Whose Tradition? Korean In-Laws, Wedding Halls and the Drama Plot — Epoche C1
A book about wedding halls, and the question it settles about television Laurel Kendall's Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity (1996) is an ethnography of how South Koreans found spouses, negotiated the goods that changed hands at marriage, and staged the ceremony itself, drawn from fieldwork in a village outside Seoul and in the commercial wedding halls of the capital across the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is not a book about television and it discusses no drama. It is nevertheless the book that most directly tests the assumption a viewer brings to Korean family serials: that the mother-in-law who rules her son's household, the daughter-in-law who serves her, and the young couple caught between them are the residue of an old order, so that watching them quarrel is watching tradition collide with modernity. Kendall's central finding is that the collision is staged, in both senses of the word. The elements of a contemporary Korean wedding that everyone present understands as traditional are, to a striking degree, recent, commercial and assembled — and the people who understand them as traditional are not confused about their own culture so much as engaged in producing it. That finding does not make the drama plot false. It changes what the plot is evidence of. If in-law authority were a survival, its decline would be a matter of erosion, and the serials would be a record of a long retreat. If instead it is something continually remade — by wedding halls, by household budgets, by the law of family registration, and by television itself — then the serials are not a mirror held up to a receding past but one of the workshops in which the past is manufactured. What follows takes Kendall's argument in the order she builds it, adds the longer history she takes for granted, asks what the drama form does to the material, and ends with what has changed in the three decades since her fieldwork closed. The thesis the serials propose, and where the usual evidence for it fails The in-law plot has a genre home. It lives in the weekend family serials of the terrestrial broadcasters — KBS2's My Father is Strange (2017), in which the marriages of four adult children are worked out under one roof, or Once Again (2020), built around siblings whose marriages come apart and who return to their parents' house — and, in a coarser register, in the daily serials, where a mother-in-law's disapproval can be delivered as a leaf of kimchi across the daughter-in-law's face. That gesture has circulated internationally as a detached clip, and is now the shorthand by which foreign audiences know that Korean television has a mother-in-law problem. The history implied by the plot is easy to state. The bride enters her husband's house; the house is ordered by seniority and by the male line; filial duty falls to the son and is discharged by his wife; the mother-in-law, who commands the domestic economy, must approve the marriage for it to prosper. Three pieces of evidence often produced in support of that history do not survive contact with the programmes themselves, and they are worth clearing away before turning to Kendall. Jumong (2006) is a long historical epic about the founding of Koguryŏ; whatever it dramatises, it is not the domestic authority of a modern Korean mother-in-law, and citing it as such mistakes a costume for a continuity. What's Wrong with Secretary Kim (2018) is sometimes read as the story of a woman hesitating before her prospective in-laws; its family conflict is between two brothers and turns on a childhood abduction. And Crash Landing on You (2019-20) cannot depict a warm relationship between in-laws, because its couple never become in-laws — the drama ends with them meeting in Switzerland, not with a marriage that joins two households. The stock figure is real enough; the evidence usually offered for her antiquity is not, and assembling it is exactly the habit Kendall's book was written against — reading present arrangements backwards into a past that is asserted rather than examined. Kendall's first correction: the traditional wedding is younger than the modern one Kendall's fieldwork is set in the yesikchang, the commercial wedding hall, which by the late 1980s was where most South Koreans married: a rented room, a scheduled slot, a hired officiant, rented clothes, and the next couple waiting. What makes the hall analytically interesting is the room next door. After the Western-style ceremony the couple withdraw for the p'yebaek, in which the bride, now in hired Korean dress, bows to her husband's parents and senior kin, who throw dates and chestnuts into her held-out skirt as a wish for children. Everyone present understands the p'yebaek as the traditional part and the ceremony in the main hall as the modern one. Kendall's point is that the two arrived together. The p'yebaek as performed — compressed, costumed, timed to the hall's schedule, purchasable as an addition to the package — is a modern production of tradition rather than a fragment left over from the Chosŏn household. Its meaning depends on the ceremony it is contrasted with: without the white dress in the main room there is nothing for the hired hanbok to be traditional in relation to. The same logic governs her treatment of what the two families exchange. Honsu, the household goods the bride's family provides, and the reciprocal gifts from the groom's side, were discussed throughout the 1980s as an oppressive inheritance from the old order. Kendall shows the inflation to have been recent and prosperity-driven: as incomes rose through the 1970s and 1980s the scale of expected furnishings rose with them, so that the burden families experienced as tradition bearing down on them was in fact a modern escalation, financed disproportionately by the bride's side. Her account includes the state's attempts to legislate against it, in the family ritual standards in force from 1969, which set limits on what could be spe