What Price Beauty?

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good,
A shining gloss, that fadeth suddenly;
A flower that dies, when first it 'gins to bud;
A brittle glass, that's broken presently:
     A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower,
     Lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.
William Shakespeare, "The Passionate Pilgrim"

One cannot travel anywhere on public transport around Seoul without being confronted with the latest fad: young Koreans obsession with plastic surgery. You wouldn't believe it until you see it — advertisements everywhere, on the subway and on buses, showing before and after photos of enhanced faces and altered bodies. Walk around Gangnam and you see signs plastered on building exteriors for plastic surgery clinics. I haven't yet figured out where I would need to go if I had the flu and needed to see a doctor, but I would have no problem finding a place for a face lift. It's shocking!

Imagine going down a subway escalator and seeing this ad

In general, the fixation with looks goes beyond anywhere else I have traveled in the world. Walk around anywhere in public on a typical day, and you'll see a Korean woman in an idle moment with her hand mirror out, examining her face. In this week's news, I read that South Korea is the world's biggest market for male cosmetics — a country of 50 million people makes up 21% of global skincare sales! That's a lot of fancy moisturizer being used by a metrosexual bunch. My newsfeed also pulled up an announcement of 15% off tour packages to Korea this month for cosmetic procedures. And recently one of my colleagues suggested I watch the Korean film "Cinderella", a horror flick showing poor teenage girls scraping each other's faces.

Having done a little reading on Korean culture before arriving in August, I knew that plastic surgery was becoming a thing here. I had read the New York Times piece last November documenting the dramatic rise in cosmetic procedures. The article quoted a 2009 survey, which found that one in five Seoul women between 19 and 49 admitted to having undergone plastic surgery. It said that the double eyelid fold procedure, designed to make the eyes look larger and rounder, was "so common here that most women on Seoul streets seem to have a double fold, though only one in five Koreans is born with one."

This woman looks happier "After".  Shocking...

What's the look that Korean women are going for? You'd be surprised. Says a plastic surgeon quoted by NYT: “Koreans agree on what constitutes a pretty face...The consensus, now, is a smaller, more sharply defined youthful face — a more or less Westernized look."

So this explains the obsession with the bigger eyes. And bigger busts. Rhinoplasty to create a more defined nose bridge. Contouring the chin and cheeks. Even (I kid you not) calf reduction surgery!

But why the obsession with the Western look? And why throw tens of thousands of dollars into getting it? Partly it could be due to the popularity of Western media, American movies and the like. Koreans do very much like things they perceive as European or American, which connote a sense of wealth and prestige. Hence the love of Starbucks Coffee. And golf. And BMW cars. But the tentacles of Western media creep far and wide in this world. And in most other countries, women don't feel compelled to take scalpels to their faces to show their love of Hollywood.

I think the reason for the surgery boom is the hyper-competitiveness of the Korean culture. I recently finished the book "Korea Unmasked" by Won-Bok Rhie, a cartoonist who tries to explain the idiosyncrasies of being Korean, especially what makes it different than being from China or Japan. One of the themes which came out of the book for me was the predominant group culture here. Koreans feel very drawn to groups with which they share things in common, and therefore feel a desire to keep pace with the group. In America, we have an idiom for social benchmarking called "Keeping up with the Joneses" — in Korea you could translate this into "Keeping up with the Kims". In Korean society, this trend manifests itself in the education system, where students work morning to night to study to keep pace with their classmates. It manifests itself in Korea's recklessness with credit card debt — the average household debt burden exceeds that of the US before the global financial crisis! And now, I think, you see this trend with plastic surgery. If your neighbor gets her cheeks tweaked and her nose fixed, then finds a husband or gets hired for a good job, you'll probably do the same.

The label for this beverage says (in English) "I'm on a Diet. Look at me!"

As a foreigner from a country where beauty is certainly important but an obsession with which is seen as undesirable vanity, the whole surgery trend strikes me somewhat as a country gone mad. Don't get me wrong — I certainly appreciate a women who is well-put-together, eats right, exercises. And I understand that the genetic lottery has given some people more fortunate appearances than others. But in all this cutting and scraping for the ideal look, there must be something lost in Korea. As a trained economist, certainly I see an economic loss from throwing all this money into the rather unproductive plastic surgery industry. As a human*, I wonder why the elements of uniqueness and diversity, which are also beautiful, are so undervalued here. In a region of the world already mocked for having everyone looking the same, these elements are badly needed, but Koreans seem to be going down the path towards external conformity, sadly.



