this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Interesting. That's a pretty rare opportunity, assuming you're not in Russia or China (and even then, it's still fairly uncommon).
You know im sorta wishing now I would have tried to get the story. I mean we had like half a dozen other koreans and no one seemed to treat him differently but he was not especially outgoing and that is even for a korean student who were not the most outgoing to begin with and lets face it. PhD students are not necessarily the most outgoing of the popluation at large. At the time it was just woa, but you know otherwise he seemed no different than any others. He did smoke which I did not think about it at the time as many PhD students smoked but it was not prevelent in the korean students. At least the ones I knew which is a not a super large set.
Eh, Koreans have a pretty high rate of smoking (this site claims >40% of adult men), so you're probably just getting sampling bias if most you know don't smoke. My SO's friends are all anti-smoking for religious reasons, but when we visited Korea, a lot of people smoked. A lot of people in Asia smoke, it's nuts.
But yeah, Koreans tend to stick with other Koreans. My in-laws are quite racist against non-Koreans (I get a pass), and while the younger generations are better about it, they still tend to stick with other Koreans. I had a lot of international friends growing up (Vietnamese, Japanese, Taiwanese, etc), but none of them were Korean, despite having a pretty big Korean population where I grew up. I had a good working relationship with one in college when I was dating my SO (he was super good at StarCraft, that's not just a meme), and I helped him edit his essays.
I will say most koreans I have known are religious (and christian curiously) and come to think of it I don't recall this guy ever mentioning religion.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure N. Korea bans religion, kind of like the USSR, because the leader is supposed to replace God.
South Korea is something like 50% non-religious, and the rest is split between Buddhist and Christian (a bit more Christian than Buddhist). But at least from my experience, Koreans tend to see religion as more of a social club than actual belief, and in the US, they tend to be business networking places instead of places to actually worship. So even a Christian Korean probably wouldn't be super upfront about it.