South Koreans Are Working Themselves to Death and ‘Bali Bali’ Culture Is To Blame
In Korea it is not uncommon to wake up at 4 a.m., teach yourself English or Chinese, tutor your children before school, get yourself and the kids ready to go, work a full ball-busting ten to twelve-hour day, and then go out on a mandatory drinking session with the boss until eleven or twelve at night…
There is a tendency in Korea to be swept up and find oneself bobbing along on a rip tide of constant change, barely able to keep your head above water. You hear a lot on news programmes and documentaries about bustling Asian cities, vast neon metropolises that never sleep. I’ve been to several Asian cities, but I think that stereotype must have been born in Seoul, and in my view, it is the place that most readily encapsulates that image.
This is a place that not only never sleeps but never rests. I have students who wake up at 4 a.m. to teach themselves English and Chinese, tutor their children before school, get themselves and their kids ready to go, work a full ball-busting ten to twelve-hour day, then go out on mandatory drinking sessions with the boss until eleven or twelve at night. They have perhaps a week’s holiday a year and often do not take it. This is a place where time off is so rare, people refer to weekends as holidays. I keep having to explain to my students that your two days rest a week is not special like a holiday is; it is not something to be treated with reverence, it is a right.
This is a place where a man comes to collect the used cardboard boxes and recyclables from outside my window at 5 a.m. and then not forty-five minutes later, just when you think he and his rattling, stinking, ancient truck with its head-splitting engine noise, coughing out fumes enough to wake you by themselves has gone, a man comes by hawking fish at the top of his lungs like a Korean Oliver Twist-style Victorian street merchant. I’ll never forget his song — ‘Ojinga rang, kalchi rang,’ which translates to ‘Squid; lovely squid. Mackerel, lovely mackerel!’
This is the country where it is almost mandatory to stop your car past the white stop line when waiting at traffic lights just to get, and I’m not exaggerating, a couple of seconds’ head start on the other waiting motorists. It is very common to see people who have either stopped their cars on the other side of the pedestrian crossing from the traffic lights or have inched forward in order to get a head start on the other cars when the lights go green. This is the country where my students regularly disregard my instructions in class, race through the activity I set them, and race ahead to the next exercise in the book so they can be seen to finish before anyone else, seeking to gain approval from both the teacher and their fellow students.
Speed Kings
You see, in Korea, fast is good. Fast is king. Fast means you get more done. Getting more done is the key. It doesn’t matter if it looks pretty, is particularly good quality, or is likely to stand the test of time. Getting it done so that it works is the goal. This is the country where little old ladies will elbow you out of the way without the slightest thought just to get to a subway seat before anyone else. It really is a dog eat dog society. It is very easy to be left behind in Korea. Everyone seems to be in a constant state of competition — the students in the class who want to finish faster than anyone else, the drivers on the road who want to get a split-second head start on others, the old ladies fighting their way to the subway seats. Coming from Spain, with a placid, passive population and a distinct air of nonchalance, it was like someone suddenly switched on the warp drive. You see, the thing is, even non-Koreans end up becoming a victim of the Bali Bali mentality.
If you work in what is essentially the customer service sector, as I do, you are expected to adjust to the mentality of working hard, doing unpaid overtime. Students love (and some expect) the teacher to extend the class an extra five or ten minutes after the end of the lesson. I think they feel that, as customers, they are almost entitled to this and the teacher is not working hard enough if he or she doesn’t indulge them. The Bali Bali mentality can manifest itself in some pretty awful ways too. One major issue in Korea is one of corporations desperate to outdo each other financially putting profit first and the safety and well-being of their workforce a distant second.
Disaster Strikes
Nowhere can this be seen more acutely that in a documentary from the nineties about the collapse of the Sampoong department store in 1995, which claimed that upon building quality inspections following the disaster, significant numbers of buildings checked had structural defects caused by hasty construction and poor materials, with various forms of corruption playing a big part in the substandard buildings. The department store collapsed due to poor construction, and several city officials were jailed for taking bribes to allow this poor construction to take place.
The Sewol ferry disaster was put down to, in part, this Bali Bali, slapdash, it’ll do, get it done ASAP attitude. The boat was overloaded, the crew inexperienced, and everyone involved just crossed their fingers, hoping it would be all right. That’s the thing — it usually is. But this time it wasn’t.
A ‘Hobbyless’ Society
One of the saddest things about the prominence of Bali Bali culture in Korea is the fact that Korea has, for all intents and purposes, become a hobby-less society. This is something I came to observe very quickly upon arriving in the country, engaging in conversations with my new Korean friends and students and finding out, to my shock and sadness, that almost no one I spoke with did anything productive with their time other than work and/or raise a family. There was, they claimed, simply no time to cultivate interests outside these spheres. This was borne out by the fact that a disproportionate number of musicians I found myself playing with in the local music scene were foreigners as opposed to native Koreans who just didn’t seems to have the time or inclination to see making music as a worthwhile use of their time.
