I call the two women pictured above my Seoul girlfriends. They work at the 24시 (twenty-four-hour restaurant) I eat at every day, and when I come in, they immediately start to giggle, flash me big thumbs up, and sing out “thank you, thank you” as the woman on the right escorts me to my table with a big smile.
I see them every time I come in because they are always there, the red-aproned woman in the kitchen doing whatever happens back there, the other out front, dashing about with steaming bowls of soup and smaller bowls of banchan, usually kimchi, buchu muchim (garlic chives), and yeongeun jorim (pickled lotus root and garlic).
I order the same meal almost every time — ulkeun gukbab (spicy soup) and Namdo Tteok-Galbi (braised short ribs) — and like a mother with a child, which I have no doubt they see me as, the waitress slowly cuts up my short ribs for me chanting “Thank you,” followed by a half-hour-long round of exaggerated thumbs-ups, smiles, and more thank yous, before I leave, when the waitress follows me out the door into the street, waving wildly, with her sing-song “thank you, thank you, thank you” eventually getting lost in the clamor of hundreds of drunk Koreans.
After fifteen trips to Seoul, scattered over five years, I'm not sure exactly what they make of me, the man child, but I've decided they call me "Mr. Thank You," a phrase I realized after a few visits, when they started saying it back to me proudly, with a practiced flamboyance, I did say a lot, which is why it’s now "our thing."
When someone asked me why, with so many options, I eat in the same diner every day, a rather run-down, no-frills place with a limited menu, I said, "Because I can't let my girlfriends down. If I don't show up they might think I've turned on them, moved onto something better, and I can't do that to them." Really though, I keep going back because while I genuinely love my meal (it is top-notch) I much more appreciate the connection, however cartoonish. When you live a transient life, human connections become even more important, even if they're wordless.
The name of the restaurant1 is “The Real Broth — Sillim Location” (더진국 신림점) and as the name says, it’s part of a chain, but there is little chain-y about it, because my girlfriends are always there, and so it feels more like I’m eating in their home, albeit one with twenty tables and a steady flow of single older men reading horse racing forms, sipping soju, college students who have clearly been out all night somehow drinking more, and then that odd man child waegukin (외국인), Mr. Thank You.
My eating every day at the same 24시 isn’t a Seoul thing. I usually become a regular at some restaurant in every city I spend more than a few days in. While I go into a new town with a general outline of what I want to do, I don’t go in with an overly structured agenda. That’s especially true when it comes to eating out. Rather than getting anxious about making sure I find the absolutely best restaurants, I choose where to eat by a place’s friendliness as much as anything.
I do sample a handful of establishments, most chosen entirely randomly, but within several days I have a few that work for me, that I go back to over and over, to the point where I’m recognized, or at least known as Mr. Thank You. There are always better options I’m sure I’m missing out on, with finer cuisine2, but I’ve learned not to care. I like my places, because I like relaxing, watching the community in them, and most of all the moments of human connection, like with my girlfriends.
That’s one of my biggest travel tips — don’t stress too much about trying to maximize your experience. Give yourself room to let things develop naturally, and don’t feel you’re missing out if you fall into a rut. If you really like a restaurant, bar, or cafe, then go back!
When I look back on past trips, what I remember most are those moments that happened serendipitously3, and you can maximize serendipity — primarily by walking a lot, with a healthy curiosity4, which allows you to experience a city on all levels.
Last week I asked a friend, fellow Substacker, and author, Colin Marshall, to join me for my last meal at The Real Broth, because after ten years in Seoul, he’s so fluent in Korean he writes books in it, and I wanted to know more about my girlfriends, and give them a chance to find out more about Mr. Thank You.
I also asked Colin because I really like him, and almost everything I love about Seoul — LP bars, army base stew (Budae jjigae), Hoff bars, and 24시 (although not this one) — he introduced me to. I’ve been guided over the last five years in my Seoul explorations by Colin and I’ve been remiss for not giving him more props prior to this.
