For South Korean youth, Parasite burrows close to home GlobeDebate
Jobless, penniless, and, above all, hopeless, the unmotivated patriarch, Ki-taek and his equally unambitious family – his wife, Chung-sook ; his daughter, Ki-jung , and son, Ki-woo – occupy themselves by working for peanuts in their squalid basement-level apartment in Bong Joon Ho's award-winning film Parasite.
South Korea is one of the few non-Western countries in modern history to achieve both a full democracy and large-scale economic development. Culturally, too, South Korean pop culture has been gaining recognition globally, finding a new peak recently thanks to the boy band BTS, which has helped inspire interest among young people from all over the world in visiting the Asian country.
Increasingly, too, there is the sense that you can only succeed if you’re a SKY graduate – that rarified-air abbreviation for Seoul National University, Korea University and Yonsei University. Alumni go on to become South Korea’s elite class, while the rest are forced to live in a kind of lower underworld.
So, as the poorer family’s daughter Ki-jeong asks: “What’s the plan?” Mr. Bong suggests the older generation has neither the vision nor the ability to make our society better, meaning young people will need to figure out how to move to higher ground themselves, even if it requires stepping on top of others to achieve it.
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