The Birth of Korean Cool (10 page)

Whatever he did during those two weeks impressed his bosses enough for them to offer him a full-time job. “I pretended to think about it, but as soon as I heard that, that was it, I was
not going back to medical school.”

It’s hard to imagine a better training for a chef than the kitchen at Daniel. “I learned to cook the French way,” he said. “It’s the only way to cook. It is the
right way to cook. It’s the philosophy and principle that there are no shortcuts. There are, but in the end product, you’ll see there is a difference. So do everything the right
way.” Then he said with an oratorical cadence that really reminded me of a French chef, “The right way is always longer. The right way always costs more money. The right way is just
more difficult. But the food  doesn’t lie. People can really tell.”

He went right to the third rail of Asian cooking: MSG—monosodium glutamate, a controversial food additive that supposedly enhances flavor. “For me, MSG is a shortcut. It’s
cheating. It’s like athletes taking steroids. They’re chemically trying to withdraw more flavor where there isn’t any.”

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the dishes I sampled were a revelation. I tried his
dukbokki
, which is a spicy rice cake snack that Korean schoolchildren often
get when they’re hanging out after classes. It’s a comfort food, almost a junk food. But not the way Kim makes it. He cooks his in pork fat and garnishes it with tiny slivers of pepper
that resemble saffron.

Hanjan’s decor is chic, cozy, and modern, with very little in common architecturally with most of New York’s other Korean restaurants. But Kim resists typifying his restaurant as an
upscale one. “I still don’t think Korean food is fine dining,” he said, which made me raise my eyebrows. “The best food in France is cooked by the three-star Michelin
chefs.” By contrast, “I think the best food in Korea is cooked by the mothers and grandmothers. There is a history of restaurants in certain countries. Korea doesn’t have that.
Korean dining food history is
jumak
—home-cooking, casual street food, market food.”

Surprisingly, Kim says his mother never cooked at home, noting that chefs usually fall into extremes in that regard: either they were inspired by their mother’s cooking or they were forced
to learn to cook because their mothers didn’t. In Kim’s case, the cold stove at home encouraged him to go out to eat with his friends. “I fell in love with the restaurant
scene—the atmosphere, energy.”

Another detail to which Kim pays fastidious attention is garlic; he says almost all the garlic out there is useless for his purposes. “Ninety percent of the garlic used in restaurants is
from China,” he said. “The flavor profile is that it’s really powerful for the first four hours, but if you look at it as a graph, the line goes down. The next day you don’t
taste it anymore.”

Kim is pleased at the global Hallyu phenomenon, but he doesn’t think that food has a place in Hallyu. “For me food is so much more real than a pop song or a video,” he said. As
with all great chefs I’ve met, he talks about food as a man would talk about a woman he’s in love with. Once more adopting his lyric speech rhythms, he said, “Looking, hearing is
one thing. Tasting, touching is another. Smelling and tasting is the heart and soul of what Korea is. As much as pop culture wants to globalize, food is the best way for Koreans to share their soul
and culture.”

Turning the expression “you are who you eat” on its head, Kim said, “No. You eat who you are. No one describes who you are like your food.”

WHY WOULD KOREA FOCUS ON POP CULTURE AS A
path to international success, one might well wonder, when this area has been the near-exclusive domain of
the English-speaking world for a century? Korea’s most influential popular culture critic, Lee Moon-won, pointed out, “Very few countries have ever attempted to sell their pop culture
to the United States. Even Japan didn’t try.”

Korea’s cultural ambitions are not just chutzpah. Nor did they come out of nowhere. They were born of necessity. And by necessity, I mean shame. After decades of concerted effort to pull
itself out of poverty, South Korea’s economic boom hit a wall in 1997 in the form of the Asian financial crisis.

If it were not for the crisis, there might never have been a Korean Wave. The debt emergency, which effectively halted many exports, forced South Korean industries—including
entertainment—to think outside the box in order to make up for lost revenues.

