From the Outside In: Kdrama Imponderables

“Don’t you know anything? Rinse first, spit second.”

When I posted about feminism in Kdramas last week, I was expecting one of two things: that it would be greeted by the utter, soul-crushing silence generally elicited by tl;dr writings, or that I would be flamed within an inch of my life for cultural insensitivity or daring to criticize beloved dramas.

It turns out that neither happened—the post got many hits and sparked a good deal of interesting discussion. Its contents also garnered some extremely valid feedback: that throughout the entry, the line between dramaland and the real world was uncomfortably fuzzy. Of course, what we see on television isn’t always real. If it was, America would be populated exclusively by beautiful people with perfect makeup, hair, and wardrobes. Even the poorest of the poor would live in funky city lofts worthy of a profile in Architectural Digest. Our kitchens would be clean enough to operate in, and we would all have an endless supply of witty comebacks for every occasion. Even if credulous aliens came to planet Earth expecting American culture to exactly replicate their beloved Friends reruns, one look around would prove irrefutably that it doesn’t come close.

And does anyone really believe that all Koreans yank out their cell phone batteries whenever they don’t want to answer a call? Does every hardworking, poverty-stricken orphan eventually bag her own chaebol? Are bands of Joseon scholars wandering around downtown Seoul as I type, having time-slipped in from their home era? No, no, and no.

Ultimately, though, television isn’t created in a vacuum: It inevitably has a relationship to the people it serves, and represents their values, concerns, and mores. Otherwise, who would watch it? If South Korea and America are anything alike at all, dramaland and the real world are actually part of a neverending feedback loop: one creates the other, while simultaneously being created by it. Take Jackass, for an extreme example. When I was a teenager, this MTV show filled with crazy, death-defying stunts was all the rage. And guess what happened? Much to the chagrin of everyone involved, kids out in the real world started dying when they tried to mimic the show’s lunatic antics. Or how about the Brady Bunch? It would be easy to assume that bastion of 70s cheese bears no relevance to real life—until you remember that it was famously inspired by a news article on the growing number of blended families in America. 

If The Brady Bunch found its roots in hard news coverage of the changing American family structure, is it really too much to think that the 8.9 million Kdrama wrist-grabs I’ve witnessed in the past year might have bearing on things that happen in the real world? The trick, it seems, is to figure out what might be true, and to what extent. 

Sure, it’s important to distinguish between dramaland and the planet we actually live on. And sure, there’s no such thing as one, immutable “culture” shared by every single resident of any country. But that doesn’t mean that plumbing the depths of Korean drama can’t teach you a little something about Korean life.

As (a self-styled) Kdrama ethnologist, I’m full of questions about how the shows I watch relate to the lives people actually lead. Here’s an iceberg-scratching list of imponderables that have been on my mind of late.

—Are students and teachers in Korea really expected to have such close relationships that the student might call the teacher from the police station—and the teacher might actually go bail him out, as did the female lead in A Gentleman’s Dignity? In America, boundaries between students and teachers are carefully enforced, and the teacher would have gotten into an incredible amount of trouble for bystepping the student’s parents.

—The established tooth-brushing order in Korean dramas is: brush, rinse, spit. On the other hand, I am almost totally sure that bathrooms across America see only brush, spit, rinse. Why the difference? Is Korean toothpaste less foamy than American?

—Do lawn mowers not exist in Korea? And even if they don’t, isn’t there some easier option for lawn maintenance than the little hand scissors people are always shown using in Kdramas?

—From what I’ve heard, Korean popular music includes a lot of English. Does the average person sitting at home watching Boys over Flowers know the language well enough to understand what lyrics like “Almost paradise” mean? Or is it just as foreign and indecipherable to them as Korean lyrics are to me? (If so, that sort of explains why the people behind BoF thought they could get away with reusing that song ad nauseum—if the lyrics don’t mean anything to you, the fact that they’re completely inappropriate for the scene at hand won’t matter so much.)

—Girls in Korea don’t really walk around with hand mirrors, gazing adoringly at their own faces at odd moments during the day. Right?

