The partial biographies presented in this piece are situated as stoppages that mark generational experiences of structural change in South Korea. In Part I, I considered how biographies of subjects do not necessarily fit within grand narratives of structural transformation specific to South Korea. The partial biographies of Part II illuminate further how subjects experience generational stoppages such as structural transformation through highly particularised ways and how these experiences can be accounted for by the Korean word pok (luck/fortune) that intersects with structural and gendered limitations.
As The Food Cart Vendor (introduced in Part I) had explained to me, people are either born with a lot of pok and live well, or not: those who do not find fortune in their lives, such as the chance encounters that might transform one’s socio-economic position, often live difficult lives no matter how hard they try to make a living.
As such, pok is a word that denotes a world in which each subject is born with dispositions toward becoming a successful person.
Cosmological conceptions such as pok are more readily discussed by the generational cohort such as The Food Cart Vendor, The Driver, and The CEO (the latter two will be discussed in further detail in this piece) and less so by those of The Student’s generation (introduced in Part I). What becomes apparent in these discussions is the linkage between the kinds of measures put in place by state-bureaucratic policies and the relation of pok to gender.
Those who grew up during Park Chung Hee’s state-led mass participatory movements include a 60-year old retired taeriunjŏn driver (chauffeur service). Although The Driver, much like The Food Cart Vendor, left the province of Kangwŏndo to seek out work in Seoul (mŏkko sallyŏgo – to eat and live), he had spent his youth helping to reconstruct his village as a part of the Saemaul Untong (New Village Movement) that began in the 1970’s. At that time, the disparity in material conditions between urban cities and rural villages had grown to such an extent that Park Chung Hee set out to restore the poverty-stricken farming life. Park Chung Hee had dedicated as much resources as was required in order to further mobilise the Saemaul Untong. After the NACF (National Agricultural Cooperation Foundation) donated 335 bags of unmarketable surplus cement to the countryside in order for villagers to use them for communal projects, the Saemaul Untong developed into a widescale development project that had been presented as a spiritual movement, one that would build a sense of self-help and self-reliance (Lee, 2011, pp. 364-365). The Driver had lamented that in contemporary Korean capitalism, there was no longer any drive toward mass coordination that he had reflected upon so fondly, but rather, that people no longer “work hard anymore”. People were only “interested in their own work” (chagi ilman hanikka), and the cooperative labour conditions of communal village restoration projects such as the New Village Movement could no longer be observed.
Photo by author
The CEO had been less fortunate in his youth. He had left his home due to domestic problems (chiban sangt’aega an choasŏ) and had found himself on the street, making himself an income cleaning people’s shoes. What followed, however, was a chain of events, chance encounters, moments of luck attributed to the word pok that transformed The CEO’s living conditions. After re-uniting with brothers and sisters who had scattered throughout Seoul, he had met by chance a manager at H car manufacturing company who had offered him a job on the marketing team that was designing advertisements. Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 104) has suggested that people do not necessarily move about in social space randomly, but that inherited capital offers a set of foundational trajectories that can lead to positions of equivalence. Unless, of course, people are subject to collective events such as war or crises in which life trajectories may shift accordingly (Bourdieu, 1984, 104). The CEO’s life trajectory in the context of an industrialising nation, recovering from war and colonial occupation, had seen a rapid socio-economic shift in his life trajectory, from cleaning shoes on the street to rapid social mobility partly due to chance encounters. The CEO had spent his youth under the chaotic conditions of a rapidly industrialising nation, and his pok (luck/fortune) did not arrive until some chance encounters had re-united him with family members, and he was offered a job position at H car manufacturing company during a time when men were hired in greater numbers in the heavy and chemical industries. This pok proliferated in subsequent years, as in the years he spent at H car manufacturing company he was able to amass enough resources to launch his own marketing company where he holds his role as a CEO.
The interaction between state mobilisations, pok and gender emerges in the way in which the disparity of opportunity in gendered national roles allow particular openings for pok to have agency in the life of The CEO, for rapid shifts in socio-economic trajectories that had allowed him to ride on the agency of his fortune. In taking this partial biography seriously, as a mark of a generational stoppage within the context of a rapidly industrialising society, I could not retreat into sceptical assumptions about whether or not to believe his story. Whether or not the events truly happened in the sequence of events he had re-counted, whether they truly happened at all – a case like that of the CEO reflects a cultural imaginary, of belief in the possibility for life trajectories to shift in the kinds of rapid ways in which The CEO had recounted.
