Today is the third class of our current four class set. Please write your mini grammar sentences. You need to choose present continuous or simple present. Our reading will be the Pearl by John Steinbeck. I have included a link for the pdf, but for now you don’t have to read at home- we can read together in class. You still have listening material, so please listen and follow the transcript. This is extra practice for you to do on your own time.
Here is where we left off - "The doctor," she said. "Go to get the doctor."
Click HERE for the PDF
WARNER: We are back now with ROUGH TRANSLATION. I'm Gregory Warner. What is in a name? It is an age-old question. If you're a star-crossed lover in a Shakespeare play, your family name is the thing that keeps you apart. In our next story, the name you're given at work, it keeps you apart from yourself. And here to explain all that...
SE EUN GONG, BYLINE: Yeah, it's brewing now.
WARNER: ...Se Eun Gong.
GONG: Hi, Gregory.
WARNER: So how are you feeling?
GONG: Nervous (laughter).
WARNER: If you've heard an NPR story out of South Korea for the past four years, Se Eun likely had a hand in it. She is a journalist in NPR's bureau in Seoul, though she's usually working behind the scenes instead of in front of the mic.
GONG: Yeah, I'll - (laughter) I'll try my best.
WARNER: So if we were speaking Korean right now and if we were in the same office and I just addressed you as Se Eun, which is what I call you...
GONG: Right.
WARNER: ...Would that be a problem? And who's - like, who would it be awkward for?
GONG: Well, in this context, you are senior in age and work experience. It's OK for someone higher up to address someone lower. So if you are calling me just Se Eun, that's perfectly fine. If we were Korean speakers and I would call you Gregory, that would be considered unusual.
WARNER: Unusual?
GONG: It just - it feels rude.
WARNER: South Korean businesses are respectful of these hierarchies of age and experience, but they can also create a climate of silence that squelch good ideas and free-flowing communication. A 2017 survey by the Korean Chamber of Commerce found that nearly 70% of Korean corporate workers don't actively voice their opinions at meetings.
GONG: Younger workers would feel like they cannot raise objections to bad ideas of their bosses for fear that they can be seen as presumptuous.
WARNER: And your name is part of that. How people greet you marks your relative age and rank.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GONG: English nicknames - it's a helpful trick.
WARNER: And so there is a growing trend in South Korea - it began with tech startups, but it spread to other industries - to change the names that people use at work.
GONG: Yeah, a lot of job postings will advertise the fact that they use English nicknames.
WARNER: Oh, so like, hey, we pay well, we offer good benefits, we use English nicknames?
GONG: Yeah.
WARNER: These are Korean-speaking workplaces where you go by a single English first name. And the idea is that instead of having to adjust what you call someone based on their rank or age, everyone in the company would be on a first-name basis.
GONG: I mean, I, for one, was initially skeptical how effective this would be. I suspected that it would be not much more than window dressing. So I met this person...
SHIN HYE JEE: (Speaking Korean).
GONG: Shin Hye Jee.
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
GONG: She's a 27-year-old woman who works at a startup accelerator. So she learned about the company's English nickname policy during her onboarding process.
WARNER: So, yeah, so she shows up at her first day of work, and what happens?
GONG: She gets there, and then she went into a meeting where the head of the company attended.
WARNER: Wow, right away.
GONG: Yeah.
WARNER: She meets her new colleagues, a bunch of Daves and Carols and Sarahs and Susans. And the thing about using English nicknames is you don't attach someone's title. In her old job, Hye Jee used the standard Korean naming convention with titles attached.
GONG: So she was called...
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
GONG: Shin Hye Jee daeri neem - Shin Hye Jee, her full name, daeri, the title, and neem, the honorific.
WARNER: So it would be like every time Se Eun greeted me, she had to say, Mr. Podcast Host Warner. Every time a co-worker told Hye Jee hello...
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
WARNER: ...Or goodbye...
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
WARNER: The title followed her everywhere. So what is her title, actually?
