The Korean Mind. Boye Lafayette De MenteЧитать онлайн книгу.
rights by the Confucian-oriented government was cloaked in the guise of chongyong (chohngyohng), or “paying proper respect”—to one’s parents, siblings, elders, the authorities, and so on.
While the Confucian concept of chongyong was emminently admirable when presented in principle, translating it into practical day-to-day rules that governed all human behavior turned out to be primarily a political maneuver that stifled the lives and spirits of the Korean people. Common Koreans had almost no personal choice in their lives. They were required to submit to the will of their parents, particularly their fathers, who in turn were subject to the will and authority of the government. With only a few exceptions during the long pre-modern dynasties, this system kept Korea locked in a social, political, and economic time warp.
Particularly between 1392, the beginning of the Choson dynasty, and the latter decades of the 1800s, changes in Korea were few and far between because the emphasis was on a kind of harmony with the status quo and the past that made change immoral. But modern times were to bring to Korea in just one century as many changes as most European countries went through in five hundred years.
One of the facets of traditional Korean culture that has survived these changes, however—albeit in significantly altered form—is chongyong. For the first time in more than five hundred years, paying respect in Korea is more a matter of personal choice than of government edict. Koreans today continue to show exceptional respect toward their parents, teachers, and superiors who have legitimate authority over them. But they draw the line at respecting people they consider undeserving, especially government officials.
The most important facet of chongyong in Korea today is the respect that individuals expect and demand for their own feelings and face. People are extremely sensitive about any comment or demeanor that appears to be disrespectful in any way. The respect that bosses expect from their employees, for example, includes bowing to them at all appropriate times, addressing them by their titles and using other respect language, not leaving the office or workplace before they do, and doing—or trying their utmost to do—anything asked of them.
There is also a strongly nationalistic facet to the respect that Koreans expect. They are fiercely proud of their country and their culture and react very emotionally to any comments or actions that disparage either one. Foreigners dealing with Koreans must therefore be equally sensitive about their feelings, keeping in mind that their reactions are likely to be emotional rather than logical and that once they have taken a position they will typically defend it well beyond all reason.
To maintain effective working relations with Koreans, foreigners must continually demonstrate Korean-style sincerity, loyalty, and respect for all of the things that Koreans hold dear.
Chonjung 촌중 Chohn-juung
Deferential Honor
Until the latter decades of the 1900s the Korean lifestyle denied people on all levels of society the right to exercise personal prerogatives, to demonstrate any significant degree of individuality or self-interest. In fact, there was virtually no time and no situation in which Koreans could think or do exactly as they pleased. Their lives were programmed to conform to a very precise and strictly enforced vertical system based on gender, social class, age, order of birth, education, and occupation.
Every individual had a specific place in this hierarchically arranged society that generally was fixed at birth. In most of the fundamental things in life—such as education, occupation, place of residence, marriage, and so on—people usually had little or no personal choice. These were things that were prescribed by custom and by law. Life was further controlled by a system of stylized etiquette that was designed to maintain harmonious relationships among all the ranks and categories of people.
In such a society self-esteem derived mainly from following all of the rules prescribed for one’s class and category rather than from individual efforts, skills, or accomplishments. With but few exceptions, personal ambition, initiative, innovation, and anything else that might disturb or change the status quo was taboo.
One of the most important cultural factors in the existence and survival of this system was the role of chonjung (chohn-juung), or “paying deferential honor to superiors.” Koreans were literally programmed from childhood to treat those above them with extraordinary deference at all times. Deferential respect for parents, especially fathers, for the male sex in general, for senior members of the family, for elders in general, for government authorities, and for spirits and the gods was a prime directive in the culture and resulted in chonjung becoming a key element in the foundation of the social system.
The repeal of Korea’s feudal family laws following the end of World War II in 1945 and the gradual introduction of democratic principles into Korean government over the next several decades removed almost all of the legal coercion and much of the social pressure that had artificially supported the respect syndrome in Korean culture since ancient times. But by that time chonjung was so deeply embedded in the culture that, although greatly diminished in many respects, it has continued to be a significant factor in Korean life.
Koreans are still distinguished by their respect for their parents and family, for their seniors and elders, for scholars, for discipline, for form and formalities, for education, and so on, but they no longer passively accept or automatically respect government authority or its elected or appointed officials. For the first time in the history of the country the people of Korea not only have a legal right to criticize and oppose government authorities but also are protected by laws that guarantee this right. And even though these laws are not always enforced fully or fairly, Koreans now have a voice in their government, and they are as verbal—and sometimes as violent—in asserting this voice as other people with much longer democratic histories.
Present-day Koreans have made great progress in personalizing chonjung—that is, they decide who and what they are going to respect according to their own criteria, not according to traditional customs or authoritarian government regimes. In this new environment, self-respect takes precedence over all other people and institutions. Individual Koreans are, in fact, extraordinarily sensitive about being respected—in itself this is nothing new, but in the past the respect they demanded was based on external factors such as their age, gender, rank, position, and so on. Now it is based primarily on their image of themselves as individuals with personal rights and only secondarily on other circumstances. Koreans also have great respect for themselves as a national group, with virtually unbounded confidence in their combined abilities.
Chonjung is therefore an especially important word in the Korean vocabulary and one that foreigners dealing with Korea should learn in all of its nuances.
Chontu/Ssa-um 촌두싸움 Chohn-tuu/Ssah-uum
Fighting at the Drop of a Hat
The ancient view of Koreans as paragons of good behavior and of Korea itself as “The Land of Morning Calm” stands out in stark contrast to another aspect of Korean life—the inherently volatile character of Koreans and their willingness to fight whenever verbally insulted or physically confronted. Korean social scientists invariably rank a “peaceful” nature high on any list of Korean traits. But this one-dimensional reading of the character of Koreans is based on the fact that historically Koreans were not aggressive toward their neighbors (the Chinese, the Khitans, the Japanese) and did not go out looking for trouble.
The home front was a different matter altogether. The code of Confucian etiquette and ethics that Koreans lived under from the fourteenth century until modern times was so all-encompassing and so strict that it required Koreans to suppress virtually all of their emotions and confine themselves to a highly stylized form of behavior that was contrary to practically everything that is normal and natural for human beings.
This behavioral conditioning made Koreans extremely sensitive to any deviation from the prescribed Confucian manners, particularly any behavior they regarded as disrespectful toward them or their family, and primed them to take quick action on such occasions. It could be said that Korean men in particular were something like water in covered pots that was normally just below the boiling point but hot enough for considerable pressure to build up inside the pot. When the “heat” on Korean men was turned up by anything that was upsetting, the pressure inside them