4 - Cultural Adaptation

Summary

NEW IN KOREA? Feeling the strain? You are much better off than we were. At least you can read Dr Crane's Korean Patterns (1967). Beg, borrow or steal it. It tells you how the Korean mind works and the areas in which a foreigner must be particularly careful. Insightfully, Crane begins not with relationships, which would be the obvious place to start, but with kibun. There is no English word for kibun, but when you have been in Korea for a while, you’ll know all about it. Kibun controls everything. With good kibun, you feel good; with bad kibun, you feel bad. By the time you motor through the gradations of good, better and best, not to mention bad, worse and worst, you’ll know a lot about kibun. For one thing, you’ll know that it's not just a matter of your kibun; the other person's kibun is important too. That's lesson number one.

Directions

Kibun controls the show.

Rationalize afterwards, if you must.

Don't shirk the bill, though.

Consequences never go.

And read Yi Munyŏl's Our Twisted Hero. This book gives the psychology of relationships and consequently of power in Korea. Ultimately, it is an allegory on power, said to be like The Lord of the Flies but really very different. It is an allegory about the abuse of power during the era of the generals in the ‘80s, but the way relationships work here shows how they have worked throughout history at all levels of Korean society, from government to hospitals and schools, from crooks to bishops.

Ŏm Sŏkdae, monitor of the sixth grade in an elementary school, rules his class with an iron fist. A sinister, shadowy figure, he terrorizes his classmates into abject submission, reducing them to cringing, fawning pawns. He beats them, takes their money, uses them to cheat on exams, collects ‘dues’, sells preferment and in general insists on being treated as a king. The story is told from the point of view of a transfer student from Seoul who challenges Sŏkdae's dictatorship.