The Birth of Korean Cool (8 page)

Stressful, huh? Welcome to the daily heart attack that I experience every time I visit Korea.

The reason you have to go through this whole rigmarole is based on the Confucian concepts of keeping order by everyone knowing their place in the social hierarchy, being respectful of those
superior to them, and not rocking the boat.

The Chosun Dynasty adopted Confucianism in all walks of civil and personal life at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The nation’s kings were worried about losing power and sought a
drastic solution to obliterate the two biggest threats: chaotic class warfare and the increasingly influential Buddhist clerics. Since the system favored those already in power, it was a no-lose
proposition for the monarchs.

Several business books have speculated that the modern-day Korean economic miracle has Confucianism to thank. This is certainly possible, since unquestioning obedience certainly can be a huge
time-saver when you’re trying to build an economic empire.

Lee Charm, head of the Korean Tourism Organization, gave an excellent definition of Confucianism. “It goes back to the relationship between heaven and earth, spiritual and physical.
It’s a set of behavioral rules based on an observation of nature, an observation of the relationship between plants, animals, and the cosmos.”

Lee was born Bernhard Quandt in the western German city of Bad Kreuznach, and he visited Korea for the first time in 1978, when he was in his midtwenties. He was supposed to stay only six
months; instead, he went completely native.

Lee learned flawless Korean, married a Korean woman, and in 1986 became a Korean national. He gave himself a Korean name. For his surname, he adopted Lee, his wife’s family name. His first
name, Charm (the
r
is silent), is the Korean word for “cooperate” or “participate”—a badge of pride for his role in Korean society. He is a businessman and
local celebrity. He acts in the occasional Korean television drama, and by happy coincidence, he once portrayed a real-life historical figure whose life closely paralleled his own: the Prussian
aristocrat Paul Georg von Möllendorf, who in the late nineteenth century settled in Korea and became a special adviser to Korea’s King Gojong. Möllendorf adopted traditional Korean
court dress and chose a Korean name, Mok In-dok, and was instrumental in helping form Korean foreign policy.

This storyline mirrors what Lee is doing now. In 2009, then-president Lee Myung-bak appointed Lee Charm as the country’s first non-Korean-born head of the national tourism board.
It’s a highly important post in Korea, a central part of the overall Korean brand management. It’s shocking that an extremely tall, white German guy with very Teutonic features would be
appointed to lead it, considering that Korea, the so-called Hermit Kingdom, was once so afraid of westerners.

Charm’s assimilation into Korean society at the height of its cold war xenophobia in the 1970s and 1980s makes him, from my point of view, a very reliable expert on the idea of what it
means to be Korean.

Lee believes that Confucianism took a wrong turn somewhere on the journey from theory to practice: Korea’s ancient rulers corrupted Confucianism and turned it into a political tool.
“Confucianism in Korea became very pharisaical. The original idea was very good. The husband has a certain role; the wife has a certain role. But their relationship is not [supposed to be]
top down; originally, they’re on equal footing.”

As mentioned, women in modern Korea were not allowed to be the legal head of the household until 1990. So I was surprised to learn that until the fifteenth century, women had equal rights.
“They could be head of the household, and they could be the master of the ancestral ceremonies,” said Lee. In other words, there was really no reason why the women in my family had to
bow before the graves twice as many times as the men.

“[The current practice that] the parents decide everything or the husband decides everything is a misinterpretation of the Confucian concept,” Lee explained. He has very good reasons
for his surprisingly frank views on the matter. He suffered the raw end of the system when he started dating the Korean woman who became his wife. When he first came to Korea in 1978, it was
unthinkable for a Korean to marry a foreigner. It’s more acceptable now but still frowned upon.

