Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.

As a Korean resident of the United States, I have been both amazed and bewildered by the recent success of Korean popular culture in the country. When I first came to the US in the mid-1980s, despite South Korea’s significant economic advances of the previous decades, most Americans I met still had the impression of my homeland as an impoverished third-world country that made cheap but shabby goods, often placing it in Southeast Asia, and sometimes confusing it with Vietnam.

But now, my students at the Midwestern university where I teach listen avidly to K-pop music, while many of my American friends are enthusiastic consumers of K-dramas. In 2021, the television show Squid Game became the most-watched program on Netflix in the US and in many other countries. I myself may have benefited from this development in a modest way, as the Penguin Classics edition of my translation of the Joseon dynasty novel The Story of Hong Gildong (2016) – the narrative of an outlaw hero comparable to Robin Hood, and the subject of a number of films and K-dramas – sold surprisingly well, and became required reading in many college and high-school classes.

These works have increased interest in Korean culture in general, creating opportunities for Korean American writers to emerge as explicators of all things Korean. In their writings, the concept of han (한) has been invoked as crucial to understanding the Korean character, as well as its culture and art. A supposedly untranslatable term, it denotes a uniquely Korean sense of profound sorrow, regret, resentment, rage, and other negative emotions that are all bound up inside an individual as well as the people as a whole. It has been claimed that modern Koreans inherited it from deep tradition, as a collective emotional memory of their ancestors’ experiences of historical traumas, including many foreign invasions throughout the centuries. Han has frequently been mentioned in the US media too.

An early example is a 2003 episode of the TV show The West Wing that is titled ‘Han’, involving a visiting North Korean pianist who seeks to defect to the US. When thwarted from the course, the show explains, he’s filled with han, ‘a sadness so deep that no tears can come’.

When interpreters of Korean cultural products such as films and TV shows mention han, they are referring to the works’ intense emotionality, especially the feelings of sorrow, regret, resentment, and rage associated with the concept. Parasite, for instance, begins with a family of swindlers who target a rich family, but their plot turns deadly with the explosion of seething anger from class resentment. Squid Game features the sad desperation of people whose lives are in such shambles that they willingly risk death in a series of sadistic games for a slim chance at salvation.

Seen from the perspective of han, such emotions seem to be the common theme running throughout all the works. That notion is a questionable one, yet, because han has become the unavoidable go-to term in explicating all things Korean, it is important to explore its exact origin and meanings. And it is ultimately necessary to ask whether it is indeed a useful term in understanding Korean culture.