Out And About In Hong Kong

Bob Dylan: more relevant than ever to politicians on both sides of The Pond;
"Don't criticise what you can't understand"

Last August, one of the most cocky spring chickens of the 1960s confidently ambled onto a modest stage perched in the cavernous rafters of Hong Kong's vast Convention & Exhibition Centre. Now a venerated old bird, at the rude old age of 77 a comfortably craggy Bob Dylan took centre stage to crow out, once again, that amongst many other certainties in life, we are all "...gonna have to serve somebody". In perhaps no other city in the world is this truth more seamlessly woven through the daily lives of its inhabitants. Endless pages have been written about old Hong Kong; from the opium wars to the Kowloon Walled City. Perhaps more has been written about modern Hong Kong; the lavish skyscrapers by Sir Norman Frosty or the 'new' Chek Lap Kok airport built in the sea. However for a huge number of people in Hong Kong, life is all about service. 

The Kowloon Walled City before demolition in 1993;
a one-stop-shop for opium, women and gambling, courtesy of local triads

https://www.businessinsider.com/kowloon-walled-city-photos-2015-2/?IR=T/#the-walled-city-had-its-own-micro-climate-according-to-girard-due-to-the-massive-amounts-of-tubing-wires-and-open-gutters-snaking-through-the-building-the-lower-levels-were-constantly-hot-humid-and-damp-23

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1191748/kowloon-walled-city-life-city-darkness

Spielbergian skies over Hong Kong Island's famous northern waterfront 
- transformed by prestige architects

Anyone in primary school in the 70s will remember most of their toys were stamped with the familiar words 'Made in Hong Kong'. However by the early 80s, China's social reforms encouraged most of HK's manufacturing to move to the mainland, together with much of its male workforce. 

While HK's departing industry was quickly replaced by service businesses such as finance and consulting, the departing male workers were quickly replaced by Hong Kongese women.  Then suddenly family households needed cooks, cleaners and nannies (Domestic Helpers, DH) at home.  This coincided neatly with the policy of the Philippines' wily president Marcos to export all of his problematic unemployed abroad. He was very successful and in the 20 years which followed, Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Nepal also tried their luck with the same Marcos model. 

View from Hong Kong over Victoria Harbour to Kowloon.
Now a monument to finance and consulting.

In Korea in 2015 it was estimated that 2.5% of families employed a Domestic Helper (DH). These are almost exclusively Chinese-Koreans since immigration laws restrict such work to ethnic Koreans only. This is designed to avoid the (perceived negative) impact of foreign cultural contamination in Korean homes.  The policy not only runs contrary to foreign teachers being allowed to teach English to school children but also the fact that many parents consider an English-speaking nanny as a learning advantage for their children.  However, as the law stands, it is taken very seriously by Immigration, as Korean Air heiress Heather Cho found out in 2018.

Heather Cho, celebrated for commandeering a departing plane on the tarmac at JFK airport because she was served macadamia nuts without a silver tray, this time answering allegations that she circumvented immigration law by hiring Filipino Domestic Helpers as 'Korean Air trainees' 

https://coconuts.co/manila/news/korean-air-heiress-infamous-airplane-nut-rage-accused-hiring-filipino-domestic-workers-illegally/

http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20180617000217#cb 

In a total Korean population of 50m people, estimates are that 30,000 to 80,000 people work as DHs, typically earning just under US$1,000 per month. 

By comparison, up to 33% of Hong Kongese families are estimated to hire DHs, amounting to 350,000 people or 5% of a total HK population of 7.5m. DHs are almost all female, split 50:50 Filipino:Indonesian, mostly in the age range 20 to 45 and typically earning US$500 per month.

In Hong Kong, DHs are legally obliged to live with their employers. Their day starts very early as they prepare breakfast for the family, get children washed and dressed for school and quite possibly deliver them to school also. The day is then filled with food shopping, cooking, washing, cleaning and then collecting children, feeding them, washing them and getting them to bed before the return of the parent(s). 

There is a lot to do so it is a long day, often finishing after 9pm, which explains why most DHs are not highly visible Monday to Saturday. Sunday however is the customary day off, when many DHs go to worship before collecting in the city's parks and open spaces to share food with friends, make video calls to the family back home and to fall asleep in the shade to the comforting background chatter of their native tongue.

Road closed for dancing in the street; a typical Sunday in Central in HK
Domestic Helpers set up impromptu food and dance parties in the city's open spaces.

Noodles and kick-boxing make for a relaxing afternoon

'Pretty maids all in a row';
Sunday in the park after worship; headscarved Indonesians to the left and Filipinas to the right.

While a foreigner in Korea still usually finds themselves the only non-Korean on the subway, in the supermarket or at the bar, in HK the ethnic mix could not be more complete. There are people from every corner of the world attracted by the combination of high salaries, low taxation and lenient requirements for work permits and residency. Of course in mid-summer this still feels like miserable compensation for the infernal heat and oppressive humidity. To adapt an old line from General Sheridan; "If I owned Hong Kong and Hell, I'd rent out Hong Kong and live in Hell." 

