The Korean style

Lixian Huang

Nov 1st. 2015

Week 7 Blog

ASA 2, A03

In the article “Korean American Youth and Transnational Flows of Popular culture across the Pacific”, Jung-Sun Park indicates that the globalization has profoundly reshaped people’s life, forming a well-mixed popular culture, among which the Korean popular culture plays an important role. From my point of view, the rapid raise of Korean culture is well-observable to us who born in 1990s. At first, just two kinds of pop-culture products stood out in Asia to the Western countries—the same as what mentioned by Park, one was the Hong Kong film and the other is the Japanese animation. However, in late 1990s and early 2000s, tons of Korean dramas were poured to the young generation. As what I can remember, one girl out of three owned a Korean romantic fiction book at that time, while the other two of three just shared it. The theme of the Korean romantic fictions and dramas were very simple: Many wealthy men fell in love with an underprivileged lady. Even though the theme is very simple and “silly” most of the youth became addicted to those stories because such theme fulfilled their illusion about love, which may be the reason why many people know the trick of Korean dramas, they are still amazed by those stories. In addition, Korean dramas also brought a new style of fashion, where men dress up neutrally instead of showing off their muscles. American peoples are gradually influenced by such new fashion style as more and more Korean immigrants come to the U.S.

Question: How did Korean culture’s increasingly important position in the U.S. affect the positions of cultures from other Asian countries?