—Is there no such thing as a Korean laundromat? One of the most stunning things early in my Kdrama viewing was seeing people hand (erm…foot?) wash clothes and bedding in a plastic tub. In America, pretty much everyone has access either to pay laundry facilities or their own washer and dryer at home; it literally never even occurred to me that there were people in the developed world who still did laundry by hand.

—On a related note, are linens not included in the price of a hospital stay? Is that why hospital beds are often shown with fancy sheets—someone brought them from home? Presumably that’s why we occasionally see people (hand)washing laundry at a family member’s hospital room? That’s pretty crazy, if so: a less-than sterile wash could bring germs home with them.

—And then there’s the fact that dramas show even average, middle-class people going to the hospital with a little sniffle and getting a bed and IV drip. Is this really the way Koreans react to an illness? In America, hospitals are usually seen as an absolute last resort for someone who’s extremely unwell—we’re a touch suspicious of them, and they can be outrageously expensive, so nobody is lining up to go in for a check-up.

—Do celebrities actually engage in martial activities while they’re doing their mandatory two years in the military? Or is it all cucumber facials and Abs of Steel on DVD?

—When you see giant racks of squid drying in the sun in shows like Padam Padam, does the entire town reek? I’ve walked by outdoor fish markets in midsummer and almost lost my lunch—I can’t imagine what 2,000 dead squid would smell like after a few hours out in the elements. (And even if it does smell bad, is it a nice smell to people who live there? I’m from a rural area, and every summer nearby farmers spread cow manure over their fields. Even though this is generally acknowledged to be the worst smell ever, I secretly kind of like it—it smells warm and earthy, like home.)

—Do people really leave cooked food lying around on tables under those funny little umbrellas? Does “Plate’s in the fridge; 2 mins. on high in the microwave” not translate into Korean?

—Is there a cultural aversion to eating out of hand? In America, people are delighted to pick up big, juicy hamburgers and take a bite. We also eat apples whole, bite after bite, until we get to the core. But in Kdrama, these things are almost always cut up and eaten with the help of a fork. In the Japanese version of Boys over Flowers, the second male lead’s unwillingness to bite off a piece of apple was actually a plot point. Is this an Asia-wide thing?

—Do some people really reckon their birthdays based on the solar calendar and others on the lunar? That must get pretty complicated.

—If the Korean government is involved in the funding and running of the major networks, do they have censorship power over drama content? I know the strike earlier this year was related to government influence on news broadcasts, but do they care about shallow drama things, like how the Joseon king is depicted in the umpteen-millionth sageuk airing this decade?

—Does nobody in Korea have a regular metal key? Even in older dramas everyone has electronic keypads and weird little fob things.

—I love those contract stamps people have with their names on them, but aren’t they incredibly easy to fake? They’re just purchased from a regular store, not government-issued or anything.

—Is there really still milk delivery in Korea, or is that a job invented for the sake of hardworking Kdrama girls? About the only thing I could have delivered at my house is the newspaper—there’s one pizza place that serves my area, but with a two-dollar per mile fuel charge, the delivery fee would be higher than the price of the pizza.

—SOLVED! Whenever someone gets food delivered in a Kdrama, it looks as if it arrives in plates that aren’t disposable. What the what? 

• [According to Eat Your Kimchi, you just leave the plates outside your door and the restaurant comes back to pick them up. That’s the life...as long as you’re not the delivery guy.]

—SOLVED! So. Circumcision in Korea—yes, no, maybe? (Wipe that shocked look off your face, dear reader. You should feel free to tell me you’ve never wondered, but be aware that I will feel free not to believe you.) 

• [Yes, maybe. The answer to this one comes from the unlikeliest of places—last week’s Dramafever podcast. Stranger things have happened, but most of them involve sightings of Elvis.]

I guess all this means that I’m the Kdrama-fan equivalent of that nosy person who sits next to you on an airplane, asks all sorts of inappropriate questions about your personal life, and then totally misinterprets your answers. Oh well.

Anyone else have other Kdrama imponderables, or more information about any of these things?