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Philip_Sheridan

Permanent residency can be acquired after 7 years of living legally  in Hong Kong.  However, controversially, this excludes people working as Domestic Helpers.  Some have mounted legal challenges to this but so far these failed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vallejos_v_Commissioner_of_Registration

Although English serves to connect most people in HK, it is interesting to note that a common language does not in itself deliver real social integration.  On Sundays it is quite normal to see a group of Filipinas having an impromptu zumba under some trees while head-scarved Indonesians sit reading and chatting in a separate group nearby. Meanwhile two blocks away there will be English, Irish, Aussies and Yanks downing beers and following their own national sports in their separate home-styled bars.  This shows that social integration occurs between people with shared histories, experiences, values and beliefs; it requires much more than simply speaking a common language.  

Braving a summer squall in Taymar Park: an open air screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) attracts people of all nationalities to come and get wet together

If there is any ethnic-unifying culture in Hong Kong then this is most visibly simply money.  The striking number of jewelry shops, even in the most bland malls and socially humble residential areas shows a pre-occupation with bling; see and be seen, get it and show it to everyone on My-Life-Is-Better-Than-Yours.com

A Lotus get-away car for the groom; cheap and tacky but unusual
(just like his boots and haircut) 

Anyone taking the popular, open-topped city tour bus ride will have seen The Pawn as they pass all the famous land marks of Hong Kong.  The building dates from 1881, was formerly a pawn shop and was since reinvented as an upmarket bar and restaurant.  Here you can take green tea on the balcony while peering down your nose at the great unwashed for just US$14; the same list price as the Guinness.  Bottles of spirits are priced at 5 times their respective duty free prices, which puts a bottle of champagne at about US$350.  At such places it is unremarkable to see a young couple, barely in their 20s, order a bottle of Moet, drink one glass each while waiting for friends and then leave the rest of the bottle as they move onto their next venue.  

The Pawn on Johnston Rd, Wanchai

Hong Kong's WanChai; a place where the high-life and low-life rub shoulders.
If you drop US$300,000 you can walk out with a McLaren on 20" wheels.
If you drop US$300 you can walk out with an hour's worth of intimate company on 3" heels.
Good quality rubber is essential for both options.

A six-decked yacht named 'Diamonds are Forever'
sits idle month after month in a marina overlooked by the Gold Coast Hotel

Proving that absurd advertising does not detract from its success.
The current must-have item for HK's male and female professionals alike
- chunky gent's watches by Omega, or at least, strikingly good imitations thereof.

As a social model, HK demonstrates how different cultures can live, drive and survive together without being assimilated into the culture of the host country. A healthy mutual respect, a live-and-let-live attitude and a common observance of the law can be enough.  This should reassure those Koreans who are increasingly panicked by the popular media about the rising numbers of foreigners in Korea and the potential erosion of Korean culture. 

Just Say "Aaaggghhhh !"

Alien 1979: "In space, no one can hear you scream".
In any competition  involving teeth, Korea wins every time

This week Seoul was chosen as the South Korean city which will  bid jointly with North Korea for the Olympic Games of 2032.  

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190211000920&ACE_SEARCH=1

It is hard to believe that 30 years have already passed since South Korea boldly hosted the summer Olympics of 1988. These games would go down in history as the event which proudly launched the Korean sport of Oral Hygiene (OH) into the global arena for the very first time. Viewers around the world sat speechless as the host nation carried away every gold, silver and bronze medal, effortlessly beating all foreign competition in every single OH event. 

First up was the eye-wateringly fast 15-Second Power-Brush Dash; ideal just before kissing and caressing or just after a secret cigarette. Then came the precision events such as the Single-handed Interdental Floss. These demonstrated skills patiently perfected over centuries into a near art form by Korean Buddhist Masters to remove their main diet of leafy greens from  between their rear molars. There were also an impresssive range of endurance events such as the Double-Handed Foam Marathon. This showed us for the first time how two beads of toothpaste can be whipped up into an entire mouthfull of foam, with all the uncompromising firmness of a Korean mattress, in just under 20 minutes. Of course the reasons for creating this foam still remain as opaque as, well, the foam itself really. In any case, with these unique and admittedly imaginative skills, South Korea instantly positioned itself at the cleaning edge of global Oral Hygiene. The rest of the world would have to brush up and catch up. 

From such unlikely beginnings, Korea's great Heroes of '88 were instantly immortalized as their as Oral Hygiene routines soon became ritual and are now observed in daily life with the same discipline one would expect of any finely-honed military unit. Official advice is to strictly follow the 3-3-3 concept, that is; to brush 3 times per day, for 3 minutes each time,  within 3 minutes of eating food. Yes. Seriously. Within 3 minutes of eating food.

https://journals.lww.com/md-journal/fulltext/2017/02170/Association_between_oral_health_behavior_and.62.aspx

Sharing is caring: brush together

Lunchtimes for office-dwellers are therefore characterised by fast and furious food around noon, then by a sharp sprint to the washroom armed with brushes, pastes and any number of the latest accessories. Of course the number of sinks are limited so an orderly queue is observed, with obvious deference to seniors who can slip in front of juniors any time, at their leisure. 

Guys in a hurry can at least use an additional evolutionary advantage to jump the queues; they can brush their teeth while standing at the urinals. Given a little practice with a well-disciplined Trouser Snake, one can urinate quite deftly while brushing one's teeth with one hand and posting on Facebook with the other hand. Those who eat a larger lunch take their brushes and mobiles into the cubicles to somehow combine their ablutions and social media updates at a more relaxed pace while seated. It is little wonder that recent studies showed 18 times more bacteria on the average smart phone than on the average toilet flush handle. 

http://time.com/4908654/cell-phone-bacteria/

None of this means that Oral Hygiene is in any way limited to mere tooth brushing. Frenzied brushing of the teeth in proscribed sets of horizontal, vertical and orbital motions, is merely  a cunning warm-up to flex the finger  muscles required for the more demanding tasks to follow. The first of these is the slow, methodical root-to-tip pressure-scrubbing of the top surface of the fully extended tongue. It amounts to scouring your most sensitive erogenous zone in front of the mirror in public. 

