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| Put down that silverware, Eun Kyul! (And stop laughing at my lousy screen capture, while you’re at it. It’s hard to take them, you know.) |
I’ve spent essentially my entire life
in the northeastern United States, and if someone were to sequence my
DNA I’m sure they’d find it was made up of maple syrup,
snowflakes cut from paper, and tiny little holstein figurines. (What,
you expected something boring and scientific, like base pairs? As
if.) But where I live is just an unavoidable fact of life; it’s
not something I’ve really spent a lot of time thinking about. So it
surprised me how shocked I was to see the kids from To the
Beautiful You casually eating
hamburgers with forks and knives early on in their show’s run. It felt fundamentally blasphemous and
wrong, deep down in my bones, to see someone approach my national dish in such a foreign way.
Since then, I’ve
realized that there’s yet another unexpected side effect of my
obsession with Korean drama: Seeing my own culture in a new light.
Kdrama offers a glimpse into life on the other side of the world, but
through the comparison I’m also coming to learn more about life here.
As is probably true
of most people in my country, the biggest reminder that I’m an
American rolls around once every four years: the presidential
election. Democratic elections are actually something
that Korea and America have in common—while we Americans are voting
for a president this November, the Korean campaign season will be
winding to a close in anticipation of their December election.
In honor of what our countries do differently and the things they share, I
thought I’d post two short lists today: one of American rituals and
customs worth exporting to Korea, and one of Korean
rituals and customs that we Americans should try out.
America to Korea
•
Trick-or-treating. Halloween
may have roots in religion, but these days it’s almost totally
secular. As a kid, there is literally no experience more wonderful
than donning a costume to become someone else for an evening, and
then going door-to-door demanding candy. It’s not unusual to spend
months planning what to wear and strategizing the best neighborhoods
to visit. Where to go is a balancing act: you want high property
values, because that’s usually an indication of good candy. But you
also want closely packed houses to minimize the time spent getting
from one place to the next, which means a bigger haul in
the end. Starting around five on Halloween night the streets are
thick with families and kids all dressed up and carrying plastic
jack-o-lanterns for booty storage. As the night progresses, the kids
get older, the costumes get gorier, and the parents start to
disappear. The “trick” part of trick-or-treating rarely happens,
but when it does it generally involves high school kids misbehaving.
In suburban America, if you don’t have your porch light on kids
know that you’re not participating and just pass you by, rather
than taking any sort of revenge.
As
seen in: E.T.
• Summer
break. As a grown up, it can be hard
to remember what summer break felt like: these days, two weeks off
from work is an impossible dream. But kids attending American schools
have more than two months off
every summer to do whatever they want. Once upon a time, this
vacation was intended to allow kids to help out on their family
farms, but in the modern world it mostly involves video games,
sleep-away-camp, and marathon-level slacking off. South Korean
schools have breaks between semesters, too, but nothing so mammoth as
the mid-June to early September vacation that’s traditional in
America. Also of note is the fact that until this year, South Korean
kids went to school on Saturdays, for a total of six days a
week. Economic miracles take hard work and all, but this is clearly a country
in need of a nice, long vacation. (A random side note: some of the “goose families” that are occasionally referred to in Kdramas
actually send their kids to America specifically because the
academics are so much more relaxed here.)
As
seen in: Dazed and Confused
• Prom. Out
of all the youth-oriented Kdramas I’ve watched, only Boys
over Flowers has included
anything like a school dance. On the other hand, practically every
American coming-of-age story uses the prom as a big finale—from
Twilight to 10
Things I Hate About You to
Pretty in Pink. (And
let’s not forget Carrie, either.)
The prom is essentially a teenage version of Halloween: you get
dressed up as something you’re not for a few hours and do something
you wouldn’t normally do. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll
admit that I never did attend a prom. I can’t say that this
is surprising—I’m not great fan of dresses or high heels or
dancing, all key elements in the traditional prom experience. But
when it comes right down to it, hating on the institution of prom is
just as much a cultural touchstone in America as attending the event.
Whether you went or you didn’t, whether you spent the whole time crying in
the bathroom or ended up as prom queen, the grande dame of formal dances really is a
key character-building experience that’s worth sharing.
As seen in:
Footloose
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| Even without Jun Pyo in attendance, I’m sure this would be a good time. |
Korea to America
• Making
kimjang. Practically every time
someone is shown eating in Korean dramas—breakfast, lunch, dinner,
or instant ramen consumed while standing in a convenience
store—kimchi is involved. At least some of that kimchi was
probably prepared during a fall gathering devoted to making enough kimchi
to last through the winter. Extended families get together and, over
the course of several days, work produce enough kimchi to go around. I’m no great cook, but there’s something deeply appealing about this communal event. See
posts on Electric Ground and Life in Korea
for more.
As
seen in: Boys over Flowers
• Hanbok.
There’s really no such thing
as “American” traditional dress. As a nation of travelers, our
backgrounds are too diverse for such a thing to ever have taken
hold—with the possible exception of Civil War getups for the
reenactment set and fat Elvis jumpsuits for the fat Elvis set. I
suspect it’s a dying tradition, but I love seeing that one woman at
any Kdrama formal event who’s all decked out in this traditional
outfit. The hanboks themselves are beautiful, and a distinctly Korean
tradition like this strikes me as something too precious to lose to
globalization. I would love to know more about what it actually feels
like to wear a hanbok,
but unfortunately the Internet is pretty much mum on this point. There are a few sources of information, though: how to put on a hanbok at Youtube; a visit to the hanbok store at Korea.net; and the hanbok photobooth at Estherxie.com. (If the owner of the last blog had watched as much Korean drama as I have, she would immediately realize the painting she’s sitting in front of was done by Shin Yoon Bok, one of the artists Painter of the Wind was inspired by.)
As
seen in: Sweet Eighteen
• Go-stop. I’ve probably seen seventy hands of go-stop
played in various Kdramas, but I have yet to grasp a single rule. It
looks terrifyingly complex, but based on this guide for beginners it might not be so bad. (The full rules of gameplay are a bit more
off-putting, to put it mildly.) Trying to learn this game is probably folly for someone with my limited brain capacity, but those Korean drama characters really seem to enjoy it. (I especially love the sharp snap they use to discard cards.)
As seen in: Coffee
Prince
