Korean names — problems resurfacing

By Mark Peterson In the last few weeks, I posted a video about problematic Korean surnames, and in the process, I learned more about a subject I thought I already knew well. The video was one I had intended to post for some time. It was about the so-called "seven low-class surnames.

" I have intended to post a video about that because the concept is false and yet it labels people with those surnames as former butchers and slaves and not a part of the elite "yangban" structure of Korea. I have known for a long time that the characterization is not only false but harmful to people with those surnames. And indeed, in the comments to my video several people commented that they bore one of the problematic names and were ridiculed throughout their lives because of it.



One person even wrote that his teacher in grade school teased him because of his name. He said it was humiliating for him as a child. Another writer wrote me a long email explaining how noble and prestigious his family name is — reiterating the very point I was making in the video.

The seven names appear to be problematic in that their meaning is somewhat mundane or common — although one can argue the Lee (pear blossom) and Park (gourd) are not that noble sounding, really. Kim is "gold" — you can't get more noble than that, can you? There isn't a name for platinum or diamond, so gold is as good as it gets. The problematic names are Cheon, Bang, Ji, Chuk, Ma, Gol, Pi — meaning "thousand," "direction," "pond," "cow," "horse," "bone" and "hide.

" Especially with the latter names, the reference to animals and butchering is evident and can lead to the assumption that the names imply occupation — indeed, with European names, occupations are a major category — Barber, Smith, Carpenter, Tanner, Wagoner, and yes, Butcher — the captain of the U.S. "spy boat" taken by the North Koreans and still held as a museum in North Korea, the "Pueblo" was a man named Lloyd Bucher (although technically, this name means wood-cutter, but still, there are many well-known people named Butcher).

The problem in Korea is that the butchers and the hide workers, the tanners, were a caste of untouchables with their own label — the "baekjeong." So, were these seven despised names truly connected to the despised occupations? No, they were not. There were two issues that disprove the theory.

First, the non-aristocrats of Korea, the commoners and the slaves, like those statuses in many other cultures, did not have surnames at all, traditionally. Not until the 19th century in Europe as well as in Korea did they acquire surnames. So, to say these names are the surnames of the commoners or slaves is nonsense from the get-go.

The second point is that each of the surname groups had representatives who had passed either the civil service exams or the military service exams. The word "yangban" which we know as "aristocrat" actually means the "two ranks" — meaning the two arms of government, the civilian and the military. In Korea, one had to submit a list of one's "four ancestors" in order to qualify to sit for the exam.

The four ancestors were one's father, grandfather, great-grandfather and maternal grandfather. (How many of you readers can tell me the names of your four great-grandfathers?) If one did not even know the names of those ancestors, or if one of the names was a name like "horse droppings," "eighth-month," or other inauspicious slave names, one presumably would not be able to sit for the exam. Korea was different from China in this regard — Korea got the examination system as part of the government from China, but in China, the exam was an open system.

What we might call the "log cabin myth" — any poor boy from the countryside who was bright and prepared to sit for the exam could. But in Korea, only the upper class was supposed to sit for the exam, and indeed, only the slave-owning leisure class had the wherewithal to study for the difficult exam. The exam was given in classical Chinese, so one not only had to be conversant in Korean but also able to read and write the difficult Chinese pictographs with nice brush strokes in order to pass it.

This was not unlike the medieval Europeans of England, France or Germany, whose education was only in Latin. Simply put, each of these surnames was as legitimate a member of the ruling class as any Kim, Lee or Park — or Choe, Jeong, Gang, Yun or Cho. Korea's ruling class seems broad in one sense, in that many different surname groups had marriages with the royal family, but it was very narrow in another sense — the total number of surnames.

In Korea, there were only 250 surnames — compare that with 2,500 names in China and 250,000 names in Japan. So, if you meet a Korean friend with one of the names Cheon, Bang, Ji, Chuk, Ma, Gol, or Pi, do not, repeat, do not ask them if they were part of the yangban class or not. They were.

Mark Peterson ([email protected]) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah..