The Birth of Korean Cool

ALSO BY EUNY HONG

Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © 2014 by Euny Hong

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.

The right of Euny Hong to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-47113-104-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-47113-105-9

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The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given.
Corrections may be made to future printings.

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

To my childhood nanny, Mrs. Terebush, who gave me a love of reading,
without which I could not have become a writer.

“Korea” refers to South Korea, unless otherwise specified. Names of Korean individuals will appear using the Korean convention, last name followed by given name,
unless the person has opted to use the Western name convention.

Introduction

1 Before Cool

2 The Birth of Irony

3 The Dying Art of School Thrashings

4 Character Is Destiny: The Wrath of Han

5 Kimchi and the Cabbage Inferiority Complex

6 Why Pop Culture? Or, Failure Is the Breakfast of Champions

7 When Korea Banned Rock ’n’ Roll

8 The Lean, Mean, Star-Making K-Pop Machine

9 Northern Girls, Southern Boys

10 K-Drama: Television and the Origins of Hallyu

11 K-Cinema: The Journey from Crap to Cannes

12 Hallyu: The Shot Heard Round the World

13 Korea’s Secret Weapon: Video Games

14 Samsung: The Company Formerly Known as Samsuck

15 The Ministry of Future Creation

Notes

Acknowledgments

Character is destiny.

Heraclitus (c. 535–c. 475
BC
)

KOREA WAS NOT COOL IN 1985.

That was the year that my parents decided, after spending nearly twenty years in the United States, to move back to Seoul, South Korea—specifically, to Gangnam, the wealthy neighborhood
whose famed “style” was to be the subject of rapper Psy’s song.

I was twelve years old; my sisters were nine and seven, respectively. At the time, I strongly favored the move. My early childhood in the Chicago suburb where we lived was full of corn, beef,
milk, hay fever, and racists. It’s implausible, but sadly true, that eight-year-old boys would call me “Jap,” as if they were Marines during World War II checking trees for
snipers. I would just put up with it; why explain that I was actually Korean, when in those days Korea was still linked to an unpopular war in which many American soldiers were killed? Whenever
kids asked me, “Are you Chinese?”—which was often—I would invariably respond yes. My mother heard me doing this once and gave me hell for it. “Why didn’t you say
you were Korean?” she asked. I was not doing that again, not after an incident in first grade in which a boy told me: “You’re lying. There is no such place.” I remember
briefly wondering whether my parents had been bullshitting me about where they came from.

I was eager to leave this life and embrace the new one: Korea was my Zion. I had read too many British novels about wretched children finding out they were actually of noble birth and I was
expecting to be salaamed upon arriving at the Seoul airport.

Now, yes, South Korea is rich and increasingly futuristic. It’s easy to forget that in 1965, South Korea’s per capita GDP was less than that of Ghana, and even less than that of
North Korea. As recently as the 1970s, North and South Korea’s GDP were neck and neck.

Today, South Korea is the world’s fifteenth largest economy and Seoul resembles the type of space-age city that Arthur C. Clarke imagined in his novel
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Plans
are underway to construct an “invisible” skyscraper near Seoul—one that will use cameras and LEDs to create the illusion from a distance that the building is not there. Every
single subway car has two wi-fi hotspots so that people can watch their morning TV shows on their Samsung Galaxy phones—benefiting from a superfast Internet connection that never gets
interrupted even when the subway is going through tunnels or below water. Korea is widely considered one of the greatest economic miracles of the modern day.

What most of the world doesn’t know—or has forgotten—is the painful period between poverty and wealth. Within a matter of decades, South Korea went through changes that most
wealthy nations took hundreds of years to achieve: social changes as radical as those brought about by the French Revolution and economic changes as radical as those brought on by the Industrial
Revolution.

Bridges, skyscrapers, and highways appeared seemingly out of nowhere; it was almost like watching a time-lapse video. Meanwhile, everyone was clamoring for their rights: women, students, the
newly rich, the old aristocracy, laborers, white-collar workers. It was a cacophonous and chaotic time to live in Seoul, but it was also an amazing time. Few people can boast, as I can, that they
saw Rome being built in a day.

Other countries have gone from rags to riches in the last century, but among these, only South Korea has the cheek to set its sights on becoming the world’s top exporter
of popular culture.

