Has Korea lost its soul?

Straits Times columnist Andy Ho’s article “Seoul cool to copy?” caught my eye just as I was leaving to school yesterday. And I couldn’t help but give it a quick read before I zipped out of the house. Ho seems to argue that culture of a country can be created and is not entirely reliant on the donkey-years of tradition or history that a country has. It’s an intriguing read – one that I’m quite sure some of our interviewees won’t agree. Tradition still seems to be that element that roots them back to Singapore, or at least Asia.

I wonder what will be the test of Ho’s argument?

For now, it seems that it is tradition that roots overseas Singaporeans back home. Not culture. Quite frankly, I don’t even know what culture is there is for Singapore to talk about. Five-foot ways, childhood memories, Cathay building, Char Kuay Teow: those are words that Returning Singaporeans bring up. I think that’s tradition, not some newly constructed culture.

Even if culture were to be constructed, surely it needs a starting point. Where does Singapore start? From Tomorrow or from tradition? Even Korea’s drama serials consist of its tradition – think Yi San – King Jeong Jo, The King and I, Da Jang Geum. What it seems to me is that Korea has created a very marketable culture, but surely it has not lost its tradition. I can’t really recall when was it we had a drama about our tradition. Price of Peace? But it’s a serial I remember the very clearly though. I loved it.

I do think we need a culture badly. But what sort needs to be more closely examined. Do we want a culture of coolness like Seoul, as Ho asserts? Or do we want something that roots us home? It is an important factor to consider, I think, to draw Singaporeans back. It builds a sense of, maybe not so much patriotism, but at least one of belonging. I wonder if Korea has lost its soul in trying to propagate this new funky culture it has? With its hundreds of years of history, I think people still embrace tradition. Singapore but only has 40 over years of nation building history, we’ve not even hit mid-life crisis yet, or have we?

Ho’s article can be found here.

CREATING A SINGAPORE WAVE

Seoul cool to copy?

Andy Ho

Even so, that is just food, a female colleague protested. Look how naturally romantic South Koreans are in their TV serials, which is far different from our humdrum selves.

But according to Dongguk University culturalist Kwon Boduerae, it was only around 1905 that the term for romantic love between a man and a woman – yeonae, the Korean pronunciation for lien ai in Chinese script – would even have appeared. It then needed more time to become socially valorised.

Of course, there were always romantic relationships, but these were seen as being harmful to social order: Whereas in (the Korean pronunciation of ren or benevolence in Chinese script) at the centre of Confucian order was something that could be generalised to others, passionate love was too narrow, too selfish. Thus, back then, even romance novels would moralise about its negative results. It would take a drama in three acts for yeonae to become cast in a positive light.

Act I was the introduction of a religion advocating love – Protestant Christianity. Its converts were seen to treat one another as brothers and sisters without class distinction, and Western nations were perceived to be strong and wealthy because, it was thought, they strove for the public good through their practice of Christian love and equality.

Thus, by the first decade of the 20th century, the idea of love had found public acceptance – but only as love for country, not romantic love.

Act II came in 1910 when Japan colonised the Korean peninsula, which would shatter the monarchy. Deprived of economic and political rights, the collective identity as gungmin, or citizen, became considerably attenuated. In its place, an alternative understanding of what it meant to be human began to emerge among the young.

People began to see themselves as psychological beings – individuals who made their own choices according to their own preferences rather than being faceless, replaceable units making up an unchangeable social structure that served some universal (Confucian) ideal.

Fortuitously, at this time, the works of a radically liberal Swedish feminist writer and suffragist, Ellen Key (1849 – 1926), were becoming well known. Act III came by way of her advanced ideas about love, marriage and the child-centred family which she propounded in her books: The Century Of The Child (1909); Love And Marriage (1911); The Woman Movement (1912); and The Younger Generation (1914).

Her ideas found fertile ground in the post-World War I turmoil for reception among Korean youth who latched on to and worshipped her. Arguing that love was the highest social principle, that people could only be happy through love, and only happy people made for a great nation, personal happiness was made coextensive with the public good.

It was through this logic that yeonae finally became socially acceptable. Thus the Koreans were not always the floridly romantic folk we now suppose them to be.

So if it is not about how long our history might be, we must ask how the marketing of Korean popular culture became such a success story. Yonsei University anthropologist Cho Hae Joang argued that it was fundamentally global capitalism – with its unprecedented mobility of capital, technology, ideas and images across borders – that prepared viewers in Asia to identify with South Korean stars so ardently.

Just as the United States has been promoting (the appurtenances of) capitalism through Hollywood movies since the mid-1950s, she said, the Korean culture industry is accomplishing the same thing in Asia today.

Presented as the icons of a modern and up-market lifestyle, the hunks of Korean drama are perceived to be uber-cool while their celluloid heroines redefine Asian femininity. And global capitalism has given rise to affluent, urban, middle-class youths in Asia, many of whom – no longer enamoured of Western trends – choose these Korean icons as culturally closer products that are somewhat more familiar.

In particular, a rapidly modernising post-Tiananmen China provided a huge and ready market. (For many in China, say, the Japanese alternative may be a non-starter given the country’s record of wartime atrocities in Asia, Prof Cho opined.)

While TV serials and movies are the medium by which Korean popular culture now circulates widely in Asia, many a culture commentator continues to trivialise their impact on people’s lives. Yet much research confirms that they lead many middle-class Asians (especially women) to engage in serious historical reflection, Prof Cho told me.

That is, watching television serials and movies is not the trivial pursuit of powerless folk. Rather, it represents the common consumption of popular culture that shapes the contours of public opinion in a pan-Asian community.

If so, Mr Schwartz’s proposal may have considerable merit. However, Prof Cho cautioned, young, energised entrepreneurs – like singer Stephanie Sun – empowered to market local pop culture across borders must take the lead, not governments.

But, of course, in the broader scope of things, this might only be a mere detail.