"In Korea" #1: In Korea, people carry umbrellas when it’s sunny.

I’m trying to motivate myself to write for this blog more regularly.  Since I feel like my day-to-day experiences aren’t always blog-worthy, I’ve decided to introduce a new feature to my blog that will, I hope, entertain the reader and also allow for more frequent posting on my part.  I call it my “In Korea” series.  In it, I will write short, bite-sized posts attempting to describe or explain random quirks and idiosyncrasies of Korean society and culture.  A great majority of my readers are Americans who presumably know little about this country – these posts will mostly be for their benefit.  I am aware that I also have some readers here in Korea – for those of you in this latter category, a lot of this stuff will be common knowledge for you, but I encourage you to leave comments if you think there’s something I’ve left out, or if you have some additional insight.  And now, without further ado, on to the first installment:

In Korea, people carry umbrellas when it’s sunny.

Exhibit A

By “people”, I mean mostly ajummas and halmeonis (middle-aged women and grandmothers).  And by “carry”, I don’t mean they just happen to have them handy as a precaution against a possible shower later in the day; I mean they carry them open in the full light of day when there’s not a cloud in the sky.

And if they don’t have an umbrella, ajummas will probably be sporting a comically large sun visor, sometimes accompanied by a scarf or bandana wrapped around the whole thing.  Younger women tend to wear floppy wide-brimmed hats or baseball caps instead.

Exhibit B

All you need for an ajumma Halloween costume
is a visor and a loose-fitting shirt with a floral pattern.

The purpose of all of this is to shield from the sun, and from what I gather, the reason they do it is only partly because of the possibility of sunburn.  They also do it because in Korea a tan is not considered beautiful. Quite the opposite.  The Korean ideal of beauty, among other things, includes milky white skin.  The lighter the better.  Having darker skin carries with it the connotation of being from “the country” – which is something that, in this increasingly modern, urbanized population, is considered common and unglamorous.  In Korea, it’s all about status and appearance.  Heaven forbid someone interpret your tanned skin to mean you’ve been working out in the fields. 

And here I thought superficiality was an obsession more or less confined to western cultures.