This evening, Miss Jiwaku and I had a conversation with some of her relatives. These particular relatives are very nice and very decent people, good folks. But there was a line in the conversation that got me, where someone said, “But you know, as nice or polite as people in other countries might be to one another, Koreans have something unique… they have jeong.” If you haven’t run into this idea, jeong, well, then you apparently haven’t talked to many South Koreans. It gets translated variously as “harmony” or “coexistence” or all kinds of other things that sound, well, nice, but …
The 정 Challenge
