I recently saw the film “Chin Gu” (Friend) which opened to a huge commercial success in South Korea in 2001. I thought it was superbly entertaining and made with a fairly high production value as is the case with many recent movies from South Korea. (I rented it from Blockbuster, of all places.)

More than that, however, the film captured for me so much of what it was like to grow up in Korea in the 70s and 80s. The opening sequence in which children run blissfully after a truck spraying toxic DDT, in particular, made me recollect very similar scenes I witnessed while growing up in Korea when it was still economically underdeveloped.

A reviewer noted of this scene thusly:

The film opens with a group of youngsters running after a vehicle releasing clouds of insecticide. This was a common sight in the 70s in Korea. The kids loved the smell and would disappear in the clouds. The symbolism of this opening scene is clear. The children are curious about the world, but the world is full of poisonous experiences harmful to their minds and bodies. They breathe in the noxious poison like a breath of fresh air not knowing it’s harmful effects. The powerful imagery is reinforced by the narrator’s words: “Being thirteen-year-old adolescents in Pusan of 1976, for our innocent curiosity, the world had too much to tell us, all too much…” The theme of curiosity leading to harm resonates throughout the film.

The film’s location of Busan and its dialect are also endearing… as if to say that there is, afterall, life in South Korea outside Seoul.

This film made me reflect upon a theme about which I discussed as a commenter on The Marmot’s Hole sometime back — the somewhat different nature of personal relationships in South Korea and the U.S.

American visitors and expats in Korea are often exasperated by the seemingly almost ruthless rudeness that Koreans display to them and to each other. They shove, they push, they mob without forming a queue and they let the door slam behind them on other people’s faces.

As I once wrote, the ability of a group of people to form a queue spontaneously, without any direction from the authority, is a great indicator of their level of civilization as defined by the Roman (and later Western) sense of Civitas. The ability of a large group of people unrelated by kinship or close friendship to interact with each other politely is a unique achievement and one of the apogees of the Western civic tradition.

This tradition is largely missing in Korea. Some blame Korea’s high population density for this apparently pervasive rudeness. Perhaps there is something to this — afterall, Americans in NYC tend to be far more rude than those in, say, Des Moines, IA. But there is something more. Korea is still a highly tribal society beneath the glitzy exterior of the economic and technological success.

Although Koreans seem to be disrespectful to each other (and to foreign visitors) to outsiders, the actuality is somewhat different. In a clannish society where what sociologists call “primary relationships” reign supreme, a man is judged mostly by his family and close friends. How a person “does by them” rates a good deal in judging him a good person or not, rather than how he relates to the society at large (and by extension all the people).

In other words, Koreans often reserve most of their affection, respect and other resources, both social and economic, for these primary relationships to the utter neglect of others outside those relationships. Indeed, those who stand outside this boundary either do not exist or, if they do, they exist as merely barriers, competitors and obstacles to the successes of one’s primary group. Hence the pushing, shoving and etc.

Foreign observers are often contempteous of Korean social interactions, because, I suspect, they, as the ultimate outsiders, are often the recipients of this rude behavior meant for outsiders all the while without experiencing the positive side of this clannishness. For them, it is basically “all bad and nothing good.”

For Koreans, however, the family bonds and close friendships, especially those based on regional background or school ties, are generally very intense. The film “Chin Gu” demonstrates this theme repeatedly. The protagonist of the movie is academically successful. He goes on to study in the U.S. for his Ph.D. He is a model product. Yet he continues to maintain his long and deep friendship with another major character who turns out to be a hoodlum. The phrase they often exchange after having given some offense is “There is no need for ’sorry’ among friends.”

It is often said that Americans are increasingly isolated and alienated — plugged into iPods, cable TV and the Internet, but plugged off social interactions with actual human beings. They have fewer friends. Indeed, in the U.S., people often call those who would be considered merely acquaintances in other societies “friends.” In the U.S., friends are generally work colleagues or neighbors or fellow church goers with whom one occasionally “hangs out,” does barbeques and so on (a significant exception would be fraternity/sorority friends, as an example). It is unlikely that one will be able to rely upon such people in moments of extreme personal distress. In America, one does not go around to his neighbors looking for money when one is in financial trouble. That would be very bad form.

In Korea, friends are essentially family. And they will help you when you are in trouble despite great personal costs to them. It is, in a primitive tribal sense, about the survival of the primary group. You look out for your own. To cite a personal example, my mother still enjoys what seems to me to be exceptionally strong friendship with her “So Kkop Chin Gu” (”playing house friend” from her early years) and high school and university classmates. They have been amazingly helpful, a great comfort to my mother, in times of her distress. In turn, when some of them faced misfortune, she was there for them. Theirs is no fair-weather friendship.

Of course, this is not uniquely Korean. Many immigrant ethnic communities (e.g. Sicilians, Irish, Jews and etc.) have displayed such tendencies. But perhaps because the U.S. is such a large country and also because Americans tend to move around a great deal (long distance friendships are always difficult), they tend to form “instant” but perhaps not deep friendships with those in their new vicinity.

On the whole, such clannishness can be anti-modern and anti-economic. They breed regionalism and even corruption based on clique-ness. In the modern era, there is much to recommend about the Western model of Civitas, friendships with boundaries (where one does have to be sorry for transgressions) and allegiance to one’s entire community rather than primary groups.

But once one experiences the intensity of affection among Korean-style friends, it is emotionally and personally very difficult to reject it. Indeed, in the era of post-modern America, a dose of such relationships may provide a much needed cure to the socially alienated and restore their faith in what it means to be friends with other people, rather than with pets, TV or computer.
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