Fourth Cultural Post

[James Kim]

For my fourth cultural post, I learned and analyzed relationships within families in Korea. Unlike America, Korea has different names for relatives. For example, Americans call all of their parents’ siblings aunts and uncles. In Korea, there is a different name for all your aunts and uncles depending on which side of the family they are. This is the same for cousins, great grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and distant relatives as well. Additionally, women in Korea traditionally go live with their husband’s family right after marriage. In the old days, women were literally sent off to their husbands’ families and barely had contact with their own family. Koreans are also less likely to get divorced than Americans. This statistic is slowly changing as more Koreans are getting divorced due to a rise in liberal minded individuals but it is still lower than that of America. Certainly, there are a lot of differences between the culture of families in America and South Korea.