`Go yourself to the Middle East!`

Sometimes, a bad joke spoils the atmosphere. So was what President Park Geun-hye said to the Employment and Labor minister at the trade and investment promotion meeting at the presidential office on Thursday. The president said, “Please try it out so that there will be no young Koreans in this country. Where are they? They’re all in the Middle East.” There was an article on a record high youth unemployment rate in the morning newspaper on that day. President Park might have said so in excitement after her visit to the Middle East and due to the concern over the youth unemployment. However, it was uncomfortable to hear the joke because the president did not seem to understand how tough it is to work in the Middle East.

Ruling Saenuri Party Chairman Kim Moo-sung had a meeting on Monday with young people in a cafe in Shillim-dong, Seoul, which is home to many students who prepare for bar exams. The members of some youth groups chanted with a sign that says, “Go yourself to the Middle East!” It is a parody of a line in the Korean movie “Friend” – “Go yourself to Hawaii!” Korean construction workers in the 1970s earned money fighting against the sweltering heat in the Middle East, being separated from their family and even without alcohol and entertainment. When President Park, who had lived in the presidential office back then, said “Go yourself to the Middle East,” the president should have thought about what she said in the shoes of the workers’ families.

When a reporter told President Park that the president had too little face-to-face reporting in the New Year’s press conference, the president made people laugh by asking ministers, “Do you think you need it?” Then, the president told the reporter, “You are a Cheong Wa Dae correspondent but you do know too little about it.” Some praised the president for answering the sharp question with a joke, but what else could the ministers do except for laughing?

President Park knows well that she is not good at joking. Before she became a president, she used to write down jokes in her notebook. It was good to see her trying hard to tell jokes, although they were not that fun. Off-the-cuff jokes are the product of empathy. One can make laugh others by learning the development of a situation in a short period of time and finding a subtle crack in it. If the president wants a good joke, I would like to advise her to develop a sense of empathy first.

pisong@donga.com