SO YOUR PARTNER IS KOREAN

Nobody warns you that you never pour your own.

You have met someone. You are serious about each other. And in three weeks you are going to sit down with their family, at a table where the order of every small thing was settled long before anybody arrived.

Most guides to Korea are written for visitors. They will walk you round the palaces and tell you where to eat in Seoul. None of them will tell you why the first thing you are asked is what year you were born, or why an empty glass is a request and a half-full one is a polite full stop.

This is a book about the specific, high-stakes, quietly terrifying moments that come with being taken into a Korean family. It was written by an outsider who went through it, got things wrong in front of people, asked far too many questions, and wrote down what would have helped on the first day.

And it covers three situations rather than one. A family in Seoul, a long-settled Korean-American family and a recently arrived Korean-British one are genuinely different propositions. Wherever the answer changes, this book sets the three side by side and says so.

Inside

• Hangul in an afternoon, which is the best-value hour in the book


• Age, speech levels, and why your birth year is the first question asked


• What to call fourteen relatives, and the two in-law words that will carry you


• Nunchi, and why it is what you are actually being assessed on


• Shoes, bows, and the gifts that quietly mean a funeral


• Who lifts their spoon first, and why the bowls stay on the table


• Soju: two hands, turned heads, and how to stop without offending anybody


• The questions you will be asked, including your salary and your blood type


• Yongdon, jeonse, and what a Korean family expects of money


• Church, temple, jesa, and the family argument nobody will explain to you


• Seollal, Chuseok, Parents' Day and the birthdays that are real events


• Sanggyeonnye: the day the two families meet, and how to brief your own parents


• The wedding hall, the envelope, and pyebaek


• Illness, death, the white envelope and the three-day funeral

Twenty short chapters, a cheat sheet you can read on the way there, and a glossary of sixty-four terms with hangul.

It will not make you fluent. It will get you through the first dinner.

So Your Partner Is Korean is part of The Nervous Guest series, alongside So Your Partner Is Filipino, So Your Partner Is Nigerian, So Your Partner Is Chinese and So Your Partner Is from Hong Kong.