The Birth of Korean Cool by Euny Hong Read Free Book Online Page B

universe can never pay off this debt to them, not ever. (Koreans are not known for being forgiving.)
    Han
is never-ending. It is not ordinary vengeance. As Korean film director Park Chan-wook (
Oldboy, Stoker
) told me, “
Han
only occurs when you cannot achieve
proper vengeance, when your vengeance is not successful.” (It is worth mentioning, however, that Park emphatically denies that his movies are about
han
.)
    My mom describes
han
this way: “When sad things happen not by your own design but by fate, and over a long period of time.” I asked her to give me examples of
han
.
They were grim: “If a baby is abandoned by his parents and suffers throughout his childhood because there is no one to take care of him, then he feels
han
toward his parents. If a
woman gets married young and her husband abandons her for another woman and leaves the wife no money, and the wife has to live a life of strife, then she builds up
han
toward her husband
and herself. And finally, Koreans have
han
toward the Japanese.”
    But Koreans do not consider
han
to be a drawback. It’s not on the list of traits they want to change about themselves.
    The word
han
came up several times during the course of my interviews for this book. When I asked the co-creator of the popular Korean soap opera
Winter Sonata
, Kim Eun-hye,
why Korean dramas contained so much human misery, she said, “Well, you know, Koreans have a lot of
han
.” When I asked a top music executive why old Korean songs  were so
sad, he said, “Koreans have a lot of
han
.”
    It’s the opposite of karma. Karma can be worked off from life to life. With
han
, the suffering never lessens; rather, it accumulates and gets passed on. Imagine the story of Job,
except when God gives him a new family and new riches, he has to relive his suffering over and over again.
    One enduring example of the persistence of
han
is Korea’s emblematic song—not the national anthem, but the song that represents Korea more than any other: a folk song called
“Arirang.” It’s so old that no one really knows how old it is. It’s so universally Korean, in fact, that even North Koreans play it on their news broadcasts and consider it
a symbol of their nation, too. The gigantic mass spectacle North Korea hosts every year is called the Arirang Games.
    What is this song about? In verse one, a spurned lover says, “Ye who hast tossed me aside and left me, I hope you get a foot disease before you have traveled ten li.” (The subsequent
stanzas are more conventional love declarations.)
    That first stanza is spiteful and vengeful. And it speaks volumes that Koreans have used “Arirang” as their international ambassadorial song, without any discussion about changing
the lyrics. They don’t question whether it’s okay to air this kind of hostility in public.
    Han
reminds me of Carl Jung’s concept of racial memory—the idea that the collective experiences of a race are hereditary. Thus, the memories of our ancestors are encoded in
our DNA, or at least in our unconscious. The neuroses the current generation endures is because of the suffering of their ancestors.
    Han
doesn’t just mean that you hate people who have wronged you for generations. It also means that random people in your life can spark the flame of
han
. Someone who
cuts you off in traffic or disappoints you with his or her friendship can unleash the anger of generations. I have never seen so many roadside fistfights, or so many people permanently shunning
their friends, as in Korea.
    Some claim that one can die from
han
. The disease caused by
han
is called
hwa-byong
in Korean, which literally means “anger illness.”
Hwa-byong
is
an actual, medically recognized condition. It is listed as a “culturally specific disease” in Appendix 1 of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, fourth
edition (DSM-IV).
    What I found astonishing in the course of researching this book is that many Koreans ascribe