The End of Men and the Rise of Women (34 page)

Actually what they said to Theresa Rah, the TV anchor they finally chose to be their communications director, was, “we need a woman,” she told me when we met in a Seoul coffee shop. Raised by a diplomat father and fluent in Korean, English, and French, Rah was drafted as the face of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Games Bid Committee. At the final meeting, she gave a public presentation that won over committee members and made her an instant celebrity in Korea, the symbol of the “perfect working woman,” as one
Korean newspaper put it. Youthful and utterly charming, Rah gave a speech that could have just as easily served as a plea to Korea’s leaders on behalf of the nation’s women. The committee should give “people with desire and talent the tools they need to succeed,” she urged them. “This is a race about dreams, about recognizing human potential.” At one of the press conferences announcing that Korea had beaten out France and Germany for the Winter Games, a young woman showed up dressed in the Korean national costume and insisted on shaking hands with Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee. She was a university student now but “in the future I want to be president of the IOC,” the girl told him.

Women such as Yongah Kim at McKinsey or Theresa Rah remain a rare, privileged breed in Korea. They are buffeted by impressive foreign diplomas and worldly diplomat friends, and fluency in several languages. If they get truly frustrated, they can escape to Switzerland or California. But for the average Korean woman—as for the average woman in most recently industrialized countries—appearing too cosmopolitan, or cosmopolitan in the wrong ways, can backfire. Perhaps the most insulting of the expressions for the new breed of power woman used regularly by the Korean press is “soybean paste” girl. The label implies that she eats soybean paste stew for her meals because it’s cheap and she wants to save the rest of her money to buy foreign luxury products—a Louis Vuitton bag, Chanel sunglasses, and a six-dollar Starbucks coffee to go with her one-dollar stew. In other words, as a consumer she is a national traitor.

In a wonderful unpublished paper, University of Chicago graduate student Vivien Chung compared the soybean paste girl with her vaunted counterpart, the fashionista. In the Korean media, the
former is portrayed as an embarrassing mimic of other people’s styles. She wears whatever she sees on
Sex and the City
or
Gossip Girl
and carries around English magazines that she can’t really understand. The latter—the fashionista—is a true artist, the ideal modern Korean woman who creates a personal style that’s locally inspired. In the fashionista, Koreans see a nation that can hold its own with France or the United States, a nation whose cultural prestige genuinely matches its economic power. In the soybean paste girl, Koreans see what they fear they have become—an arriviste nation, with economic power but no panache or respect, a mimic of other nations’ modernity.

In her paper, Chung quotes from a series of popular stories that imagine a romance between soybean paste girl and hot pepper paste man. He is a hardworking student fresh out of the military and preparing for his grueling national exams. He does not have much money, so he eats a frugal lunch and drinks water. Along comes a pretty soybean paste girl, who convinces him to buy her a fancy meal and a Starbucks coffee. He blows all his remaining money on a single meal. In the parable, hot pepper paste man is the old, noble Korea and she is the shallow temptress leading the nation down a dangerous path.

It’s easy to recognize the soybean paste girl on the streets of Seoul—a young woman in sunglasses with a designer bag on line at Starbucks. But in my experience she was not usually nursing her cappuccino, or madly texting her friends about which mall they would meet at next. What seemed most off to me about the stereotype was the impression that she was in any way frivolous—crass and commercial, maybe, but not a woman with endless time on her hands. Initially I had written a few contacts saying I wanted to “hang out” with some young Korean women and maybe go shopping with
them. I got this idea from reading about what was known a few years ago as the new class of “parasite girls” in Japan—young super-shoppers who idled all day at department stores, changing their look every two weeks and living off their parents. But then one of my contacts corrected me: “I know plenty of women here who shop,” she said. “But I can’t think of a single Korean friend who ‘hangs out.’ That’s just not something they do.” Instead they are generally rushing somewhere, to study or to work.

The real danger to hot pepper paste man these days is not soybean girl; it’s something like her opposite: a woman who doesn’t tempt him away from his exams because she is so busy studying herself, a woman who a few years later has no need of his money to buy her lunch or a fancy designer bag, because she is making enough money to buy them for herself. Asia’s looming problem right now is not the dangers of seduction but the threat of industrial-scale sexual indifference. In a host of Asian countries, including Korea, the new woman and the same old man have looked each other over and each has deemed the other a wholly unsuitable life partner, creating a region of “lonely hearts,” as
The Economist
recently called them. Japan, a few years down the road in this phenomenon, is now into comic territory. Sixty-one percent of single Japanese men between ages eighteen to thirty-four said in a government survey they have no girlfriend, and nearly half said they did not want one. The travel industry has begun to adjust honeymoon resorts to accommodate single-sex groups. The men often show up with a handheld device containing a virtual girlfriend who is a customized digital being, or with a body-length pillow on which is painted a picture of a woman.

Stephanie Kim and Kirsten Lee have been friends since they went to college together in Seoul. I met Stephanie through a friend and she brought along Kirsten because she was a typical “Gold Miss,”
Stephanie informed me: thirty-four, successful, and decisively single. We met in a slouchy tea house that doubled as a theater and served Korean takes on American vegan (tofu cheesecake, for example). They were both consciously stylish but in no way unserious; Kirsten carried all her work papers in a backpack, not a designer bag. She works as a producer of soap operas for the main Korean television station; you could say both had sacrificed domestic stability for independence and work satisfaction.