GONG: Daeri, daeri. Why don't I first explain the conventional titles in a company? At the top there's (speaking Korean), chairperson. Below (speaking Korean), there's (speaking Korean), president, (speaking Korean), director, (speaking Korean), division chief, (speaking Korean), deputy division chief, (speaking Korean), section chief, daeri, deputy section chief, which is Hye Jee's title - old title - and then (speaking Korean), the lowest. It's just staff.
WARNER: Those titles disappear when people use English nicknames. Or at least they're supposed to.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As David) I am David.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As Andrew) I'm Andrew.
WARNER: This is from a TV adaptation of a short story by Jang Ryujin. It's called "The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work," and one storyline follows a fictional Korean tech startup with an English nickname policy that gets totally misused. People start attaching the titles and the honorifics to the English nicknames.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character, speaking Korean).
WARNER: And readers of the short story wrote in to say that, yes, they recognize this. Their company does the same thing. Despite the English nicknames, hierarchy reasserts itself.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Just like Silicon Valley.
WARNER: So Hye Jee...
GONG: She was a bit nervous about having to call the boss by just his first name.
WARNER: She was extra cautious that first day on the job.
GONG: She's the kind of person who, in that kind of setting, first watches how others do it. And she saw someone calling the head of the company by his English name. And then she realized, oh, like, this is really OK here to do that.
WARNER: It took a few weeks, but she finally got used to it, chatting with the boss on a first-name basis.
GONG: She felt like she was talking to him having shed the insignia. And this is a pretty commonplace expression in the Korean language, meaning that you're doing something free from the social hierarchy.
WARNER: But using these new names - it didn't just change how she communicated with her bosses. It changed how she saw herself.
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
GONG: She said she's thinking to herself when she arrives at the office that...
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
GONG: ...From here on, I'm not Shin Hye Jee, but I'm Hannah.
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
GONG: She said her English name, Hannah, gives her a work persona.
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
GONG: And that person, the Hannah, she thinks, is a braver version of herself.
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
GONG: She would voice grievances to the head of the company with ease. It's something that she couldn't imagine doing in her previous workplace.
WARNER: Where did this bravery come from? Was it just that the rules of behavior changed, or did this name allow something inside herself to be revealed? We called up one of the early adopters of this English name policy, JiHyun Won. He's the co-founder and COO of a video streaming company called Watcha.
ALEX JIHYUN WON: At Watcha, I am not COO. I am Alex.
GONG: Have you always had that name, Alex?
WON: No, actually, no. I picked Alex as my English name because I am a big fan of the English football club Manchester United and their legendary manager.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: The greatest British manager ever, Sir Alex Ferguson.
(CHEERING)
WON: Alex Ferguson.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WARNER: He tells us about two years after they put in this English name policy, it came to the test. There was this intern who got really angry about all the problems in their code.
WON: He was a software engineer. And he was mad.
WARNER: The intern confronted the COO, but he didn't call him COO; he called him Alex.
WON: He directly raised the problems in the company, and we listened to him, how we can fix them. So small changes can make big differences.
WARNER: As a Korean startup, they have to compete with global players, like Netflix and Disney+.
WON: A good idea deserves recognition, no matter what, and should not be overshadowed by hierarchy.
WARNER: But these shadows of hierarchy can fall both ways. Alex, the COO, he's younger than many of his employees.
GONG: And you may feel more comfortable talking to them as the boss, but as a younger boss, is that the case?
WON: Yeah. We started to not remember people's age here. But in Korea, that is a big change.
WARNER: Those older employees who he found it so awkward to talk to when he used their Korean names and titles, it actually changed how they saw him. They'd tell him.
WON: Oh, you were younger than me. I didn't know that for two years. That is a big thing here, yeah.
WARNER: They'll not only forget his age difference.
WON: So we are confused sometimes that - what is your original name? Like, something like that.
WARNER: (Laughter).
WON: Hey, Alex, what's your name? Yeah.
WARNER: Wait. Really?
