Grace Jung is a force of nature: a fiction writer (The Moon Hangs Like a Stupid Mistake and Deli Ideology); literature translator (Sweet Potato, stories by early-modern Korean fiction writer Kim Tongin); standup comedian; actor (“The Joe Schmo Show”); YouTube personality; podcast host (“K-Drama School”); Fulbright Scholar in Korea; PhD; and university lecturer.
K-Drama School is likewise many things: 15 lessons that educate us on various facets of contemporary South Korean society, each contextualized by one or more popular Korean television shows; an autobiographical account of how the author was sustained in large part by Korean TV dramas during a challenging adolescence as the daughter of undocumented immigrants; a critique of academia drawn from Grace’s recent experience in a Ph.D. program in Cinema and Media Studies; and a recipe for healing and well-being not only in an increasingly divisive America but in South Korea, where an ascension to status as the world’s 13th largest economy is ironically juxtaposed with a malaise known as Hell Chosǒn, which affects a generation of young professional people not only in that country but among Korean international students in North America.
One of the many strengths of K-Drama School is its insights into U.S.-Korean relations since the Liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. Readers who come to this book out of interest in Hallyu—the wave of Korean popular culture that increasingly drives popular culture worldwide—may be surprised to learn that the origins of Korean television and much of the content of Korean TV dramas can be contextualized in part by South Korea’s contact with the West since the Korean War (1950-53).
In Lesson 2, “A Brief History of K-Traumas and Early Korean Television,” for example, we learn that the first South Korean television station was established in 1959 with the support of RCA (Radio Corporation of America). This short-lived station, closed down the same year, was followed by the AFKN (Armed Forces Korea Network) station, which until the end of 1961 was the only TV station in the nation. In Lesson 7, “#MeToo Korea and Resilience in Something in the Rain and One Spring Night,” we see that the #MeToo movement in the U.S. inspired a vigorous trend in Korea in “outing male celebrities for victimizing and assaulting women in the entertainment industry.”
Other lessons offer examples of Korean TV programs likewise influenced by a combination of domestic and external conditions. Lesson 4, “Penthouse and Food-Slapping Makjang Dramas for the Ego’s Soul,” one of the most lively chapters in the book, suggests that makchang TV show—serialized daily and featuring “crazy unexpected narrative turns with outrageous scenarios and extreme plot twists for shock entertainment”—developed in response to both a culture of family conservatism in Korea and the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s, which required International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervention and hit Korea especially hard.
Lessons 5 and 9 are especially thought-provoking. The former, “Orphans with Leukemia in K-Dramas,” outlines two mid-twentieth-century developments in Korean American history: Korean orphans and Korean war brides. Both have their basis in the American military presence on the Korean Peninsula, dating to the post-Liberation years of 1945-48, when the U.S. established a formal military government in what would become South Korea. And since the July 1953 armistice that brought a halt to the Korean War, the U.S. has maintained a military presence there. Relations between American military personnel and Korean women in the military camptowns arising outside the U.S. military bases led to populations of Korean spouses of American soldiers and offspring of their liaisons arriving in the U.S. through emigration or adoption. Adoption of Korean orphans by Americans was set in motion by the Korean War, which claimed the lives of an estimated 1.6 million Korean civilians alone. But since the publication in 2003 of Jane Jeong Trenka’s memoir, The Language of Blood, increased attention has been devoted to the difficulty many Korean adoptees in the US have experienced in their efforts to locate their birth parents in Korea—resulting in suspicions that some adoptees were not orphans but rather were placed in orphanages by families reluctant to acknowledge the mixed-race offspring of a daughter.
Chapter 9, “The Cycle of Military, Child Abuse, and Bullying in DP,” helps to explain the ongoing presence of hazing in the mandatory military service and corporal punishment in the Korean classroom. The former has led in some cases to PTSD, and the latter in some cases to bullying; both have contributed to suicide.
Acknowledging the weighty subject matter of these and other chapters, Jung offers us a half-page respite in Lesson 8, “Go Mash Something: “…let’s take a break and have some play time. Go make farting noises or play with a cat, dog, or hamster. Eat some candy or drink a smoothie. Splay out on your couch and stare at the ceiling for an hour. Or do some yoga to realign your chakras…. Just do it for fun.” Play time is essential.
The triumph of K-Drama School comes at the end, in Lesson 15, “My Liberation Notes and How It Feels to Be Free.” Earlier, in Lesson 3, “Realism and Trauma Recovery in My Mister,” Jung establishes the foundation for personal liberation by noting that “My Mister” “is a slice-of-life realist text about how a person reconnects with their inner humanity after experiencing a disconnection due to trauma.”
In Lesson 15, she strengthens this foundation: “If you take away anything from this book,” she writes, “I ask you to please worship yourself and others. Offer praise to yourself and to those around you. Give compliments and learn how to accept them. Offer yourself and one another acknowledgment and recognition—big or small.” Welcome advice indeed, in an increasingly fractured world.
Very few books about Korea combine subject expertise, context both in and outside of Korea, and life lessons in wellness based on personal experience. Let’s hope that K-Drama School will inspire similar volumes that examine Korean film, Korean popular music, and perhaps even the most venerable component of the Korean cultural tradition—literature, both oral and recorded.
Bruce Fulton occupies the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia, where he serves as a Professor in the Department of Asian Studies. He is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous works of modern Korean fiction, most recently Togani by Gong Ji-young and Chinatown, four stories by Oh Jung-hee (Penguin Modern Classic); co-recipient, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of the first U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for a Korean literary work and the first residency at the Banff International Literature Translation Centre awarded for a translation from any Asian language; and editor of The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories.
