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Explore Korean history, culture, society, food, books, politics, and everyday life through stories rich with context and heart. Hosted by Dr. Jiwon Yoon and developed with Jihyun Lee, this podcast helps listeners understand Korea beyond headlines, stereotypes, and trends.
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🎧A Meal in Your Name
Somewhere in Korea right now, a coffee truck is wearing an actor’s face. It’s covered in banners and jokes, and it’s serving lattes to an entire crew. Somebody paid for all of it, and somebody else kept the receipts. In this episode, we mee
🎧The Lunch Tray Grows Up
Twenty-three years ago, my husband’s job at LG in Korea came with a place to live—and three meals a day. His monthly dormitory fee, including breakfast, was ₩21,000 (about $18 at the time). Lunch and dinner at work were free. We sometimes s
🎧The Cost of a Hot Lunch
A school lunch can arrive on time even when the people making it are struggling. How did South Korea’s school kitchen workers get others to listen? This episode follows the workers whose accounts of illness helped prompt investigations and
🎧The Women Behind Korea’s School Lunch Trays
The same school cook might be called ‘teacher,’ ‘auntie,’ or ‘ajumma,’ and each name can change what we notice about her work. In this episode, we follow the words spoken around Korean school lunch—from a serving counter to a workers’ strik
🎧Reading a School Lunch Backward
In a Korean school, “teacher” can be someone who plans your lunch. And the person cooking it might end up competing on Netflix. Why does South Korea have nutrition teachers? This episode explores the people behind Korean school lunches: die
🎧The Lunch Korea Built
Before Korea’s stainless-steel lunch trays, there were dosirak: lunches packed at dawn, compared at shared desks, and, in some classrooms, inspected by teachers checking the grains in a child’s rice. After a month of research, conversations
🎧A New Season Begins With School Lunch
A Korean school lunch tray looks simple: rice, soup, kimchi, and a few side dishes. Follow it far enough, though, and it leads straight into politics, invisible labor, hagwon schedules, convenience-store dinners, child poverty, and the very
🎧65. I Said I Was Taking a Break. Here’s the Whole Story.
Yes, I did say I was taking a break last week. And yet, here I am in your feed again. (Life comes at you fast, especially during the summer.) In this special, highly personal episode of Understanding Korea, One Story at a Time, I am sitting
🎧64.The People Inside Convenience
What if convenience has a night shift? In this Season 1 finale of Understanding Korea, One Story at a Time (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/), I look at Korea’s culture of speed through the people who make everyday convenience possible: deli
🎧63. The Road Is the Factory
What if the most dangerous factory floor in South Korea had no walls? In 2022, a food delivery platform claimed the number one spot for industrial accident insurance filings in South Korea — and has held it every year since. It beat out shi
🎧The Moving Dot Is a Person
You’ve seen the map. You’ve watched the little dot move toward your door. You’ve opened the bag without thinking twice about who carried it there. This episode is here to make you think twice. In this companion episode to this week’s newsle
🎧The App, the Bowl, and the Knock at the Door
Food delivery seems ordinary until you start following the meal. You tap the app. The food arrives. You eat. Simple, right? But in Korea, that small sequence can lead you almost everywhere: to eighteenth-century cold noodles, moving-day jja
🎧Appetite for Sale: The Hidden Economics of Mukbang
This week, we return to mukbang, but not the gentle “screen-table” version. We’re talking about what happened when comfort became content, and content became an industry. If the newsletter (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/mukbang-business)
🎧Why Mukbang Feels Like Company
This week’s newsletter (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/mukbang-explained)looked at mukbang as thenext step after (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/podcast-eating-alone-korea)honbap (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/podcast-eating-alone-ko
What Lunch Reveals When You Eat Alone
This week’s newsletter (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/korean-public-solitude) followed honbap (혼밥), or eating alone, through Korean popular culture: dramas, webtoons, variety shows, and coin karaoke booths. This companion episode takes t
🎧Eating Alone While Being Seen: The Hidden Politics of Honbap
This week’s episode is a companion to my newsletter essay, (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/eating-alone-korea) not an audio version of it. Read the essay and listen to the episode together, and you’ll get the fuller picture. The newslette
🎧Before Korea Ate Alone
This is the companion episode to this week’s newsletter, (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/korean-did-you-eat-explained)“Did You Eat?”: The Three Words That Explain Korean Culture (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/korean-did-you-eat-explain
🎧Decoding the Korean Table: A Review of "Why Do Koreans Eat This Way?"