I see it as an ethnographic imperative not to debate about whether or not such events took place, but to consider how such an imaginary through social processes can make the partial biography of The CEO, along with the biographies presented in Parts I and II, a reality.
For those who shared their biographies with me, it was as much about narrating their lives as about enacting and transmitting inter-generational knowledges. To consider these partial biographies in their relations with structural transformations is – as Haraway (1988, 585-586) suggests – to be seeking out perspectives from points of view that cannot be known in advance, that promise extraordinariness: the knowing self is partial, never finished, stitched together imperfectly. The partial biographies can lead us to relations with narratives of a situatedness within national projects which are experienced through divergent, conflicting, and personalised ways.
The interaction between pok and gender, and state-bureaucratic mobilisations can be understood through the partial biographies I have presented in Parts I and II. For those of the generation who grew up under Park Chung Hee leadership, they had experienced a rapid speeding up of time and space in which the state instituted a wide-scale movement toward industrialisation that produced a fast-paced work ethic that came to impact upon personal lives.
This speeding up of time and space in the wide-scale industrial movements of Park Chung Hee’s authoritarian leadership is what Chang (1999) and Hae-Joang (2000) refer to as compressed modernity. What I want to emphasise is how each person experienced these alterations in time and space in distinctly personalised and gendered ways.
It was influenced by their own life trajectories, access to resources and job security that had provided the means through which pok could flourish for those such as The CEO, while allowing The Food Cart Vendor to negotiate the production of income and a business of her own.
For The Food Cart Vendor, her dream to live in a large rural hanok (large traditional multi-room home) remained with her, and although she has now come to reside in a tchokpang (small one-room space with shared kitchen and bathroom) in the neighbourhood where she works, she nevertheless remains ambivalent to this fact, working to make a living running a food cart on the sidewalk. The Driver reflects upon his time participating in the Saemaul Untong in such a way as to render his memories as if they had been dreams; the new realities of contemporary Korean capitalism could no longer bring together the kinds of communal participation that he had experienced during his youth. The CEO, too, explained his chance encounters from living on the streets cleaning people’s shoes for an income, to re-uniting with family and working at H car manufacturing company as almost impossible realisations of dreams he could not have imagined working on the street as a shoe cleaner, that could not have happened at another time.
For The Student, his friendship groups, and those of his generation who occupy similar spaces living with family in residential apartments, they are yet to tell of their life trajectories. As Hae-Joang (2015, 446-448) suggests, those of The Student’s generation have come to internalise the neoliberal logics of competition and compliance in which they were more inclined to micro-management, and time management in order to accumulate higher qualifications by foregoing leisure. And yet, The Student cannot be easily located within these spaces, choosing instead to pursue his personal ambitions. What contemporary Korean capitalism has made possible is this emergent contradictory condition: to live in the relative comfort that the former years of rapid industrialisation has brought, all the while being subject to the competing forces of neoliberal logics that demand of the youths of The Student’s generation to commit to exhaustive laborious study in the hope to acquire qualifications. As I have outlined, The Student very much seeks alternative options, and flees these generational commitments in favour of personal pursuits that look beyond economic and social incorporation. This is not to suggest that cosmological concepts such as pok no longer have any relevance in the biographies of those growing up in contemporary South Korea – it is not yet clear what those of The Student’s generation will have to say about their biographies and how pok will play out in their lives. This can only be reflected on as passing moments in one’s life.
[separator type=”space”]References
Bourdieu, P 1984, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, R Nice (trans.), Routledge, London and New York.
Chang, K-S 1999, ‘Compressed Modernity and its Discontents: South Korean Society in Transition’, Economy and Society, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 30-55.
Fortis, P, & Küchler, S 2021, ‘Introduction’, in P Fortis & S Küchler (eds.), Time and its Objects: A Perspective from Amerindina and Melanesian Societies on the Temporality of Images, Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York, pp. 1-20.
Haraway, D 1988, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of a Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 575 – 599.
Hae-Joang, CH 2000, ‘You are Entrapped in an Imaginary Well: The Formation of Subjectivity within Compressed Development – A Feminist Critique of Modernity and Korean Culture’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 49-69.
Hae-Joang, C 2015, ‘The Spec Generation Who Can’t Say “No”: Overeducated and Underemployed Youth in Contemporary South Korea’, Positions: Asia Critique, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 437 – 462.
Lee, Y. J. 2011. The Countryside, in B-K Kim & E. F. Vogel (eds.), The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformations of South Korea, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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