So below is a conversation with him, via email, that I hope helps bring more insight into Korea and gives him a wider audience, and I will also let him tell you a little about what we learned about my girlfriends, although I’ll beat him to the punch and say I like them even more now, because they are as sweet and warm as I’d thought, and really do work every day of the year, from ten to ten, with the exception of two national holidays. You can’t fake being gracious every waking hour of the year, unless you’re a psychopath.
Me: First, thank you for doing this. Hopefully we can capture some of the energy of our in-person conversations. I’ll start with, tell me about my girlfriends! I got a lot out of our conversations with them, but since it all came via your translation, I’ll let you describe it.
Colin: They’re two pleasant ladies, energetic if not in the first bloom of youth. According to the standard taxonomy of Korean social types, they’d fall somewhere in the much-disputed borderlands between the middle-aged ajumma5 and the grandmotherly halmeoni. Just as you call them your “girlfriends,” one of them told me that everyone there also refers to you as her “boyfriend.” She used that exact word, incidentally, despite not having the habit, common in her generation, of peppering her conversation with English expressions at bewildering random6. Though demanding, as she tells it, the restaurant has its perks, not least the daily chance it provides her to interact with her dangol sonnim, or regulars, a category in which she included you.
The other lady was once able to take at least enough of a break from that rigorous work schedule to travel to the U.S. for her niece’s college graduation7 and the full Manhattan tourist experience, Statue of Liberty and all. She showed us photos from the trip on her phone, a moment I imagined being incorporated straight into your ongoing meditation on the rest of the world’s enthusiasm for America — even though you then had me tell her that you think Seoul is better than New York, not that she disagreed.
Though I don’t necessarily put much stock in them myself, there are three emotions supposedly unique to Koreans often invoked in discussions of their culture. The idea that there exist uniquely Korean emotions at all is probably more relevant than the specifics of those emotions, but they are, in any case, as follows: han, the deep-seated and implacable personal sorrow inflicted by historical injustice; heung, the capacity to erupt into spontaneous demonstrations of collective joy (which I recently overheard someone in a coffee shop ascribe to my infant son); and jeong, the sense of affection and generosity, not without its obligations, that comes with interpersonal bonds that form through shared experiences over time.
It’s tempting to call the relationship that has developed between you and your “girlfriends” a textbook example of jeong, which I suspect actually benefits from difficulties like the language barrier or the months-long gaps between your Seoul sojourns. Hence the drinks and snacks we got for free — or rather, as seobiseu, a Konglish adaptation of the word service that refers to items provided on the house, usually to dangol sonnim. Such are the perks of your preferred form of travel, with its repeat visits to not just the same neighborhoods but the same businesses over a period of days, weeks, months, even years.
I do wonder if you can develop jeong with places as well as people. Years ago, I interviewed the novelist Lawrence Osborne about Bangkok Days, his nonfiction book on the city where he now lives8. We got to talking about the kind of relationship you get into with a city when you spend time there and time away over a period of decades, which he described as “almost like a love affair or a friendship.”
If you think about the way in which you get to know a human being in all their complexity, it’s something that happens over many, many years. You don’t meet somebody in one period of time and decide that they’re a friend or a lover. You do in some ways, but what you really do is drop in over and over again, you get to know that person over a very, very long period of time. And when that happens — ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years — the accumulation of those visits, the accumulation of that time spent, produces in you complex feelings.
At the time, I’d barely been anywhere, but I understood the truth of what he was saying on a basic enough level that it’s never left my mind. Now that I’ve been out in the world long enough to experience it for myself, I’m fully sold on traveling for depth in a few places rather than breadth in as many as possible. Not for me the twenty-countries-in-twelve-days Eurail trip, much less the “bucket list” attempt to set foot in every county in the world.
Me: Thank you so much, and what I loved so much about finally “hearing them”, was realizing we both appreciated each other for the same reason — I come in because they are always so happy and friendly, and then them saying that is why they like seeing me!
I love the concept of jeong so much I should just start telling people I am walking the world seeking jeong! You certainly have gone with depth over breadth. You’ve lived in Korea for over a decade and are so fluent you write books in Korean!
At this point you have been at the center of “English writers writing about Korea” for over a decade now, as someone who does that (in English and Korean) and as someone who knows almost all the works of others in the genre — what do they get right, and more importantly, what do you think they get wrong? I would include myself in that category, so feel free to push back on my own pieces!
