But whatever they’re calling that stuff at Starbucks and the rest of the coffee shops here is, “good tea” it ain’t.

Val,

Yes, that makes sense about the Medieval parallels to this pattern. Probably this is a pattern we can find in all major civilizations. At some point I really do want to try get around to a comparison of the Soybean Paste Girl and some literary character like Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew and, comparing the Korean ajumma figure to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. Maybe there’s a better set of characters to match, I don’t know, but something along those lines.

The women’s households reminds me of a couple of things, but mostly about the government’s handling of family registers. I think it’s changed in the last few years, but it used to be that a woman was always on her family’s register, which posed a problem to Korean women who married foreign men. (I think the Korean women can now have their own family paperwork under their name, though according to this comment by Ranting Englishman on a somewhat unrelated post, it’s still hard to get a foreign man’s name into the system, even if the half-Korean child is his legitimate child and he is married to the mother!)

This also ties in with a pretty interesting book I read about lovesickness in the middle ages that suggested the epidemic of love sickness among rich men was the aristocratic equivalent of witch-hunting among the poor. In both cases, you have men complaining of the supernatural hold that specific women had over them, which seems, in essence, tied to the dilemma that ceaselessly troubles men: women are so much “trouble” for us, but we really can’t live without ‘em. This dependency seems to breed a desire for control among many, and to bubble up into social structures that allow men a measure of this kind of coveted control over women in general.

I think you’re right about this anxiety tying in with a new interstitial state, though that has existed for a long time, I suspect. The difference is that the interstice is now acted out in public, and that it has become a demographic, with potential social and cultural effects. The sight of seeing young women together isn’t threatening in itself, but seeing young women having a grand old time without need for boys around — that’s scary to a lot of young men, I think. And when it’s relatively new… hence the vituperation of Starbucks.

Junsok,

Thanks, the background you wrote helps! I think you’re right about the way a lot of this comes from older mindsets colliding with very modern change. In a sense, this is why I think an emergent female consumerism seems to be the tie, partly because it’s more visible as a “thing” than older forms of consumption that might not be so apparent as such.

(Like I said, a night out with soju may not cost more than two coffees — especially when you include the anju side dishes — but the former has a long history, and the latter is “new.”

As for job-getting, that’s interesting. I noticed that it was mostly female students getting jobs, but then, in my department it’s mostly female students, so I thought nothing of it. As for the time-wastage in the army… yes. But interestingly, I’ve never seen any guy who was, well, let’s say, “bright,” who made extensive use of the term. It was always the seemingly less-intelligent guys who talked about soybean paste girls.

(I say “seemingly” because I think as much as I like to think I can see past communication difficulties, one must always be willing to doubt one’s judgment a little. When I speak Korea, for example, I sound like an idiot, so…)

Julia,

William’s exaggerating a touch, but yeah, most of the tea here is green tea-ish stuff. In a place like Starbucks or Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf I think you can get stuff like Earl Grey or English Breakfast, as well as various sorts of chai, which has enjoyed a vogue here in the past few years. But I think you still need to do to a specialty tea shop or foreign foodstuffs market to get the good brands of Western-styled teas. And things that seem to have come into vogue in Canada, at least, like Rooibos, I haven’t seen much around here. But then, I haven’t been looking too carefully.

I’ll also add that bean coffee is sort-of available in supermarkets, or Starbucks, but that people who are really into coffee buy
it online, fresh-roasted, from places like this. (Which is sales point on Gmarket for the the service we use: 로스터스빈 — Roaster’s Bean.) I kind of wish this place wasn’t so far, though.

Finally, as for tea stuff in Korea, they do some interesting things with green tea. By which I mean interesting in a good way. Green tea latte, green tea ice cream, green tea cakes… soem of them are pretty damned good!

William —

Heh. Maybe it’s un-Canadian of me, but to hell with the queen’s opinion — I like making the old lady aghast! Maybe I should serve her green tea latte if I ever meet her? I did once place God Save the Queen for her son and, I think, Lady Di, back in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, if memory serves correctly. :)

Otto,
I don’t know the chain, but yeah, I know the experience. I actually don’t frequent coffeeshops anymore — Iksan was where I did that. Jeonju had only one, across town, and in Bucheon I find them so crowded and noisy that I get more work done elsewhere. Even at home! The only way I can stand coffeeshops is with earphones in.

Maybe coffee is coming into vogue among men who prefer not to have to drink as much? I took a class out last semester and said we could go for a beer or coffee, whichever they preferred. Even the guys seemed happy with the idea of coffee and not beer. Another possibility is that it might be the obvious social drink for men who, for religious reasons, abstain. (I have met some guys who were hardcore Presbyterian and for that reason drank no alcohol. Though, come to think of it, they were maybe the only guys I’ve known who never drink.)

Interestingly, over the last few months more men have been coming in, but almost always with their girlfriends. Once or twice now I have seen groups of guys sit there, actually having coffee, but it is so strange that they are the first things you notice when you enter.

Maybe the growing number of men who don’t drink alcohol will slowly start drifting to the coffee shops?

The sort of swill they should be red-faced about calling tea.

The Queen would be aghast!

Oh my, lots to comment about, but only after I move. (Which is tomorrow and Friday.)

Till then…

I’m curious as to what sort of tea you can get in a Starbucks in Korea, now.