This episode is a companion to this week’s Substack essay, “The Korean Table Is Not Finished Until Someone Suggests Coffee.” (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/why-koreans-eat-this-way) Today, we move from Korean restaurant buttons and “저기요!
🎧The Snack That Changes the Room
This episode is the companion tothis week’s Substack essay (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/korean-food-connection). If you haven’t read it yet, it’s waiting for you right here! (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/korean-food-connection) But
🎧Does Korean Pleasure Always Need a Permission Slip?
What if Korean food isn’t less joyful than Swedish fika or Spanish tapas, but simply joy spoken in a different accent? This episode is the audio companion to this week’s Substack essay: Beyond the Iced Americano: Does Korea Have Food That I
🎧What Korean Society Looks Like When You Follow the Pain
Once a month, I read a book written in Korean that hasn’t been translated into English and bring it to you. Not because I enjoy being the only one who can read it — though honestly, sometimes — but because some of the most interesting think
🎧Iced, Even in a Blizzard
Sorry this week’s episode is late. I had recorded it, but when I opened the file to edit, my voice suddenly sounded oddly metallic, so I had to scrap it and record again. This episode grows out of this week’s newsletter, (https://yoonjiwon.
🎧Never Mother Alone
This week’s episode takes the long way around one deceptively simple idea: after birth, mothers need care. We begin with Korea’s sanhujori (산후조리) and follow what happens when an old postpartum instinct of warmth, rest, and nourishment becom
🎧How Korea Holds the Mother After Birth
This episode is a companion audio to this week’s Substack newsletter on (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/korean-postpartum-care-1)sanhujori (산후조리) (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/korean-postpartum-care-1), Korean postpartum care. In it,
🎧 Three Korean Books That Refuse the Supermom Myth
Before you listen: My new microphone and I are still in the “getting to know you” phase. Unfortunately, the first 22 minutes of this recording are a bit rough. I desperately wanted to re-record it, but then I remembered the lesson from this
🎧 The Warm Floor Theory of Korea
Why do Koreans call boiling soup “refreshing”? Why does warm water show up in K-dramas before advice ever does? In this companion episode to my newsletter (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/the-warm-floor-theory), we follow the logic of siwo
🎧 Warmth Rules: The Korean Logic Behind “No Ice, Please”
Quick audio note A small behind-the-scenes update: I used to record this podcast with a clip-on mic plugged into my phone, sitting in my walk-in closet. My husband felt sorry for me and surprised me with a real microphone for my birthday in
🎧 The Muscle Memory of Democracy: Gwangju, Minnesota, and the Work That Follows
This is the companion episode to this week’s newslette (https://yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/democracy-muscle-memory)r, but it goes deeper into what I couldn’t fully hold on the page. I talk about what “Gwangju” means in the Korean nervous syst
🎧 A Voice Memo for When the News Steals Your Breath
Editing this episode, I noticed my voice sounds a little different. Maybe it is because my sleep has been shaky lately, with panic creeping back in at night. Maybe it is because I recorded earlier than I usually do. Or maybe it is simply be
🎧 Podcast: The Baby Expo That Sells Fear (With Free Samples)
“Wait and see” sounds calm in English. In Korean parenting culture, it can feel like negligence. In this episode, I’m introducing a Korean book that hasn’t been translated into English: The Sociology of Marriage and Childcare (https://ebook
