Here’s an audio documentary in two parts from CBC Radio’s Ideas, on being and becoming Canadian, and the experiences of one Korean family.

The first time I took the citizenship oath, back in 1979, I was 12 years old. My family had been in Canada for only a few years and we were living in Regina.

The ceremony was in a big beige building on Victoria Street. And everyone in the family was very nervous.

My mom made us get “dressed up” in our very best outfits. They were so uncomfortable that my sisters Yu-Kyung and Hi-Kyung, and my little brother Ung-So and I were all fidgeting.

My dad kept saying (over and over): “This is a Very Important Occasion. When we come home today we’ll be Canadian.”

I had no idea what he meant: would we stop eating rice? Stop using our Korean names? Stop being… Korean??? And when I looked around the room, things got even more confusing. Everyone was white, except for us. As far as I knew, white people were already Canadian. So what were they doing here?

The question of what it means to be Canadian is one I like to think most Canadians have gnawed at sometime in the past.

For a Korean living in Korea, one of the world’s more monolithic monocultures, the question of what it means to be Korean is pretty easily answered. For an immigrant to Canada, the questions of what it means to be Korean or Canadian, or both, becomes a lot more slippery.

I’ve lived in Korea for more than ten years, and though I am a permanent resident and may soon receive dual nationality, I am not in my mind or in the mind of any Koreans I know, anything but Canadian, and that won’t change even if I receive a passport.

Were the situation reversed, it becomes harder, for the Korean immigrant, of course. Though in the eyes of the law, and in the eyes of their fellow Canadians, once they have been granted citizenship, they are Canadian. But in their minds and hearts, the balance is lot more precarious — to what extent am I Canadian, and to what extent and in what ways Korean?

For most Koreans, the answers venture into things folks in the west, outside of America at least, feel a little uncomfortable talking about these days — bloodlines and ‘race’. We prefer to talk about ethnicity, or culture, or language, at least in part because it feels like history has left fewer examples washed up on the beach of organized murder and institutional hatred based on these.

I believe — the inevitable strains of racism and xenophobia aside — that Canada’s way (or at least ideal) of accepting and encouraging immigrants to become Canadian while retaining their own cultural identity has been the wisest way, and stands in stark contrast to the America’s ‘you come to American, you’re American now, son’.

But it doesn’t make for easy answers to hard questions.

On a community website where I spend a lot of time, someone asked recently for advice on how to deal with his noisy neighbours. He doesn’t live in Korea, but he thought that the couple next door was Korean, and that when they were shouting at each other in the wee hours, they weren’t shouting in English. He reasonably took this as an indication that some knowledge of their cultural background could come in handy if he girded his loins enough to talk to them about it. I responded:

Koreans are fighters, certainly, but no more than anyone else, I don’t think, and it’s not like it’s a cherished part of Korean culture or anything. What is a part of Korean culture is to ignore people who are outside your circle of personal friends/acquaintances/family. If someone’s not in your circle, they are an unperson, so a) their feelings are not considered b) you can be unembarrassed about airing your dirty laundry, in whatever form.

So if these folks are indeed Korean, making friendly overtures so that you impinge on their humanradar (depending on how old-skool Korean they are (ie if they hew fairly closely to the usual Korea-Korean norms, it’ll work)) might just make you a person to them, in which case they’ll be too ashamed to make all that noise.

Someone else suggested in no uncertain terms that they thought my suggestions were bigoted, which completely shocked me (and pretty much everyone else). After one of those interminable long arguments about what constitutes racism and what doesn’t, it seemed like my use of the word ‘unperson’ had triggered a strong response, which wasn’t intended. I should probably have used a word a little less emotive. Live and learn. In the course of that argument, which ended up involving a good hundred people, I offered the following mini-essay about some Korean Kultural Konstructs, and I thought I’d share it here.

So this is what I said. It was off the cuff, and I was angry, so I’ll apologize upfront for inaccuracies.

Go:

[Have a look at some background material], and then I’ll try to pull some threads together into a nice package:

Some of the forces at play in molding some of the ways in which some Koreans tend to perceive both themselves (that is, their own identities) and others with whom they interact (as well as Korean Identity as a whole) are the concepts of chemyeon (face, sort of), neunchi (sensitivity to social subtext), kibun (personal mood+life force), bunuiki (group mood), cheong (loving attachment to one’s immediate circle), and han (sorrow and rage angainst injustice). All of the translations I’ve offered are weak and inaccurate. For the most part, none of these words translate well (or at least pithily) into English: we know the feelings, perhaps, but they are very difficult indeed to discuss. I believe one of the strengths of Korean, and one of the reasons Korean folks can speak of cultural norms so easily, is that they have single words to describe them.

