#42. 김칫국 드링킹 -- Being pathetic

Of course, there are many breeds of pathetic out there. The kind of pathetic people that I want to talk about are people like 준호. 준호 happens to have a crush on a girl 아영, and from any outsider's point of view, it's painfully clear that 아영 is not interested in 준호 at all. In fact, she goes out of her way to avoid 준호, to ensure that he doesn't get any false hopes.

준호, on the other hand, is not getting any hints. He thinks that 아영 is avoiding him because he thinks that 아영 has such a crush on him; that she is avoiding him to not make a fool of herself in front of him. 준호 regularly stresses out about whether 아영 would be okay with having just two kids. He already has a list of wedding guests, although he's excluded a few of their mutual friends since 아영 is sure to invite them even if he doesn't.

If 준호 ever came around to writing down his stresses on an internet forum, the Korean internet users would probably scold him using the following phrase:

김칫국좀 그만 마셔 ㅋㅋㅋ (stop drinking kimchi soup).

Or if they're younger, they might even say:

김칫국 드링킹하냐? (Are you drinking kimchi soup?)

Or

김칫국 원샷하는것좀 보소 (Look at the dude chugging down the kimchi soup).

This phrase actually has a very long history. And it features two everyday Korean food items beloved by the Koreans (but these don't seem very well-known or very loved by the non-Koreans.) These food items are 동치미 and 떡. Have you heard of these?

동치미 is a kind of 김치, but it might be different from the standard 김치 that you think of. There are some major differences between the two.

Despite the appearance, this is still a type of 김치.

동치미 doesn't use red pepper flakes (고춧가루). Since the redness of 김치 comes from the red pepper flakes, 동치미 is not red. The main ingredient of 동치미 is not the Korean cabbage (배추), but Korean radishes (무). Finally, 동치미 comes with a lot more soup than the regular 김치 (when you make it, a lot more water goes into it, so 동치미 has an appearance of being a watery soup, rather than 김치 looking like a vegetable.) It is still served cold.

My favourite part of 동치미 was always the soup. I was never really interested in the vegetables inside, but the soup is absolutely fantastic. It's cold, it's very light and flavourful, and when you're eating something greasy or heavy, you start craving a sip of the ice-cold 동치미 국물 (동치미 soup.)

One food that 동치미 pairs very well with is, of course, 떡 (rice cakes.) In my opinion, it pairs especially well with the type of 떡 called 백설기, which is just steamed rice flour. 백설기 is pretty boring as far as 떡 goes, and you can find other kinds of 떡 that is a lot more interesting and delicious. I especially dislike the relatively dry texture, since it crumbles, and it doesn't feel so different from eating a 고구마.

"백" means "white," and "설" means "snow" in Chinese. "백설기" got its name because rice flour looks like snow.

So when you eat food such as 백설기 (or 고구마, but that's irrelevant for this post), it's good to have some 동치미 국물 at hand. If you've never tried this food pairing, you should try it -- it's a classic Korean food pairing!

And so our ancestors started using a proverb (속담 in Korean) that goes:

떡 줄 사람은 생각도 않는데 김칫국부터 마신다.

 If someone says this to you, it translates to: "Drinking 김치 soup when the person holding the 떡 isn't even thinking of sharing with you." That is, you're expecting that you will be given 떡, and you've already set the table with some 동치미 soup, while the person with the 떡 has no intention of sharing. Awkward!

And this phrase applies perfectly to 준호, since he's setting the table with the proverbial 동치미 soup of wedding plans and planning for children, while 아영 doesn't even have any intention of dating 준호.

But Korea is a country of trends. While the above phrase is known to all Koreans, only the very elderly like my grandparents would use the full phrase. It often gets shortened to

김칫국 마시네 (you're drinking kimchi soup)

suppressing the mention of 떡. This phrase is probably the most common among the Koreans (even the elder people) without getting internet-vulgar.

The younger people of Korea are even more trendy, and they popularized this phrase by adding some humour into it. Instead of just saying "마시다" (to drink) which is standard Korean, they replaced it with the English word "드링킹" (literally, "drinking") to make it sound a little more vulgar and a little funnier. Remember that when a Korean word gets combined with an English word that has an easy Korean substitute, the result is often vulgar yet funny (이불킥 is another example.)

If you tell 준호 over the internet:

김칫국 드링킹 하냐? (Are you drinking kimchi soup?)

Then you've succeeded in using a trendy phrase, and you've possibly set yourself up for a little skirmish over the internet!

Of course, there are other vulgar substitutes for "마시다" such as "원샷때리다 (chug down in one gulp)" and that would achieve the same effect. In that case, you would say "김칫국 원샷하냐?" or "김칫국 원샷때리냐?"

Despite the long history of this phrase, I would use the neologisms only to close friends or over the internet, since the phrase itself already has an element of derision in it. But if you wanted to use it in the proverbial sense in the right context, you should be able to use it with everyone, with a little bit of tact!