South Korea is a highly developed country, and it seems like a beautiful country with a beautiful culture. It is also very safe.

My friend from South Korea, who is fiercely patriotic, warned me that South Korea has a huge "dark side". My female professor from South Korea also echoed that sentiment.

Answer:

Well, I actually quite liked living in Korea, but you seem to be looking for dirt, so here it is.
One thing your contacts might have been referring to is that gender roles are still very fixed in Korea, and it is a VERY chauvinistic society. It's pretty much expected that all women will grow up to get married, immediately quit their jobs, and just become housewives before 30. If you choose to focus on career or want to wait or don't want kids, you're heavily looked down on.
Many of my Korean friends and girlfriends also told me that the older males in their family make the rules and break them as they wish. Don't talk back to Dad, or Uncle. There seems to be a lot of abuse that people don't talk about...physical, sexual, and of course emotional.
Korean marriages, like much of Asia, are often for a lot of reasons other than 'everlasting love'. So after a couple years, marriages are more like business partnerships, and there is rampant cheating. Actually, from what I saw, there's rampant cheating while dating, too. It seems a pretty insecure, faithless society.
There also tends to be (again, like many of the surrounding countries) a lot of stereotyping and racism. I heard often from many people in Korea that black people look like monkeys, or that foreigners were responsible for all the AIDS in Korea. The nightly news will even report stuff like this, that is rampantly nationalistic or xenophobic. And they report fan death! lol
So, these are a few of the negative points you may encounter. Of course, there are downsides to almost everywhere, and again, as a whole, Korea can be a very enjoyable place to live, especially as a white, male American! Things tend to break your way a lot more in that case.



Source: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-da...in-South-Korea


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