The Art of the Thank You: Navigating Korean Dining Etiquette with Seniors — Epoche B2
MEMORANDUM To: Incoming visiting researchers, Department of Sociology From: Han Ji-woo, International Faculty Liaison Date: 23 October 2023 Subject: Being taken to lunch by a senior colleague — what to do about the thank-you A senior colleague takes you to lunch and pays without discussion; you want to thank them properly and are not sure how, or when. Several of you have now asked some version of that question, so it is worth writing down. What follows is not a rule, but it is what most of us do, and it will keep you out of the two mistakes that visiting researchers reliably make. Since I promise to keep you out of them, I should name them at the start: the first is succeeding in paying, and the second is thanking the host too warmly and too soon. Sections 2 and 3 explain why each is a mistake, and section 4 gives the sequence that avoids both. 1. What actually happens Begin with the event itself, because the analysis afterwards refers back to it. Yesterday I had lunch with Professor Kim at a sundubu-jjigae place behind the west gate — soft tofu stew, the sort of place where the meal is 9,000 won and the queue is out of the door by twelve fifteen. When the bowls were cleared he stood up and paid at the till while I was still putting my coat on. Nothing was said about it, before or after. This was not generosity in the transactional sense, and reading it as generosity is where most of the subsequent errors come from. In a Korean academic department the relevant relationship is the one between seonbae (선배) and hubae (후배) — literally 'earlier colleague' and 'later colleague', the person who entered the institution before you and the person who entered after. The pair is not merely descriptive. Yum, surveying how Confucian ethics shaped interpersonal patterns across East Asia, describes these relationships as asymmetrical but reciprocal: the senior party owes protection and provision, the junior owes deference and availability, and neither side's obligation is voluntary. Paying for the meal is the senior's side of that arrangement being discharged. Declining it firmly enough to succeed would not have been modesty; it would have been a refusal to let him occupy his own position, and that is the rude act. 2. Why the debt is meant to stay open That explains why he paid. It does not yet explain why you should not simply pay him back, which is the natural next thought and the one that produces mistake number one. The reason comes from the anthropology of gift-giving, and it is worth a paragraph because everything in section 4 follows from it. Marcel Mauss, in an essay published in 1925 that founded the study of the subject, argued that gift exchange in societies without impersonal markets rests on three obligations that are felt as compulsory rather than optional: the obligation to give, the obligation to accept what is given, and the obligation to reciprocate. His crucial observation for our purposes is that the reciprocation is not a settlement. A gift that has not been returned leaves the receiver in a subordinate position, and the whole apparatus works precisely because the balance keeps being reopened. A relationship in which nothing is owed in either direction is a relationship that has ended. Pierre Bourdieu added the piece that makes the timing intelligible. Analysing gift exchange among the Kabyle of Algeria, he pointed out that the interval between gift and counter-gift is not incidental delay but the thing that constitutes the exchange as a gift at all. Hand back an equivalent object immediately and you have not reciprocated; you have declared the transaction closed and revealed it as a swap, which is an insult. The counter-gift must differ in time and, usually, in kind. So: paying Professor Kim back — reaching for the till, or 'getting the next one' in the same restaurant at the same price — is mistake one in its pure form. It closes an account that is not supposed to close. 3. Why the immediate, effusive thank-you misfires Mistake two is subtler, because the instinct behind it is a good one. Most of you arrive intending to thank the host warmly and specifically as soon as the bill is settled, and in many places that is exactly right. Here it can misfire, for a reason worth understanding rather than memorising. An elaborate thank-you treats the payment as an exceptional favour. But by section 1 it was not exceptional; it was the senior's role being performed. Calling it a favour therefore draws attention to the very difference in rank that made it automatic, and it does so out loud, at the till, in front of whoever else is in the queue. The host is then obliged to wave it away, because a senior who accepts loud thanks for meeting an ordinary obligation looks as though he thinks he has done something unusual. You have handed him a small piece of work to do at the end of his own lunch break. Note that this is the same mechanism as mistake one, arriving by a different route: both errors consist of making the exchange explicit. 4. Recommended practice Here is the sequence, with the reason attached to each step so that you can adapt it rather than recite it. Before eating, say jal meokgesseumnida (잘 먹겠습니다). It is not optional and it is not really addressed to anyone in particular — see section 5 on why the grammar makes that possible. On leaving the table, say jal meogeotseumnida (잘 먹었습니다) — 'I have eaten well' — with a slight bow. This is understated on purpose. It acknowledges the meal rather than the transaction, and so avoids mistake two. Immediately afterwards, buy the coffee. This is the part people miss, and it is the most useful thing in this memo. Coffee near the west gate is about 4,500 won a cup, so for the two of you the counter-gift comes to $2 \times 4{,}500 = 9{,}000$ won against a lunch bill of $2 \times 9{,}000 = 18{,}000$ won: a ratio of $\frac{1}{2}$. That proportion is the whole point. It is large enough to be a real contribution and visibly too small to clear the debt