Colin: Korea is definitely “having a moment.” Or rather, it’s been having a moment in Asia for a couple of decades now, which in recent years has made it to the West. Unlike the equivalent periods for Japan or China, however, it hasn’t produced a huge amount of inspired explanatory writing in English. To Westerners coming here for the first time, I often recommend Daniel Tudor’s Korea: The Impossible Country and Michael Breen’s The New Koreans, both of which were published in the twenty-tens.
As well as those books hold up, it’s still surprising that no new challengers have appeared since. Search Amazon for the latest books about Korea, and apart from the academic readers, you get a mixture of travel guides, cookbooks, puerile-looking romance novels, and rudimentary language primers. Most seem pretty low-budget, and increasingly many have the look of AI slop; the overall impression is of attempts to cash in on a trend before it runs its course.
Online writing about Korea, judging by what I’ve read, tends toward extremes: on one end the touristic, covering the same places and themes over and over again without attempt at insight, and on the other the obscurantist, honing in on historical or cultural details of presumably scant interest even to a specialist. (I here leave aside the political tracts inspired by North-South relations.)
Part of the problem is that so few writers inclined to address a general readership in English can speak or read the Korean language with any proficiency. When I first came to Korea, I’d been studying it on my own for years, assuming that every foreigner with significant time here would be decently proficient. That assumption turned out to be incorrect, as evidenced by the many Westerners who’ve lived here for five, ten, twenty years with nothing more than survival Korean to show for it.
In part, that reflects how many come not out of interest in the country, but to do some particular job, teaching English being the classic example. But it also holds true, if not without exception, even for the foreign press (apart from most Korean diaspora members, who in any case come with complications of their own). I often wonder what readers of Korea coverage abroad would think if they knew how many of the reporters are illiterate.
Not that the entire problem comes down to a lack of Korean-speaking Westerners. Nor, forcefully though I recommend it, do you need to know Korean to write anything interesting about this country. A literary translation, from Korean or any other language, stands or falls not on its faithfulness to the original text, but on the translator’s own writing skill.
To write about a place, by the same token, depends almost entirely on facility with not the local language, but the one you’re writing in. If you parachuted, say, Emmanuel Carrère into Seoul for a few weeks, he’d write something not only more compelling than what Korea experts usually come up with, but also more illuminating. At issue, not to put too fine a point on it, is the caliber of foreign writers this country attracts9.
All this strikes me as downstream from the reality that, unlike China or Japan, Korea hasn’t traditionally captured the Western imagination. Korean film seems to have had its time in the sun, but considerable interest remains, of course, in the “Korean wave” of pop-cultural artifacts like idol-group music and Netflix dramas. Whether a writer motivated by that interest follows such threads to the nature of Korean civilization itself is another matter.
In my experience, even the phrase “Korean civilization” has a slightly contentious ring; editors sometimes question my own use of it in English, as if Korea wasn’t distinct enough from the other countries of northeast Asia, or indeed from the West, to merit the label. In Korean, I tend to emphasize that most English writing on Korea doesn’t go very deep, in that it perpetually circles around the same few subjects: the North, the conglomerates, suicide, the birth rate, educational and professional pressure, BTS, and so on. While those do all exist, of course, there’s much more to Korea, albeit little of it easily perceptible absent a genuine fascination with the place.
Me: Two things strike me from reading this, and from prior conversations with you — both having to do with the idea that “Korean civilization has a contentious ring to it” and then the last line, “there’s much more to Korea.” I’ve adopted Seoul as my Asian home, and everyone finds that odd when Japan is right there, as if Korea is their lesser child, without a distinct civilization worth understanding on its own. I feel I have to explain myself, and when I do, I say something like, “It is less uptight,” which is my summary of “there’s more to Korea.”
You’ve mentioned that Koreans themselves have something of an inferiority complex, and a lot of recent history can be seen, perhaps simplistically, as being driven by a desire to step out of the Japanese shadow.
Is that true? And then I would love to explore those “more things” that make Korea Korea — to me first, and then to you. I like it as much, if not more than Japan, because of unique, almost Japanese but very different, day-to-day cultural things such as the Hoff bars, LP bars, army base stew, and 24시 (twenty-four-hour restaurants serving comfort food), all of which you have introduced me to.
