#122. 갑질 -- Introducing the most entitled Korean family of 2018

As a Korean child, you grow up hearing about the importance of ethics. You are constantly educated on saying please and thank you, being polite to your elders, giving up your seats, helping the elders carry their heavy luggages, and so on.

Not following these social norms is not a crime. However, if you are sitting down in a crowded subway listening to music and minding your own business while an elderly grandmother is standing in front of you (swaying with the crowd and carrying a heavy 보따리), you can be assured of the fact that half of the people in the subway are silently judging you and your parents, who probably didn't raise you properly (in Korean, the phrase is "가정교육을 못받았네," or "he did not receive home education.")

You should probably give up your seat at this point.

With social climates such as these, the public figures of Korea are held to an especially high standard. They are expected to behave in an absolutely exemplary way, so that the young people of Korea can look at them and learn how to behave. If they fail to do so, they are subject to harsh internet criticism. For example, if an idol group is found to have bullied a member, then

1. The public will curse them out in comments to major internet news articles (we're talking about hundreds of thousands of hate comments), as well as on their personal social media accounts;
2. Their fans will have become disappointed in them, and they will leave the fandom (in Korea, just declaring that "I quit" doesn't count; most of these people will post proof on the internet that they've left the fandom by destroying all the fan merchandise they have accumulated over the years and posting a picture);
3. The general public will start boycotting any brands that this idol group models for, leading to their advertising contracts being terminated early. These groups are then often sued for having defamed the image of the products, and they will be ordered to pay for damages.

That is, engaging in a behaviour that goes against the Korean ethics can lead to huge financial ruin for these public figures. The Korean celebrities are not kidding when they say that their jobs are stressful!

The Korean speed skater 김보름, having accused of ostracizing her teammate in the Pyeongchang Olympics, had to apologize to the Koreans on her knees on her next game; she lost her contracts from her sponsors, and lost many fans over the incident.

The job of being a public figure is not limited to just the celebrities -- various members of high-profile political and entrepreneurial families are also expected to act in this way, as their success is also highly dependent on the public support. On top of being flawless in terms of the Korean ethics, these people are also expected to act according to the principles of noblesse oblige, which generally means being kind to even the people of the lowest social status, and donating to good causes.

Despite this, celebrities are not perfect, and these kinds of ethical scandals of national scale seem to explode in the Korean internet every couple of months or so. The most recent scandal that has the Koreans' blood boiling has to do with the family that founded Korean Air (대한항공 in Korean). As a quick background on how the Korean businesses work, most businesses are passed down within the family, forming their own small dynasties called 재벌 (chaebol, entrepreneurial dynasty).

The current CEO of Korean Air is a son of the founder of the company. He has three children, two daughters and one son. His two daughters, named 조현아 (age 43) and 조현민 (age 34), will take the centre stage of this article.

This is 조양호, the son of the founder of Korean Air.

As you can imagine, being born in a very rich family, knowing that you will one day become the CEO of one of the largest corporations of the country, can really shape your childhood. Whatever the truth of their upbringing was, in the popular Korean imagination, the children of the 재벌 family grow up never lacking anything, while everyone around them waits on them hand and foot. They probably have no empathy for the common folks, and they are probably rude and spoiled.

Many of the times, these speculations are proved wrong as many of these 재벌 families engage in volunteer work and donate to many good causes, but the current turn of events have made the Koreans suspect that the Korean Air family is probably exactly how they imagine how a 재벌 family is. And here is why:

The younger daughter, 조현민, has been making the headlines in the past few days for her entitled behaviour towards her employees. According to reports, an external advertisement agency for Korean Air was having a meeting with her to discuss the advertisement strategies for the British destinations for Korean Air. 조현민 asked some questions to one of the presenters, and it seems that the answer of the employee was not satisfactory.

This is 조현민, the third child of the Korean Air 재벌 family.

Being upset at the low-quality answer, 조현민 exploded in anger, throwing her glass of water in the direction of the employee; while the glass did not hit the employee, it is said that the water spilled from the glass splashed on the employee.

This instance by itself does not seem too scandalous to me (albeit humiliating to the employee). The reason it made headlines is because she and her family had been involved in several ethical scandals of similar nuance before -- they are rich and powerful, so everyone should bend to their will, right?

