Getting the cold shoulder: the paepi and PyeongChang

Ga-hee, a middle-school girl, has her own online business selling eyeglass accessories. / Courtesy of Michael Hurt

By Michael Hurt

This essay is going to seem a bit disjointed, or even outright crazy. But remember that I’m not talking about a causal relationship here, but rather a canary-in-a-coal mine kind of thing.

In recent years, much ado has been made of “Hell Joseon,” the generation gap, and certain Korean social issues that are really functions of socio-structural change. Of course, there have been changes in the structure of Korean society that have been game-changers before, one being the democracy movement that finally culminated in the late 1980s.

And the recent dethroning and jailing of the great dictator’s daughter this year is testament to the true strength of democratic institutions and an actual culture of democracy in Korea.

It has struck me just how much people seem to be surprised at how relatively liberal and tolerant young Koreans are of things such as LGBTQ identity in supposedly “conservative” and “Confucian” South Korea. But if one ponders on this with a mind to social science and the relationship between the hardware, infrastructural side of the economy and the relations of production (the “base,” as it were) and the culture, beliefs and values that tend to form around/atop it (the “superstructure”), this all makes perfect sense.

The most seismically jarring force to wreak havoc on the old ways of thinking ― such as the ethno-nationalist notion of nation and people (minjok), traditional social categories such as “Korean blood” and other notions of “purity” ― has been the shift to consumer capitalism as not just another mode of capitalism, but as an all-rationalizing ideology unto itself. Part of this involves a shift to a notion of consumptivist bases of identity ― you are what you buy.

I’m not saying this is good or bad. It is merely a fact. And like many noteworthy aspects of Korea, it is not categorically unique to Korea. It is not a matter of type, but rather a matter of scale. So it is when talking about other social issues or changes here; prostitution is not categorically unique to Korea, nor interesting in type, but is interesting as a matter of scale. Prostitution being either 4.1, 5 or even 8 percent of GDP here means something socially, makes a palpable difference in life here. So it goes with private education competitiveness (gone to extremes in hagwons), misogyny (the Gangnam murder) or extreme political polarization (Ilbe).

The class of sartorially stylish and sartorially sophisticated super-consumer known as the pae-pi (a Korean portmanteau made from the Koreanized pronunciations of the first syllables of “fashion people”) is a herald of this sea change in the way to be Korean.

Blurring and mixing gender codes are second nature to many younger people these days. / Courtesy of Michael Hurt

Koreans born from the new millennium on have a completely different training and history of socialization in what it means to be a kid/boy/girl in Korea, what it means to live in a new millennium and lifetime that has always had the smartphone, Facebook and instantaneous messaging ― at least from the formative ages of early childhood. They have a different habitus ― or habits, education and knowledge that frame an understanding of the world and the ability to function in it ― than their parents and grandparents. This is actually most apparent in South Korea, which has had nearly ubiquitous downloads of video content far, far before YouTube was even a glint in Steve Chen’s eye and also had camera phones and a “selfie” culture years before the West had either camera phones or the word “selfie.”

Korean kids in their teens and 20s today grew up with the idea of virtual avatars as meaningful doppelgangers for their actual selves, along with the idea that one’s choices as a consumer meaningfully define one’s identity, whether it was clothing for their Cyworld avatars, skins for their “Mini-Hompy”, or characters with which to adorn their cellphone cases.

The very notion of what it means to be a person in this society is inevitably caught up in consumptive choices. Their immediate forebears, reared anywhere from the 1950s through the 1980s, knew very modern identity categories such as girl, boy, student, son, daughter, Korean ― largely without complexity or confusing complications such as having to make choices about who and how to be. It was not existentially difficult.

In short, the paepi is a class of super-consumers ― many of the most influential of whom are high school and even middle-schoolers ― who have simply become adept at doing what they have always been told to do by society: Cultivate a sense of refinement and taste, as this is important, and choose, buy and adorn. This defines who you are in the New Korea, where declining birth rates, an unfortunate upsurge in the number of universities in the 1990s and economic recession have made for high rates of youth unemployment or underemployment, extreme sexism and lookism that has bolstered personal and fiscal investment in plastic surgery and other beauty industries, and a popular culture that peddles in a positively pedophilic and pornographic set of media representations to define and sell the national identity. Is it any surprise that certain groups of young consumers have decided to avail themselves of the cheap (counterfeit) fast-fashion infrastructure of Dongdaemun and define themselves through clothing and body adornment, spurred on by information gleaned from Korea’s relatively new connection to the global internet through Facebook, Instagram and the like?

Which brings us back to PyeongChang and an advertising campaign that utilizes codes that have meaning only to people reared in a time of simple, unnuanced categories of ethnonationalism and straightforward, top-down social categories defined through simple allegiances and tribal chants. I venture to say that ad campaigns harkening back to the days of 2002 and the incantation “Dae~~~han min-guk, or a 1988-era raising of the fist to the word “Fighting!”, is not only completely old-fashioned and irrelevant to the lives of the younger population, but totally alien as well. Which is one big reason, among others too numerous to describe here, the crowds in PyeongChang will be sparse at best. That is, of course, unless more old-school Korean methods of padding the crowds are used, such as companies forcing employees to buy tickets and attend, or simply buying spectators. But either way, you won’t see Korea’s real ideas leaders bringing in friends to fill the seats.

Most middle-aged civil servants moonlighting as marketers and media people don’t even know the paepi ― either the word or people ― exist, let alone know how to talk to the younger generation. Which is why they’re speaking a marketing language from the 1980s and before. And which is why many seats at PyeongChang will not be filled by anyone who cares very much about being there.

This young paepi has completely different cultural habits than old-school Koreans. / Courtesy of Michael Hurt

And which explains why so many young Koreans seem so liberal and tolerant of difference and alternative lifestyles. Because, if all difference and alterity is a valid choice devoid of the dictates of negative ideology, who really cares who’s gay, straight, mixed-race or from the countryside? And in the same breath, who really cares about Koreanness or simplistic nationalism in a time of no border to tastes, communities or consumer allegiances? Who cares about some random winter sports enough to brave the freezing cold without even a roof cover?