Tongue-scrubbing

Next follows the vigorous up-down scraping of the inside walls of the cheeks, which gives the impression of a large, trapped insect trying to claw its way out from inside the mouth. Finally comes a complete brush down of the entire roof of the mouth. The first time you see this you cannot help wonder if the person is trying to hook the base of their brain so they can pull it out via the soft palate. 

Evidently none of the above are effective unless followed by a complete ensemble of deep throat gargling, three intense mouth-rinse cycles and finally hacking up phlem from the deepest, darkest reaches of the trachea. All of these are accompanied by their own personal combination of gutteral grunts, groans and roars which are normally only heard from moody Scots at Wimbledon.

Game, set and match

No Sex Please I'm British

Puffer jackets - now a near fetish in Korea 

The silly season has definitely returned to Seoul this winter as December heralded a third consecutive year of obsession-near-fetish as students and adults alike competed to drop anything upwards of US$750 on identical, almost invariably black, ankle-length, duck down quilted 'caterpillar coats'. The knee length or waist length coats of previous years are strictly passé so it is best not to attempt a personal fashion revival by pulling either of these out of the wardrobe - even if you are still paying off the loan for them ! This will just get you de-listed from every event on your social calendar and will guarantee you your very own spotlight on social media. 

https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/global-currents/why-puffer-jackets-are-so-popular-in-korea

Size does matter; the guy on the right is going home alone tonight 

If you cannot afford the Full Monty this year then just stay home in your PJs with Netflix. This confirms you are one of life's 'little people'. 

Life's 'Little People' in Seoul Station subway,
taking refuge from temperatures of -15°C in their own padded sleeping bags

Of course, if you can afford to wear what looks like the sleeping bag in which you slept in the subway with the hobos last night, then your style has triumphed over your common sense and you can proudly strut that shapeless, sexless but inexplicably coveted Michelin Man look all over town. 

High school competition is fierce; the longer the better

Aside from the astonishing price of the coats, the social pressure to have the 'reassuringly expensive' brand 'because you're worth it' (brainwashing legacies of Stella Artois and L'Oreal respectively) and the fact the coats will be re-styled next season and therefore obviously unwearable, is the sheer incredible bulk of the coats. They instantly endow a 60kg whispish rake of an office boy with the commanding profile of a Kiwi scrum half. These coats transform a person's stature just like Steve Rogers / Captain America before and after the treatment. All this comes to a head during rush hour on the subway where normal overcrowding is already a game of groans. 

Rush hour on the Seoul subway: busy 

Seoul commuters are quite accustomed to packing into carriages so tightly that anyone can happily fall asleep standing up without any risk of falling over, since there is quite literally no space to fall into. The tight crush of people exerts a supporting pressure on everyone like a jar full of toothpicks. Of course, a carriage is never full; if nobody exits at a particular stop, everyone has to bunch up to accommodate the new onboards. The danger point is recognised when commuters spontaneously begin 'synchronised breathing'. This is when one person inhales while the person next to them exhales; because if everybody inhaled at the same time then the person with the weakest ribs will simply implode into a soggy mess. This is not only traumatic for their travelling companions but also highly inconvenient for the cleaners. The health risks of overpacking become clear whenever the train brakes harshly or lurches on a sharp curve. This is followed by a wave of popping sounds as the shoulders and hips of the most fragile commuters gently dislocate and then re-engage as a surge of crowd-pressure ripples through the carriage.

At peak hours the crush is so acute that it is quite impossible to avoid rubbing erogenous zones with at least six strangers while travelling just three stops. Whether you are rubbing EZs with people of your preferred sex, sexuality, age or physical attributes is very much a lottery - you can only hope to get lucky once in a while. Essentially, subway commuters are willingly engaging in the foreplay of a fully public orgy which they have not actually consented to.

The daily commute; agony and ecstasy - the public orgy you didn't consent to

Just this week one gentleman (I have to assume, since he seemed superficially polite) backed up so close to me that his ear brushed against my lips. Now, as a man of the world I am normally quite adept at stimulating an earlobe or two. A slow combination of warm breath, quiet murmurs, an inquiring tongue, together with some soft nibbles with moist lips and perhaps a gentle bite or two can be a very good starting point for a long and rewarding intimate evening. However it is sadly not the same when some unknown gent half a head shorter than me, drags his earlobe across my lips and tickles my nose with his dyed-black, gel-stiffened, toilet-brush haircut. He assumed this much foreplay from me without so much as a coffee and a little frisky small-talk. I was furious: how easy does he think I am ?

Pupae: unexpected fashion icons

The caterpillar coats and the overcrowded subway present serious social challenges when taken separately. When they combine, they make the morning commute the ultimate test of endurance. At rest, each person is said to emit about 100W of heat. However when wrapped in sufficient insulation to climb the peaks of Pluto, then ram-packed into subway carriages hot enough to grow tomatoes, the average commuter finds themselves cooking in their own juices and, ironically, in danger of passing out from heat stroke. Meanwhile shorter, vertically challenged commuters face the additional risk of being smothered by the taller crowd around them. So effective is the sensory deprivation provided by today's mobiles and noise-canceling headphones that there is no chance of noticing a fellow commuter turn from red via purple to blue and then expiring with a muffled whimper. Yet another dilemma for the cleaners !