Can you tell us a little about each of them, what makes them uniquely Korean and why, and then some other things about Korea you yourself are fond of that most people miss?
Colin: The English writer Clive Leatherdale traveled around Korea in the mid-nineteen-eighties, a time when he could ask around beforehand and get only the idea that the country might be a “lackluster Japan.” That phrase has always stuck with me, not least because I suspect that more than a few Westerners making their big Asia trip still come away with the same impression, though probably colored by an appreciation for a distinctive but hard-to-explain streak of vitality unique to this society.
Koreans have long been stereotyped as country cousins of the Japanese, and often unfairly, though as an American academic with extensive life experience in both places once explained it to me, the Japanese have had much longer to adapt to urban life. The Koreans, by contrast, remain in many ways a “rural people” even in an outwardly ultra-urban city like modern Seoul. I like to ask other foreigners who’ve lived here decades longer than me what they miss about the Korea in which they first arrived, and they often mention vanished qualities like the casualness and generally extended trust characteristic of village life.
I traveled to Japan with some frequency in my early years here. At first, I figured I’d concentrate on the differences between the two countries, but over time, I started to wonder whether they had anything in common after all. Upstream from a lot of what I noticed is, to my mind, the nature of their relationship with the wider world. Despite an apparent willingness to re-invent itself in subordination to the dominant power, its full integration with the global economy, and more visibly, its comically flamboyant enthusiasm for imported culture, Japan is still seen as the rare non-Western country that retained its own essence.
Pico Iyer, a friend and longtime Japan resident who helped give me my introduction to that country, put it well when he described it as “a froth of shifting surfaces and flashing images projected on an old, strangely shaped piece of wood that never moves.”
Korea, for its part, has long practiced aggressive, at times seemingly indiscriminate assimilation of the influence of foreign powers as survival strategy, to the point of occluding the nature of Koreanness to Koreans themselves. When giving talks here, I sometimes ask that, if we can tell when a car looks Italian, or German, or even Japanese, how come — despite the increasingly world-beating success of this country’s automobile industry — we have no sense of how a car could look Korean?
I once read a book by a Korean professor who asks his reader to imagine taking a vacation in a small African country, and as the plane lands, looking out the window on the approach to its capital and seeing only traditional Korean buildings. Then, in the taxi from the airport, the radio is playing a song by Cho Yong-pil, who, the taxi driver says in enthusiastically broken Korean, once came and played a concert there. That would be weird, wouldn’t it? So why isn’t it weird that Korea has done pretty much the same thing, but in relation to the West in general and the U.S. in particular?
Unlike you, I haven’t been to Mongolia, but from what I’ve heard, Ulaanbaatar is actually starting to become a bit like that hypothetical African country, with more and more Korean restaurants, Korean coffee shops, Korean convenience stores, and yes, even Korean-speaking taxi drivers. It would be worth experiencing it myself to get more material for a pet theory I have about the emergence of a new cultural-economic Korean Empire in Asia, contradict though it would Korea’s official self-image as always the invaded, never the invader.
What travel I can manage these days still tends to take me to Japan. Every time my plane lands in Osaka, Sapporo, or wherever it may be, I think, “Boy, it’s good to be in Japan.” Then, whenever I get back to Seoul, I think, “Boy, it’s good to be in Korea.” Going from Korea heightens my appreciation for Japan’s qualities like the feeling of cultural self-containment and the much-admired concern with aesthetics, which, even if somewhat oversold, becomes something to savor when you live in a country where the photos in restaurant menus are in the wrong aspect ratio half the time.
Coming from Japan heightens my appreciation for Korea’s qualities like broadly being “less uptight,” as you put it, which permits a certain rustic flair, as well as what it makes me cringe slightly to call its dynamism. Koreans used to ask me all the time how often I planned on staying here, a question I notice nobody ever asks new arrivals in America. On the rare occasion they do nowadays, I tell them that, even apart from now having a wife and family here, I can’t resist sticking around to see what dramatic change or other — social, cultural, technological, economic, linguistic, culinary — will come down the pike next, for better or for worse.