* (which, perhaps, is the opposite of being an economist!)

Gyeongju

My two weeks of Samsung orientation wrapped up on Friday; now the real work begins! Clearly, the highlight of the week was an overnight trip to Gyeongju in southeastern Korea, the capital of the ancient Shilla dynasty. Though little of the ancient city remains, the area is home to a couple large Buddhist temples up high on lush green mountains. The whole area was beautiful. On our way there we visited the Samsung factory where the Samsung Galaxy S3 phone is assembled (all-female workforce!) and had a fancy welcoming party at a lovely resort in Gyeongju. We cut loose with our Korean staff over drinks, dancing, and karaoke (what the Koreans call "noraebang") – the Koreans can really sing!

Pond at the Bulguksa Temple

The new Samsung GSG class at Bulguksa Temple

New Job, New Home

Whew! What a week! Not only did I have my first week on the Samsung payroll, I also moved into a new residence. While I catch my breath I'll recount how things went.

First, I returned to full-time workforce after a 28-month hiatus on Monday, ironically celebrated as "Labor Day" in my home country. I slapped the alarm clock, suited up, wolfed down breakfast, and arrived at 7:50AM at the office. It was like a return to first year of business school, albeit dressier. Our first two weeks at Samsung are an orientation period, so we're not "working" per se, though keeping similar hours. Thankfully we had been up early the week before to attend Korean language classes, so it wasn't a complete jolt to the system to be up that early, though certainly the realization that I no longer live in B-school la-la land has set in.

A light photo moment on workday #1

On Monday morning, the 42 new hires boarded a bus in Seoul and traveled to the Samsung HR Development Center (HRDC) in the exurbs of the Seoul metro area.  The HRDC was quite nice and immense...even had dormitories for overnight stays. Felt like "Camp Samsung" to me. Our group stayed for two days, spending the night sleeping on the "Wassily Kandinsky" floor (meant to inspire our creativity we were told). At the HRDC we listened to lectures on the Korean culture and succeeding at Samsung.

Wednesday felt less like work as we completed a "challenge course" designed to promote teamwork. No trust falls at Samsung, though we did climb ladders built from logs and learned how to communicate with one another while blindfolded. On Thursday, we toured Samsung Electronics facilities in the nearby city of Suwon, listening to more introductory lectures and viewing the assembly of semiconductors. On Friday, we stayed in the new office in Seoul and learned about some of Samsung's lesser-known business divisions: construction, green energy, and insurance.

One of several group photos taken last week of the entering Samsung GSG class

The weekend left no time for rest as my moving day was Saturday. It felt disorienting to be leaving my hotel in Gangnam – after a month there that neighborhood had become the center of my Korean universe. My new apartment is in Hannam-dong, a neighborhood just north of the Han River that has many of Seoul's foreign embassies. I seem to be in the ASEAN area – the embassies of Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand all stand within two blocks of me. The neighborhood feels far more residential than Gangnam and is popular with colleagues in my group due to its proximity to the bustling Itaewon nightlife as well as the office (a 25-minute commute by bus).

The moving company arrived promptly Saturday morning at 9AM and got to work very quickly. So much more manpower on the Korean side of the move – I had three Americans packing my stuff in Charlottesville, and eight Koreans packed into my apartment to unload! Not surprisingly, the Koreans worked very quickly and I frantically tried to direct them. After living out of suitcases for almost three months, I started to wonder why I owned so much stuff! Thankfully almost everything arrived intact.

New Seoul residence: Rosemary Villa in Hannam-dong

The new apartment has a lot of space and a lot of windows. I also have a guest bedroom, so any visitors to Seoul have a place to stay!

After living like a vagabond since school graduation, it feels great to finally have a place to finally settle into. There's a lot more to be done to make Seoul feel more like home, but having a full-time residence is a milestone.

Getting the new guest bedroom set up. Open for visitors!

