2007년 03월 23일
NYT "한국, 뒤틀린 혼수 문화로 이혼까지"
Where the Wrong Gift Can Mean Love’s Labor’s Lost
Lee Hyo-yon, right, and Kim Young-seok at their wedding ceremony in Seoul, South Korea. Ms. Lee said she was lucky because Mr. Kim’s parents, at left, were not interested in receiving fancy gifts from her family.
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SEOUL, South Korea — When two young television stars called it quits only 12 days after their wedding recently, their very public and acrimonious divorce shined a rare spotlight on the underside of marriage in South Korea.
Lying in a hospital bed with a broken nose, Lee Min-young accused her husband, Lee Chan, of domestic violence, causing much hand-wringing in the country’s news media and blogosphere. But as accusations and counteraccusations flew, an equally heated debate arose over another reason cited in the breakup: wedding gifts.
According to accounts in the media, the bridegroom’s father said he received a gold-plated spoon among the gifts from the bride’s family, but he said he merited at least a silver spoon. The bride’s mother, in turn, complained bitterly that her daughter deserved to live in a more spacious apartment than the one chosen by the bridegroom.
The divorce shows that these days, perhaps more than ever, choosing the right wedding gifts for the new in-laws is fraught with pitfalls in South Korea. Misjudgments can lead to strained relations between the families or, at its extreme, a quick divorce.
Traditionally, the bridegroom, or his family, was expected to provide the newlyweds a home that the bride and her family were expected to furnish. A bride’s dowry was compensation for being taken care of for the rest of her life. Nowadays, changes like the rising status of women, the country’s growing wealth and, not least, skyrocketing real estate prices, have complicated matters.
“In the past, simple and useful gifts were given,” said Han Gyoung-hae, a professor of family studies at Seoul National University. “But now the price of the gifts has become more and more important, especially among the country’s new rich. If, traditionally, the gifts were meant to tie families together, now they are meant to show off how rich you are. The phenomenon is an expression of how materialistic South Korean society has become.”
Gifts started becoming lavish along with South Korea’s rising economy in the 1980s. Then in the 1990s, the families of the brides began giving sums of money outright, said Kim Joo-hee, a professor of family culture at Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul.
“But it’s become customary for the bridegroom’s family to return half of the money,” Ms. Kim said. “If they don’t, it could lead to confrontation.”
The anguish over choosing the right wedding gifts, though perhaps most intense among the wealthy, is shared by all social classes, she said.
“A woman from a poor family may have to work and save for her marriage, instead of relying on her family, but she will face similar problems over gifts,” Ms. Kim said.
Despite South Korea’s high-tech exterior, marriages here are still unions between families, and parents remain deeply involved in the final selection of their children’s spouses.
“Marriage is a whole family thing,” said Lee Hyo-yon, 28, an official at the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, who married recently. “And gifts are such an important part of it that some couples even break up before they ever get married. The family of one friend of mine gave $30,000 to the bridegroom’s family, but they said that wasn’t enough.”
Ms. Lee said she was lucky because the parents of her husband, Kim Young-seok, an engineer at Hyundai Motors, were extremely easygoing.
The courtship followed a common course among members of their generation. They were introduced by a mutual friend who, by custom, will now be presented with a suit, or the equivalent, in gratitude. Their first date was at an Italian restaurant in Kangnam, a fashionable district in southern Seoul, and Mr. Kim later impressed Ms. Lee by going to pick her up at the airport at 2 a.m. As many men here do, he proposed on their 100th day together.
The young couple will live with the bridegroom’s parents for the time being. But his parents had already bought an apartment for their son and his wife.
“We’re three brothers in my family,” Mr. Kim said. “So my parents bought each son an apartment years ago for their future marriages.”
As for Ms. Lee, she is supplying a new king-size bed. Unlike many other mothers-in-law, hers was not interested in receiving any gifts.