Prior to the crisis, the South Korean entertainment industry didn’t make an aggressive effort to peddle its wares overseas. After all, who the hell wants to hear songs or watch shows in
Korean? But with their backs to the wall, people in the entertainment industry decided that they had to sell their films, television shows, and music to the rest of Asia. Little did they know that
they were planting the seeds for a regional addiction.

The financial crisis—which started in Thailand and was caused by a perfect storm of bad debt, lender panic, and regional contagion—affected most of Asia, including South Korea. In
December 1997, the Korean government negotiated a loan of up to $57 billion from the International Monetary Fund. (They ended up using only $19.5 billion.) The day they made the loan request was
called the Day of National Humility. President Kim Young-sam told his country via television that he was “whipping himself every day” in shame at having brought his country to this
situation.

To this day, Koreans refer to the Asian financial crisis as the “IMF crisis”—because in their eyes, having to take out a loan was the unkindest cut of all. Amazingly, South
Korea was able to pay back the loan in 2001—fully three years ahead of schedule. It’s an achievement that economists today often refer to when discussing solutions to Europe’s
current debt crisis (ahem, Greece). How did South Korea do it?

Mostly, it was via draconian measures, such as putting a halt to loans that banks were giving all too freely to chaebols—Korea’s mega conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai. This
forced over half of South Korea’s chaebols to shut down and led to painful side effects, including huge unemployment and increased interest rates.

Wealthy women relinquished their wedding rings and athletes turned in trophies and medals to be melted down into ingots to help the national cause. The gold drive raised some eight metric tons
of privately donated gold in its first week alone.
¹
South Korea knew that it was a poor country not long ago, and they had learned that defeating poverty
was a national effort.

Paying back the loan was trivial compared to the larger underlying issue: Korea now had a serious image problem. TH Lee remembers getting an odd phone call from the Blue
House—Korea’s presidential residence and office—in February 1998. Incoming President Kim Dae-jung, who had the task of cleaning up the mess from the debt crisis, was asking Lee
for his help. At the time, Lee was the head of the Korean branch of the global public relations giant, Edelman. “I thought, why would they want to call me? I’m a PR guy.”

But that’s exactly why they called Lee. Korea wanted to rebrand itself, quite possibly the biggest national rebranding campaign in world history. “They told me, ‘Everyone
believes Korea is in crisis and we are losing investors and a lot more.’ ” Hence the unprecedented move of a Korean president calling on a PR firm. It was a huge first step in what Lee
describes as Korea’s campaign to broadcast the message that it was “joining the global village.”

Lee’s approach was radical and Don Draperesque, in a country that at the time had no Mad Men: If people think Korea is a country in crisis, why not spin it exactly that way? “Koreans
are good at engaging in crisis,” he said, pointing to all the times the country had been invaded—by Britain, Russia, China, Japan, and the United States. “Only two countries are
still alive after hundreds of invasions: Scotland and Korea.”

Thus, rather than hiding from the word “crisis,” it in fact became the core message of a book he and then-president Kim Dae-jung published within a month of that Blue House call. The
book—bearing the unambiguous title of
Korea: On Course and Open for Business
—was aimed at potential international investors. It focused on the notion that crisis brought out
the best in people. It featured uplifting stories of Korean workers who were laid off and reinvented their lives by learning new skills. “Before the crisis, Korea was a closed country,”
said Lee. “Korean media saw international investors as the enemy, as an economic invader; but they opened their gates to the world.”

Another huge shift was that Korean youth felt emboldened to be entrepreneurs. “Before the crisis, students were students,” said Lee. “After the crisis, a lot of young people
started businesses.” He cites the example of Lee Jae-woong, the founder of Daum Communications, the company that created one of the world’s first user-generated web portals. When Lee
first started the company in 1995, he was fresh out of graduate school. But when the crisis hit Korea, he faced a choice: fold—or do something crazy. He went for crazy. TH Lee explained,
“He sold company stock on the street. He said if you buy our shares, we’ll buy you a winter coat. That was a crisis situation. Now he is a very rich man.” In 2012, Daum earned
about half a billion dollars in revenue.

