I will never visit authentic Korea

A few months ago I went on a vacation to Korea and Taiwan, mainly staying around Seoul and Taipei. I have a lot of thoughts, and will be recording them in a few different blog posts. This one is the first.

As I left, flying roughly 16 hours back to JFK, I realized that although I visited Korea, I didn’t visit *authentic* Korea. Rather, authentic Korea isn’t a real thing and never could be.

K-Town

As a New Yorker, my understanding of Korea could easily be influenced by K-Town, a Korean-themed ethnic neighborhood in midtown Manhattan.

Calling it “Korean-themed” is a critical phrase. There are Korean restaurants, and Korean attractions like karaoke. But it’s not truly Korea. It’s sort of like a theme park, like visiting one of the countries at Epcot. It vaguely resembles Korea. It might even be a good representation. But can it be authentic?

Who are the people who live in midtown Manhattan? For one, an apartment today has a rent upwards of $4000/month. I imagine many residents benefit from rent control tied to when they first signed a lease. Korean residents may have found a place a decade ago, or several decades ago.

Who are the people who visit these businesses? Mostly they’re New Yorkers. We eat their food and sing at their karaoke bars. But does that mean the businesses are authentically Korean, or are they changing some of what they are in order to fit the desires and expectations of New York consumers?

If a Korean person immigrated a decade ago, how much do they know about Korea today? The country’s GDP has grown roughly tripled since 1994. Going from a poor to middle-income country is a big change. Even if they were born there, the country they came from has changed in large ways.

I’ve gone to restaurants in K-Town many times because the food is really good. The food they make is probably a reflection of the food they ate growing up. Fried chicken was common because Korea was a poor country and chicken was cheap. How much of their cuisine was intentional versus a product of their socioeconomic conditions?

The fried chicken I got in Korea was better than the kind I get in K-Town. It came with a rich creamy drizzle and biting onions. The restaurant was in the center of Seoul, a place with an upscale vibe. It’s a fancier take on classic Korean cuisine that was probably unavailable to the Koreans who immigrated to the US decades ago.

Makgeolli

I visited a rice brewery. Koreans have a fermented rice drink called makgeolli. It was common for generations as something farmers brewed at home. Under the Japanese occupation, homebrewing was banned.

In the post-occupation period, it was still banned in part due to rice shortages. So makgeolli was made from wheat and corn. Fermenting rice was something made illegally and sold on the black market. It was a cheap beverage. I had a chance to try a classic blend at the brewery and it was bad. It was tasteless and chalky.

Since the 1990s, the ban was lifted and today there’s a resurgence of breweries that can make it including the one I visited. I had a chance to try a modern blend and it’s quite good. It’s like sake, but sweet and not as strong. I’m definitely eager to find a vendor in New York.

What’s authentic here? Is it the original homebrew? Those recipes have largely disappeared after decades of oppression. What Koreans view as “classic” was the brew forced to change not through culture but politics and resource constraints.

The “modern” brew is produced with automation, not in a home. But that’s what Koreans drink today. Young professional Koreans prefer the modern, sweeter version. Is it “authentic”? Or is “authentic” the representation of what people are actually doing?

I don’t know, which is sort of the crux of this post. A part of tourism is about going to new places and experiencing new cultures different from your own. But Korean culture today is not something pure and untouched. It never was.

Sitting on a small speck of land in East Asia, it has long been influenced by the world around it. Surrounded by neighboring countries, people traded and communicated. Culture developed organically, but Korean culture couldn’t help but be affected by the cultures around it. Of course Korea in turn affected those cultures.

Seoul is a tourist city. The signs have English underneath. Lots of the music played in bars is from western artists. I went to a baseball game (Go LG Twins!). I ate at a Brazilian steakhouse and got hamburgers. It’s really approachable to Americans. It’s hard to visit Seoul and view it as the authentic culture of some foreign country. And yet it also contains about 20% of the population.

Contemporary Korea can’t help but be influenced by the past. The Americans who came during the Korean War left an impact. The Americans like myself who came this year left an impact. By the things I bought and the places I visited, it leaves an impact on the people and businesses. Does this make tourism bad? No. It means tourism is still a way to learn about others and create connections, but at a deeper interpersonal level as well as broad strokes. I made friends, and saw old ones. Everyone is richer because of it.

Suwon is quite different from Seoul in a number of ways. They don’t have a lot of English signage. Many residents don’t speak English at all, which made it harder but not impossible to communicate. Unlike Seoul, there were a number of people who sat on sidewalks, homeless and begging for money.

So is Seoul authentic or is Suwon? One city might be what Korea presents to the world and another might be the darker underbelly that they try to sweep under the rug.

Accepting Globalism

So I cannot go to a time and place where Korea was exclusively Korea and I’ll never get a pure Korean experience. It will always be touched by influences including my own self being there.

But isn’t that better? Do I want to go into a world completely unknown? Do I want to be completely lost, or find myself in a world that’s welcoming and inclusive? I like fried chicken, and who wouldn’t? It’s got everything: chicken, and deep frying.

American music rocks and that’s something Koreans agree with. So why wouldn’t they want to listen to it also? Do they like it authentically, or in some strange colonial way to appeal to American tourists?

I think this line of thinking becomes unfalsifiable. While the impact of disparate power dynamics are worthwhile to discuss, it becomes almost pathological if you assume that people of another country cannot legitimately like the same things you do. Assuming they lack the free will to enjoy American music and can do that because of colonization reverts your thinking back to the era of racial hierarchies.

Perhaps the true goal is not experiencing an authentic culture but making authentic connections. It’s about the people ultimately. Trading Pokemon with new friends in Incheon was much more valuable an experience than something more “authentically Korean”.

I also got to visit Taiwan on this trip, and I have my own thoughts on the island. But my thoughts are similar there too. Taiwan’s culture today is more than just itself in isolation. It has taken the best of other cultures to create something new and dynamic.

I’ll end this post with a final quote that really encapsulates my thoughts:

All lives touch other lives to create something alive and anew