Storm in a tea cup

There is a widely held belief that you can tell much about a person or a nation from the way they handle themselves in a crisis.  

Great leaders of our time, and David Cameron.
The Prime Ministerial spectrum; from the 
original salad dodger to the risible porker porker

Wartime heroism is such a distant memory that the quote most often heard about crises these days is the cynical observation; 

"When the going gets tough, the tough get going". 

In the wake of Cameron's resignation after the Brexit referendum, political satirists joyfully updated this quip to; 

"When the going gets tough, the toff gets off".

This divisive issue continues to dangle British politics over a precipice. With Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg all jockeying for leadership positions, it is still too early to assume the next update will be; 

"When the toffs gets tough, May will stay".

Quotes about crises from people in the public eye range from the sage Dexter Morgan; 

"There's nothing like a crisis to define who you are". 

To the sublime Jeremy Corbyn, who evidently didn't see the current antisemitism storm brewing on the horizon when he shared his wistful thinking;

"I find if you are in an office, the crisis finds you. 
If you're not in the office, the crisis finds somebody else".

Either way, this summer it was the tropical typhoon which provided the barometer by which to measure how different countries respond to a looming weather crisis. 

Most people are aware of the annual monsoon which  gestates slowly before midsummer then unloads torrents of water shortly and sharply over much of India. However the wider geographical area, from North Australia through to China, experiences approx 27 large, heavy storms each year which form quickly, barrel in from the western Pacific Ocean every fortnight and then ping around the archipelagos of south east Asia at the whim of some atmospheric pinball wizard. 

Trajectories of 2018's western pacific typhoons to date

Thanks to weather satellites and cloud penetrating radar, the speed, strength and direction of these storms can be monitored and to some extent predicted. However reacting to the risks is still very much an individual national decision.

Of the average 27 storms, the smallest 10 are usually only of concern to international shipping. The remaining 17 develop into typhoons, most of which make landfall somewhere between the Philippines to the south west and Japan to the north east. While half of these simply deliver long, soggy days of unending rain, the other half form 'super typhoons' characterised by destructive winds and enough rain to cause severe flooding. 

Espana Boulevand, Manila 2014

In some places the rain is manageable; cities have sewers and canals to route water quickly to the river or sea. However deforested hill-sides in rural communities are at high risk as the rain saturates the topsoil, increasing its weight, while simultaneously lubricating the soil so it slides more easily. Unfortunate townsfolk buried under large mudslides are regular events. High winds generate powerful waves and uproot trees while broken overhead power lines have greatest impact, cutting off electricity and thereby also water and gas.


In 2016 South Korea's national weather service proudly hailed the installation of its new Cray weather-predicting Super Computer No4 (SC4). At US $54m it was staggeringly expensive, lightning fast, highly sophisticated, it was the bee's knees; the last word in weather analysis. It would make Korean weather sexy.

Cray supercomputer, a snip at US$ 54m

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2014/06/25/cray-signs-a-54-million-supercomputing-contract-with-south-korea/amp/

Ever critical and always hard to satisfy, it was not long before a dubious public started to comment on significant differences between the weather promised by SC4 and what they were actually receiving. It rapidly became something of a national hobby to check SC4's daily forecast and then watch for the correlation, in much the same way that people might check their daily horoscope and then look for evidence of its predictions as the day unfolded.

http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=212464

Criticism rapidly turned to scandal as every man, woman and dog eventually concluded that the forecasts spewed by the new computer were correct less than 50% of the time. This meant in practice, that if the forecast said no rain, then the chances were that you should take an umbrella with you.

A deeper analysis showed that forecasts were indeed more accurate before the new super-computer. What had gone wrong ? Who had ripped off the Met Office and pocketed a fortune ? Who had been duped by a lousy pile of circuitry dressed up with bells and whistles ? The public demanded answers.  Attempts were made to deflect criticism by blaming the extraction of data from the nation's weather satellite Chollian-1.

http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20170822000749#cb 


Two years later, after all the outrage, the investigations, the exonerations and the excuses, the dust settled and the public turned their ire to more urgent matters; such as impeaching a president who had never even twittered a tweet. 

In August 2018 typhoon Soulik formed in the western Pacific, looming large and leaning heavily towards South Korea. The bells and whistles on SC4's super circuits warned of the worst typhoon since 2012; the wind speed measured in hundreds, injuries predicted in thousands and property damage expected in millions. Public events were canceled, people stockpiled food and water while others even dusted off the apocalypse survival kits they were gifted the previous summer at the height of Kim JongUn's 2017 attention-seeking, missile-launching, frenzied rite of passage.

