Brunei is being swept away by the Korean wave of culture, clothing and the 9th Korea Forum.
According to Dong-Yeob Kim, Korea’s Director of International Cooperation, the Korea Forum is held twice a year but in a different Southeast Asian country each time. The main theme for the forum is “Hallyu”, or Korean Wave. “Hallyu is the word used for Korea’s recent surge in the entertainment industry that has sparked tremendous interest from abroad, particularly Southeast Asia. With this high impact, it has come to our interest to explain what it is and also to let them know the direction of this Korean wave,” said Kim.
And, in case you thought the Hallyu was a recent introduction to the Southeast you might be interested in these two Forum lectures: “Contacts and social interactions between Korea and Southeast Asia between the first and eighth century” and “Korean poems sung in Vietnam during the 17th century”. In this posting – Vietnam – the Origin of Korea – didn’t it seem like the wave was coming from the other direction?
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It’s completely true.
I lived in Brunei for several years. My students were all over my (tenuous) Korean connection, hounding me to teach them to write their name in hangeul, wanting to know the meaning of certain phrases they kept hearing in dramas – they were totally obsessed.
It was the adults, too. Several of my local Bruneian colleagues spent fortunes on tours of Korea that escorted them to famous locations from movies and dramas (“right here is the bridge over the Han where Kim Min-Su slapped her boyfriend’s face in Summer Concerto…”) They couldn’t understand how I could have lived in Korea for the better part of a decade without taking that bus tour.
I thought it was interesting that they really didn’t care about anything from Japan, which has been much more successful at marketing its culture as “cool” in Western countries. Or China. It was all Korea.
Having just left Korea and still in the process of decompressing myself, I begged my students to never ever disclose their Korean obsession to any Koreans they happened to meet. I felt that Koreans didn’t need to hear any more about how the rest of the world loved them.
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