I want to underline the idea in my post, which is that I don't believe there is, say, a typical Korean middle schooler. That's because I don't assume that all Korean middle schoolers are the same gender, come from the same social class, belong to the same social group, have the same set of friends, subscribe to the same politics, have the same religion, etc., much less have the same temperament. (I say this while knowing almost nothing about Korean middle school.) So even if a particular Korean is a conformist who is having difficulty "breaking away from convention," whatever that means, he (let's say it's a he) would still have to make a choice as to what conventions and which people to conform to. If he's a Christian, how does he avoid running counter to Buddhists? And since not all Christians belong to the same sect or congregation, how does he avoid differences from his fellow Christians? If he's conforming to his peer group, does that mean he's going along with his parents, too? And so on.
I'm skeptical of any broad social generalization such as "it's hard for Koreans to break away from convention." And assuming you're remembering the Ask A Korean guy's argument correctly (really, was it that unsubtle?), I can't make sense of it. I mean, get rid of the phrase "war-torn" and change "60 years ago" to "80 years ago" and you could be describing African Americans; but would anyone claim that African Americans as a whole are particularly conformist — more so than most people — and are under more pressure to conform and so find it harder than everyone else to break away from convention? How is that any kind of an argument? You could just as easily replace the word "more" with "less," in regard to American blacks, in regard to Koreans, etc. Why wouldn't undergoing urbanization inspire flexibility rather than conformity? Why wouldn't it pit children against parents? And if Ask A Korean's argument applies to Koreans now (if it is his argument), why wouldn't it apply to most Latinos in America now, or most European immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth? Or the ones who stayed in Europe, for that matter. They generally went from rural to urban too (and some then went suburban), and many had come from a background of famine, civil war, oppression, and so forth.
(This doesn't mean we shouldn't think about what pressures South Koreans are under; just that we should assume that there are a multiplicity of pressures, and a multiplicity of reactions to them.)
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I'm skeptical of any broad social generalization such as "it's hard for Koreans to break away from convention." And assuming you're remembering the Ask A Korean guy's argument correctly (really, was it that unsubtle?), I can't make sense of it. I mean, get rid of the phrase "war-torn" and change "60 years ago" to "80 years ago" and you could be describing African Americans; but would anyone claim that African Americans as a whole are particularly conformist — more so than most people — and are under more pressure to conform and so find it harder than everyone else to break away from convention? How is that any kind of an argument? You could just as easily replace the word "more" with "less," in regard to American blacks, in regard to Koreans, etc. Why wouldn't undergoing urbanization inspire flexibility rather than conformity? Why wouldn't it pit children against parents? And if Ask A Korean's argument applies to Koreans now (if it is his argument), why wouldn't it apply to most Latinos in America now, or most European immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth? Or the ones who stayed in Europe, for that matter. They generally went from rural to urban too (and some then went suburban), and many had come from a background of famine, civil war, oppression, and so forth.
(This doesn't mean we shouldn't think about what pressures South Koreans are under; just that we should assume that there are a multiplicity of pressures, and a multiplicity of reactions to them.)