Govt and employers even took the astonishing and previously unimaginable step of telling people to "work from home" (a new phrase never previously heard in Korea). This advice was totally unprocessable by most middle managers who still cannot conceive of people working dutifully if they are not in the direct line of sight of a 'superior'. Team leaders attempted to control their colleagues by scheduling as many online video conferences as possible to ensure their team members were awake, properly attired and actively engaged in their duties at home, not just kicking back in their slippers on the sofa with their kids in front of some K-drama. Most notable was the number of family men who ignored the typhoon warnings to brave it to the office. This time not for the usual reason of habitual presenteeism but rather the sly, unspoken truth that with the schools closed and the kids at home with the wife, an empty office offered the most peaceful environment to finish binge-watching on Netflix.

http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20180823000573&ACE_SEARCH=1

http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20180820000522&ACE_SEARCH=1

In the end typhoon Soulik came and went. The entire nation spent a whole day in total lock down anticipating events of biblical proportions. What happened in most places were simply long, tedious hours of drizzle. Somewhere on the south coast, which apparently took the brunt of the storm, damage rose into the high single digits as an old lady's umbrella blew inside out. Definitely it was the dampest of squibs.

http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20180824000589&ACE_SEARCH=1

And the solution ?  Why, to buy a bigger supercomputer of course ! Supercomputer No 5 is already on order at a whopping US$56m to go !

http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=243468

Even so, Korea's newest and most expensive number cruncher yet will still rely on the same quality of data from the same satellite used today.

At the current rate the govt is spending anything upwards of US$50m on weather prediction supercomputers every 5 years, or US$10m per year, for predictions which are more often wrong than right.  Meanwhile old folks can make more reliable predictions by simply looking at the weather on the horizon in the direction that the wind is blowing in from and preparing for the same the next day.

Into Darkness - Extreme Exam Culture

"Beware the Ides of March" by all means but September is never a dull month in any country. In Germany it is the month of the Oktoberfest - nothing less than the holy grail of the calendar year for many. Of course these days the event has been successfully exported worldwide including to both North and South Korea.

Bavarian colours redesigned with military chic.
Capitalising on NK's very highly rated brewing skills, Kim JungUn gave his personal nod 
to a 20 day beer festival in 2016, which is now an annual event in Pyongyang.

https://www.i4u.com/2016/08/114354/north-korea-has-first-oktoberfest

Seoul's Grand Hilton Hotel Oktoberfest:
more lederhosen and fewer starched uniforms than our friends in the north

Meanwhile in the more romantic nations of Europe, September sees a slothful return to work following August's closure of schools, small businesses, consultants, etc, to enable the merchants and professionals to rekindle their passions somewhere secluded. 

Alas for most students in the northern hemisphere, September reluctantly heralds the start of the new academic year and in Korea, it is the final count down to Seunung, the College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT) held each Thursday in the second week of November. This is an 8 hour long national marathon of a selection test in which approx 600,000 students compete for positions at university. The importance of this test is difficult to overstate because of the widely held (and largely self-perpetuating) belief that selection to the best university puts you above your peers socially and provides a roadmap to success for the rest of your entire life. To reinforce the gravity of the exam, police control traffic on the day to ensure everyone arrives at school on time, military exercises and civilian flights are postponed to reduce distractions, meanwhile stock markets, banks and govt offices open late to allow parents to burn the midnight oil with their kid the night before.

https://www.economist.com/banyan/2013/11/08/point-me-at-the-sky

Today more than ever, across the world and especially in South Korea (whose OECD ranking for graduation rates leaped from #34 to #1 in only 30 years) school and exams are a test of endurance rather than a test of intelligence or a useful foundation for a career. Students learn the facts and are then tested on how much they can remember. Likewise teachers teach-to-the-test; they coach the students on the type of questions they will be asked and the answers to reply with. This seduces some with the inviting short cut of learning only the questions and the respective model answers rather than learning the basic material. These students are quickly revealed when they leave the room 20 minutes into a 3 hour exam because the questions do not include the ones they learned. 

For the last 4 years South Korea has been #1 worldwide
for high school and college graduation rates.
This prompts the Whitehouse to ask what can the USA learn from  SK ?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/05/what-can-the-us-learn-from-south-koreas-education-system/

Defiance

In 2012 a UK teacher proudly confided that she would refuse to implement the govt exams for 6 year olds in her class. She explained that her students were too young to be stressed by exams and that school is for learning and fun. Furthermore it is unfair to assess anyone based on their performance in one particular hour. A listener noted that when they become adults, her class will be regularly assessed, accepted or rejected in much less than an hour, often in just a few seconds.  This will happen every time they walk into a meeting, attend a job interview or introduce themselves to a potential date at a party. As the saying goes; "You don't get a second chance to make a first impression", so why try to avoid the inevitable ?  Why not become good at it by regular practice ? 

May 2016: UK teachers, parents and children protesting against national exams for 6 year olds

The noble teacher might consider that in former times the Korean education system included exams for entrance to middle school and then again for entrance to high school.  Due to grueling pressure on the students, the middle school exam was abolished in 1971. However this simply increased the stakes riding on the high school exam.  Competition in the high school exam then became so feverishly fraught that it was replaced by a lottery system for allocating school places. Ultimately both of these 'fixes' combined to shift all the pressure further along the system making November's Seunung the single, defining, make-or-break, absolute cliff-hanger of a student's application to university. 

http://undergraduatelibrary.org/system/files/Schooling%20%26%20Culture%20-%20South%20Korean%20Education%20System.pdf

Real Life
At school I recall learning how to calculate the inclination of a cannon set at distance S so that a cannon ball fired with velocity V hit would hit the top of a castle keep at height H. I'd like to think that I could do the same calculation today, which would indeed be a fine test of memory. In real life it is astonishingly rare to be given such a well-defined problem to solve and if you are that lucky then computing the answer is rarely difficult. 

