The Birth of Korean Cool (17 page)

The ministry also replaced outdated terms with more politically correct ones. Significantly, North Koreans who have escaped to South Korea are no longer to be called “defectors”;
instead, they are “North Korean émigrés.” All of these changes reflect the rapidly evolving attitudes of South Koreans toward North Koreans. The new motto seems to be,
hate the regime but not its people.

I have to say, though, that just like corporal punishment and stool samples, growing up with the fear of invasion is something that forever sets you apart from other people. For me, at least,
the fact that the North Korean threat was very real made it fun to me, a sheltered American kid who had previously never got to do anything more exciting at school than a tornado drill.

Periodically, North Korean aircraft would airdrop little packs of chewing gum or candy over Seoul; these were wrapped in notes containing North Korean propaganda. The school told us that if we
were ever to find such an object, we were to turn it in to the principal immediately and absolutely not read or open it. I am devastated to report that I never found one.

WHEN I LIVED IN KOREA, THE ONLY ENGLISH-
language television channel at the time was the American Forces Korea Network.
¹
I watched a lot of ancient American reruns on AFKN, including the 1960s sitcom
Gidget
, in which Sally Field played a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old California teen.

I was dumbfounded by the banality of the scrapes Gidget would get herself into week after week, like losing her surfboard and having to get a new one, or having to go on two different dates on
the same night. It was an utterly alien world to me. When did she study for exams? Why did her father let her wear a bikini? And why was 1960s Californian civilization light-years ahead of 1980s
Korea?

Shows like
Gidget
highlighted one of the main differences between American society and Korean society during the time that I lived there: teenage dating culture. Today, dating among
pre-university kids is much more common in Korea, but when I was in school, I didn’t know anyone who was given official permission by their parents to have a boyfriend or girlfriend. If you
wanted to date you had to do it on the sly, and for most of us it was really just too much trouble. Consequently, Koreans would begin college with no notion of how to do something as basic as
asking someone out to dinner, let alone arranging an assignation of any kind. In my neighborhood, Apgujeong, a boy who liked a girl would signal this by giving her an orange—at the time, an
expensive fruit in Korea. Hence the nickname the media assigned to Gangnam kids from my generation: the “Orange Clan.”

Kids who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s were part of a hilariously awkward generation that was transitioning between marriages arranged by matchmakers and the western notion of dating that
is commonplace in Korea today. They had no idea how to meet people of the opposite sex, so they sought mates the only way they knew how—via ridiculously contrived and elaborate meetups called
sogae-ting
.
Sogae
is the Korean word for “introduction”;
ting
is not Korean at all—it is actually pseudo-English. Koreans seemed to think that
ting
was a proper abbreviation for the English word “dating.” I’m not kidding. Ergo, every dating-related activity had the suffix
-ting
at the end of it.

There were many variations on
sogae-ting
, some of which resembled live-action role-playing games. One popular one was called
elevator-ting
, which required monopolizing the
elevator of a random high-rise commercial building. Groups of girls would stand on different floors of the building, in front of the elevator banks. Boys would be inside the elevator, riding up and
down and stopping at each floor. If, when the elevator doors opened, you liked the look of a girl, you’d get off on that floor and start talking to her. It was so ridiculous that it could
never be construed as threatening or predatory, and that was the whole point. For the people who worked in the building, it was pretty annoying to have an entire elevator go out of commission for
half a day.

Another popular form of
sogae-ting
was called
007-ting
, as in James Bond 007, so-called because it required a little sleuthing and stealth. For example, a girl might be given
the following instructions: “Go to the KFC in Gangnam and find the boy who is talking to the statue of Colonel Sanders.” If you didn’t fancy the boy talking to the Colonel, you
could discreetly disappear without embarrassing him face-to-face.

