Little People Offer Big Things
This was so well put, and such a honest description of Koreans that I thought I should share it with you. It is a reflection on the country life of Koreans, as he walks along Route 1 from the small village of Naju to Gwangju (the fifth biggest city in Korea).
"The life of the urban Korean was changing with unprecedented rapidity, without a doubt; but out here, far from the influences of city life, the ancient, Confucian rhythms were being preserved - and the economic simplicities that went with them. Poor villages - no one ever hungry but no one with a compact-disc player, either - are strung along the length and breadth of Korea, and within them are hundreds of thousands of ordinary Koreans for whom the goal of middle-class British life is not only unattainable but also profoundly undesirable. It would be condescending to say that the Koreans are a people who admire what some writers about India call the 'dignity of poverty'. Quite the reverse: the Koreans are an ambitious, hardworking people, perhaps more hardworking than any I have ever encountered and ever will. They want to improve their lot. They want, desperately, to improve their children's lot. They will work all the hours God gives them to provide a good education for their offspring - no sacrifice is too much for a Korean father to make, no hours too long for a Korean mother to work, if only the child is well educated, is given a better chance, a better series of opportunities.
But at the same time there are those Koreans, both old and young - and the fact that young Koreans are included is important - who have as a conscious ambition a desire to preserve the essence of their lives and are thoughtful enough to care to resist the seductive charms of change....The Koreans - not all of them, by a long chalk, but many - seem to feel the same way. They know that Seoul is only a few hours away and there is chromium and glass and glitter and money and power there, and they appreciate the magnetism of it all. but they know also that what they have in these small villages - and yes, they also have electricity and direct-dial telephones, and I know one man in a thatched cottage who keeps a facsimile machine next to his kimchi pots - is as worth preserving as the modern world is worth exploring. Perhaps, I thought, I would meet someone along the road who would explain it more succinctly."
-- Simon Winchester Korea; A Walk Through the Land of Miracles