An age old maths problem; the ballistic trajectories of cannon balls
- until 2017 also used notoriously by Kim JungUn for launching ICMBs into the Pacific

Real life problems are poorly defined at best and often hidden at worst; they require analytical skills. The first is observation; recognising that there is a problem with a business unit, a production line or a project is a very subtle skill. The second is investigation; correctly identifying which factors contribute to the problem as opposed to other issues which have no influence. Observation and investigation simply define the problem. Then come the follow-up skills; finding options and choosing a solution. Even the best schools and the most hotly contested universities have been excruciatingly slow at coaching future generations in the analytical skills needed for real challenges. The DAX, NYSE & FTSE are littered with examples of businesses which collapsed because nobody recognised anything was wrong (eg: Lehman Bros) or because a company achieved technical supremacy and/or market share with a product for which there was no longer a demand (eg: Kodak). 

Koreans themselves are scratching their heads over this dilemma, noting that despite Korea's #1 ranking for graduates in the OECD, Korea has yet to win a single Nobel prize in sciences.  Commentators identify rote learning as a likely culprit for stifling creative thinking together with the parents' unbalanced obsession with the reputation of certain universities rather than the subject their child will actually study. 

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2018/09/181_254202.html

http://www.theasian.asia/archives/99165

Returning to the example of the cannon; relevant questions to ask before lighting the gunpowder might include; what makes an artillery attack preferable to undermining the walls, starving out the defenders or better still, confusing the incumbents by rocking up in a huge wooden horse ? Also, are non-adversarial strategies feasible such as starting rebellion among the defenders, converting them into allies or subverting the loyalty of an under-appreciated gatekeeper by offering him a quiet farmhouse with a few sheep tended by a Nordic shepherdess ?

Nordic shepherdess : offers a discrete alternative to military bombardment 

The analytical skills needed to detect and define problems then assess feasible solutions are hard to teach, harder to test and even harder to evaluate objectively. Therefore the education system blithely stumbles on, testing what students can remember; not because this constitutes a good education but simply because exams are easy to operate and everyone receives a standardised  little score for easy comparison.  

Work life
Analytical skills are similarly hard to teach, test and evaluate in a working environment. But rather than admit to the fallacy of annual performance reviews, HR gurus continue to ply their trade by annually launching the latest reincarnation of their review process which is invariably tweaked, overhauled or rebooted to include some enlightening mantra 'pinched with pride' from some uncredited business class in-flight magazine.

It is no surprise that many major corporations shed the yolk of performance reviews as they stepped into the 21st century, starting with tech companies like Dell, Microsoft and IBM but then joined by consultants such as Deloitte, PWC and Accenture, then industries such as GAP, Lear and General Electric.

https://hbr.org/2016/10/the-performance-management-revolution


https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/ahead-of-the-curve-the-future-of-performance-management

https://qz.com/428813/ge-performance-review-strategy-shift/


Sadly Korean chaebols are generally operated like military units with decisions made by Human Resources rather than managers. Here the annual performance review is essentially abused since the manager is unable to freely score individuals according to merit. Instead the HR dept. proscribes the spread of people who can be scored high (salary rise), middle (no change) or low (salary decrease). The manager must simply decide which to assign to who, even if all the team have done well and nobody merits a poor score - see previous post

Enlightenment
The most important casualty of an exam-fevered education is the joy of discovery - which is ironically the most powerful incentive to study. Students today memorise that the planets orbit the sun, the circumference of the earth is 40,000 km or that the swing of a pendulum is proportional to the square of its length. Today these are given as dry, unremarkable truths, delivered without context of the significance of the discoveries or how they changed the world. Nothing is taught about the curiosity, passion and egos which drove people to discover these truths, the primitive methods used to make the measurements, the wrong theories which were abandoned before the right theory was realised, the personal, religious and political fallout surrounding the discoveries. A student's enlightenment comes from learning how a discovery was made, who believed it, why it was challenged, who ignored it, as much as from the actual conclusion itself. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

Once education is made devoid of enlightenment, reduced to examinable facts which are dull and unmotivating, clearly students will begrudge the best years of their lives being smothered by the inexorable darkness of extreme exam culture. 

1979: Pink Floyd's The Wall; an early warning of darker times ahead

The Bottom Line
Putting educational philosophies and student motivation aside, the bottom line is that the business of education is business, not education.  In South Korea education is a huge opportunity to squeeze everything that parents can afford in exchange for even the most marginal perceived advantage for their children.  Like the market for new smart phones, the market for educational services needs no advertising, no sales pitch, no marketing.  Parents actively seek out each and every conceivable opportunity to upgrade their child's study experience.  

The prize is simple; a place at one of the nation's 3 elite 'SKY' universities; Seoul National Uni., Korea Uni, and Yonsei Uni. These accept the top 2% of students which sometimes leaves the student feeling a little more entitled than his less fortunate peers.

https://www.quora.com/How-does-South-Koreas-education-system-affect-students

Competition for SKY and other high-rated unis used to start in primary school with parents spending on average 20% of household income on private evening crammers (hagwon).  

https://theconversation.com/south-korean-education-ranks-high-but-its-the-kids-who-pay-34430

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/10491289/OECD-education-report-Koreas-school-system-a-pressure-cooker-for-children.html

Hagwons routinely teach until 9pm, often later, leaving children so tired that teachers perversely have to allow them to sleep the next day during regular school class.