South Korean soap operas, music, movies, video games, and junk food already dominate the Asian cultural scene. In fact, South Korea has been the tastemaker of Asia for over a decade, and its
westward expansion is inevitable. You may not even realize that it is already underway.

You may have an iPhone, for example, but its microchips are made by Apple’s biggest competitor—the Korean electronics company Samsung.

The Korean wave of popular culture is called “Hallyu.” You should learn the word, since you’ll be seeing a lot of it. U.S. President Barack Obama referred to it during a March
2012 visit to South Korea, in the context of discussing the nation’s technical and pop culture innovations. He said: “It’s no wonder so many people around the world have caught
the Korean Wave—Hallyu.”

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Hallyu is the world’s biggest, fastest cultural paradigm shift in modern history.

How did Korea sneak up from behind?

Well, in 1994, when the United States and the United Kingdom were kicking and screaming in protest against converting from analog to digital TV—some people even arguing that “this
fascist government can’t force me to buy a new TV”—Korea was busy wiring the entire country for Internet broadband with government funds, just like building a national highway or
railway system. This new mode of transport would be everything that Korea wasn’t: uninhibited, multilingual, indifferent to class and hierarchy, not boxed in by ocean on three sides and an
aggressive totalitarian state on the fourth side, and ready to risk being barraged by uncensored and possibly seditious material. Openness was not an inherently Korean trait: nineteenth-century
explorers from the West dubbed it the Hermit Kingdom. But what enticed the nation was not so much the virtual cargo that these new channels would bring in; it was what Korea was planning to send
out to the world that really mattered.

Did South Koreans know that “Gangnam Style” would be the song that put K-pop on the map? Of course not. But they knew it would happen eventually. They had been setting up the
mechanism for pop culture domination since the dawn of the World Wide Web in the 1990s.

One might well ask, why focus on pop culture when this area has been the near-exclusive domain of the United States for a century? Because South Korea is developing its soft power.

“Soft power,” a term coined in 1990 by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, is the intangible power a country wields through its image rather than through force. Hard power is
military might or economic coercion. Soft power, on the other hand, is how the United States got the world to buy its Marlboro Reds and Levi’s jeans: by peddling a desirable image. By
peddling cool.

It wasn’t the United States’ tank technology or its impressive show of muscle in invading Grenada that made the kids in communist Yugo slavia want to pay two months’ wages for
black market Levi’s 501 jeans. It was James Dean.

Now, Korea wants to have this kind of cultural cachet—even in the West—but it’s not relying on “Gangnam Style” and K-pop. I don’t think that Koreans, if
they’re being honest with themselves, believe their music will take up significant market share in the United States or western Europe. Instead, it’s about getting the crucial but still
dormant third-world market hooked on Korean pop culture—eastern Europe, the Arab nations, and soon, Africa. The addiction has already begun; in Iran, the Korean historical costume drama
The Jewel in the Palace
is so popular that Iranians have reportedly begun organizing their mealtimes so as not to interfere with the show’s broadcast time.

Right now, the third-world countries are too poor for most western nations to care about. This is where Korea has a peculiar, unreproducible advantage over every single other nation that has
been a global pop culture power: it was once a third-world country. Thus Korea understands the stages of other nations’ development; it has carefully studied these cultures to determine what
kinds of “K-culture” products would be most favored there. And Korean economists are hard at work gauging the rate at which these nations will become wealthier and have more purchasing
power. You can bet that once the citizens of these countries are able to afford to buy mobile phones and washing machines, they’ll buy Korean brands. Why? They’re already hooked on
Korea the Brand.

If this sounds like a national campaign, that’s because it is. The South Korean government has made the Korean Wave the nation’s number one priority.

Korea has multiple five-year plans, the likes of which most democratic and capitalist countries have never seen. The government felt that spreading Korean culture worldwide was dependent on
Internet ubiquity, so they subsidized Internet access for the poor, the elderly, and the disabled. Currently, the government is wiring every single household with a 1 gigabit-per-second
connection—which would make it two hundred times faster than the average Internet connection in the United States. South Korea learned from having to rebuild its country after the Korean War
(1950–1953) that if you’re going to make change, the change has to be drastic, it has to be fast, and it has to be for everyone. E-mail is useless if only a few people have it.