Progress Report 26.1

Anyong hasseyo, pally,

Wha g'wan? Yeah, I know, far too hot, innit. I haven't had a proper night's sleep in over a week. And all the sweating is taking its toll – I've been putting athlete's foot cream on them for days, but they're still itching like bejesus.

Anyway, enough on that; we have a bigger fish to fry: viz. Nationalism.

If you are particularly news-astute, or if you happen to work for them, you'll know that last week the United Nations Commission for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination officially 'rapped' (in the tabloid parlance) the nation of South Korea for what it sees as an attitude that could prove detrimental to the safety and assimilation of those non-natives that have, for whatever sorry reason, chosen to take up residence in this country. It surmised that the widely-held belief in the purity of the Korean bloodline and the ethnic homogeneity of the Korean people could lead to discrimination against non-Koreans, especially those from South-East Asia and Africa. It averred that Korea, as a nation, should fucking well pack it in.

Well, much editorial navel-gazing followed, ranging from apoplectic self-loathing to 'go-fuck-yourselves'. Myths were cited, names were called, realities were checked. The English-language press, knowing only too well on which side its bread is buttered, led the charge in exhorting Koreans to up the tolerance, whilst at the same time, seeking to explain the current levels of intolerance. Chief among them was the fallacious fact that Korean nationalism (the source and motivation for the myth of blood purity) helped the country stay united whilst its glorious 5,000 year history of self-determination was interrupted for 35 years last century by Japanese imperial rule. Also cited was the sorry state of division that the kingdom of Korea found itself in after the Russians and Americans had manoeuvered back and forth across it after World War II, along with the inherent dirtiness of those deeper yellow types, and the fact that they come here, they take our jobs and they don't even bother learning themselves the language.

And whilst most pieces finished on a note of hope for the future, the fact remains that Korean society is still at the present time hopelessly blinded by its nationalistic urges. I know this because I researched it in depth, by discussing it with the students in my conversation classes (which is about as thorough and scientific as you're likely to get from me).

At first, my hopes of finding tolerance thriving were buoyed after my initial sortie on the subject with my most advanced class, a group of women whose decency and cosmopolitan good sense is so tangible that I often think I'd like to languorously stimulate it with the tip of a finger. They came up trumps, pooh-poohing the blood myth and tearing the veil of Korea's self-delusion. They know that foreigners get a raw deal on this peninsula, and one of them, Gawd love 'er, even devotes a day a week to assisting a charity that asserts foreign workers' rights. See what I mean about decency? When was the last time YOU did anything for charity? Exactly. You disgust me.

However, this proved to be the calm of decency before the raging storm of implied intolerance. My two other classes, love them though I do, didn't quite get the Stevie B 'right-on' stamp of approval. What was the problem? Well, it wasn't that they were directly racist (except for one student, who wasn't afraid to admit that he wouldn't let a black person teach his hypothetical children without meeting him first, but would apply no such condition to a white teacher), but that they failed to renounce the lies that Koreans tell themselves about themselves. They couldn't bring themselves to admit that maybe, just maybe, there are a few things about Korea that are slightly sub-par.

Before we go into any further detail, let me first attempt to précis the conditions under which any reasoned realisation of Korea's shitiness must proceed...

Korea, as you know, has come from being a smoking pile of rubble to the world's 11^th largest economy in a dizzyingly brief amount of time. In 1945, they were scurrying around burrows and eating mud; now they drive expensive cars and use their laptops in Starbucks to check the value of their share portfolios. In order to achieve this stunning economic turnaround, the Korean working class (i.e. everyone who wasn't wearing a very neatly pressed army uniform when the Americans arrived) were required to sacrifice a considerable amount of their individuality and free will to the government. If you've ever tried to systematically abuse a partner, you'll sympathize with the government's position as you'll know that this isn't the easiest state to attain. It takes dedication, imagination and a superior sense of purpose.

To this end, the various governments of post-war Korea decided that the ends would justify the means and took to resurrecting and reinventing myths about the Korean people and their rightful destiny. Now everyone in Korea was Confucian, and so had to follow the newly-emphasised unquestioning respect for immediate authority that Confucianism prescribes. And now everyone was of pure Korean blood, and so were genetically predisposed to working towards the glorification of their people (yeah, like the Japanese had managed to keep their dicks in their pants for 35 years of occupation...). And now everybody therefore worked not for himself but for the good of the Korean economy, and so were required to work every hour that God (or his Confucian equivalent) sent. To slack was treason against destiny.

