Bring back the Korean craze?
A new life with Korean culture in Hong Kong
Ms Lee puts on her hand-made casual Korean clothes in Korea after learning it there.
The traditional Korean clothes look too serious to wear in daily life that Ms Lee wants to bring the casual dress to more people's closets.
Teaching Korean language class, making hand-made Korean casual clothes, talking about Korean cultures and going to Korea twice or more every year take up a huge part of her life now. Cherry Lee is not a fanatic of Korean culture, but she brought back what she learnt there as a working holiday maker to her life in Hong Kong.
After the whole year of experience in South Korea two years ago, she abandoned the original path of working at a magazine but tried new things. She was known as an impatient person among her friends, but she is now teaching. She used to hate doing hand-made assignments in home-economics classes at high school, but now she developed a brand for the Korean dresses she made.
Her friends said she was “out of her mind” after going to Korea.
“Some people have stereotypes on working holiday and believe that participants just want to escape from reality. They would put on an extra label on those going to South Korea. They would say we must be going for chasing pop stars,” said Ms Lee.
A lot of the blogs or Facebook Fan Pages about working holiday share about spots to visit, “must-try food” and adventures, leaving readers an impression that they spend a lot of time having fun. Going to another country and starting their lives there, having to overcome all the obstacles to find jobs and earn for their trips offer challenges to participants. But these were what Ms Lee found a lot of the returnees had not shared.
She would like to turn over a new leaf related to Korean cultures and let more people clear the misperceptions on working holiday in Korea.
Since the establishment of partnership with South Korea in 2011 with an annual quota of 200, the number of Hongkongers going for Korea is still low as compared to other countries. The quota has expanded to 500 in 2014 but only 274 embarked their trips.
Ms Lee is among the first batch of participants. She believes that immersing herself in Korean culture can also be as inspiring as going to western countries. It may be even more challenging due to the language barrier. She had studied Korean language in Hong Kong for about two years, but she still found it hard to get every sentence spoken by natives as they spoke really fast.
Similar to a lot of Hongkongers, she had very positive impression towards this country due to the influence of Korean pop culture. “I thought like everything was beautiful, with great scenery everywhere, handsome guys and attractive ladies and so on,” she said.
Working holiday made her really understand how Koreans were like and how to live with and treat them.
“At first I realized that a lot of Koreans walked so fast on the streets and did not care about whether they would bump into somebody accidentally or step onto others’ feet. They would not say sorry and still think it was all right. I felt like they were impolite at the beginning,” she said.
“A lot of the people spit on the road too. Even though they look handsome or pretty like pop stars.”
These worsened her impression on Koreans, but then she realized that they would treat others like a family member after getting to know about them. She thought they were still nice but things were not as perfect as she expected before.
She worked as a kimchi-making demonstrator, a worker at a mobile phone factory, staff at a hostel and a salesperson at a cosmetics store. However, a lot of the old customs made her difficult to adapt to life there.
“The have a deep-rooted strong sense of seniority and class maybe due to the influence of Confucianism. If you are told by an elderly to do this, you have to do or else you are regarded as not respecting him or her,” she said.
She also found she had to follow the the managers’ way of doing things when working and workers were not supposed to give advice to higher authority. Once she suggested doing the tasks in another way, but she was blamed for offering advice.
“When I met new Korean friends, I had kind of mixed feelings to get whether they treated me well because they wanted to be friends of me or just had to respect me since I was elder than them,” she said.
She said Koreans would first ask for your name, then your job when they first met somebody. The third question would be “how old are you?” as they wanted to know how they should treat you according to seniority.
These cultural differences made her more aware of the minor things in life, and she would pay more attention to the attitude she treated different people.
She wanted to share with others all the observations and reflections she had after coming back. “Working holiday means growth in different
The different works she tries in Korea: (Clockwise from top left) The first time she puts on a uniform at the cosmetics shop; she needs to do the cleaning at the guesthouse; the working space of the mobile phone factory; the children puts on the traditional Korean clothes after watching her demonstration of kimchi-making.
ways. It is not like when you come back and you have to get back to your ‘Hong Kong way’ of life,” she said.
Also, she wanted to keep a good memory of the trip and write down the experiences.
About one year later, she then randomly looked for what had become a hit in Korea, she got to know about “casual Korean clothes” and would like to try on hand-making them.
Some people approached her and asked about the dresses after seeing the posts on Facebook and Instagram. That was how her book and her brand developed. She even gives talks on working holiday in South Korea and accepts to be interviewed in various media. “I become more thick-skinned, but I realized I can accept more challenges than I expected.”
What's so special about casual Korean dresses?
After the reports of her and other two ladies going on working holiday were released, a lot of negative comments were posted online, such as “chasing after pop stars burning their lives off” and “not being serious towards their lives”. She believes that the strong stereotypes on working holiday may be due to the lack of information about the experiences and Hongkongers’ deep-rooted sense of working hard as one of the top priorities.
She wrote a book about her journey in Korea and tried to promote her Korean clothes at an Easter market. “I would not have been on this path if I hadn’t gone for working holiday in Korea,” she said. She does not want to promote Korea blindly, but let more people know about the different sides of this country.