In Confucianism as practiced in Korea, a person’s identity is determined by the male side of the family. Your ancestry is recorded in a
hojok
, a record of lineage. Traditionally,
a non-Korean male could not be in the
hojok
, nor could any of his descendants. Using the same logic, illegitimate children could not be in the
hojok
unless the father declared his
paternity. These
hojok
restrictions were not completely eliminated until 2005; it took three more years to officially implement the change.
⁶
So
what, you ask? Why did your name have to be written in some silly book?

The
hojok
was not merely ceremonial; it wasn’t like
Debrett’s Peerage
in the UK or a social register that tracks descendants of the
Mayflower
in the United
States. In Korea, if you were not in the
hojok
, you did not exist as a Korean citizen. You had about as much status as an illegal immigrant. You could not inherit your parents’
assets after their death. It would be difficult to find a job.

One Korean American adoptee who suffered the cruelty of the old
hojok
system is Daniel Gray. The story of his life illustrates how much Korea has and has not changed.

Today, Gray is director of marketing and tours at O’ngo Food Communications in Seoul, a company that offers food tours and Korean cooking classes to international chefs. Though he seems
perfectly natural in his current milieu, he has actually only been living in Korea as an adult for the past seven years.

He was born in Korea, out of wedlock: “My mother and father were in love,” he said, but his father was already married with three kids—a serious problem for their son. This was
the mid-1980s, when illegitimate children had no legal status. “My mother would not have been able to register me as a person, not even under her own family line, because she was not a man.
There was a lot of social stigma against [illegitimate children]. All the schools would have known I didn’t have a father. It would be hard to get into university.

“My mother begged my father to take me in, because of the
hojok
,” he said. His father did take him in for a while, but “my stepmother didn’t care for me much at
all,” Daniel recalls.

One day, Daniel was told that his mother was coming to pick him up. But the woman who showed up at his father’s home was not his mother. She was a representative from the Holt
orphanage—Korea’s most established orphanage and adoption agency, founded in 1955 by American Christian missionaries. “She took me to a noodle restaurant and a toy store and
brought me a change of clothes. I was upset, I didn’t exactly know what was happening.”

What had happened was that Daniel’s father and stepmother declared that they were not going to take care of Daniel anymore, so his mother put him up for adoption. Daniel was six years old
at the time.

Daniel was only at the orphanage for three months. “I was very lucky,” he said, recalling that any day a kid at the orphanage got adopted was an exciting one. The adoptee
“would get a gift box from their [new] parents. It would always have a picture book and chocolate, so all the kids would look forward to that. There would be a big party, and everyone would
get snacks and candy.”

Daniel’s gift box included photos of his new family and home. “All the pictures were very foreign,” he said. “I saw pictures of my parents’ house, a two-story house
with a big front yard. And my father had an orange Ford truck up front.” There were also photos of his adoptive parents, Linda and Larry Gray, as well as his new little sister, another Korean
orphan who had previously been adopted by the family.

It took a long time before Daniel thought of the Grays as his parents. “I didn’t speak for a long time,” he said. “I had a lot of major health problems and needed a lot
of dental work.” The adjustment was rocky. “I was very distant, very scared.” He was also mistrustful. The Grays tried to introduce Daniel to Korean American friends as well as to
a Korean minister, but “When I first got to America I was really scared they were going to send me back, so I disassociated as much as possible.” This included forgetting all his
Korean.

Despite a rebellious childhood and adolescence, Daniel excelled at school, at art, and at the guitar. He became a writing teacher and a volunteer at inner-city schools in Wilmington. But he felt
restless. At age twenty-six, he went to Korea to take a job teaching English at a small school in the southern city of Gyeongju.

After two years, he gathered the courage to go to Seoul and try to find his birth mother. It was a logistical nightmare. “The process of finding your parents is not very well
detailed,” he recalled. “There is a lot of misinformation.” It’s a good thing he didn’t wait too long to embark on his search: “The agencies that helped me five
years ago no longer exist.” Not only that, his original orphanage, the missionary-run Holt group, no longer helps orphans locate their birth parents. Nowadays orphans have to go through a
third party to locate their adoption records.

