The Birth of Korean Cool (4 page)

I had totally forgotten that in Korea, food was to be eaten sitting and ideally indoors; you didn’t walk around with an ice cream or a bottled water. And definitely not coffee. That would
be like walking the streets with a pint of Guinness. The culture of carrying around a cup of coffee is very recent in Korea—a Starbucks invention. (I would say that’s true for most of
the world.) Who cares, you might well ask? Well, other than that it’s considered slovenly to carry your drink around, I had also denied my hosts the chance to offer me a refreshment. I am
appalled at myself. They do not know the protocol for what I have done. Neither do I. If they offer me coffee, I am obligated to say yes. If I refuse, they can’t have any coffee either.
That’s the other Korean food etiquette hang-up: It’s rude to eat in front of someone who is not eating.

Most people would have trouble understanding why I was being so neurotic about the passive-aggressive, silent Starbucks-staring contest going on between me and the education officials.
I’ve made much worse gaffes, like the time I accidentally spilled hot soup on a Nobel laureate’s lap and then set fire to his kitchen. But for me, the Starbucks faux pas reverberates
because it represents irreconcilability between new and old Korea. The clash between convenience and good manners, for example. Overly roasted Seattle brew versus dishwater Nescafé. I had
taken Korean modernization for granted: yes, change has been rapid, but this does not mean that everything modernized at the same rate.

Nowhere is this gap more apparent than in the Korean school system, which is why I was at the offices of the National Institute for International Education (NIIED), a governmental body
affiliated with the ministry of education. I was expecting some kind of sleek glass pavilion, because I’d heard about all these exciting high-tech developments in the schools, such as the
ministry’s plan to replace all physical textbooks with e-readers by 2015.

So I was surprised to discover the building was in a sketchy part of town, and its dingy red exterior made it look like a Korean public bathhouse.

One of the first things my interviewees told me when I arrived was that they didn’t want to answer my questions about the e-reader switchover. (I had submitted my interview questions in
advance, per their request.) They didn’t really give a reason except that they “couldn’t give an objective opinion.”

I would later discover that the e-reader program was a matter of controversy and that even within the government, some detractors were complaining that the switch was not worth the $2 billion
price tag, and technology does not equal a good education.

Additionally, the officials I interviewed were crabby, imperious, and entitled (at several junctures they barked things like “stay focused on the topic” and “we don’t
have time for this question”), behavior that was consistent with what I had observed about my schoolteachers. I began to wonder whether these were bad signs—whether all the vaunted
changes were overhyped. I had little faith in the Korean educational system’s ability to evolve. In sixth grade, when I was studying a chapter in my Korean literature textbook about Marie
Curie, my mother surprised me by quoting the first paragraph from memory. That story was in her sixth grade textbook, too.

Yet surely the system had to have been revamped; I could not imagine that the new Korea could get away with running its schools as it did when I was a student.

I’m of two minds about my Korean schooldays. On the one hand, the schools were Dickensian: marked by discipline, obedience, and relentless thrashings. I was so cowed by it that after three
years, I transferred to an international school in Seoul, with my tail between my legs. On the other hand, this system is at the root of Korean success.

THE SCIENCE AND ART OF THRASHING

The anchor of the Korean education system is the millennia-old Confucian belief that teachers are benevolent beings who guide you through your measly existence, and if you
don’t obey them, your life will be ruined. And this was no idle threat, given that your destiny was based on your performance on one exam—the university entrance exam.

There is no getting around it: my Korean teachers were the most arrogant, entitled people I’ve ever met in my life, and there’s some pretty stiff competition out there. They were
responsible for some pretty surreal childhood memories, including the multifarious, almost admirably creative thwacking. As a young student fresh from the United States, I  wasn’t
prepared for how often this method would be meted out. We got hit for all kinds of reasons, crimes that have no name.

Such as:

The no-foreign-school-supplies rule was enforced by way of surprise inspections, heralded by the teacher suddenly yelling midlecture: “Everyone, put your hands on the top of your
head!” This would send all the students into full-on freakout mode, trying in vain to hide their Japanese mechanical pencils in the gaps between the floorboards, like a drug dealer flushing
his stash down the toilet.

In eighth grade, my teacher picked up a plastic Tupperware-type container from a student’s bag, looked at the bottom, and shrieked, “Made in Thailand? Thailand?! If you’re
going to buy non-Korean goods, why would you pick a beggarly country like Thailand?” She then hit the offending student on the head with the contraband plastic container.

Even worse than getting hit was being responsible for someone else getting hit. On one occasion, I scored an 88 percent on a Chinese language exam—far exceeding anyone’s
expectations. Since I didn’t speak Korean at the time and was regarded as the class idiot, the teacher announced, “Every student who scored lower than Hong Youn-kee [my Korean name] is
going to get hit.” I was not very popular after that.

Why so much brutality for such young children? For starters, Korean culture views childhood as an extremely high-stakes period. If you screw up your early years, you are finished, finished,
finished. There’s an old Korean saying that I heard often: “A habit begun at age three lasts until age eighty.”

By the time you realize you might be in possession of bad habits, you are most likely past age three. Too late! You are already possibly doomed and have to work in constant emergency mode to
outpace your demons. This early-instilled childhood panic was one reason why we were so obedient—and why it never really occurred to any of us to hit the teacher back.

People who have never experienced corporal punishment outside the home don’t understand that it does not leave the same psychic scars as getting hit by your parents. Punishment from
teachers was not personal, and if everyone is subjected to the same rules, you can tolerate quite a lot.

