With K-drama’s gaining huge fan following across the world, women are found traveling to South Korea just to find themselves a boyfriend
Min Joo Lee
For my entire life I’ve obsessively watched South Korean television dramas, or K-dramas. When I was in elementary school in the U.S., I regularly went with my parents to a Korean grocery store an hour away from my home to borrow VHS tapes of K-dramas. Eventually, streaming services ended the need for VHS rentals, but I turned my passion for South Korean television into a career by earning a doctorate in gender studies at University of California, Los Angeles, where I researched the racial, gender and sexual politics surrounding the global popularity of K-dramas.
For my dissertation, I interviewed women from different parts of the world who were inspired by K-dramas to travel to South Korea to experience the culture firsthand. To meet them, I stayed at guesthouses around Seoul near K-drama filming locations and popular tourist destinations.
More broadly, I wanted to learn about what drew them to South Korea. But I soon realized that a significant number of tourists were less interested in the sights and sounds – and more interested in the men.
The rise of the K-drama
Some of the first K-dramas to attract a following outside of South Korea were “Jewel in the Palace,” “Guardian: Lonely and Great God” and “My Love from the Star,” which aired at the start of the 21st century.
In recent years, K-dramas have gone mainstream. Today, streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney+ not only offer up a bevy of K-dramas for their subscribers, they’ve also produced K-dramas of their own, such as “Squid Game” and “The King’s Affection.”
The worldwide popularity of K-dramas occurred alongside the popularity of other South Korean cultural products, including K-pop, cosmetics and food. This phenomenon is known as “Hallyu,” or the “Korean Wave.”
Galvanized by their interest in South Korean popular culture, more and more tourists are traveling to the country.
South Korean locals call these visitors “Hallyu tourists.” Many of them dine at restaurants and street food vendors so they can try out the food that they see in K-dramas, visit K-drama filming locales or attend a live K-pop performance.
However, a significant subset – the group I came to be most interested in – travel to South Korea for love. Drawn to the characters they see on their TVs, they start to wonder if real-life South Korean men resemble the K-drama male characters, both in their looks and behaviors.
They come from all around the world – North America, Western Europe, Russia – but tend to have a similar profile: heterosexual women in their early to mid- 20s.
The tourists who were interested in Korean men soon stood out. Unlike the other tourists who would wake up early to explore the city, these tourists would sleep in or watch K-dramas during the day, and then dress up and put on makeup before hitting the clubs and bars at night. They had one primary goal: to meet a Korean man.
To some of these tourists, the opportunity to date these men was a way to fulfill a fantasy – “live their own K-drama.”
Some of these women were fluent in Korean, while others were able to communicate by mixing Korean and English. Many claimed to have learned Korean by consuming hours of Korean popular culture.
In pursuit of ‘soft’ masculinity
“Romantic,” “gentle,” “handsome,” “knights in shining armor” are just some of the terms that the tourists used to describe their idealized Korean man. It was a stark contrast to the men back in their home countries, whom they tended to describe as emotionally stunted and hypermasculine.
A certain type of man does tend to appear in romantic K-dramas –well-groomed, romantic and gentle. As Korean studies scholar Joanna Elfving-Hwang explains: “… men in popular dramas and romantic comedies are portrayed as attentive, sensitive and ready to express their feelings if needs be. They are well-groomed and fashionably dressed, accessorised with the latest man-bag, and excessively concerned with their looks.”
Some of the tourists did, in fact, find their ideal partners, marrying and settling in South Korea. Their photos and stories circulated among some of the other tourists, giving them hope that they, too, might find and marry a Korean man. However, these were the exception, not the norm.
Most of the tourists I interviewed and stayed in touch with left the country somewhat disappointed. Some did manage to have a short fling; but in most cases, these relationships fizzled out.
Interestingly, regardless of whether they left the country only partially satisfied or demoralized, many of the women were steadfast about their desire to one day fall in love with a Korean man. They believed that they were simply unlucky this time around – that there still existed the possibility of meeting the perfect man during a future visit to South Korea.