Each of these deals with the way one interacts with the group, or the way the group impinges on one’s identity and emotions. This is no accident. Koreans are brought up (this is changing, as all things are, but not as much as much else in the country) to understand their indentity within various overlapping circles, the first, of course, being strongly-connected family. Marriages are the binding of families, not individuals (many marriages in the past were arranged: some still are), for example. Extended families are still the norm. The elderly (less so, again, than in the past) are almost never put in retirement homes or the like. Brothers and sisters share a generational name (one syllable amongst the three syllables that constitute 95% of all Korean names). The list goes on. As I said here:

Relationship words are blanket nouns denoting relationships between people that are commonly used in informal conversation between people, rather than given names – older brother, younger sister, uncle, auntie, grandmother and so on. (In the slummy, thin-walled building I used to live in in Busan, it was de rigeur on Saturday nights to hear sounds of passion and female cries of ‘Opa! Oh, opa! (older brother)’ from the playboy-next-door’s apartment.) These extend to the common practice of referring to a woman as ‘so-and-so’s mother,’ rather than using her given name.

In a restaurant, on the street, wherever: one calls people (in Korean) ‘uncle’, or ‘auntie’ if they’re older, or ‘grandfather’ or ‘grandmother’, regardless of their relationship. There are a thousand variations.

This and more stands in contrast to the western tradition of identity being predicated on the individual, on him or her first, followed by context. In Korea, it’s context first. (It is amusing to me at least to note that when we say something like ‘hey buddy’ to someone we don’t know in English, it’s usually in an aggressive tone or situation.)

Another thread to this, and part of the reason this is so, is that Korea is the most Confucian country in the world. Confucian ideas are relevant here because (as I also wrote earlier)

Confucius focused on the need to maintain social order though willing or unwilling submission to the five primary relationships :

1. Ruler and subject
2. Parent and child (teacher and student)
3. Husband and wife
4. Older and younger person
5. Friend and friend

All of these relationships are explicity hierarchical, excepting, significantly perhaps, the last, although friendship of a Confucian bent is a considerably more meaningful proposition, it may be argued, than ‘buddies’ in North America might be.

Confucian beliefs permeate Korean society, for better and for worse (egregious sexism is a downside, for example). Regardless, here it is again one’s relationships that define who you are, and what you can and cannot do. Note (because it’s unfortunately necessary, it seems to say so) that these are generalizations about an entire nation, not a taxonomy of the beliefs of any given individual.

It might be said that Buddhist beliefs have some influence (honoring the god inside the other) here, and that may be the case, but Korea is about 45% Christian, and both Buddhism and Christianity are just veneers on the old animist beliefs, to an extent, anyway, so I won’t go there.

But when you put together the confucian primary relationships together with ideas like ‘cheong’ and ‘bunuiki’, and believe deep in your bones that proper, civilized behaviour means acting in accordance with these baked-in ideas, Korean people are left in a deep and difficult-to-resolve quandary: you can’t behave in accordance with these principles with everyone. It’s just not possible to treat the taxi driver and the garbageman, the kid behind the counter at the 7-11 or the guy in the next car at the stoplight as part of your primary relationship group (family, friends, coworkers, bosses, alumni).

So what happens? Well, if you’re not part of one of the groups that count, then you are more or less in my way. I’ll call you ‘uncle’ or ‘auntie’, but that’s as far as it goes. Not all Koreans are rude or unpleasant to everyone not in their circles, of course. This is not what I am saying.

But manifestations of this are everywhere, and it’s only in part hierarchy. People are (to a western eye) shockingly rude to waitresses (there are no male servers, for the most part), to clerks at shops. In their cars, they seem to ignore other drivers, and pedestrians. Neighbours, especially if you haven’t met them, effectively don’t exist. Regionalism has made an internecine battlefield of Korean politics. Park Chung Hee’s graduating class made up most of the government during his military rule, and the same thing happened when Chun Du Hwan took power, with his class, in 1979. Examples of both inside-group and outside-group thinking are everywhere.

That said, Koreans can be amongst the kindest and most welcoming of people, particularly to foreigners who are so far outside the inside-group that they need to be thought in entirely new ways — in other words, as individuals. And once a foreign person becomes part of a cheong relationship — with family, friends, coworkers, whatever — you’ll find it hard to find people as loyal.

Are people outside the circle ‘unpersons’, as I suggested? Well, I think so, even if [my accuser] understood the word to mean ‘sub-human’ (I did not). But it’s not a value judgement, it’s a coping mechanism. [My accuser] was overlaying his (reasonable) beliefs, based on his culture (I assume he’s not Korean), about ‘all men being equal’ to the situation, and gleaning a mistaken understanding that there was a boot on someone’s forehead if I was correct, or that I was racist for saying what I did, even though I did not intend my comment to be disapproving, merely explanatory.

