular culture is also generating an interest in ‘high culture’ ― from Korean language to gestures to semiotics to culture customs,” Jieun Kiaer, a professor of Korean linguistics at the University of Oxford, told The Korea Times. “Even ‘Korean common sense’ in the form of concepts like ‘nunchi’ ― which can be compared to emotional intelligence in the West ― is a hot talking point across the globe.”
Just as han must be dissociatively presented as Korean bitterness, and jeong as Korean kindness, nunchi can only be Korean common sense, as opposed to a wonderful word for an intuitive skill common to all socialized humans. I realize that some members of the Korean diaspora have been trying to make this a “thing,” just as some like to tout the unique profundity of a Korean mother’s love, but must Korean studies join in? Would any Germanist define Gemütlichkeit as German conviviality?
Far more visitors find Koreans conspicuously lacking in sensitivity to each other’s unverbalized feelings than find them abounding in it. Take for example the custom of pointing out to a young woman in mixed company the pimple she has piled concealer on; or of cheerfully interrogating an older, obviously crestfallen woman as to why she doesn’t have kids. But the diaspora is well known for preserving the guk-ppong myths that they or their parents emigrated with.
Meanwhile most of the homeland has moved on. My foreign students’ unpleasant experiences here (like my own) usually involve Koreans of a certain age. After the Seoul Olympics in 1988 children stopped getting that frog-in-the-well stuff dinned into them. I just asked a young acquaintance over Katalk (not in a leading way) if she considers nunchi a Korean thing. Her surprised response: Who says it is? She’d always assumed there was an English word for it. People planning to marry foreigners no longer have to hear warnings, as my wife did in 1987, that most international marriages end in divorce, a fake fact chalked up to the Other’s lack of that “Korean common sense.”
So I’m afraid visitors who still want to hear an old-school ethnocentric fuss made about han, jeong, nunchi, etc, will have to buttonhole someone over 50 — or fly home and take Korean studies. But how many want to hear it? If the field’s popularity isn’t growing in proportion to the popular culture’s, it’s in large part because the one thing seems so much more inclusive than the other.
