Highway to Hell Choson, Not-so Glamorous After All
Ever-extending skyscrapers. Nationwide high-speed broadband. Mighty display of world class public transportation. While foreigners often associate these attributes to South Korea, South Koreans themselves do not necessarily perceive the country in this way. For them, the appropriate term to describe their nation is “Hell Choson,” the newly popularized term evoking the 300-year ruling feudal Choson Dynasty to describe the difficulties of pursuing an ambition in Korea today.
The term entered the popular lexicon when an image depicting the realities of living in Korea titled “Hell Choson: An Infernal Hell Peninsula” from the Korean online community DC Inside went viral.
“Being born in South Korea is tantamount to entering hell, where one is immediately enslaved by a highly regulated system that dictates and entire course of life,” said Se-Woong Koo, a writer from Korean Expose. “Onerous education and service in the abusive military are the norm, and the only goal for the young is to become servants of the mighty corporations that rule the realm from its heart.”
It is now common to hear South Korean college students bantering about creating a fried-chicken franchise upon graduation. It is a satirical remark stemming from the difficulties they face finding a job after graduation, making use of their college degree, and maintaining employment status. This generation of young Koreans is known as the N-Abandonment Generation, a term used to describe the number of ambitions, such as owning a home and starting a family, that they must forfeit in order to sustain a living.
College graduates find it difficult to break the barriers of unemployment. According to a series of interviews conducted by Joongang Daily, a graduate from Seoul National University with a 2.70 GPA and a driver’s license was able to join one of the conglomerates back in 1992. 22 years later in 2014, a young graduate from Seoul National University boasting a 3.64 GPA, high scores in the English tests, four different certifications, and a series of extracurricular activities failed in obtaining an offer from 23 different conglomerates and public offices.
South Korea ranks 27th out of 32 countries in the 2015 OECD report “How’s life?” On a scale from one to ten, Korea averaged at 5.80, almost a full point below the OECD average of 6.58. It ranks as one of the lowest in the number of hours parents interact with their children, while the hours of overtime work without compensation consistently high.
The “Hell Choson” movement gave birth to the satirical notion of “spoon classes,” criticizing the a perceived lack of social mobility. People have classified themselves into “spoon classes,” each corresponding to certain attributes that reveal the degree of injustice and inequality people in lower classes have to face. A child born into the “golden spoon class” for example, can receive a private education and land a job through family connections.
“The best thing for a South Korean is never to be born,” a follower of the website Hell Choson commented. “The second best thing is to die as early as possible.”