Apparently lacking faith, though, in the mere power of ideas, the military dictatorship kept these edicts in place through the lusty application of methods apposite to the dictatorial idiom. This continued right up until 1987, when President Major General Chun Do Hwan (who, if you remember, came to the position of president after the shooting of the previous incumbent by the head of the Korean CIA) agreed to step aside and let the nation have some choice in which major-general got to run the country. But by this time, the economy was first-world, and firmly established as the vanguard of the economy were the chaebol - the Korean conglomerates.

The chaebol: Monolithic family-run giants-of-industry who were as much a part of Korea as the mountains and the sky. They are names that you will be familiar with: LG, Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo, and the lesser-internationally-known Lotte, and between them (and along with a few other smaller names), they manufactured, serviced and transported every single good or earthly chattel you could possibly think of. They had the Korean domestic market trussed up tighter than the four-year-old underneath my kitchen sink. They had supported the economy as it rose and now they found their loyalty rewarded by a government that was happier than ever to bend to their will. They formed a financial uber-class, beyond challenge and reproach.

That was back in the day. But such monopolistic business practices can't be the norm in this day and age, right? Right?

Wrong. The chaebol are still in the same position now, 20 years later, as they were then - perhaps even more insidiously so. They continue to dominate and monopolize without the worry of legal assail, and still provide most of what Koreans could possibly need or want in their everyday life.

You might only know LG as a manufacturer of flat-screen tellies, but to a Korean, they are the provider of electronics, cell phones, clothing, soap, white goods, and a thousand other things besides, as well as being a major player in heavy industry, insurance, finance and, er, baseball. You could live your life using only goods made by Samsung, and then holiday at their theme park. Hyundai don't just make cars – they make apartments and everything that goes into apartments, as well as semi-conductors, department stores, lifts and containers, and they also exclusively run tours to a mountain in North Korea.

The chaebol use their enviable position to form cartels, fix prices, blackmail banks, trash small businesses and keep out imports, and do so with the tacit acceptance of the Korean people. They make sure that the government levies heavy taxes on imported goods, thus emasculating competition from abroad. They charge more for goods for Korean customers than they do for the same products abroad. They exploit their workers at every level as a matter of daily routine. They infiltrate popular culture so thoroughly that their brands and products become part of the very fabric of being. They are despotic.

But most Koreans are rosily proud of the chaebol. Why? Simply because they're Korean. In return, their loyalty is rewarded with high prices, shitty goods and average services. Koreans are happy with this because the chaebol consistently manipulate their nationalistic passions to their ends.

Surely the government should step in and end this disgraceful state of affairs? Not likely. The chaebol are the government. The presidential hopeful most favoured to win the election next year is Lee Myung-Bak, previously chairman of the Hyundai group. See how it goes?

Of course, the chaebol couldn't achieve such blinkered group thinking on their own. They require the education system to pitch in, and schools are only too happy to do so.

Koreans schoolchildren were until only recently taught that they are all of pure blood and that miscegenation would weaken the nation, and are put through a schedule so pointlessly grueling that they are conditioned to believe that anything less than 14 hours of work a day constitutes pathological indolence. Education even today is not afraid to get issue-specific – one of my students told me that her son had come home from school yesterday and announced that he was no longer prepared to eat imported American beef, having seen a video that day detailing the ghastly conditions in which American cows are raised. Korean beef, however, would be fine. (American beef imports have recently resumed under the bitterly-fought-out Free Trade Agreement, much to the chagrin of the Korean beef industry, who are fighting the foreign competition with alarmingly xenophobic rhetoric.)

And it's through this - this readiness to resort to shameless propogandizing and to assault whatever way the national psyche - that Koreans find themselves beamingly proud of a second-rate nation with second-rate goods and second-rate culture. They've been relentlessly tenderized into accepting shitiness in the name of Korea. Just tell them it's 'traditional', they'll tell you it's delicious. Tell them it's Confucian, they'll work till they drop. Tell them it's their culture, they'll defend it to the death.

Let me give you some examples...