The reason for this red tape is horrifying: “There are a lot of anti-adoption groups,” he said, “groups that feel that the orphans should not have been put up for adoption in
the first place. They say, the parents weren’t properly vetted.” So institutions make it difficult for children to find their birth parents, a situation that only serves to punish the
innocent.

Finally, Daniel went through Holt. “They opened up my file. They sent a letter to my mother.” Two weeks later, she replied that she wanted to meet her son. In fact, that was why she
made sure she left her address with Holt from the beginning: “She was waiting for me,” Gray recalls.

The long-awaited reunion happened at the Hapjeong train station in Seoul; Daniel’s biological mother had come in from her hometown.

“She gave me a big hug and said,
‘Oreh gan man i eh yo.’
” Which means, “It’s been a long time.”

“She asked me how I was, if I was healthy. She asked what I was doing.” She also told him his real age: he was one year older than he was led to believe. When his birth mother put
Daniel up for adoption, she knocked a year off his age, thinking that a younger child might stand a better chance of getting adopted.

Daniel chose to stay in Korea, which is a very brave thing to do, given the country’s hostile climate toward Korean adoptees. Illegitimate children now have legal status without the
declaration of paternity, but a lot of Koreans are uncomfortable with his western last name. “There are still repercussions,” he said. “Some Koreans still see it as a negative.
Some of the parents of girls I dated in the past thought I wasn’t a whole person,” he said.

Yet even with all those impediments, Gray says he feels Korean. “I feel more comfortable here,” he said. Now he is a successful businessman in Seoul, has relearned Korean, and is
about to marry a Korean woman. He plans to take his birth mother to Delaware to meet his adoptive parents. “She said it was a dream of hers, to thank them.”

Daniel’s story makes it obvious how fortunate it is that some aspects of Confucianism have disappeared. Other aspects have eroded more subtly: I’ve noticed that young people no
longer have the universal, automatic reflex of offering their seat to an elderly person. In my day (yes, I know how crotchety that sounds), kids would literally grab the hand of an old person, even
a total stranger, and escort them to the seat they were yielding.

I’ve also begun to see young people yell at older people, including a strange thirty-something woman in the Seoul subway who was wearing a green cellophane sun visor and a lot of makeup.
She was screaming shrilly that my parents were monopolizing the station manager with a question. I can say with complete confidence that I never witnessed any such incident when I was growing up in
Seoul.

These might seem like harsh descriptions of the Korean character. But they are also responsible for what is best about the culture. Perhaps a good metaphor for all these Korean
traits—wrath, Confucian principles, and nature fetishism—is its famously pungent cuisine. Or, as one Korean American chef described his food, “aggressive.”

THERE ARE NOW SEVERAL MICHELIN STAR KOREAN
restaurants in the United States. This may come as a shock to diasporic Koreans; many of us still bear the
childhood scars brought on by our non-Korean friends opening our fridge for a snack and being repulsed by the smell of Korea’s national dish, the fermented spicy cabbage called kimchi.

And it’s not a shame restricted to children; a Korean doctor I know who worked at a prominent Boston hospital early in his career was told by his boss that the nurses were complaining of
his breath. His wife changed her kimchi recipe to include less garlic.

Being Korean in America when I was a child was like being a smoker now. We were pariahs with filthy smelly habits that made our friends not want to come over to play.

Bobby Kwak, a successful entrepreneur based in New York, is all too familiar with this scenario. Today, he is a posterboy for Korean American cool. He is a hip restaurateur, inventor of the
prize-winning
bibimbap
(marinated beef barbecue, vegetables, and a fried egg burger), and owner of Circle—one of New York’s hottest nightclubs, catering to high-rolling
Koreans. But he recalls that not long ago being Korean was not cool in America. In his swank midtown Manhattan office, I asked him about what it was like growing up as a Korean American in northern
New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. “It was embarrassing,” he said, shielding his face with his hands.