Nobody in a Korean Office Calls You by Your Name

 

Nobody in a Korean Office Calls You by Your Name

If you have watched any Korean office drama you have probably noticed this without quite noticing it. Almost nobody uses anybody's name. The subtitles quietly smooth it over, turning everything into "hey" or a first name, and the thing that is actually happening gets lost.

What they are saying is the person's rank.

Not their job. Their rank. There is a difference and it takes foreigners a while to see it.

The ladder

Most Korean companies run a grade system that people climb over a career. Roughly, it goes like this.

Sawon, then gyejang, then daeri, gwajang, chajang, bujang. Six rungs, give or take. Gyejang has quietly disappeared at a lot of companies and some have flattened the whole thing, but this is the shape most people still have in their heads.

You are not called by your name. You are called by whichever rung you are standing on, with -nim attached, which is a politeness marker with no real English equivalent. So a gwajang becomes Gwajang-nim. Often with the family name in front — Kim Gwajang-nim.

Downward it relaxes. A senior person might drop the -nim when speaking to someone below them. Upward it never relaxes.

Which means the rank is said out loud, by everyone, dozens of times a day. You do not have to look anyone up. You hear where they are in the building every time somebody speaks to them.

Then there is the other ladder

Here is what took me a while to realise is confusing from outside.

Rank and job are two separate things.

Your rank — jikgeup — is roughly how far along you are. Your position — jikchaek — is what you are actually responsible for. Team leader, division head, and so on. The two are related but nothing forces them to line up.

A team leader might be a gwajang. Might be a chajang. And the people on that team are sitting on the rank ladder at whatever rung they happen to have reached, which has a lot to do with how many years they have been working.

So the arithmetic does not always come out even.

Eight years

When I was a team leader, one of the people on my team was eight years older than me.

I want to be careful not to make this sound more dramatic than it was. Nobody stormed out. There was no confrontation. It was just awkward, in a low-level way that ran underneath ordinary work for a while.

Because in Korean you cannot really speak a neutral sentence. The language makes you pick a level before you open your mouth, and every sentence carries it. So every single exchange with him required a small decision. He is my team member, which points one way. He is eight years older, which points the other. And you have to resolve that before you say good morning.

Then it stopped being a problem.

I cannot tell you when. There was no conversation where we sorted it out, because you do not have that conversation. At some point I noticed I was not thinking about it any more, and neither was he, and we just worked. Which is, I suspect, how most of these things actually get resolved anywhere.

I hear some companies have gone to English names, or made everybody a "nim" regardless of rank, to get around all of this. I never worked at one, so I can't tell you whether it helps. I would be curious.

Outside the building it gets simpler

All of the above is for inside your own company. With customers it collapses into something much easier.

Sajang-nim.

It means company president, and out in the field you use it for more or less anyone running their own business. The dealer, the shop owner, the man with three employees and a van. You walk in, you say Sajang-nim, and you are safe.

It is not really about their legal title. It is closer to a courtesy — you are treating this person as the person in charge of their own thing, which they are. I said it thousands of times over twenty-three years and I do not think I ever once got it wrong.

What it is actually for

The usual explanation is that Korea is hierarchical, which is true and also not very useful, because it does not tell you what the system is doing.

What it does is remove a question. In an American meeting you often have to work out, live, who is senior to whom. In a Korean meeting that is settled before anyone sits down, because everybody's rank was said out loud on the way in.

That saves a lot of time. It also means the answer is fixed, and when it does not fit — when the person in charge is younger than the person being led — there is no clean way to say so. The language does not have a setting for it.

You get used to it. Mostly.