Suneung is the one day a year when an entire country rearranges itself around a single exam. Planes stop taking off. Offices open an hour late. The stock market waits. Police officers on motorbikes race late students to their test sites, and younger students stand outside school gates in the cold, cheering for seniors they … Read more
The Korean games in Squid Game are all real. Not one of them was invented for the show. Ddakji, jegichagi, gonggi, spinning tops — Korean children have played all of these for generations, and some of us were still playing them in schoolyards in the 1990s. What English-language explainers usually get wrong is not the … Read more
Fly into Incheon, take the train toward Seoul, and you will pass them for forty minutes without a break — identical towers in blocks of eight or twelve, numbered in enormous digits on their sides, repeating across the landscape. Visitors often read this as bleak. Korean apartments house roughly half the country’s population, and the … Read more
Everyone knows you take your shoes off in a Korean home. Most guides stop there, as though it were an arbitrary custom you simply have to remember. It is not arbitrary. Koreans remove their shoes because of a heating system invented two thousand years ago, and once you understand that connection, a great deal about … Read more
Within minutes of meeting someone new in Korea, one of you will ask what year the other was born. To English speakers this can feel intrusive. It is not — it is the question that determines how the rest of the conversation will be conducted. Korean age and titles are not politeness decorations layered on … Read more
Watch a Korean hand something to someone older and you will notice it: both hands on the object, or one hand giving while the other touches the giving arm. It happens with glasses, money, business cards, documents, phones, anything. Foreign visitors usually learn this as a rule to imitate. It is worth understanding why Koreans … Read more
Korean drinking etiquette has more structure than almost any other social ritual you will encounter here. There are rules about who pours, which hand you use, which direction you face, and when you are allowed to stop. Most guides present this as charming tradition. It is also, for many Koreans, a source of genuine workplace … Read more
Search for Korean table manners and you will find lists of twenty or thirty rules, presented as though breaking any one of them would cause offence. This is not how it works, and following such a list will make you look stranger than not following it. The truth is that a handful of things genuinely … Read more
When Squid Game opened its first episode with hundreds of players sprinting across a field while a giant doll chanted, then froze them with a single glance, the world met a Korean childhood game for the first time. Strip away the deadly stakes and that game is something every Korean grew up playing in schoolyards … Read more
Malttukbakgi (말뚝박기) is the Korean schoolyard game where one team bends over in a line and the other team runs and jumps on top of them. If that sounds less like a game and more like an accident waiting to happen, you have understood it correctly. It was also, for boys of my generation, one … Read more