I’d hesitate to frame the notion of Koreans having an inferiority complex as my own. The first person to put it that way to me was a Korean friend, a fairly prominent economist, though I’ve heard it echoed by others since. Early in the pandemic, I published a piece about Korea’s being a more developed country in some ways than the U.S., a truth Koreans struck me as being strangely unwilling or unable to accept. A Korean reader e-mailed me in response, eloquently laying out his theory that, however impressive the country’s achievements, Koreans have trouble considering them their own. He saw the roots of that condition going at least as far back as Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule, which Koreans know deep down, yet cannot acknowledge, did not come about as a result of their people’s own efforts. “Our thinking and way of life were borrowed,” Michael Breen quotes a Korean official as saying in The New Koreans. “Most majors we study were not created by us. Nor are the sports we play, the music we listen to, the movies we watch, or even the food we eat. Most specialists and experts study abroad. In their minds, the ideal destination is not here. They always refer to some other place, like the United States, where things are done better.”
Cultivated in part out of fear of being seen as parochial “frogs in a well,” as the local saying has it, this grinding fixation on the outside world seems unhealthy to me, and I always take pleasure in its relative absence in Japan. Still, there’s also something undeniably fascinating about the unlikely forms into which imported pieces of foreign culture cohere in the context of modern Korea.
You’ve named a few of them in your question. Hof bars emerged in the nineteen-seventies and eighties as a kind of adaptation of Western beer culture to Korean social forms: their décor tends toward Western-inflected kitsch (not that I’d have it any other way), and their clientele includes a lot of office-worker or college-student groups there to drink — never done in Korea without something to eat — until late into the night.
LP bars, usually presided over by one ajeossi (that is, an unrepentantly middle-aged man) and soundtracked by the selections he pulls out of his vast record collection behind the counter, descend from another institution of that same era, the eumak dabang or “music café.” There, young people could go to drink cups of intensely sweetened instant coffee while listening to the house DJ spin the latest foreign hits.
And “Army base stew,” called budae jjigae in Korean, got its name from its ingredients: not just Korean tofu and kimchi but also baked beans, Spam, hot dogs, and slices of American cheese, all of which could be illegally acquired by those with the right connections to a U.S. military PX in the aftermath of the Korean War. Like so much in Korea, it combines things you’d think would never go together, but in practice somehow do.
Seoul’s reputation as a 24-hour city does feel overstated to me, which could owe to its nightlife never having quite recovered from the pandemic, to the character of the neighborhoods in which I now spend my time, or just to how accustomed I’ve grown, after a decade here, to the idea that you should be able to get a decent meal somewhere in the middle of the night.
Even though I don’t have much occasion these days to get a meal of any kind in the middle of the night, I do appreciate the specialization of eateries in Korea, 24-hour or otherwise. Here, you don’t so much go to a particular restaurant as you go to eat a particular dish: a budae jjigae joint, for example, will serve several varieties of budae jjigae and not much else. This is as it should be, which I remember whenever I’m confronted once again with another punishingly extensive menu back in America. Increasingly, I just want to say, “You know which dish you do best. Just give us that, and bring enough for the whole table.” The custom of everybody in a group eating the same food, often from large shared dishes, is something else that soon came to feel obviously correct. Each person choosing their own individual dish (and worse, requesting their own individual customizations) drains the meal of meaning; you might as well not be eating together at all.
You don’t necessarily have to come here to enjoy some of these things, as long as you’ve got a robust enough Korean neighborhood within reach. Before moving to Seoul, I myself lived in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, in whose restaurants and cafés I spent years practicing the Korean language — and where my ability to place an order long preceded my ability to understand anything said to me in response.
Koreans today exhibit a great fervor for international travel, but they often say that they can’t go too long abroad without kimchi. For my part, when I’m outside Korea, it surprises me how much I miss conducting everyday business in Korean. That feeling bolsters my long-held suspicion that languages aren’t equivalent to one another; just as a translation of a novel is by definition not the same work as the original, life lived in one language has a different character from life lived in another.