But some teachers were out of control. The most brutish teacher I ever had was my seventh-grade homeroom teacher, Mr. Chung—or Chung Sun-seng (“teacher”), to use the honorific.
He was a very short, thin man of about thirty, with dark skin, poufy hair, eyes that darted quickly from side to side when he got angry, and a facial twitch. He had no neck and his trousers came up
too high on his torso; these combined features made him look even smaller. Basically, he looked like a bad guy from a Roald Dahl children’s book. And he should have been
institutionalized.

At some point, a classmate’s mother had called Chung Sun-seng to tell him to lay off a bit on the beatings where her own son was concerned. The next day, Chung Sun-seng called the boy and
me to the hallway outside the classroom. The teacher boxed the boy’s ears, saying, “Why’d you go crying ‘Mommy, Mommy,’ like a baby?” The boy fell to the ground;
then the teacher kicked the boy repeatedly in the stomach and in the head until the boy bled from his mouth and lost a tooth.

Yes, I watched and did nothing. I don’t remember what it was I was meant to have done, but I do remember that I was in trouble as well. All I could do was patiently wait my turn—but
my turn never came. At the time, I thought it was because the teacher had run out of steam. Years later, I found out my mother had paid my teacher off, with an envelope full of cash, to leave me
alone. I believe the teacher had called me out to witness this beating as a way of terrorizing me without physically harming me.

My mom is not a bribing sort of person, but paying off teachers was a normal practice. It still is. In the old days, a mother sliding an envelope to a teacher was a signal that she
wouldn’t mind terribly if the teacher were to do some creative grading on the next exam, maybe overlook a few wrong answers. The corruption was getting so out of hand that some schools,
including mine, switched all the exams to multiple-choice bubble tests to be graded solely by computer.

Those tests were punitive. They weren’t like the old SATs in the United States, where test takers had the unimaginable luxury of being able to use a number 2 pencil and—more
crucially—an eraser to fix mistakes. We had to use a black felt-tip permanent marker. You  couldn’t change answers, and if you filled out the wrong bubbles for your student ID
number or the subject test code, this would result in a grade of zero. The nicer teachers would sometimes issue you a new card, so long as you were willing to get hit for your mistake.

My eighth-grade homeroom teacher hit every single student in the class after exams. It wasn’t because of overall poor performance. It was just something she always did. The number of times
students got hit equaled the number of their class ranking in the exams: the top-scoring student got hit once; the second-ranking student got hit twice, and so on until the final student got hit
sixty times. The teacher did it without an ounce of anger or vengeance. She said, “I’m being fair. Even the top student gets hit.”

Corporal punishment in Korea has been phased out over the last decade, and it became officially illegal in 2011—but there are loopholes.
¹
The laws
only prohibit a teacher from striking a student directly, but it’s technically still permissible for a teacher to ask students to punish themselves.

Yes, we would inflict pain on ourselves on command. If you’ve never seen this, and you happened to stroll by a classroom during one of these sessions, you probably would be puzzled by what
you were looking at. You might wonder, “Why are sixty children holding their desks over their heads?”

My seventh-grade class had to do that for an hour or so because we lost the school choral contest. Sometimes we had to go outside to the gravel playground and do push-ups—not with our
hands flat on the ground, but on our bare knuckles.

A popular punishment was
to ki dwim
, which means “rabbit run.” To do the rabbit run, you crouch down into a low squatting position, grab onto your earlobes with your hands,
and hop, hop, hop. Usually once or twice around the perimeter of the playground. It was amusing to watch if someone else was being punished but not if it was happening to you. And it’s as
good a piece of evidence as any that these teachers sometimes punished us for their own entertainment.

Corporal punishment has persisted in Korean schools for so long partly because the parents sanction it, and partly because the students think they deserve it.

Kim Young-sun, team director for the NIIED—and one of the bureaucrats whom I had embarrassed with the Starbucks cup—explained the parent-teacher complicity: “In the old
days,” she said, “the teacher was often much more educated than most of the parents. So the parents entrusted their children to the teachers. Some mothers would bring their own sticks
to the teacher and say, ‘Please use this to hit my child.’ ”

Apparently, such an instrument was called “the stick of love.”

The weirdest instance I ever witnessed of a parent siding with a teacher over her own child was in seventh grade. During morning prep, my homeroom teacher, Chang Sun-seng—the tooth
buster—called up a tall, thin girl to the front of the class. He said, “Your mother called me to tell me that she looked in one of your notebooks and found mean notes you had written
about me.” He smacked her across the face; the willowy girl lurched back from the blow.

Even the students supported the teachers’ prerogative to hit them. In 2003—when corporal punishment was starting to disappear—a survey conducted by a Korean NGO representing
teachers indicated that
fully 70 percent of Korean students said that corporal punishment was fair.
²
The Korean newspaper
JoongAng Daily
reported at the time that students in the same survey said that the “honor” (I assume this means social status) of teachers had “eroded.” But the real jaw dropper is that a
third of the respondents “criticized themselves and their parents for not respecting teachers enough.”

Students criticized themselves and their own parents, rather than the teacher? In other words, students felt that teachers could do no wrong.

This might sound like Stockholm syndrome, but it’s much more complicated than that. The roots of teacher worship go back literally a thousand years.

THE ARISTOCRACY EXAMS

Confucius, the Chinese sage who lived in the fourth century
BC
, was not just an author of fortune cookie quotes. His writings laid down a
regimented system for making an orderly society out of chaos.