Euny Hong lived in the United States until she was 12, when her parents decided to move back to their homeland, South Korea. Hong spoke very little Korean and didn’t understand many of the taboos of the much more reserved society. Later, Hong moved back to the U.S., attending Yale University and working as a journalist. Being both an outsider and an insider, Hong is the perfect guide to explain South Korean culture, as she does in The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture.
The conversation with Hong has been edited for length.
Why has the government of Korea, a very capitalistic country, taken on the task of funding and promoting South Korean culture?
There are a couple of reasons. After the financial crisis in 1997-98, the whole Asian continent completely collapsed and the Korean government, led by Kim Dae-Jung, did what one could call a Maoist self-criticism, a self-examination.
The crisis highlighted that the country was too reliant on its chaebols, Korean mega-conglomerates, like Hyundai and Samsung. If they were having trouble capitalizing or meeting their loan requirements, we needed to build new industries that are independent of those companies. They wondered, “What can we do that doesn’t have a high initial overhead?”
The answer was popular culture. All you really need is human capital and a recording studio. All you need are people to put together the songs. All we need is creative minds. We don’t need natural resources. This is something we can get up and running right away.
One of the things you note in your book is that South Korea provided the Internet to every household, regardless of income. This must help the spread of culture.
In the late 1990s, the Koreans decided, “We are going to be the most conductive country in the world.” So the government offered subsidies to spread the technology. There is a principle called Metcalfe’s law, which says the spread of communications is only useful if a mass of people have access to it. The Korean government realized that.
They were much more interested in what they could send to the outside world than what they were receiving. On the Internet you can get to anybody. It was kind of like NASA sending these capsules to the outer space with the idea that if they find other beings, they could spread U.S. culture through Louis Armstrong records and other cultural items on-board the capsules.
For two or three generations Korea has studied American culture in an intense way. Since the end of the Korean War it has been an unofficial colony of America. It is one of America’s closest military allies and there is still a very, very strong U.S. military presence in South Korea.
(Koreans) learned that if people think you’re cool they will buy your pop culture. If your pop culture is cool they will buy other stuff.
Koreans are very impatient. They didn’t want to get rich slowly. Korean culture had to be packaged in a way that they could make money immediately. Korea could never occupy the cultural role that the Americans have.
You often refer to Hallyu in your book and note that it’s a word everyone outside Korea should learn. Can you explain what it means?
It is the Korean word for Korean Wave. I was living in France when I first began to understand what the Korean Wave was. It is kind of like the Korean version of the British Invasion — The Beatles, the Rolling Stones.
But Korea doesn’t want the Korean Wave to happen by itself. It wants it to be something like the British Wave but government-funded, transmitting fast and globally.
Why did Psy and his Gangnam Style video become a global phenomenon?
The truth is nobody really knows how that became viral. Everyone in Korea was as surprised as everyone else. Psy was pretty popular in Korea but he was an outlier. He wrote his own songs and did pretty much on his own what the government was trying to do to other musicians by force.
He was showing some of Korea’s unflattering aspects, but he did it with a sense of humour. Somebody at the ministry of culture says a government committee has been set up to examine why Psy became such a global phenomenon.
Couldn’t someone just interview Psy and ask?
Psy doesn’t know either.
In many ways South Korea is finding it hard to emerge from its past. I’m thinking about issues such as corporal punishment in schools, which wasn’t outlawed until 2011. How can culture thrive in a place that remains so restrictive and conformist?
That has become a question on the national agenda. The Korean Wave made Koreans think about our Korean educational system and our culture. It arose out of 1,000 years of Confucianism.
I used to teach English to Korean kids and it was extremely frustrating because I could never get them to speak. They would giggle and cover their faces and refuse to speak. They used to hate being photographed and would duck behind trees. They are very self-conscious, very shy.
So it is definitely a paradox. The fact that they are really disciplined and good at taking orders and are scholastic is part of the K-pop formula. No other country would go about building a pop culture industry this way but it’s the only way Koreans know how to do this and, strangely enough, it seems to work.
Even though it seems like a paradox, that cool comes out of discipline and study.
The way you describe South Korea in your book sounds a lot like what we North Americans understand about Japan.
In the sense of discipline, there are definite cultural similarities. Asian countries are influenced by Confucianism. The kinds of traits we are talking about come from the old system where your life’s fortunes and your family’s fortunes were determined by passing a civil service exam. You could become an aristocrat if you did well. The pressure was extremely high.
The stereotype of Asian kids is they study hard. You wouldn’t think this would result in coolness. It’s kind of like a mentality that money can buy anything.
You’ve spent most of your life outside Korea, in the U.S. and France, and you see yourself as a Korean-American. Would ever move back to Korea or do you still feel like an outsider?
I really don’t ever want to live there again. I definitely feel like an outsider. The culture is really, really formal and it has too many rules for me. One of the reasons I lived in Europe for so long is that it’s a happy medium between the excessive formality of Korea and the laid-back style of the U.S.
Koreans work a lot of hours and I couldn’t do that without Adderall.