For example, her older sister 조현아 made international headlines for her entitled behaviour on a flight from New York to Incheon, where she got upset at the flight attendants for having served macadamia nuts in its original packaging (as opposed to serving them on a plate), and ordered the flight around back to New York to throw out the offending flight attendant from the plane (here is a Wikipedia article on the incident). As a result, having obstructed aviation safety, 조현아 served about three months in prison. It is said that their brother was also involved in scandals of similar nature, having cussed out an elderly lady in her 70s after a car accident.

This is 조현아, the oldest daughter of the Korean Air family.

There are many rude people in this world; however, when the rude people also happen to have a lot of power over you, the amount of humiliation that one might feel on the receiving end becomes exponential. And this is probably why the Cho sisters received so much online hate -- as powerful public figures, they did not behave appropriately at all.

And sadly enough, this kind of rudeness, where the offending party holds much more power than the other side, happens so frequently that the Koreans have invented a word for this. The act of rudeness, or humiliating someone socially weaker than you, is called "갑질" in Korean slang.

The suffix "-질" has appeared in this blog a few times. It denotes the act of doing something shameful. It can be spoken in irony, so for example, a teacher can say something like:

"선생질 하고있어요." (I do that embarrassing/inferior thing called teaching)

to demean themselves (presumably mostly in jest), or if you spend cash in games, you can say:

"게임하면서 현질해요." (I spend cash "현금" in games).

The word "갑" comes from an old Korean way of keeping track of time. The Koreans used ten Hanja characters to keep track of year, month, day, and hour (along with twelve more Hanja characters corresponding to animals, but we won't get into that in this post). The ten Hanja characters, called "십간" are as follows:

甲(갑)

乙(을)

丙(병)

丁(정)

戊(무)

己(기)

庚(경)

辛(신)

壬(임)

癸(계)

In any case, note that the first letter of these ten characters is "갑."

These letters also came to be used in legal contracts -- these contracts tend to not refer to the two parties in a contract by their proper names (think of all the search-and-replace the lawyers must go through, if this were the case!) So for example, in English rent contracts, instead of names, one uses "lessor" and the "lessee."

By convention, the Korean legal contracts tend to refer to the party with more power as "갑" and the other party by "을," the second letter of 십간. So your landlord would be written as "갑" and you would be "을" in your contract. If you were performing for a party, the party host would be "갑" as they would be the ones paying you, and you, the performer, would be "을," and so on.

So by the word "갑질," the Koreans are saying that you're doing that shameful thing that the people with more power (갑) do. This extremely appropriate slang came into being in around 2013, and has been used extensively even in media since then.

For example, if a customer from a clothing store comes back with an obviously worn dress and demands a return (of course, customer is king, and hence the customer is 갑), the store clerk might mutter under his breath:

"갑질고객 한분 또 나타나셨네" (Another power-tripping customer.)

Or in the case of the Cho sisters of the Korean Air, one of the most common comments you will see online might be:

"슈퍼갑질 제대로다." (I guess that's how you super-power-trip.)

Perhaps taking a hint from these 재벌 families, small-scale 갑질 are quite common in the Korean society as well; many people feel that they are in power when they are paying customers. Some Koreans would take extreme offense when the store clerks are not behaving to their satisfaction, and would go as far as getting the clerks to ask for their forgiveness on their knees. Another common instance is professors using their powers to manipulate the students into doing what they want.

Based on the Korean tendency to become submissive to their superiors, 갑질 carries a nuance that is a bit more serious than power-tripping. While most people are deriding those who are power-tripping, the word 갑질 is often spoken with an underlying empathy for those in the position of "을," as they probably just went through a very humiliating experience.

In closing, here is a bit of a Korean humour making fun of the Korean Air situation:

The poster says that he learned a life lesson that he will always sieve out (거른다) anyone with the last name of Cho "조씨." And on this list are a bunch of people with last name "조," who have been featured in national news for criminal activities. Here you might recognize:

- 제너럴 조승희: the shooter at Virginia Tech named Cho Seung-Hee (the Koreans have dubbed him "the general," which is a story for another day);
- 성추행 조민기, 나쁜남자 조재현: these two actors, known for being loving fathers to their daughters, were recently in the headlines for having sexually harassed and assaulted numerous women;
- 땅콩리턴 조현아, 물투척 조현민: the Korean Air family;
- 고담시티 조커: here is a bit of a Korea joke, where they include Joker from Gotham City, because in the Korean alphabets, Joker is spelled 조커, which makes it sound like he has the last name "조" in Korean!

The other names on this list are more Korea-specific, but each of these people have made national headlines at some point, and I must admit that as of late, the people with last name Cho have been in the news a lot.