Given the name of today’s blog post, you might be able to guess where our group visited in Seoul today. Normally I would aim for a more creative title, but not very much rhymes with Hanyang, so this is all I can do. Easily the best part of the trip was a lecture given by an American-Korean professor, Reggi Lee, about the psyche of the Korean people. His goal was to condense thousands of years of Korean history and societal development into a single hour, and to use that history to explain why the Korean people behave in the ways that they typically do. Given the difficulty of his task, I would say he did as well as he could have, and his lecture certainly provoked more thought on my part about the cultural differences between Korea and America.

The concept of defining, “the Korean psyche,” begged the question to me of whether or not there was such a thing as a unified American psyche. Understandably, given Korea’s more collectivist nature, the answer seems to be no, but even so, the extent to which I can not explain a collective American psyche shocks me. The task becomes slightly easier if I condense the question down to states; the Tennessee psyche, for instance is far less nebulous. Even so, it is still far more ambiguous. South Korea is around five times the population of Tennessee, yet culturally remains far more unified than my home state. That is not to say one way is better than the other. As someone who very much clings to the individualism that is engrained in American culture, South Korea is a challenging culture to engage with. I can appreciate that many Koreans seem to voluntarily engage in the collective culture, but I do often wonder how someone who dares to step out from the pack is treated. Hanyang definitely helped provide some insight into that question, being an extremely selective institution that relies on finding the students who have separated themselves from the pack. 

Even more challenging for me at times is the hierarchical nature of Korean society.. I grew up saying sir and ma’am, and I still try to treat my elders with a certain respect that I would not give my peers. With that being said, the idea of this respect being something built directly into society rubs me the wrong way. I always had struggles with authority growing up; I loved to question what was commonplace if I thought it was foolish or wrong. To me, status was very much irrelevant. All that mattered was your argument. As I have gotten older, I have begun to understand that sometimes there are things that I simply can not understand because of my age, but are these things so numerous that I should be unable to discuss them with my elders as though we were peers? I am not convinced.

South Korea continues to be extremely foreign to me, but the longer I am here, the more I begin to understand why things are the way that they are. I really appreciate that this country’s culture is so opposed to mine; being challenged is an important aspect of studying abroad. Here’s to hoping Korea will continue to make me think about why I do things the way I do, and whether or not I should be changing my outlook on life.