When staying in foreign cities, I tend not just to eat at their Korean restaurants, but also to spend time writing at whatever Korean coffee shops they may have, during which I sometimes forget that I’m abroad at all. No matter where in the world you go, I’ve found, if everyone around you is Korean, you’re in Korea.
Me: There is a lot of insight in there, but for brevity I would like to focus on the idea of Koreans as still being a rural society. I think that’s very true, and while it might sound absurd given that forty percent or so of the country lives in Seoul, a sprawling dense megalopolis, but as I’ve found, it’s really a patchwork of small communities. Every big city is, but Seoul more so than most. I think that’s what I like about it so much. On my last day here we had lunch in my regular 24시 and I was finally able to “talk” to the two women who run it, who I feel I’ve become close to despite the language barrier.
What I realize I like about it so much is that it does feel like I’m in a small town diner, despite being in the middle of Silim, surrounded by hundreds of other restaurants, and lots of partying drunks at all hours of the day. From the outside there’s absolutely no indication the inside would be warm, welcoming, and intimate, but that’s what it is, as are all the establishments lining the street.
During our conversation with them, they both mentioned they work twelve-hour days, every day of the year (except two holidays) and when pressed, neither had a problem with that, because they like being there — they get to spend the time talking to regulars. I think a lot of people who look at that from the outside find it depressing, or see it as playing into the stereotype that Koreans work too hard without a social life, but that’s almost backwards. The work is their social life, and it’s a fulfilling one!
OK, that wasn’t so much a question as me going off, so I’ll leave you with two direct questions.
You just became a father of two. Congratulations! So let’s finally address what everyone wants to talk about with Korea, which is the falling birth rates. As a recent father of twins, how has that changed your perception of Korea, if at all?
Second, your car analogy is striking — we can recognize an Italian or German or Japanese car aesthetically, but not a Korean one. Do you think that’s changing, and if so, what would a distinctly Korean aesthetic actually look like? Would it be the subject of your latest book, Newtro?
Colin: You really can’t talk about Korean life without talking about work, which puts outsiders at something of a disadvantage. Or at least it puts at a disadvantage outsiders who don’t have a conventional job or business.
I, for example, came as a freelance writer and broadcaster, which I’ve remained in the ten years since, but that hasn’t stopped me from noticing certain telling phenomena. For example, when people who live in Korea — Koreans and foreigners alike — say they hate it here, what they’re usually saying is that they hate their job, but they express it through anger at the entire society.
I don’t know about you, but none of the many people complaining about their work whom I’ve met in the U.S. go on to declare that they hate the U.S. There, the latter doesn’t logically follow from the former; here, it seems more natural to see work, among other things, as a direct reflection or extension of the national culture.
One widely known manifestation of that are hoesik, more or less regular, all-but-mandatory alcohol-soaked after-work dinners with your boss and co-workers. People claim to resent having to go to them, and they probably do feel like yet another form of uncompensated overtime, but on occasion, when I notice a big table of office types getting loud at a local pub or restaurant, I feel a passing but distinct longing to join in.
I’ll certainly watch with fascination as our twins, now eight months old, find their own places in Korean society. Back in the U.S., raising a family somehow never felt like a realistic proposition, but it became more appealing in Korea. One reason among many was the chance it would give me to understand aspects of this country that I never could in isolation. Though I do plan to naturalize, I won’t consider my getting Korean citizenship “becoming Korean” in any but a technical sense, nor would I want to10.
Besides, as we mentioned earlier, few countries change quite as rapidly, or suddenly, as this one does. Its much-discussed birth rate still languishes toward the bottom of the global list — despite, I should note, a gradual rise over the past year — but as you’ve speculated during our conversations in Seoul, if any country can turn that situation around, it’s Korea.
That’s clear in the force with which trends take hold here, sometimes permanently: you yourself saw the way Koreans switched en masse from drinking tea to drinking coffee in the nineties; an even more dramatic example, in its way, is how practically the entire population has moved into apartments since the late nineteen-sixties.