These kinds of antics, I am told, have gone by the wayside: nowadays, if a boy fancies a girl, he asks her out on a date like a normal human being. But in that repressed period of psychotically
complicated dating rituals, it’s not hard to understand why I loved shows like
Gidget
, as well as more contemporary shows featuring American teen life, such as
Charles in
Charge
and
The Cosby Show
. I began to worship the United States, the country of my birth, which I had previously deemed uninhabitably hostile and racist.

AFKN didn’t air regular commercials to hock dishwashing liquid or Barbies; instead, they ran military-oriented ads with service messages like “Don’t resell items from the
Commissary on the local black market,” “Don’t mail explosives,” and a lot of ads about OPSEC—operation security, for which the slogan was “Loose lips sink
ships.” Because most of my television viewing was on this U.S. military network, I grew up believing that Korea was very much dependent on this superpower for our every need—safety and
good television.

Today, Seoul has a bright self-assuredness and self-love. An advertisement from any company worth its salt features Korean models and celebrities. When I lived in Seoul, however, cosmetic and
clothing companies preferred Caucasian models with such pitiful desperation that they recruited western students I knew from the international school, many of them unattractive.

The Eighth U.S. Army base in the Yongsan district of Seoul was like a glistening city on a hill. It occupied prime Seoul real estate, and while the rest of Seoul was jam-packed with skyscrapers
and traffic with barely an inch of free space, Yongsan had an eighteen-hole golf course, the only Burger King in Seoul with its own parking lot, and housing with real backyards. The commissary and
PX were the only places in Seoul where you could get cheese, turkey, and underarm deodorant. All these items and more made their way to the black markets, where ordinary Koreans could buy them at
three times the price. It was highly illegal, and these black markets were constantly shutting down, moving, and reopening.

The neighborhood surrounding the military base was a microeconomy that slavishly served GIs, and was a den of hawkers shouting in bad English to draw shoppers in to buy counterfeit Polo
shirts—one fellow of local legend always yelled, “Everything is free!” At night, the streets were infested with hideous hookers with giant bad perms and ghoulish face powder.

In recent years the U.S. military base has reduced its presence in Korea, citing bud get cuts and probably shifting priorities to the “war on terror; only twenty-five thousand troops are
stationed there now, about half as many as during the cold war. The United States is turning over the Yongsan base in Seoul to the Korean government, which is transforming the space into a series
of large public parks. As a result of this transformation, the surrounding areas no longer look like a sad scene from
Full Metal Jacket
or some other American film about wartime Vietnam,
with shifty locals sycophantically catering to soldiers’ pleasures.

But in the 1980s, Koreans worshiped, feared, and resented the United States. Korean university students staged violent protests—including an absurd number of self-immolations—against
the U.S. military presence. The protests were focused on ousting President Chun Doo-hwan, who served from 1980 to 1988; but since he was thought by some to be a lackey of the United States,
anti-Americanism was always stated or implied.

Of course, in between shouting “Down with the Yanks,” many of those very students were applying to graduate schools in the evil imperialist United States. As ultimate proof that
Koreans couldn’t possibly hate the United States as much as they sometimes claimed, Korean television networks aired a fair number of American programs dubbed into Korean, and audiences
gobbled them up.

My classmates loved shows with heroic, macho leads like the
A-Team
and
Airwolf.
For grown-ups, there were old Hollywood films and modern adaptations of Sidney Sheldon novels.
The United States looked so appealing in those shows, and Koreans watched them with envy and aspiration.

Cultural critic Lee Moon-won claims that Koreans’ attachment to U.S. shows up until the 1980s had little genuine affection behind it; rather, he says, it was a form of political
conditioning. “In the old days, we didn’t watch American dramas because we loved the shows. During the cold war, America was the leader of the free world, so everyone worshiped America,
and U.S. culture spread everywhere.”

But the Korean preference for American dramas wasn’t just about politics. Let’s be honest: until the 1990s, Korean dramas were provincial and tedious. Production values were really
poor and the plots focused on minute domestic issues. All dramas used to be produced in-house at the television networks by stables of writers and producers who were either not trying very hard or
suffering from creative fatigue. Apparently, the government shared my sentiments.