“That in itself caused my mother and me to worry,” said Ms. Lee, who earned a master’s degree in management from New York University. “Maybe we really weren’t doing enough. One day we even took my future mother-in-law to a fur coat store and asked her to let us choose one for her. But she refused.”
Family-studies experts say that the rising status and income of professional women, like Ms. Lee, has also led to the recalibration of gifts. For instance, in the case of the television stars, the actress was doing better than her husband was.
“Women are more educated, sometimes more so than their husbands, and are working,” Ms. Han said. “That gives her side of the family a bigger voice in the marriage, and it complicates gift-giving.”
The current real estate bubble in Seoul has also increased the burden for today’s bridegroom. The selection of an apartment that is not up to the standards of what the bride or her family had expected — as was the case with the actress’s mother — can lead to recriminations.
“If the bridegroom’s family is affluent but does not buy an apartment for the newlyweds and just rents one instead, that can cause problems,” Ms. Kim said. “That means they chose not to buy one, and gifts from the bride’s family must be adjusted accordingly.”
Renting is not easy, either. In South Korea, instead of monthly rents, landlords usually demand a large lump sum of money that is returned at the end of a two-year lease.
In Sanbon, a suburb of Seoul popular among newlyweds, renting a typical apartment smaller than 700 square feet requires a $75,000 initial payment for a two-year lease, said Kim Won-jong, a real estate agent.
The apartment that Lee Chan, the actor, had picked for his wife was more than 1,000 square feet and in a more fashionable neighborhood. The actress’s mother, however, said her daughter was worth an 1,800-square-foot apartment.
“That,” said Mr. Kim, the agent, “is a palace.”
In South Korea, tying the knot has plenty of strings attached
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Readers’ Opinions
What is an appropriate dowry gift? (21 comments)
That female actress experienced domestic violence before the marriage. At only 12 days after the marriage, she suffered a broken nose and lost her baby. It is beyond my imagination that a reporter can focus on the “right gifts” given at a wedding and not the problem of domestic violence. It is a terrible problem here, like it is in most countries. To point out that Koreans focus on money and not life and then write about gifts and not violence (and the loss of the baby’s life) is pure hypocrisy. Where is the humanity?
Before using the actor/actress couple as an example for the story, the writer should have checked more Korean articles that had interviews from both sides.
The groom’s father is one of the most influential TV producers/directors in Korea and his family has been trying to put the exact spin on the story as this article does.
Their story should be used as an example of domestic violence, period.
So much for “Asian values.”
I find it strange that many of your articles seem critical of Korea (in an underhanded fashion). Case in point - picking the most extreme and shocking examples each time you decide to showcase an unusual cultural, political or economic story. I note you fail to do the same when talking about Japanese war crimes or the like. We all have a laugh about that.
한국망신
[Translated by the IHT: “Embarrassment for South Korea.” ]
This article carries a bit inaccurate information. The reporter wrongfully used a tragic story of a Korean actress as an example of the absurd tradition of exchanging way too much expensive wedding gifts. That was nothing more than one of many false accusations the actress’s ex made in order to cover his wrong deeds. The man is now facing not only a domestic violence but a defamation charge. I think the reporter will need to correct what’s incorrect in his report.
In every countriy, actors and actresses tend to remain flamboyant in their every day livings. So, I think this case is not exact description of materialistic way of thinking in South Korea. Rather, cheating or bribing exercises are more appealing in this kind of theme. These bad habits still exists in South Korea.
Your articles are interesting . I have read many of them.
But what makes me feel bad whenever checking your articles is that you appear to be firmly determined to dig into unusual, not ordinary life of Korea. Please don’t magnify them as popular life in Korea, and stop giving an impression that they are the things only happening in Korea.
Years ago in Korea I bought my wifes family a cow and a small farm tractor.
No frills and we have been happily maried for 25 years.
