Solidarity

Today I discovered intestine alley. Allow me to explain: in Korea, shops are almost all specialized. There are supermarkets in Daegu, but they are a relatively new phenomenon and somewhat slow to catch on. The specialized shops tend to cluster together. There is an electronics district, a hardware district, a produce district, a fabrics district, and so on. These districts become even more compartmentalized: there's a cell phone alley, a tire shop block, hell, the other day I even saw an area of 7-11's. Restaurants are often the same way. The one outside of my villa sells exclusively gumtang (ox tail soup). There are pages in our takeout menu that show one dish and four options—1,2,3, or 4 servings. These restaurants also group together. Our Daegu guidebook tells us what neighborhood to visit for good kalbi or guksu rather than listing specific restaurants. There is a row of restaurants with identical pink signs near my house which all serve cow intestines.

There is an aspect of Korean culture that fosters this uniformity. There's a Korean word for it which escapes me (anyone?), but it encompasses loyalty to tradition and conformity. Koreans tend to adhere: to their families, their neighborhoods, their culture and traditions. Most Koreans are not forthcoming about their own opinions or values because this may set them apart from others. They often order the same thing at restaurants. (I sometimes wonder what Koreans with food allergies do, though I suspect that many of them suffer.) Young Koreans are not as tied to this value; like young people everywhere, they belong to our first generation of global citizens. I suspect that they are the reason there are supermarkets at all. I know that young people are the primary market for the fast food joints and western restaurants that have sprung up around town (notably, there is neither a western food district nor a supermarket district in Daegu).

The stores on intestine alley are a portrait of uniformity. I wonder who dared to be the first to set up an intestine shop there. When other intestine shops went up, was the first guy relieved to be validated despite the competition? What is the tipping point where a deviant becomes an innovator? As I've mentioned before, Koreans are extreme, and once an idea is accepted it is clearly embraced wholeheartedly. I imagine that this is why the concept of intellectual property never really caught on here—how do you know it's a good idea until it's widely emulated?

As an American, this glorification of sameness is difficult to understand. The American values I love the most are our diversity and flexibility. There's nothing like living in another place to make a person appreciate where she came from, I guess.




Intestine alley