Kirsten has had the same boyfriend for three years. They don’t live together, because very few couples in Korea do. Theoretically she would like to get married one day, but in fact she does nothing to encourage it. Her life right now is “perfect,” she told me. “I make good money and I do whatever I want.” Whatever she wants means working from seven
A.M.
to midnight most days on the set, but that’s fine by her. She’s already told her boyfriend that she’ll never stop working, not even when she has a child, although a child at this point is just a word she throws out, nothing close to a concrete possibility.

Kirsten knows what the culture makes of hardworking mothers because she casts them in her soap operas all the time. A recent series features a working mother who is always frantically fielding calls from her autistic son’s school. But the audience reaction to her was so hostile that they had to make the woman quit her job. That experience in her professional life only made Kirsten dig in deeper in her personal one. “I really don’t see any reason to get married. If I do get married, I’ll just have to do all the work. All my married friends complain about life, so my only conclusion is, there’s no better life after marriage, only worse.”

“
They
complain?” asks Stephanie, and she is joking, since her own
story may be the cautionary tale most responsible for keeping Kirsten single. A few years ago Stephanie married someone she thought was the “new Korean man,” a cool fashion photographer who seemed like he understood what she wanted. Now, she summarizes her decision as: “I was totally deceived.” As soon as they got married he reverted to old Korea, she says. He would not do any housework or cooking; he just went to his room to work. When she went away on work trips three times a year, he shipped their son to her parents. “I was doing everything myself. I was the breadwinner and the housekeeper, and it seemed pointless to stay married,” she says, and they divorced. “I feel like I fired him.”

“Our generation was educated to compete with men. We go to equally good schools and get equally good jobs and have careers almost the same as a man. And then we get married and the men expect us to revert to an entirely different mental system,” Stephanie told me. “Once only the sons were brought up like kings. But now we are brought up like queens. And when the kings and the queens are in the same house, they collide.”

Perhaps the most depressing stories I heard in Korea were about what happens to successful women in the dating market. Young men and women frequently use dating sites and matchmakers, and like everything else in Korea potential candidates are ranked. Women lose points if they are not working at all, but they lose even more points if they are overeducated or have the potential to work too hard. As a result, a woman with a PhD or a Fulbright scholarship, say, will lie, and downgrade herself to a master’s. (“They told me my schoolbag strap was too long,” one PhD in sociology told me, meaning she’d been in school too long.) A newly minted doctor I met said the last service she applied to “told me I’m unmarketable, because I
went to a top university and I’m thirty.” Potential spouses were ranked as A, B, C, or D, I was told, and when people paired up, the A women and the D men often got left out.

By one estimate, nearly one in ten marriages in Korea involves foreign women. This is largely because there are so few women left in category D. They have all skipped up a notch, leaving the rural farmers or urban construction workers—the category D—without suitable brides. The men wind up importing brides from the Philippines or Vietnam. But the groom importation business having not yet taken off, the A women stay single.

Lacking a homegrown heroine, the lonely hearts take solace in
Sex and the City
, or in the surprise local hit by French feminist theorist Virginie Despentes,
King Kong Theory
, about her own rape and prostitution and the idea that “when it comes to sex today, everyone’s getting screwed.” Not meant for comfort, exactly, Despentes’s manifesto at least helps unleash the rage.

But there are more hopeful signs as well, even in Korean media. A recent popular drama,
My Name Is Kim Sam-soon
, starred a
charming, pudgy pastry chef who always speaks her mind. She falls for a younger man who, after much drama, chooses her over his younger and more classically feminine ex-girlfriend—a vindication for the King Kong girls. Kirsten Lee recently worked on a soap opera, which features a working woman who insists that her husband, who can’t find a job, take care of the children and cook. The woman had gotten the idea from her sister-in-law, who was a typical Gold Miss and intended to be the villain of the show; in one scene, the man’s mother bursts into tears when she discovers her Cinderalla son wearing an apron. But Kirsten’s viewers ended up being much more sympathetic to the Gold Miss, Kirsten told me, because at least “she was working hard, and she symbolized a good work ethic.”

I
HEARD HOPEFUL STORIES
of the intimate kind, too, although they tended to involve the persistence and patience of a Confucian parable, like that of an ant pushing a boulder up a hill. Generally, they featured a woman slowly and slyly teaching her husband to notice when she needed help, and a husband pliant and loving enough to start noticing. One of the women I most enjoyed meeting in Korea was a senior official at one of the government ministries. If she’d been a decade younger, she could have been a Gold Miss; she wore a fur vest and chose as our meeting place a French café on the top floor of a posh department store. Over the twenty years of her marriage, her husband had changed, she swore, but at a “glacial pace.” In the early years, family rituals would proceed in the usual Korean fashion. They would visit his family for the holidays and she would spend all day preparing food for neighbors she’d never met while the
men watched football. “It really got under my skin,” she told me. “After every holiday I came back in a nasty temper.”

Then slowly she started making small requests, adding a new one each year. “Oh, honey, can you hand me that bucket?” “Oh, honey, I need more flour.” “Guys, could you crack the walnuts?” “Pass the coffee?” Rice-flour dumplings are the staple of Korean holiday meals, and generally making them is solely a woman’s job. Eventually she recruited her husband to help with even that detailed and tedious work, instead of just shooting him “bullets with my eyes.” Just before the holidays, she will remind him that a “happy wife means a happy husband,” and after two decades he has learned to take the hint. “Now, as soon as we step through the door at my mother-in-law’s house he starts rolling up his sleeves.” She has also taken steps to ensure that her son’s wife won’t have to go through that twenty-year reeducation process. She makes him clean up his breakfast dishes and do his own laundry.