Today the battle ground has shifted to kindergarten, specifically English language kindergartens which are perceived to be the latest way to nudge your child ahead.  On average places cost an astonishing US$ 900 per month but demand is so high that there are already more than 250 English language kindergartens in Seoul - the most expensive of which cost US$ 2,000 per month.

http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20180724000470#cb


Ultimately money secures academic excellence with which to further leverage social standing.  To highjack Netflix's flawless adaptation of Richard Morgan's 2002 dystopian vision of our near future;

"Those with eternal wealth have 

eternal power over those who don't."

The Impersonal Touch

Some things are glaringly obvious but this still does not prevent them being overlooked entirely. For example; consider the argument between Darwin, Weissman and Lamarck in the late 1800s. Lamarck proposed that animals adapted to their environment during their lifetimes (eg: giraffes grew longer necks to reach higher branches) and passed on these adaptations to their offspring. Weissman disagreed vehemently and set about proving this by snipping the tails off 20 successive generations of lab mice to show that no tailless mice would produce any tailless offspring. Upon learning of this 'extreme proof', one sage observer noted that those of the Jewish persuasion had been discretely snipping bits off their men for millennia but had still failed to produce a single male who was born without the offending item; therefore why put 20 generations of mice through such unnecessary grief ? This was glaringly obvious but overlooked entirely - with no apologies to Weissman's poor mice. 

Weissman: - not a good day for mice, or Lamarck

John Betjeman's 'Inexpensive Progress' lamented the inexorable power of retailers as they erased the individual character of our main streets with the same impersonal, bleak facades found in every other anonymised town;

"Let no provincial High Street 

Which might be your or my street 

Look as it used to do, 

But let the chain stores place here 

Miles of black glass facia 

And traffic thunder through"

Half a century later we have come to expect a full suite of chain stores in any town centre where we stop for our retail therapy. Starbucks, KFC and Haagen Daz make no attempt to hide their fixes of modern junk food, even in the former opium dens of Shanghai, for example. 

Not a good blend: Starbucks subtly standing out in the crowd in the Old City of Shanghai

KFC: the crowning addition to 600 years of history and culture, Old City of Shanghai 

South Korea is no exception with every hub of every suburb offering the same predictable names in supermarkets, sportswear, clothing, beauty products, restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, fast food, etc, etc. The notable difference in Korea is the tendency for near-identical outlets to cluster right next to each other, often literally door-to-door. Most foreigners will raise an eyebrow of improbability when spotting their first collection of Starbucks, Ediya Coffee, Coffee Bronzz shops all in a row. 

Seoul: coffee shops all in a row

This will be quickly followed by a dropped jaw of incredulity upon spotting four beauty retailers door-to-door such as Innisfree, Etude House, MissHa & Nature Republic. There are too many examples to mention and even the banks can be found in similar clusters.


Initial thinking might suggest that a new beauty shop would be most successful if located as far away as possible from other beauty shops, thereby securing a 'captive audience' who have few other options in the area. By this reasoning, opening a new beauty shop next to established beauty shops would likely split the available customers to the point where all shops become unprofitable. However, the success of these clusters shows that once the first shop confirms demand in an area, then additional similar shops draw more customers by widening the choice. It is simply the time-honoured concept of the ancient gold souks applied to retailing in general; glaringly obvious - unless you missed it.


Food and drink emporia have the added bonus that Koreans are meticulously punctual about eating lunch at noon, often as quickly as possible so they can nap from 12:15 onwards. This creates a daily tidal wave of ravenous customers who will readily revert to a neighbouring eatery if their first preference is full. In this way many restaurants survive as overflows to a popular 'main attraction'. Oddly, and perhaps more obscurely, the same clustering is even seen amongst high street banks.

Since the introduction of ATMs and online banking most countries have seen a steady decline in the number of high street branches, however in Korea you can still find at least 5 of the nation's 10 principal domestic banks on every second city block. Stepping inside the larger branches is like walking into a business class lounge at the airport. With the obvious exception of the doorman, the staff are all young, female, wearing identical short, tight uniforms, expertly primped, meticulously rendered with skin-whitening masks and feigning the proscribed amount of allure. The first time you see this you can't help anticipating Robert Palmer stepping out from behind a pillar for an impromptu re-shoot of his iconic 'Addicted To Love'.

Korean banking; verging towards the Palmeresque

https://youtu.be/XcATvu5f9vE

In busy periods there can be 20 such female staff, each sitting upright and attentive behind a desk without bullet-proof glass, emergency shutters, microphones or speakers. It is undeniably plush and civilised. Just take the weight off your feet, recline in a deep, leather sofa and scan the news headlines until your number appears. Only when called to your allotted desk, do you start to notice the first subtle glitches in the matrix of ultra-high-tech, 24/7, banking-at-the-speed-of-light which has been constructed around you.

Immerse yourself in the Korean banking matrix

If you make the mistake of presenting your passbook (yup, that A6 sized, stiff-covered post-war relic) to the teller, she will insert it into the printer to add every single transaction since your last visit. If this was 3 months ago, that's anything up to 2 or 3 passbooks to fill; each page lovingly opened and smoothed by manicured, moisturised hands before the book is tenderly reinserted into the printer again and again and again. You start to understand why the staff look so vibrant; they need to hold your attention so you do not lapse into a coma before the printing is finished ! For (female) customers who do not wish to be willfully or woefully mesmerised by near-identical clones as part of their favourite banking fantasy it may be worth noting that Citibank at least allows its staff the personal freedom to dress, coif and use cosmetics as they wish.