I would hardly call this tendency of Korean society to move practically as one during times of change an unalloyed good, and in fact, I’m sure it’s played a part in the ongoing diminution of some of the desirable qualities we’ve been discussing. It actually gives the country something of a canary-in-the-coal-mine quality, which is what we saw with the birth-rate collapse: when Koreans got the technologies that enabled, and even incentivized substituting distraction for reproduction, they took it farther than most everyone else.
By the same token, an uncritical positivity about and consequently undiscriminating use of artificial intelligence, as we Americans might see it, has lately become unavoidable here. I recently saw a statistic that Koreans watch the most AI-generated video content — slop, in a word — of any population in the world, and I believe it; part of me expects to wake up surrounded by 50 million people in mass AI psychosis any day now.
My latest book, Korean Newtro: Where Youth Meets Tradition, opens with a consideration of the word chonseureopda, which, like many difficult-to-translate terms, reveals something about the culture that produced it. Ask English-speaking Koreans what it means, and their replies will range from “outdated” to “tacky” to “old-fashioned” to “provincial,” but it breaks down literally to “village-like.”
People use it to refer dismissively to anything visibly associated with Korea as it used to be, a place they remember as embarrassingly out of step with the “advanced countries” of the world: one that, to cite a trivial example that pops into my mind, topped birthday cakes with halved cherry tomatoes. There are Koreans who would apply the word to the very hofs, LP bars, and all-night eateries we enjoy, to say nothing of the pre-Starbucks dabang cafés I frequent.
To put it more bluntly, chonseureopda has been applied to many things for their being too identifiably Korean; in a newly export-oriented economy and obsessively outward-looking culture, a “distinctly Korean aesthetic” was a liability. (Think back to how few pains companies like Samsung and Kia once took to correct the widespread assumption in the U.S. that their products were Japanese.) But now a generation or two has come of age here without experience of their country’s more haltingly and awkwardly globalizing phase, and they can look back on its artifacts with cringe-free appreciation.
Newtro, a design and marketing trend first identified by a Popcorn Report-type annual publication in 2019, tends to be distinguished from retro in its promiscuous revival of not one but many mixed-and-matched eras, from centuries and centuries ago up to the two-thousands, and its appeal to not the nostalgia of older consumers but the curiosity of younger ones.
Despite being at the older end of what Koreans call the “MZ” generation (a single cohort consisting of everyone born between 1980 and 2000), I enjoy newtro in a similar way to how a college student here would. Never having been to the Korea of thirty, forty, fifty years ago, I can surround myself with the aesthetics of those days without their triggering memories, personal or inherited, of the hard times that came with living under a military dictatorship and a grueling modernization process.
In a way, my fascination with “old Korea” began in high school. Growing up in one suburb of Seattle, I’d sometimes go over to another where many Koreans happened to live, and which thus had a decent selection of Korean restaurants, mostly in strip malls. Despite having no idea what any of the dishes were called, I enjoyed the flavors of the meals there, which had little in common with the Japanese or Chinese dishes I knew, at least in their American re-interpretations.
The language being spoken at all the other tables (even in those days, non-Korean customers were uncommon at these places), of which I understood not a word, sounded completely different from Japanese or Chinese, at least as I’d heard them in movies. Nor did the décor appear to have anything in common with Japanese or Chinese interiors, or at least with the images of them I’d pieced together in my mind.
What sticks with me most vividly, somehow, is taking home from one of these suburban restaurants a calendar with pictures of what I didn’t then know were called dakjongi inhyeong, a kind of handmade figurine made with traditional mulberry paper. Usually shaped of large-headed children and old-timers engaged in rural pratfalls, they’re about as folksy as folk art gets: to some, the very definition of cheonseureoum (to use the word in its nominal form). To me — far from the most worldly adolescent, as you may have gathered — they had a highly distinctive, strangely appealing look and feel that held out the promise of a civilization different from those of not just Japan or China, but also every other country of which I’d heard.
Ever since, you could say, I’ve been curious about just how different Korea is, and why. These 25 years later, I’m not yet an expert on the country, but then, I’ve never tried to become one; in fact, I seized the opportunity to declare my non-expertise up front in the introduction to my first book, 한국 요약 금지 (”No Summarizing Korea”), describing myself instead with a Koreanization of the word connoisseur. By that I mean that what accumulation of Korea-related knowledge and understanding I can manage primarily serves not a theory, and certainly not my status in the academy — which I doubt would have me in the first place — but to enrich my own experience of the place.