WON: Yeah. We don't - actually, we don't remember other colleagues' Korean name. So it's kind of weird, but yeah.
WARNER: And this is a big reason, he says, why the English name policy is working for their company. It literally allows people to forget their old self, their more age- and rank-conscious self, at the office gates.
WON: And that is why even big, major companies are adopting English name policies and abandoning their traditional position-first, title-first way of culture. So it's already becoming a trend.
WARNER: That's interesting. So if a whole generation stops remembering people's ages - you're nodding. You're saying - does that sound like a good future to you?
WON: Yes. The next generations, millennials and Gen Z, desire for a horizontal culture at the office.
WARNER: But is it only at the office? Or might this relaxing of conventions inside the workplace lead to different behaviors outside as well? Alex hopes it will because, imagine, as English name policies become more and more common across Korean industries, will all those brave Hannahs and outspoken Andrews really stay meekly at the office? Or will they try, like the characters in "Severance," to send secret messages to their outie?
Does Alex and JiHyun, are they different for you? Are you a different person as Alex and different as JiHyun?
WON: Yeah, I think different. I think JiHyun is more personal. And Alex - if someone called me Alex, then I feel like, OK, I'm working.
WARNER: You can probably hear this in his voice, but as Alex is answering this, his shoulders slump, and he looks like a guy who's, well, imagining himself at work.
WON: So I feel very different.
WARNER: The freedom that he feels engaging with others as Alex is tempered with a kind of alienation. As Alex, he never feels like he's truly himself. Alex is a work identity, and therefore, Alex doesn't have parents. Alex doesn't have a childhood. But also, Alex doesn't have to negotiate his place in society as JiHyun might.
WON: Korean language conveys a sense of hierarchy in its grammatical structure itself. So calling me Alex, it automatically gets rid of such feeling.
WARNER: It's less formal, but it's less personal.
WON: Yeah. Right.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WARNER: And this impersonalness, this alienation of the work self, this is exactly what's allowed Hye Jee to explore this new side of herself. As Hannah, she finds herself reacting differently to how her colleagues treat her.
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
GONG: If Hye Jee, her original identity, would look over something that's annoying her and just move on, when she's in the Hannah mode, she feels the anger building up in herself, and she would actually say what she needs to say to vent that anger.
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
WARNER: Well, it's interesting just listening to you, and it's something so surprising. I'm trying to digest it. But I could maybe imagine that wearing a mask might allow me to behave differently. But the things that she would not notice, now she notices and make her angry. It's not just that she behaves differently, but she actually feels different.
GONG: Yeah. I mean, you know, one definition of brave, I think, can be being honest about yourself and to yourself. If the Hye Jee personality would require that she suppress that kind of feelings and act in a way that's more socially acceptable, switching to Hannah, yeah, she gets free from that kind of burden.
WARNER: That freedom, it ends with the end of the workday...
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
WARNER: ...Which is how Hye Jee wants it.
GONG: Outside of work, she just wants to be Hye Jee, and it's not even a conscious effort because she's called Hannah only at work.
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
WARNER: There's this scene in "Severance" where there's a kind of somber discussion about what might happen to innies if their outies find a new job. You can feel the powerlessness of being a work self in that moment, imagining that some person who is you, but a you you've never met, might decide to just pull the plug on your life. And then everything you know, the feel of your desk chair, the smell of the break room, that really banal office joke that that guy keeps repeating, all of that stuff, basically your whole world, will just cease to exist. And the part of you that is the only you that you know will just be gone.
GONG: Even though she's experienced her Hannah self, if in future she goes to work at a different company that doesn't use English nicknames and has a strict hierarchy, she thinks she'll go back to the way she carried herself in her previous workplace.
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
GONG: But then she'll think about Hannah for a long time, lamenting how she can't be that way anymore.
SHIN: (Speaking Korean).
WARNER: After the break, we suit up for a pixilated version of our work selves and enter the metaverse office, which can be a lonely place.