So: in general (again, weasel words that are made necessary by the pointing finger of disapprobation) Koreans tend to immediately slot other Koreans into one of two buckets, and the second bucket is the large one. In that bucket is everybody who just doesn’t matter as much, and is treated in that way, because otherwise daily interactions would be untenably complicated, people whose identity, affiliations, family, status, educations and age are unknown, and who therefore can’t jump into the first bucket until some relationship is established. (This is, for example, why every book you read that talks about doing business with Koreans seems confused about why Korean businessmen insist on trying to establish some personal link, and may ask what seem like overly-personal questions. It’s not irrational or sentimental, it’s baked-in to the culture.)

I haven’t made a complete tour here (by any means), and it would take a full book to do justice to the topic, anyway, I think (one which I’ve often thought of writing), but hopefully someone found this useful or interesting.

Note that although most of what I say here is something you could read in any textbook, some of my conclusions and dotted-line drawings are my own.

Kibun (기분 — variously romanized, roughly pronounced ‘gee-boon’) has been translated into English as ‘mood’ or ‘state of mind’ or ‘feeling’, but these are pale concepts compared to the Korean one. In Korea, Kibun is regarded as much more important a matter than most westerners would regard mere mood. In another of those seeming contradictions of Korea, Koreans have a tendency to dwell, involute, on their more delicate feelings, despite their rough-and-ready, earthy exteriors. The degree to which they can focus on their emotional states can seem almost effete to a westerner, particularly one who, like me, grew up in a rough, tough northern town. Kibun is of overarching importance in social relations, is constantly discussed, and attempts are always made to ensure kibun is preserved.

Damage to your kibun is damage to your essence, and can have negative effects both mentally and physically.

It might be described as the part of you that goes beyond your physical presence, that not only permeates your being but surrounds you, invisibly, like a cloud. But it can be damaged, by unhappiness or disrespect, by losing face, by thoughtlessness or humiliation, by anything that’s disruptive to the harmony you feel with other people. Damage to your kibun is damage to your essence, and can have negative effects both mentally and physically.

the only way to regain face and salvage personal kibun is to blow up and stomp and yell. This happens a lot, too.

It is this consciousness of an inner life, one that is molded by the degree of harmony one achieves in one’s relationships with other people to whom one feels any degree of responsibility, that gives Koreans their almost preternatural ability to sense peoples’ mood, and their character, and modify their own behaviour to lubricate the social gears. That’s the nice part. The infuriating flip side of that, though, for many foreigners, is the tendency to dance elegantly away from any potential confrontation. An angry waeguk-in, until they understand what’s happening, is likely to become angrier when the Korean with whom they have a bone to pick says ‘Maybe’ when they mean ‘No’, or ‘tomorrow’ when they mean ‘never’, in order to try and re-establish harmonious dealings. The accompanying, ever-present potential too, is that when someone is pushed too far, and they lose face, in which case ‘social harmony’ can take a flying leap, and the only way to regain face and salvage personal kibun is to blow up and stomp and yell. This happens a lot, too.

In this consciousness of the relationships between people and its effect on your own wellbeing, rather than the ‘correctness’, ‘objective truth’, or self-interest of an individual or his arguments, there is a minefield of potential misunderstanding. Most foreigners to Korea trip through it over and over again, myself included, before they realize that putting the kibun of the people around you first, even in a situation of confrontation, will bring results.

(As an aside, this is what the Americans do not seem to understand, or care to, when they deal with North Korea. The patterns of seemingly-irrational behaviour on the part of the DPRK negotiators isn’t (always) irrational at all, from their own perspective.)

The importance of kibun for Korean people should never be underestimated. It’s not merely convention, it’s baked-in. Koreans can make crucial, important decisions based on kibun. Business decisions, choice of a mate, career and employment choices, all may be taken on the basis of what feels right, or what will result in the most socially harmonious outcome for all concerned. Koreans will discuss kibun, but rarely attempt to analyze it in this way. To do so would perhaps damage their kibun.

This is not to say that decisions, important or otherwise, are made strictly on a non-rational, intuitive basis. Things like love and marriage, about which westerners can be decidedly irrational, are approached with a combination of cold, rational analysis and intuitive leaps here, for example. It is another of the contradictions that make up so much of what it means to be Korean.

In future, look for more on this from me. Kibun is only one of the six controlling concepts of the Korean psyche : chemyeon, neunchi, kibun, bunuiki, jeong and han, and the interplay between these guiding forces is what makes Koreans so unique, and, at times, so difficult for the non-Korean to understand.

[originally published January 2002, revised and updated 2006]