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Do you have good nunchi?

The Power of Nunchi by Euny Hong attempts to decode and dissect a Korean behaviour trait and make it accessible to those from other cultures

'The Power of Nunchi: The Korean Secret to Happiness and Success' by Euny Hong decodes a Korean behavioral concept to build better professional and personal relationships.
'The Power of Nunchi: The Korean Secret to Happiness and Success' by Euny Hong decodes a Korean behavioral concept to build better professional and personal relationships. (Photo by Helena Lopes, Pexels)

It might sound a bit far-fetched to attribute South Korea’s economic growth and prosperity to ‘nunchi’, as this new book on the Korean behavioural concept attempts to do at one point, but nunchi is certainly a way of life in the country. The ability to quickly gauge another person’s moods and understand what they’re thinking and feeling, nunchi is close to what we may think of as emotional intelligence, but there are subtle differences: Nunchi literally translates to ‘eye measure’, and it is not just about figuring out people’s state of mind but also the ability to quickly put this in context, adjust your own behaviour accordingly, and create a harmonious interaction.

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The Power of Nunchi: The Korean Secret to Happiness and Success by Euny Hong attempts to decode and dissect this ability and make it accessible to people from other cultures through practical strategies and real-life scenarios. “Nunchi is a part of daily life in Korea, because Korean culture is what is known as ‘high context’,” explains Hong. “... a great deal of communication is based not on words, but on the overall context, which has countless factors: body language, facial expressions, tradition, who else is present, and even silence.”

Nunchi can be an effective tool in building better professional and personal relationships, says Hong. Although the book contains a chapter on the various philosophies that have shaped the Korean way of life, and, apparently, its reliance on nunchi—Animism, Confucianism, and Buddhism—the book is not at all preoccupied with exploring the concept from a historical or sociological point of view. It is quite openly a self-help guide—for instance, you can gauge whether you have good nunchi or not by answering questions like ‘I do not make other people uncomfortable’ and ‘At a social gathering, I am able to distinguish easily between when it’s time to leave and when it’s not’ with a yes/no answer. A bit simplistic, one may say, because it relies on being able to objectively assess one’s behaviour, which we can assume people with good nunchi lack, but the book contains more subtle exercises as well.

You may think that nunchi is just another word for empathy — the ability to feel what others are feeling in the moment — but the author makes it emphatically clear that it is not empathy. It is an intellectual rather than an emotional ability, she seems to say. “Empathy can be selfish, and I would argue it does not always lead to understanding. It centres around the person feeling it. YOUR feelings,” she writes. “Empathy without nunchi is like words without grammar or syntax – meaningless noise, she adds.”

Hong connects nunchi to the worldwide rise of Korean soft-power—its rising influence in the global cultural sphere through music, television and cinema, beauty, and food, collectively termed ‘Hallyu’ or the Korean wave. But it is disappointing to note that she does not quite explain how nunchi may work beyond an individual level and leave an impact at a global, cultural level. Beyond saying that nunchi is related to Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory — only, in her thesis, it doesn’t mean survival of the strongest but the survival of those with the quickest nunchi—she does not go deeper into the cultural significance of an entire country of nunchi-holders.

That aside, the book works as a how-to guide and a reframing of what is essentially the core question that self-help seeks to answer—how to win friends and influence people—in a fresh, somewhat esoteric manner. At a time when we have devalued personal interactions in favour of those mediated by technology, we need to understand nunchi more than ever, Hong says. ‘Look up from the phone and read the room,’ is the core message of this book, though one could argue that reading the language of emoji correctly is also quite a subtle art.

The Power Of Nunchi: By Euny Hong, Penguin Random House India, 240 pages,  <span class='webrupee'>₹</span>499.
The Power Of Nunchi: By Euny Hong, Penguin Random House India, 240 pages, 499.

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