A café in Tokyo, around three in the afternoon. Outside the window, the street trees swayed gently, and in my cup, the Yirgacheffe was cooling. On my smartphone screen, a column from a Korean newspaper was open. An economics professor was writing that Korea’s college admissions system should be reformed by modeling Ethiopia’s coffee grading system.
Not once, while reading the column, did I lift the cup.
The writing flowed smoothly. Ethiopia is poor, but its coffee grading is the best in the world, and thanks to this, the country’s beans are trusted. Korea’s admissions, too, must become an objective system that sets aside political considerations, so that the abilities of the youth can be properly signaled, and corporations can hire with peace of mind. A Nobel Prize–winning theory is invoked, and Hyundai Motor’s advertising budget is placed as an example.
After reading it all, I sat still for a long time. I could tell I did not agree. But I could not say exactly what was holding me there for so long.
I lifted the cup and took a sip. The cooled coffee’s fruity sweetness stood out a little more.
The barista had briefly explained to me where in Ethiopia the beans in this cup came from. The name of the farm, the elevation, the processing method. These pieces of information are the language of transparency that the specialty coffee market has offered to consumers over the past twenty years. This transparency has succeeded in letting us know that “behind the coffee you drink, there is the labor of actual people.” And the moment it lets us know this, a strange thing happens. The labor is revealed, but that revelation itself becomes part of the consumption. I drink the coffee while listening to the farm’s name, and that name makes the taste of the coffee richer.
There is none of this in the Ethiopia of the column. There is only the rigor of the grading system, and there is no one who grew the beans that the system grades. One sentence mentions that a quarter of the population works in coffee — then it is gone, and the faces of that quarter never appear.
The beans in the cup and the beans in the column are different beans. Which one am I closer to? It is hard to answer.
But what the column places next to the bean is not just another bean. The youth are placed there alongside it. Both must be graded. Both must be objectively evaluated. Both receive their proper value only when the system operates correctly. This metaphor reads smoothly because it has already been inside our language for a long time.
I think of the Korean word 인재 (injae) — “talent,” but composed of the characters for “person” and “timber.” Human timber. The lumber to go into a building. I have heard this word since I was an elementary school student. Only, the language back then was a little more mixed. The words telling us to study hard and become excellent people, the words hoping we would become doctors or judges, the words that even a street vendor had become president so we could do it too, the words to succeed like that and to serve the country. These words came as a single bundle, not separated from one another. Studying for myself and studying for the country looked like different faces of the same act.
The author of the column does not directly call the youth lumber. But nowhere in his sentences do the youth appear as the subject of their own lives. The youth are someone whose abilities must be signaled, an object whose hiring gives corporations pause, and a number that gets recorded as an unemployment rate when the state fails to evaluate them properly. The grammatical subject of the text is always the state or the corporation, and the youth are the object those subjects must handle.
This grammar is not something the author of the column invented. I, too, grew up inside this grammar. Part of the reason I studied was, undoubtedly, because I wanted to become good timber.
I am not the only one who grew up inside that grammar.
Before coming to Tokyo, I met a friend in Seoul. Thirty. Graduated from a good university, worked at a company for a few years then quit, and is now preparing to change jobs. Over coffee, he said: “But these days I don’t know what I did wrong. I worked hard, though.”
I did not know what to answer. Saying “the system is the problem” was too easy, saying “you didn’t do anything wrong” was something he had already heard, and the truth seemed to lie somewhere between the two, but I didn’t know exactly where.
The author of the column gives an answer to people like this friend. “Your effort was not properly evaluated because the evaluation system wavered. Let us restore the system.” These words take the form of consolation, but in truth, they return my friend’s anger back into the same system. To someone who wanted to be properly called by name, it is a promise to attach a more accurate name.
But was a more accurate name really what my friend wanted? When he said “I worked hard, though,” what was behind that sentence? Was it a demand to be recognized, or was it a hope that someone would tell him it is okay not to be recognized?
I could not ask him.
Regarding the youth in Japan, I hear a different story. People stay at companies for shorter and shorter periods. Wages only rise when they change jobs. No one says the company is family anymore.
For a time, I was a little envious of that story. I knew well enough that the true source of the envy was neither the salary nor the chance to change jobs. The space where corporations no longer treated the youth as family — that emptied space was what I envied. But that envy did not last long. The reason the youth there were driven to job-hopping was that their real wages would be cut if they stayed at the company. What stepped into the space where the call had been withdrawn was coercion in a different form.
In articles about China’s technological rise, a certain sentence keeps returning. I want to contribute to the development of China. The fervor for entering STEM fields, semiconductor self-reliance, the trends among young researchers. Even if the backgrounds differ, the students’ words frequently converge near that sentence. It is difficult to push this sentence away with cynicism, or to pull it closer with envy. What I felt when I was young, hearing the words to study hard and to serve the country, was perhaps not very far from that.
It seems the youth of the three countries are living the same problem in different time zones. In one, they breathe the air left after the call has been withdrawn; in another, the call is growing hot again; and Korea sits somewhere between, where the call remains but what the call promised does not arrive.
It is hard to say who is more free, who is less awakened, who is suffering the most. The three countries are living this problem in their own ways, within their own times.
It strikes me as strange, now, that all these thoughts started from a cup of coffee and a column. Leaving the café, I cannot yet say exactly what it was about that column that held me for so long. To say I was displeased that the youth were compared to coffee beans is too simple. It is also true to say that Ethiopia was used as a tool. But that alone is somehow lacking.
Perhaps what made me uncomfortable was that the language of the column was not entirely unfamiliar to me. I grew up inside that language, and I still carry a part of that language inside me. The voice asking to be recognized, the voice wanting to be properly evaluated, the voice hoping someone would tell me my effort was meaningful. These voices are the point most vulnerable to the temptation the author of the column holds out to me.
I do not think I have to deny those voices. Even if I deny them, they do not disappear. Only, those voices might not be the only voices. Somewhere there might be a language that calls one’s life by name in a different way. I do not yet know it.