The chaebols that did survive the crisis had to completely rethink their strategies. Samsung stopped making cars (good idea!) and focused on electronics; Hyundai did the reverse, scaling back
its electronics division to focus on cars.

Korea made some of its best decisions in the wake of the crisis. Its information technology, pop, drama, film, and video game industries as we know them today all arose out of a last-chance,
long-shot gamble to get out of this hole. (All these industries will be discussed in later chapters.)

A period of massive debt might seem like the worst time to try to build brand-new industries. Korea could coast on its already successful products, like mobile phones and semiconductors. Why
would it want to shift its focus to something so intangible and fickle as the content industries, like pop culture?

This seemingly quixotic plan was the brainchild of President Kim Dae-jung. Kim was best known for his historic summit in 2000 with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, and a photo of the two men
shaking hands was a shot heard round the world. That year, Kim was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His final years (he died in 2009) were overshadowed by shocking allegations that he had essentially
paid for the photo op, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to the North Korean government. But as far as this book is concerned, Kim is the hero of Hallyu.

The IMF crisis had revealed a fault line in the Korean economy: the nation had become overly reliant on the chaebols—the mega conglomerates. This meant that if the chaebols fell, so fell
the nation.

Korea has no natural resources and very little arable land. Compounding the problem is that labor costs have risen so dramatically in the last twenty years that the country cannot rely solely on
manufacturing as a source of wealth.

Korea is held back by an additional political handicap. According to a Korean economist who is also my dad, Korea is lacking in one huge technological advantage from which nearly every other
industrialized nation has benefited for years: the option of letting the military lead the technological curve. “Since World War II,” he said, “countries have been investing
heavily in technology for military and defense, and the research they produced trickles down to the private sector.”

For example, the GPS technology that is now common-place in smartphones and cars was first developed by the United States and the former Soviet Union in the 1970s for use in air force navigation
and tracking nuclear warheads; jet engines were invented by Germany and the UK for use in World War II aircrafts.

By contrast, Korea is not permitted to pursue military technology on an aggressive scale. In accordance with the 1953 mutual defense treaty between South Korea and the United States, South Korea
cannot make any major military decisions without U.S. support. In other words, Korea can’t compete with the big technological players in certain areas. Thus it has been forced to focus
elsewhere.

President Kim Dae-jung pushed information technology, which was an obvious and easy point of entry: all you really need are coders. He also set his sights on popular culture.

According to Choi Bokeun, an official at Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sport, and Tourism, Kim marveled at how much revenue the United States brought in from films, and the UK from stage
musicals. He decided to use those two countries as benchmarks for creating a pop culture industry for Korea.

Was Kim out of his mind? Building a pop culture export industry from scratch during a financial crisis seems like bringing a Frisbee instead of food to a desert island. But there was method to
the madness. The creation of pop culture doesn’t require a massive infrastructure; all that is required is time and talent. And countries have always exported goods that no one really needs.
Did nineteenth-century China need Britain’s opium? Did judges in Bombay need heavy, sweaty English barrister wigs? Did Korea need Spam?

The American in me understands how easy it is to take pop music for granted as something that moody teenagers listen to in order to piss off their parents or deal with the boredom of living in
suburbia. But in places without a long history of liberalism—that is, much of the world outside the United States and western Europe—people have a direct, overwhelming connection to
American pop music.

Pop culture—specifically, American pop culture—played a large role in the fall of communism. In 1989, the former Czecho slovakia’s Velvet Revolution—in which the
Communist regime was toppled in favor of a parliamentary democracy—was partly inspired by students listening to an American band, the Velvet Underground.