In typical fashion, Korea’s politicians and lawmakers took abrupt and drastic action to improve K-drama quality. The Investment Broadcasting Law, enacted in 1990, required Korean
terrestrial (nonsatellite) networks to purchase a certain percentage of their programs from independent production companies (initially 2 percent; this grew to 20 percent over the
years).
²

Just as the American television scene was permanently transformed at the turn of the millennium by risk-taking private networks like HBO—resulting in shows like
The Sopranos
,
which raised the standard for all American TV—so did the inclusion of obscure self-employed writers and producers, who breathed new life into K-dramas in the 1990s. Breaking from the formula
of relatively buttoned-down American dramas, K-dramas unleashed their inner
han
in an abundance of screaming, crying, eye-clawing, on-screen physical violence and unfettered emotion.

THE DIPLOMATIC POUCH

Hallyu was born, some say, in a diplomatic pouch that was shuttled between Seoul and Hong Kong in 1992. And the contents of the pouch? No, not a secret microfilm, but a
Beta-max tape of a Korean television drama called
What Is Love.
Obviously. What else would two Korean civil servants be sending to each other using surreptitious means?

The sender of the Betamax was Chung Injoon, a career civil servant and cultural attaché who now serves as visiting fellow at the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute (KCTI is a government
organization); the recipient was the Korean consulate in Hong Kong.

Their mission: to get this show on Hong Kong television by any means necessary. In so doing, Chung told me, “I witnessed the first signs of the Korean Wave.” Not only witnessed it,
but set it in motion. At the time, he was the director of the overseas division of the KCTI, which in those days was called the Korean Overseas Information Service. Chung had to use a diplomatic
pouch because of protocols that made it a logistical nightmare to ship broadcast-quality videos between borders. “We thought, maybe it will be opened, maybe it won’t,” he
recalled. If the parcel had been intercepted, it would have been confiscated. And that might have changed the course of Hallyu history.

What Is Love
, which tells the story of two middle-class, middle-aged house wives who’ve been friends since high school, enjoyed a 50 percent audience share for its time slot in
Korea (personal note: I think it’s boring). Chung and his partners in crime at the Korean consulate realized that by airing the show on a single network—Hong Kong’s ATV—it
could reach not just Hong Kong but also neighboring Guangdong Province in mainland China, for a combined potential audience of 50 million in a densely populated, highly compact area.

In those days, there was no demand for Korean television shows, not even in Asia. It was going to be an uphill battle to convince a Hong Kong station to pick up the show. In order to ensure the
network would not have an excuse to say no, Chung and the consulate’s office convinced Korean companies in Hong Kong to buy ad time during the shows and used Korean government funds to dub it
into Cantonese, at no small expense.

Their efforts paid off: ATV started airing the show. It became so popular in the region that during the time slots that it aired on Thursday and Saturday evening, “there were no people or
cars on the street,” according to Chung; everyone was at home watching the show.

Furthermore, the series caused a cultural ripple in Hong Kong society, said Chung, introducing Korean Confucian concepts of spousal roles. “In those days in Hong Kong, the husband cooked
dinner after work. But the show sabotaged this, displaying the father as a superpower. When they watched the show, they saw the wife cooking, which caused kind of a syndrome.”

I’m not at all sure that this was the kind of cultural transmission Koreans had in mind, but regardless, the seeds of an addiction were planted. The show got picked up by mainland
China’s CCTV. A slew of other Korean dramas followed; their popularity spread throughout Asia—Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

In the Philippines over the last fifteen years, Koreanovelas have replaced South American telenovelas in popularity, spawning the Philippines’ own soap opera industry. Not only are the
K-dramas inherently popular, they have also inspired about a dozen Filipino remakes with local casts and in Tagalog.