Even though Korean-wave pop culture (if sometimes of dubious Koreanness these days) has stoked an unprecedented level of foreign interest in this country, you don’t have to look far before you find stories of young people who come with stars put in their eyes by boy bands, girl groups, and TV dramas, then burn out within a year or two. Often, they simply had outlandish notions about the willingness and ability of Korean society to accommodate foreigners.
But they also tend to make complaints like, “You can ride the Seoul subway for an hour and a half and the neighborhood where you get out looks just like the one where you got on.” On some level they have a point, but then again, if you have trouble reading half the signs on the buildings, sensing the finer distinctions between neighborhoods is a hopeless task. As a saying that became trendy here not too long ago has it, you see as much as you know. Much like mastering a language, learning to see a place fully can take a lifetime.
Me: Thank you for all of that, and thank you for showing me over the last five years the Seoul I would have never seen without you. I want to end with one last question. Single word answers only. What is your favorite Korean novel, film, dish.
Colin: Thanks for the opportunity to work out some of these thoughts on Korea — here, and in the long conversation we pick up in the hofs and LP bars of Seoul. After giving the matter some serious thought, here’s how those three picks stand at the moment:
Korean novel: 칼의 노래 (The Song of the Sword) by Kim Hoon
Korean film: Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010)
Korean dish: nakji bokkeum (stir-fried octopus)
Where you can find more from Colin.
His first book, 한국 요약 금지
His second book, Korean Newtro
PS: I leave for Denver Saturday, where I’ll be for a few days before hopping on a bus and heading back towards NYC, slowly, via Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, etc.
No exact schedule other than North Platte first, then Omaha, and whatever other cities I end up in when I need a break from the vibrant Greyhound aesthetic.
1640-1 Sillim-dong, Gwanak-gu, Seoul
That’s especially true in Seoul, which like a lot of Asia, has a ton of restaurants, often up to fifty on a single block, many that specialize in one or two dishes, and so no matter how hard you work at it, no matter how much research you do, you will always end up feeling you missed out on something.
It’s the old man bar that I remember most about Istanbul. That and the cats.
Many of the places I go into might initially look intimidating, because I am attracted to those that don’t cater to foreigners. There might be initial moments of awkwardness, but one of the luxuries afforded to clear outsiders (foreigners in this case) is an expectation that you will be awkward, and I’ve found that almost always means people bend over to help you, sometimes too much!
Chris: The ajumma is now a cartoonish stereotype, that has spawned a lot of discourse!
Colin adds: I notice that younger people, despite generally being more proficient at English, don’t do that; when they speak Korean, they stick to Korean.
Rutgers.
Colin adds: As the author of a Substack entirely about books on cities, I give it my unqualified endorsement.
Colin adds: If you go back to the period just after the Seoul Olympics, you can find books like Michael Stephens’ Lost in Seoul and Clive Leatherdale’s To Dream of Pigs — both obscurities now, but well worth reading if you can find them — or about a century before that, the travelogues of Isabella Bird Bishop and Percival Lowell. Nowadays, what few first-person examinations of Korea come out seldom get much traction.
Colin adds: Leaving aside the matter of ethnicity, someone who hasn’t gone through childhood, education, and (if male) military service here won’t be regarded as culturally Korean. It was important to me that my wife and I be on the same page about whether our children would do all that, and indeed everything else to ensure their acceptance as Koreans to the greatest possible extent. Even before she and I first met, among the common expatriate pitfalls I promised myself I’d avoid was that of the Western man who marries a Korean woman and is strong-armed by her into moving back to the West years later because “we can’t send the kids to school here.” Which isn’t to say that we’ll never spend time anywhere else, and certainly not to praise Korean educational culture — but on balance, I’ll take it.
I feel like I’ve been on a trip!
How did you manage not to call your girlfriends Seoul Mates?‽!!
What a wonderful warm lovely piece. I love stories about being accepted in Korea. I hear so much hate for halfies and gyopo. I wonder if it's that bad. No. Don't tell me. I'd rather not know.