About

About This Blog

Why should you believe anything on this site?

Fair question. Here's the honest answer, not the polished one.

I'm not a psychologist, an anthropologist, or a professional Korea expert with a title to point to. I'm someone who grew up in Korea, speaks it as a first language, and has spent an unreasonable amount of time noticing the unwritten rules everyone around me already knew without anyone teaching them out loud — nunchi, jeong, hierarchy through speech level, the particular exhaustion of a work dinner nobody wanted to attend. That's the actual qualification behind this site: not a credential, just a life spent inside the thing being explained.

I won't pretend to have lived every angle of every topic here. Some pieces draw on something I've directly noticed or felt. Others lean more heavily on documented reporting, research, and cases — journalists, sociologists, and writers who've covered a specific corner of this better than my own memory can. When a piece is built mostly from research rather than personal experience, that's not a trick I'm trying to hide. It's just which tool fit the topic that week.

What I do promise, on every single post:

  • No invented statistics, no invented quotes, no invented testimonials. Anything that sounds like a hard number or a direct quote is either sourced or clearly marked as not yet verified.
  • No "all Koreans do X." Culture is a pattern, not a rule, and it gets written that way here.
  • This is cultural explanation, not therapy or clinical advice — if a topic ever brushes against mental health, that's a boundary this site doesn't cross.

The goal of this project is narrow on purpose: take the specific, quietly confusing parts of Korean social life — the parts that don't show up in a phrasebook — and explain them to people encountering Korea from the outside, whether that's through language study, K-dramas, work, or just curiosity that won't go away. If a post here saves you one awkward moment of misreading a room, it's done its job.

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