ITEM: A few weeks ago, I set one of my classes to developing some ideas for an international tourist attraction that would attract visitors from all over the world. Something like the world's biggest theme park, I suggested. Or a music festival, like an Asian Glastonbury or something. Do you know what one group of university students suggested? A museum of traditional Korean costume, and a museum of Korean history. I reiterated the 'international tourist attraction' element of the task, but still they remained resolute. Build it and they will come, they assured me. Such is their faith in the pulling power of Koreana.

ITEM: One of my company class students – a research engineer and all-round nice guy who calls himself Clinton – worked from Monday morning until Wednesday morning this week. Without stopping. He didn't go home, he didn't sleep. Two whole days. Why?! I demanded of him. WHY?! He had to prepare a presentation for his boss, he told me. And still he came for his English lesson on his own time. Now tell me that there's a single manager in the UK that could inspire or demand a similar performance without later either representing his actions at an industrial tribunal or spending months in traction.

ITEM: A film was released last month called D-War. It was roundly panned by the critics, and so its director – a former comedian with a string of other high-budget failures to his name - gave interviews emphasising the fact that the film tells a traditional Korean story and that it is the result of Korean CGI ingenuity, and that directing the film had made him moisteningly proud to be Korean (despite the fact that it was filmed in English in the United States). Result: Number one box office hit for a number of weeks. Most, if not all, of my students have seen it.

ITEM: K-Pop. Korean pop music. Derivative, lame, childish, saccharine. You can't get away from it. Koreans absolutely love it, apparently unaware that in reality, K-Pop is what it sounds like to have Down's Syndrome.

ITEM: All Koreans go on holiday at the same time (the first week of August), and they all go to the same place (the East Sea). Twelve-hour tailbacks and pitifully crowded beaches don't dent their enthusiasm for the sojourn. (Why do they all go at the same time? It's when the chaebol give them all the week off.)

ITEM: Soju. (See earlier report.)

But if Korean nationalism stopped at poor taste and hard graft, then disavowing it would seem somewhat akin to snobbery (not that there's anything wrong with that). But unfortunately, it goes a little deeper - to the point where the UN feel the need to break their silence.

You see, a disarming amount of Koreans are hopelessly racist. They look down on South-East Asians, North Asians, Africans, African-Americans, Hispanics, Russians and Eastern Europeans, as well as the Chinese, Japanese and the portion of their own population that is ethnic Chinese. They are notoriously distrustful of foreigners, and hate to do business with them. They do, however, look up to white Westerners, viewing them either as equals or superiors, but that wouldn't stop them ripping them off or robbing them blind should the opportunity present itself. That they would consider fair treatment; the South-East Asians and Chinese get far worse, exploited in various noisy, dirty industries and ostracised in public.

This unabashed prejudice is reflected in social and employment policy. At the relatively luxurious end of the scale – the English teaching industry – racial antipathy is clearly evident and the law is heavily stacked in favour of the Korean employer: Schools are not afraid to place job ads for 'blonde-haired, blue-eyed teachers', and Korean schools own the visas of their foreign staff (a practice unheard of elsewhere), giving them free reign to exploit the fact, should they want to. And at the other end of the scale, there are the countless South-East Asian 'undocumented workers', mercilessly toiling in unpleasant manual jobs with no recourse to the law.

It all makes for a rum go, and a pretty dispiriting picture.

And it's all very well for me to type and sneer, and you're no doubt sneering too, but it should be borne in mind that Korea is not a multi-cultural society – not by a long chalk. It is only relatively recently that Koreans have started to travel outside of their own country, and up until twenty years ago, most Koreans had never met a foreigner that wasn't in a military uniform. I don't believe that Koreans are racist through choice, though, but through ignorance. And I know I give them a bit of rough-and-tumble, but deep down I really do like them. That's why I do it.

But the baseless nationalistic fervour perpetuated through every echelon of Korean culture by corporations that run the country like their own fiefdom is well past its sell-by date and it's high time it hit the road. The chaebol have to go too. Their stranglehold on the economy has put its further growth and development at an impasse. The country will be richer for their breaking-up, and then in a better position to rid itself of another invidious evil: Evangelical Christianity. Oof, blimey O'Reilly, there's a lot I have to say on that subject, but I shall save it for another report.

For now, I shall raise a glass to your good health, spare a thought for your troubles and bid you 'anyonghi hasseyo'.

Anyonghi hasseyo.

S