This belief is echoed in a series of interviews conducted by the photojournalist Luc Forsyth. On the subject of hobbies and free time, one of his subjects is quoted as saying ‘Most Koreans are like that (not having a hobby); they think they have no time, but they can make time. But when they have time off, they don’t want to do anything, just relax.’ This attitude, the attitude that personal pleasure, holistic learning, and interest in anything other than money is a waste of time is, it must be said, one of the tenets of Bali Bali.
I think Korea’s lack of cultural identity is down in large part to generations having grown up with no interests to cultivate outside of the working grind, and any who did so were repressed by the state for their trouble. Combined with the natural, inherent Asian need to conform, this has led to a startling lack of individualism in terms of dress and interests. It has allowed the proliferation of bland, same old K-pop in place of true artistic music and in lieu of fertile, imagination driven and original art, music, design, and theatre.
What can possibly account for this deep-seated need to do everything as quickly as possible? To beat the next person — into a pulp if need be? To win at all costs? To eschew pleasure, knowledge, and self-growth in the pursuit of money and financial gain? And to seemingly work all hours under the sun?
Growing Up Poor
It is well known that Korea was an extremely impoverished country even up until the ’70s. In fact, North Korea, the beggar boys of the world, scarcely out of the news with stories about mass starvation and food shortages, was actually considerably richer than South Korea for a large part of the twentieth century. Countries like the Philippines, never really a player on the world economic scene, were much, much richer than Korea until very recently. Ploughing and farming with oxen and cart was common until relatively late in the twentieth century, and outside the cities, many people still depend on the land to make a living and also to feed themselves with whatever they grow.
It was this poverty that caused the military dictator of the time to act. Park Chung Hee, the late father of current president Park Geun Hye, was a tough customer who had seen Korea sink to its lowest point. He introduced a series of measures designed to combat the crushing poverty and malnutrition that were commonplace at the time. He implored Koreans to work hard, emphasizing the need to get things done quickly, and to work twice as hard as their rivals from Japan and the West. Messages were broadcast on the radio and TV imploring citizens to do their bit for the development of their country. And boy did they listen. Although he was not revered by absolutely every facet of Korean society (he sacrificed artistic and cultural development in favour of the development of heavy industry), he still encounters a lot of support amongst those of pensionable age, who view Park as the catalyst and single most important reason why Korea has risen to become the eleventh biggest economy in the world with a population of only fifty million.
This is indeed a miracle, but it came with the added ingredients of social control, censorship, and political repression. He famously banned short skirts and rock music, and imposed curfews to make sure his people didn’t stray down the wrong paths. All of this came to fruition in the ’80s and ’90s, when the enormous chaebols or conglomerations we know today came to prominence. Heavily subsidized by the government (and US aid money after the war), industries such as ship building, semiconductors, automobiles, and electronics began to take over their respective markets. With absolutely no existing industry in any of these sectors to world beaters in a matter of years. This was a triumph of Korean hard work and guts, which goes to show just how the Bali Bali mentality has helped to shape the country. This was not a case of ingenuity or originality or innovation, it was simply a story of hard work; back-breaking, intense, non-stop work. In a country divided along political, financial, generational, and religious lines with, until fairly recently, a pretty low level of education amongst its citizens, Bali Bali was the one creed that everyone could get behind.
The people who lived through the grinding poverty of the ’50s and ’60s are still alive. In fact, they are running the country to a large extent, as heads of governments and multinationals, and their work all hours approach to life has been passed down to the next generation. Has it gotten better recently? Yes. However, the big chaebols owned and operated and that cut their teeth under Park Chung Hee still value this work till you drop approach, and the smaller companies trailing in their wake expect the same of their staff in order to keep up.
Final Thoughts
There are some more progressive, modern entrepreneurs coming up, especially in the tech sector, basing themselves on the more liberal Silicon Valley type approach to working, but the hard-working Bali Bali attitude will remain for a long time. It is all many Koreans know, and has come to form a large part of the national identity in a country where a national identity is still uncertain. Ask anyone what their stereotype of Italians is and they will probably say something like talkative and passionate. Similarly, ask what people’s preconceptions of Brits are and they’ll likely tell you we are cold and aloof with bad teeth. Ask a Korean what the most immediately apparent traits are of their countrymen and the concept of Bali Bali will come up time and again.
While this does not sit well with some Koreans, especially the more moderate, younger ones, and is likely to change, what is clear is that no one wants to return to the preindustrial, poverty-stricken state that they left behind only a couple of decades earlier, and until they feel fully out of the woods in this respect, Bali Bali is likely to remain.
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