50 Book Review
The Birth of Korean Cool By Euny Hong CULTURE & ARTS
Reviewed by Michael Attard
E
uny Hong is a journalist, graduate of Yale University, and author of three books. The Birth of Korean Cool, her second book, was published in 2014. She is Korean by race but was born in the United States in 1973. At the age of twelve, she moved to Seoul with her family. She states that Korea in 1985 was not cool. Note that throughout her book, Korea refers to South Korea.
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
March 2022
After reading the first few chapters, I was wondering where she was going. One chapter is about “school thrashings” (i.e., corporal punishment). This was interesting but I did not see what this had to do with the Korean Wave, or Korean cool. The chapter on, han, a purely Korean concept, did not enlighten me. This apparently is normal as, so I am told, only Koreans can understand the concept. Han arises from being wronged. Thus, “Koreans have han toward the Japanese.” Also, “Han is never-ending.” But Hong, quoting someone else, writes, “Han only occurs when you cannot achieve proper vengeance.” I was left pondering whether the Korean Wave was some kind of retribution. In a chapter on kimchi, Hong continues on a path of negativity, discussing the inferiority complex that many Koreans outside of Korea had because of “smelly” kimchi. But then, like a bird changing direction in mid-flight, kimchi was discovered as
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being healthy. Ah, there was a click in my brain. All of these not-so-cool things of the past, actually, were driving Korea, to become “cool.” I went back to the introduction and read it again. It is a quick history, from the poverty of post-war Korea to the modern day, where there are two Wi-Fi hotspots in every subway car. Hong’s message became clearer to me. The frantic pace of economic development, a total about-face from the normal modus operandi of the “Hermit Kingdom,” was actually a well-thoughtout government plan. The wiring of the entire country for internet was not because Korea was ready to be barraged by uncensored and possibly seditious material, but rather “what Korea was planning to send out to the world.” Korea had discovered the concept of soft power. But in 1997, the Asian Financial Crisis occurred. In Korea, this is referred to as “the IMF Crisis.” According to the author, Koreans felt shame. Years of effort to pull the country out of poverty ran into a wall. Something had to be done. President Kim Dae-jung came to the rescue. He called in a public relations firm and tasked it with convincing the world that Korea was “on course and open for business.” No longer, he hoped, would Samsung be known as “Samsuck.”
2022-02-23 �� 12:29:27
