Free The Birth of Korean Cool by Euny Hong

somewhere on the journey from theory to practice: Korea’s ancient rulers corrupted Confucianism and turned it into a political tool.
“Confucianism in Korea became very pharisaical. The original idea was very good. The husband has a certain role; the wife has a certain role. But their relationship is not [supposed to be]
top down; originally, they’re on equal footing.”
    As mentioned, women in modern Korea were not allowed to be the legal head of the household until 1990. So I was surprised to learn that until the fifteenth century, women had equal rights.
“They could be head of the household, and they could be the master of the ancestral ceremonies,” said Lee. In other words, there was really no reason why the women in my family had to
bow before the graves twice as many times as the men.
    “[The current practice that] the parents decide everything or the husband decides everything is a misinterpretation of the Confucian concept,” Lee explained. He has very good reasons
for his surprisingly frank views on the matter. He suffered the raw end of the system when he started dating the Korean woman who became his wife. When he first came to Korea in 1978, it was
unthinkable for a Korean to marry a foreigner. It’s more acceptable now but still frowned upon.
    In Confucianism as practiced in Korea, a person’s identity is determined by the male side of the family. Your ancestry is recorded in a
hojok
, a record of lineage. Traditionally,
a non-Korean male could not be in the
hojok
, nor could any of his descendants. Using the same logic, illegitimate children could not be in the
hojok
unless the father declared his
paternity. These
hojok
restrictions were not completely eliminated until 2005; it took three more years to officially implement the change. 6 So
what, you ask? Why did your name have to be written in some silly book?
    The
hojok
was not merely ceremonial; it wasn’t like
Debrett’s Peerage
in the UK or a social register that tracks descendants of the
Mayflower
in the United
States. In Korea, if you were not in the
hojok
, you did not exist as a Korean citizen. You had about as much status as an illegal immigrant. You could not inherit your parents’
assets after their death. It would be difficult to find a job.
    One Korean American adoptee who suffered the cruelty of the old
hojok
system is Daniel Gray. The story of his life illustrates how much Korea has and has not changed.
    Today, Gray is director of marketing and tours at O’ngo Food Communications in Seoul, a company that offers food tours and Korean cooking classes to international chefs. Though he seems
perfectly natural in his current milieu, he has actually only been living in Korea as an adult for the past seven years.
    He was born in Korea, out of wedlock: “My mother and father were in love,” he said, but his father was already married with three kids—a serious problem for their son. This was
the mid-1980s, when illegitimate children had no legal status. “My mother would not have been able to register me as a person, not even under her own family line, because she was not a man.
There was a lot of social stigma against [illegitimate children]. All the schools would have known I didn’t have a father. It would be hard to get into university.
    “My mother begged my father to take me in, because of the
hojok
,” he said. His father did take him in for a while, but “my stepmother didn’t care for me much at
all,” Daniel recalls.
    One day, Daniel was told that his mother was coming to pick him up. But the woman who showed up at his father’s home was not his mother. She was a representative from the Holt
orphanage—Korea’s most established orphanage and adoption agency, founded in 1955 by American Christian missionaries. “She took me to a noodle restaurant and a toy store and
brought me a change of clothes. I was upset, I didn’t exactly know what was happening.”
    What had happened was that Daniel’s