The Birth of Korean Cool (25 page)

AFTER BRINGING THE COUNTRY TO THE FOREFRONT
of cutting-edge technology and popular culture, the Korean government is now taking definite and expensive
steps to ensure that the twenty-first century becomes known as Korea’s Century.

Immediately after President Park Geun-hye took office in February 2013, she established a brand-new ministry, initially called the Ministry of Future Creation and Science. As a friend of mine
joked, “It sounds like a ministry that will be created in the future. So they can’t ever actually create it.”

The name leaves so much to the imagination—some critics say, far too much. Each question leads to more questions. What will the Ministry of Future Creation and Science be doing? The
mission statement on its official website says, “Science & technology and ICT [are] the key to the creative economy and greater happiness of the public.” ICT is a jargony acronym
for information and communication technology.

The sentence requires much unpacking. What exactly is a “creative economy”? It’s the official catchphrase of Park’s government, and the new ministry’s site defines
it as follows:

In plain language, the government is funding the human imagination. Sounds good, but it’s still not very clear.

As one skeptic told me, “President Park is under no obligation to explain. It’s the future, so it’s intangible. If she could explain it, then it wouldn’t be intangible
anymore. It’s like Edison’s lab. They don’t know what they’re looking for.”

In a move that clarified nothing, Korea changed the official English name of the ministry in March 2013 to the less cool-sounding Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning. Critics were
merciless. The op-ed in the April 3, 2013, English-language edition of the
Korea Times
, said, “Ministry of ICT: Give Pay Cut to Who Named It!”
¹

What is the Park government trying to accomplish with this new ministry?

The website outlines the ministry’s five main strategies, including “making software and content industries [pop culture products] the core of the Korean economy”—in
other words, bringing IT and Hallyu exports to the next level.

Another strategy is “establishing a creative economy ecosystem.” The word “ecosystem” sounds natural and organic, but in human activities, ecosystems never arise by
themselves. This ministry with the long name is clearly a Korean-style ministry, meaning that it has to exercise some muscle to put the elements of the ecosystem in motion.

Reading between the lines (and based on the government’s previously stated agenda), it’s clear that the ministry intends to marshal private enterprise to achieve the goals of
“greater happiness of the public.” The government nudging private industry to cooperate with national goals is a familiar theme, but this time there is a radical new twist: the ministry
wants the big companies to help encourage small and medium-sized businesses to succeed. Now, why would any big company want to help its potential competitors, and what sort of government would have
the audacity to ask such a favor? Well, if history is any guide, the government may actually force big companies to cooperate either by mandate or by making them an offer they can’t
refuse—namely, by making it too costly and distressing for big companies
not
to play along.

The country expects no less, and that would have been true regardless of who took office in February 2013. Park faces the thankless, high-pressure task of turning the nation into a combination
of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Industrial Light & Magic—only better, faster, and more advanced.

For the first time in Korea history—perhaps in any nation’s history—the Korean government is putting huge financial and political resources behind something as intangible as
“discovery.” No guidelines, no maps; just money and faith.

Building a creative economy is not going to be easy. This was not like that time in the 1990s when the Korean government launched an awareness campaign to get people to start standing on the
right, walking on the left on the subway escalators. Turning Korea on its head is going to take more convincing than a few weird posters and TV ads asking people to be orderly.

Onerously, Korea still has not managed to wean itself off its reliance on the chaebols—the mega conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai. True, these companies have clothed and fed the
nation since the 1960s, but they are far too powerful, now more than ever: in 2012, the top ten companies in Korea generated over 75 percent of the nation’s GDP.
²
If one of these companies fails, the whole nation will fail.

Park’s radical break from Korea’s past takes on a personal dimension for her. In order for her to fulfill her campaign promises, she has to dismantle the life’s work of her own
father, President Park Chung-hee, who ruled with an iron fist from 1962 to his assassination in 1979. (His wife, the first lady, was assassinated in 1974, in what was assumed to be a botched
attempt on the president.) It was Park Chung-hee who marshaled the government’s resources to build the chaebol economy, which increased Korea’s per capita by about 1700 percent during
his term. Regardless of the bona fides that suffering the assassination of both parents might bestow upon her, President Park Geun-hye is an untested politician and her opponents are all too happy
to rub it in.

She faced an immediate crisis and PR fiasco in her first few months in office, when her first selection to lead her new ministry was rejected by the government. In February 2013, Park tapped
Korean American businessman Jeong H. Kim for the job. Kim seemed to embody the spirit of the ministry: he was president of Bell Labs. He was a wunderkind entrepreneur. He was completely bilingual
in Korean and English. It would have been hard to imagine a better appointee. And yet he pulled out of the running just three weeks after his nomination, when it became clear that the Korean
parliament was going to block his appointment. Some members objected that he had been a paid adviser to the CIA in his capacity as engineer.

In a withering op-ed in the March 29, 2013, edition of
The Washington Post
entitled “A Return to South Korea, Thwarted by Nationalism,” Kim slammed his critics: “I was
slandered. Some, for example, theorized that I was a spy. Family was considered fair game: My wife was accused of being associated with a brothel.”
³

The subtext of this op-ed is clear to many Koreans: Kim fell victim to the persistent mistrust that many old-fashioned Koreans have for diasporic Koreans—especially Korean Americans. Kim
knows it, the Korean media knows it, and Korean Americans know it. It’s unfortunate and continually surprising. On the one hand, Korea has become quite a welcoming place for foreigners; many
westerners visiting Korea share glowing reports about Korean hospitality and how modern the country seems. On the other hand, Koreans raised abroad have a very hard time smoothly transitioning into
Korean society. I am no exception.