Getting My Sport On

I experienced several more firsts in the week that just flew by. Visited my first Korean palace (Gyeongbokgung). Hailed my first taxi in Seoul and unsuccessfully tried to navigate the driver to my destination (though I was able to at least get him to take me to the correct neighborhood). Saw my first film in a Korean cinema (R2B: Return To Base), a Top Gun-like thriller, with English subtitles. Watched live television from my new Samsung Galaxy S3 phone...on the subway!! Took my first Korean language classes. And visited my new office at Samsung, on the 26th floor of the Samsung Electronics building in Gangnam, for the first time.

On Wednesday I went with several of my new colleagues to our first Korean baseball game. Baseball is very popular in Korea...along with golf and soccer it's one of the favorite sports here. Every night this time of year is baseball night in Korea -- you flip channels on TV and you can see three games being broadcast simultaneously. The Korean professional league has 8 teams and we bought tickets to see two of the Seoul teams go head-to-head...the LG Twins vs. the Doosan Bears (all of the teams are named after their corporate sponsors).

Lots of LG Twins fans with "thunder sticks"

All we could say was...WOW!! Though the game on the field was identical to that found in the USA, almost everything else about the viewing experience was completely different. You walk off the subway at the Sports Complex station (very convenient to reach from the Samsung office) and are surrounded by tables set up by food vendors. You can buy super-cheap servings of kimbap (seaweed-rice rolls typically wrapped with vegetables and crabmeat), dried squid, kimchi pancakes, delicious fried chicken. You can also purchase inexpensive Korean beers and soju to wash it all down. Thankfully, Korean baseball stadiums let you bring food and drink into the seats, unlike American stadiums which then extort you into buying from outrageously priced concession stands. Korean baseball games are delightfully cheap to attend – 10,000 won (about $9) for a lower grandstand ticket – and the aforementioned cheap food. Definitely a sport for the common man...we didn't see any luxury boxes in the stadium.

Once inside the stadium with our food and beer, we saw the stadium neatly segregated into two cheering sections...LG fans along the third base side, Doosan fans on the first base side. Most fans carried "thunder sticks", cylindrical plastic balloons that make a loud clapping noise when struck together. A lot of female fans at the game, too...a higher proportion than you would see at an American baseball game.

Korean baseball cheerleaders

And CHEERLEADERS!!! Oh my gosh. Amazing. Built into each side was a concrete platform where the female cheerleaders would trot out in their skirts and pump up the fans with their dance moves. Then a man, who I would call an "M.C.", would walk on the platform, microphone in hand, and lead the team's fans (along with a drum master) in a long series of rhythmic chants and songs. Simply unlike anything you see at an American baseball game. More like a college football atmosphere. Fans going nuts from the first pitch. Batter hits a single, fans go berserk! The Korean baseball players that make the MLB must find American fans to be so passive. The rhythms are very catchy – by about the 4th inning I found myself loving the LG Twins...and I'm about to start working for Samsung. And there was a beer-chugging contest between innings, I kid you not!

But the strange thing about the cheering was when it stopped. There was simply...silence.  The fans would go nuts when the M.C. would tell them to beat their thunder sticks together, then would just sit there. In American baseball games, the fans sit for most of the game, then rise for the big moments. You expect a crescendo of cheers before a big pitch late in the game. But at the Korean baseball game, fans who had been going nuts for three hours were silent in the 9th inning, two outs, two strikes in a close game. Very strange. As my colleague next to me put it, "Koreans really enjoy playing Follow The Leader". I didn't expect cultural realizations at a baseball game, and had just found one.

I also got back into the soccer groove this week, playing my first game in 4 months! Samsung GSG has a team which plays about one a month against other Samsung companies, and on Saturday morning had a game scheduled with Samsung Fire and Marine Insurance. Crazy start time – 6AM!! In 25 years of playing I had never been on a field so early. We played on a turf field surrounded by a cage next to a freeway in the 'burbs. Felt like something straight out of Germany. Seemed like several members of my team (myself included) were feeling the after effects of a late night out, but other than that I found myself quite in my element on a soccer pitch again. The game was right at my level – decent technical skills, mediocre fitness, and players not taking the game too seriously. Despite the hit to my sleep schedule, I look forward to continuing playing.

My new job at Samsung starts tomorrow morning. I will be wearing a suit for the first time in awhile!

Gyeongbokgung Palace was pretty nice, too