For a non - Korean, this seeming emphasis on materialism is disconcerting. How can anybody know the true value of one person really? The last time I checked, market prices were meant for commodities, not people.
The appropriate dowry for a female? With the male-female ratio in Korea becoming ever more skewed, the male’s family should be thankful to find an available woman at all. This generation should bring the end to dowries!
The people in Asian don’t know what real values are. They don’t see that moral, love, religion and hard work are more precious than money for which they also have a god, which I take as devil.
This article carries a bit inaccurate information. The issue of this case was not the gift but DOMESTIC VIOLENCE. The writer of this article NORIMITSU ONISHI, need to research more before he puts pen in his hand.
It is happening but not all Korean couples are arguing on materials over their love! There are more couples who marry just because they love each other and nobody can stop them even though they are their own parents. And as many people pointed above, the actor and the actress’ case was totally exceptional. Please don’t make it too generalized that all the people in Korea are materialistic!
A story like this is unsettling to any Korean or Korean-American. But from a newspaper perspective, nothing gets press faster than drama. Yes, a story on the ‘ordinary life’ in Korea would be nice, but would those stories sell? It makes sense that NYT would pick up on a story with controversy, violence, and cultural taboo (within Korean culture anyway) like this.
Materialism in modern Korean culture IS a growing problem. I just wonder if and when a Korean newspaper would ever publish a story like this.
I just want to know the thought process behind assigning this story to a reporter of Japanese descent. If this were written by a white-American reporter, this would be an easy story to ‘otherize.’ Would the article have more clout if it were written by a Korean-American reporter? Does the nationality of the reporter matter in this story?
Nice tabloid journalism. Require more perspective for the NYT- or is it the IHT?
Old Fashion gifts are BEST.
Give her a Mirror and a Washboard!
Either take in WASHING or watch herself STARVE. :)
“Despite South Korea’s high-tech exterior, marriages here are still unions between families, and parents remain deeply involved in the final selection of their children’s spouses.”
… because people with cell phones and genetic engineering labs should naturally regard marriage as a contract between autonomous individuals? Why should there be any connection between technology and marriage practices? This is a lazy reporting trope that an outlet like NYT should be working to stamp out!
I am sorry for what happened to these korean couple. Dowry is common through out the world, africans requiring heads of camel/cattle, asia where dowry is required from the bride, and I suppose westerners are most casual about this customs: drive-by marriage in Las vegas. The oddest I have heard is from Saudi arabia, where the dowry is so exorbitant and beyond most so that you get aging spinster past 40 years. A flag is thus set up at the aging spinster’s house - a sign asking the hand for any man.
As a college student majoring in Jouralism, I find it really sad that this article was put forth by the NY Times and suddenly, I’m made to think that THIS IS WHY PEOPLE SAY JOURNALISTS ARE BIASED…
And though I would like to believe that this is an article that isn’t BIASED, it seems to difficult to draw that conclusion. Like many others who have commented, this couple’s probelm was more about domestic violence, not over “gifts.” Yes, modern Korean society and generations have shown probelms with materialism; however, this couple divorced because the actress was abused!
The actress, who was pregnant at the time, lost her BABY because the husband abused her.
I suggest the journalist go back to school and learn how to research.
# by | 2007/03/23 11:41 | usual | 트랙백
Your article about marriage in Korea is very interesting. I am a Canadian living in Seoul, South Korea for the past 11 years as an English teacher in a public school. While I believe this situation is happening, it is mostly in the upper class group which these days is increasing. Unfortunately the lower class is also increasing and the middle class is decreasing at an alarming rate. The gap is getting greater. Generally in the middle class, gifts to parents-in-law and other customs are decreasing a lot. The younger generation are becoming more and more westernized in their ways. But the rich will always be focused on money. To them it is the only thing in life that matters, similar to the rich in other countries. A very sad comment on the state of human affairs. I wish these people would focus more on providing a better education for their children by providing better schools and courses than on monetary customs.