I was twelve when my family moved to Korea. I didn’t speak more than a few words of Korean because there was a prevailing belief among many immigrants of all national origins that raising
children bilingually was psychologically and intellectually damaging: children exposed to multiple languages would feel torn between two or more cultures and have developmental language delays, or
so the theory went. That idea has long fallen out of fashion. But in my case, it meant that I spent my first year in Korea looking like a complete idiot, with a very thick American accent that I
never managed to shed.

I was teased constantly by children calling me “Yankee,” which was slightly amusing, and mimicking my Korean, which was less amusing. I  wouldn’t say that the kids were
openly cruel, but I have never felt more culturally segregated before or since. Mostly, they just looked at me with incomprehension. For a child, that feeling of being dumb and mute is utterly
alienating. Language aside, I was simply a misfit. My facial expressions and mannerisms were all wrong; I made intent, direct eye contact with my betters when I should have been sheepishly looking
down at my shoes.

When I insisted on transferring to an international high school in the ninth grade so I could prepare to go to a university in the United States, this unleashed a full year of tears and
incessant arguments in my family. By all means, go to the United States for graduate school, my parents said; but if you go abroad for undergrad, you can never, ever live in Korea again. It was not
an idle threat. Going to an American university would diminish my chances of getting the plum jobs in Korea, possibly impede my entering into a good marriage, and subject me to the pity and
condescension of my fellow Koreans. Now, attitudes toward Korean Americans have become more enlightened, which is to say, we are now recognized as a demographic category instead of just a bunch of
pathetic souls whose parents had the bad judgment to uproot us. But when I was in school, my desire not to go to a Korean university was viewed as a cowardly and sly attempt to bypass the
hellacious Korean university entrance exam.

People like Jeong Kim and me are not without our sympathizers in Korea. President Park certainly championed Kim. On March 4, following Kim’s resignation, Park delivered an abject
Korean-style apology, meaning that it was no apology at all but rather a thinly veiled, biting condemnation of the members of her government who were standing between her and her potential
staff.

Kim’s tarring and feathering was a public challenge to Park’s authority, and it was the last thing her new ministry needed. She needed allies—and a distraction. Fortunately for
her, she had both in the form of Psy. He didn’t expressly support her (or any) campaign, but she certainly supported his. They say politics make strange bedfellows, and these two are the
strangest.

I would never go so far as to suggest that Park won the presidency because of Psy, but he certainly didn’t hurt. In the wake of his success, Park’s dream of a creative economy
didn’t seem so quixotic after all.

On April 13, 2013, two months after Park took office, Psy debuted his song and video “Gentleman” in a live concert. There he performed what he calls his “arrogant
dance”—swaying his hips from side to side while holding his chin in one hand. He borrowed this set of gestures from another K-pop group, Brown Eyed Girls. But he did it all legally, by
paying the choreographers for the right to use it.

On that same day, President Park held a meeting at the presidential Blue House to discuss her brand-new, rechristened Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning. During an official speech at
this meeting, she praised Psy’s video, exulting, “We are living in an environment in which someone might think they could get away with tweaking the dance moves a little and then not
paying royalties to the original choreographer. But [Psy] is an exemplary case of acknowledging creative rights in the content and software arena.”

Congratulating someone for not committing dance piracy may sound like damning with faint praise. But Park’s praise was highly strategic. She realized that Psy’s success hammered home
the theme of her presidency: he put the “creative” into “creative economy.” Furthermore, she wasn’t just paying lip service with all that talk about the importance of
copyright. For decades, Korea has had a very serious piracy and counterfeiting problem—from illegal song downloads to fake Louis Vuitton bags—which is a serious challenge when it comes
to encouraging innovation.

But Park’s detractors continued to be unforgiving. The Korean press was riddled with rumors that some of the civil servants appointed to the new ministry were lollygagging, waiting for
clear instructions. On May 7, 2013, an article that ran in the website of the publication
Korea IT Times
bore the mocking title, “Future Ministry Public Officials Waiting to Be
Assigned Have No Future.”
⁴

Still, all signs indicate Korea has a fair shot at achieving a more creative economy, though it’s hard to imagine that it will fully embrace Silicon Valley mores and culture. I don’t
think even the hippest of Korean start-ups would tolerate employees dressed in shorts and sandals or coming into work at 11:00 a.m. just because they’d been up working most of the night
before.

There are already signs that Korea has become hospitable to start-ups and innovation. The website for the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning proudly features a few Korean start-ups
that qualify as “exemplary cases of creativity and imagination.” One of these is ID Incu (deriving from the words “idea incubator”). Its founder, baby-faced twenty-something
Kelvin Dongho Kim, is the poster boy for the “creative economy” in several respects. He’s young, he uses a western first name, and his company’s business plan allows other
start-ups to flourish. It offers a product called Open Survey—a combination of software and service for companies to conduct affordable surveys about their potential products, drawing from an
enormous survey pool of 240,000 ID users who have consented to answer questionnaires. Normally, if a small or medium-sized company were to commission a survey on that scale, the cost would be
prohibitive.

Kim got his big break from a competition sponsored by the giant Korean mobile company SK Telecom. This is precisely what Park’s creative economy calls for: big omnipotent businesses
nurturing small businesses. The ID Incu offices are cramped and messy, nothing like my dad’s stuffy old office, in which every conceivable surface was covered with doilies, every large room
had a grandfather clock, and office furniture was oversize and intentionally intimidating.