I think the general opinion is that consumer service is better now than it was compared to 1950s-1980s. Consumer service really rose in the 1990s as more markets were opened up to imports, and services became a very important competition factor for Korean retailers and manufacturers. (Maybe Lime should ask her parents or grandparents about how difficult it was to get a defective TV set fixed or changed in 1970s).

Concerning emerging “consumer” culture, the “accepted” interpretation of Korean culture is that it has only recently became a consumerist culture, because until about 1990, Koreans saved a lot, and Korean consumer goods market was relatively closed, so Koreans did not have a lot to spend, and manufacturers did not need to pander to consumers. This mindset persists today. When policymakers and economists in America talk about increasing economic growth, they talk about increasing consumption; in Korea, the policymakers and economists emphasize increasing investment and exports (and cutting down consumption to increase savings to channel more investment). This view, however, is changing in the last five years or so.

About female consumerism, I think you make some good points; and in many ways it may be due to changing culture and emergence of women. Traditionally men getting drunk like frat boys have been culturally acceptable (for at least last 100 years, probably longer); and women’s place was in the home – not going out drinking (coffee or soju). Also, until about 1990, most women depended on men (husband or father) for spending money, so if they consumed “wastefully”, people frowned on them. (Since women were spending other people’s money). I think Such views remain for both men and women even today. Many men (especially older men) do not like women spending money because of the traditional view of women, and the (probably mistaken) assumption that these women are spending money earned by their husbands or fathers; and many women (young and old, though obviously not all women) expect men to treat them and pay for everything because of that older traditional mind set. (I don’t know for sure, but I think younger men resent these type of women because women now generally have easier time getting first jobs than men, and women don’t have to spend nearly two years wasting time in the Army).

Very tried, but hoping that made some sense.

Kevin: yeah, definitely there’s something of the same phenomenon going on in the West. (Also, I wonder how true it was of Korea’s ostensibly Confucian past. I kind of wonder how much of that isn’t after-the-fact romanticization. Which brings me back to Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition.) It seems this process is going on all over, and tech does have something to do with it.

Someone — in Mark Dery’s anthology of essays Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, I think — went so far as to accuse us of a growing epidemic of “interactive autism,” and though that was probably more in response to answering machines and email, that’s probably even more applicable now.

But I think it’s probably even more dire in Korea because my growing sense — something I want to explore in terms of that Gin Craze series I keep never having time to work on — is that the West had a long period of transition where we had a public life unmediated by (advanced) telecommunications. We had time to develop a face-to-face consumer culture complete with etiquette, values, anxieties, rituals, and so on. Shopping in independent little shops in the US, from my experience, is more of an “experience”; the place has a vibe, the interactions are characteristic of that store, and it self-presents itself as an “experience.” Sometimes too much for my taste, or too ardently or manipulatively, or whatever, but still. Shopping in a little independent shop in Korea is, well — one little clothing shop and the one next to it, or the one down the road, are essentially interchangeable experiences, right down to you hearing the same music blasting from the speaker in front of each. (There are exceptions in certain districts, but those *are* exceptions.)

I suspect maybe it’s that “character” and the conception of offline shopping more as a total experience that is keeping small indie bookshops and music stores and clothing places going to whatever degree they still are in the US.

Which brings me to Charles’s comment: I think you’re right, Charles, and I think it’s for a good reason: the customer isn’t always right. From many years in retail during undergrad, I can agree wholeheartedly. But it’s rare that customers are willing to be shouted at by just anyone. I’ll be shouted at, maybe, by David Chang, but some random guy who screwed up my saxophone?

Maybe this comes down to me mixing my characteristics. I think “the customer is always right” really works something like the food taboos in Orthodox Judaism — it’s an extreme principle set up to safeguard a more basic principle, which is, “Happy/Sated customers are likelier to provide repeat business.” Even if you disagree with a customer, you are less likely to call him an idiot or try kick him out of the store for talking down to you.

I’d guess that with people like Chang and Ramsey (of whom I’ve never heard before your comment), it’s less an erosion of the basic idea that treating customers like crap is bad, than it is a kind of response to the watered-down crappiness you get when you literally observe (ie. pretend to believe) the idea that the customer is always “right.”

That, and of course two other things: being yelled at by someone who knows what he or she is doing — a pro — could display his or her seriousness about the business at hand — chefs yell because food is important, etc. — a meme that’s been floating around for a long time. I can see a kind of sense in having an elite chef tell off someone for slathering ketchup or reaching for the salt shaker before tasting exquisitely prepared food.

The other thing is that a certain unyielding attitude on the part of one’s hosts almost creates an exclusiveness, which is, as well, a dimension of “consumer experience.” Again, being hollered at by the random fella in the hole-in-the-wall shop doesn’t create that sense, but I can imagine it playing a part in a fancy restaurant in New York. (Or Apgujung.)

But yeah, you know, I’m personally quite comfortable with the idea that the customer is not always right… if the host knows better. I certainly don’t know enough to tell someone how to cut sushi, for example. But that’s a very different scenario than some 20 year old kid trying to tell me that my steak or my pan-fried fish is “supposed” to be cold.

Korean society is being pulled taffee-like in so many directions, and one trend is the overall decrease in face-to-face interactions, something that used to be the lifeblood of group-centered, Confucianistic Korean society. PC-bahng culture, home computers, and online shopping might be seen, especially by older Koreans, as eroding the social bedrock.

To be fair, we deal with somewhat similar issues in the West, but I appreciate your look at how these tidal forces are playing out in Korea.

Kevin