Citibank Korea - professional service without Palmer-ette mannequins

When it comes to the banking service you require, there are always at least 5 forms to be completed; your form requesting their service, their form offering you their service, your acceptance of the service they offer, your indemnifying them for any consequence of providing their service, your agreement to them sharing your data about your use of their service and so on. Applications for cheque or credit cards typically run to 15 pieces of countersigned paper, ostensibly justified by the security necessary for the issue of such cards. However once in your possession, a father can give the cards to his early-teen daughter who can use them in the shops all day, entirely unchallenged, irrespective of what she buys, or the fact that she is the wrong sex to be the card holder and obviously not old enough to legally accountable for a line of credit. Once again the explanation is glaringly obvious; bank card security is totally ignored by every retailer so the banks protect themselves by placing all risk with the cardholder. "Simples, innit ?"


Transferring money out of Korea is obsessively controlled; even if you have accounts at several banks, only one bank is allowed to transfer your money internationally. The default transfer limit is US$ 50k per year unless you can show documents certified by your employer, registered by the tax dept and Apostled by God (sorry) to prove your salary is greater than this. Regardless of the income your paperwork can substantiate, once the sum of remittances abroad, foreign cash withdrawals and overseas purchases exceed US$50K, your bank cards are automatically deactivated (without warning) for any further foreign transactions. This leaves international travellers suddenly unable to settle their hotel bill or even worse, making them blush much more than anticipated when it's time to pay for their 'Happy Ending Intimate Massage'. Calls to the bank are totally futile; some pert, polite, Palmer-esque subroutine constructed by the banking matrix advises you to open a new bank account in the country you are marooned in, then to make an international remittance from Korea into that account. They dispense this advice with a straight voice in the full knowledge that the preconditions for opening an account in any country, include formally establishing residency, because this is also required in Korea. The glaringly obvious answer is not to travel anywhere with cards from a Korean bank - you never know how they will sabotage your trip while you are away.


With such tiresome inefficiencies built into every operation, one wonders how so many banks have survived and how so many branches remain open into the 21st century. Firstly; although all banks offer an online service, these require pre-installation of a whole suite of unique security programs before each logon. Added to this, much security software is still based on obsolete Active X protocols while many sites are incompatible with newer versions of Windows, Internet Explorer or alternative browsers. Nine times in 10 you can still walk across to your local branch, queue and be served by a Palmerette faster than submitting yourself to this online masochism for a couple of hours in the privacy of your own home.


http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20170710000897&ntn=0


Secondly, joint accounts are not allowed in Korea, not even for married couples. Each person has an individual tax identity and therefore bank accounts in their own name only. Thirdly, married men are often obliged to hand over day-to-day control of their accounts to their wives after marriage as a sign of fidelity, so naturally they quietly open additional accounts on the sly for 'incidental expenses'. The wife is happy to have visibility of her hubby's salary paid into the account she controls but remains oblivious to his business expenses which his employer reimburses into his clandestine account. These two shenanigans probably explain why each family opens more accounts than truly needed. However the main contributing factor to the enduring presence of banks on the high street is surely the vast amount of personal banking generated by the housing rental system.


https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2014/02/15/lumping-it

https://qz.com/183412/koreas-crazy-system-for-renting-apartments-is-driving-the-country-deeper-into-debt/


Korea's 'Jeonse' or 'Key Money' system for renting property is said to be unique in the world. Instead of paying any rent, the tenant gives the owner key money, typically a whopping 50% - 80% of the market value of the property, for a rental period of 2 years. Considering that a one-bedroom apartment in or around Gangnam now sells for ~ US$ 1m, key money of the order of US$ 800k is quite feasible. The owner invests the key money, keeps the profits, then returns the key money to the tenant intact at the end of 2 years without any share of the profit. In former times, when risk-free investments gave relatively healthy returns and when property prices rose steadily, key money worked well. For property owners the key money was effectively a large, interest-free loan to invest and reap a handsome reward. However in the last decade, as returns on safe investments reduced and property market values became more volatile, owners struggle to make decent returns on the key money and sometimes become unable to repay it in full. For these reasons the key money system is gradually giving way to much lower deposits, supplemented by some amount of monthly rent.


Of course most tenants do not hold 80% of the market value of even an average property, so they borrow all or part of this at a modest 2% - 4% interest. In this way the rental system ensures a steady stream of custom for the banks. The banks also have a role in securing key money held by the owner until it is redeemed at the end of the rental. Defaulting owners may forfeit the property to the tenant but this may not cover the key money if property values drop significantly. The system has been likened to taking a short on the property value 2 years ahead. Foreigners write reams on the oddities of the key money system however, quite apart from the foibles of the concept itself, it undoubtedly keeps the banks busy moving huge amounts of money between the pockets of their millions of customers. No doubt this pays for all the plush leather sofas and attentive Palmerettes in branches on every other block.


And finally; let's not forget the most subtle beauty of the rental system; not only does the key money concept keep the banks busy, it has the added benefit of minimising the financial relationship between the tenant and the owner. Although a rental agreement exists between the two parties, the financial relationships, obligations and recourse of each party are primarily with their banks, not with each other, which helps to keep everything as impersonal as possible: just the way we like it !