March 10, 2022 • 33 mins
Why would hundreds of thousands of people join a forum dedicated to finding out if someone lied about their Stanford diploma? There’s history here.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Do you remember when you first heard about tableau scandal? Oh? Yes, yes,
And I was like, whoa, what's happening? What's happening with
you know, our minds because I didn't give a time
about where he graduated from. He was just a good guy.
He was a good rapper, he was a good writer,
(00:24):
he was a good entertainer. Who cares? Ah where Let's say, like, um,
do you know where she graduated? You know, nobody cares.
It's a waste of your precious time. I met j
Young Park in one of Soul's oldest neighborhoods, Guangamon, on
this narrow back street that was lying with coffee shops.
(00:47):
The street itself was pretty noisy, but his friend happens
to run a yoga studio that wasn't open that day,
so we went in there to talk. Jean is an
art curator. He also went to an elite university in Korea,
so I figured he would be a good person to
talk to about the obsession with brand names and education.
But when I asked him about the Tableau scandal, he
started laughing, which I kind of had to laugh along
(01:09):
with him because it made me realize again that yeah,
this is all sort of ridiculous, I mean, being real.
When I first heard about all this, I kind of thought, wait, what,
why does anyone care about where a rapper went to college?
I mean, you're you're you're laughing about this, but and
I'm we're laughing about this now. But this was completely
(01:30):
dominating in Korean society. I mean, again, this is hip
hop we're talking about. Even if you're not a fan
of the music, you know that in hip hop we
prized street cred above pretty much everything, and Stanford is
not where you get street cred. That's not to say
rappers don't lie. They do, but it's usually in the
opposite direction, like saying they're from the hood or they're
(01:51):
in a gang or something like that. But lying about
being an elite university graduate that just sounds like hustling
backwards to me. There there were a lot of really
angry people. People war and are generally very angry, very
angry about other people. What do you mean if you
(02:13):
are a Korean citizen, you would totally understand what I
have just said. But we are very angry at all times.
We are angry. We are angry at the president. You know,
we take out the president because we are angry at
the president. You know, we are very angry at Japan,
for example, So we always have to win over Japan.
(02:38):
It's engraved in our way of thinking for the last
half a century that we have to be really angry
to achieve because if we remain without anger, our opportunities,
our resource, maybe our country or freedom are being taken away.
(03:06):
It's that anger, that emotion, and even the absurdity of
the situation. With Tableau that may be interested in all this,
they maybe want to know more what made an entire
country gets swept up into this frenzy? What drove it
to the point of criminal charges? With all that smoke?
Where's the fire and who or what started? But like
(03:31):
with everything in life, there's a context here, a background history.
What figs my name? Whatever? I can be drum I
can I can writing there. My book runs on the
first past the mark Yeah, a boon box boat from
(03:58):
Vice and I heart I'm Dexter Thomas. This is authentic
episode four Hell career. Where was this? I rarely spick
up rich University. You know I was in because I
am aware of this issue that when I first sat
(04:20):
down with j Young, my first thought was and I
mean this in the most genuine way. I swear this
dude is just unfairly cool. I mean shoes, his outfit,
his glasses. He looks like the kind of dude who
could talk philosophy with you but then also tell you
a place to get some new kicks. At first, it
was just small talk. I was asking about himself, and
(04:43):
everything was fine until I asked him about school. I
had to actually press him to say where it was
that he went to college. I mean, I think he
almost started blushing when I when I say that, you know,
I graduated from university in Korea, you know, to be specific,
probably ah, you know, ah, you know, you have a background.
(05:05):
It's a good school. Kind of yeah, it's a good school.
But what I don't really want to the fact that
I graduated from this school with multiple degrees affects people's judgments,
you know, on me as a person. Interesting. It's very
ironic because I want to let people know that I
(05:26):
am really serious into studying and researching different stuff. But
at the same time, I don't really want to, you know,
wave the flag that you know I got this thing.
So it's really twisted desire. The reason I was talking
to Jayong wasn't really about Tableau specifically. It was because
(05:48):
of a totally different scandal, something that happened around the
time Jayong was getting out of school with his own
multiple degrees and breaking into the art world in two
thousand seven, which was a couple of years before what
happened with table If you talk to enough people in
Korea about Tableau, at some point someone will point out
that it's kind of like what happened with this really
prestigious art curator named Shin jong A. And when someone
(06:11):
explained that to me, things not only started to make
more sense, but it actually made Tableau story a lot scarier.
I wanted to talk to an expert, somebody who knew
Shinjunga's story. But when we were looking for someone to interview,
someone who was in the art world at that time
and could really paint the picture of how devastating her
story was, almost no one wanted to talk, which is
(06:34):
weird because this was a national case. It was so
big that people called it shin Gate, as in shinjong
A and Gate, because Koreans also used gate from Watergate
like we do for big scandals. But even though this
was all public knowledge, nobody seemed to want to talk
about it. I guess the reason why, especially the arts people,
(06:59):
is that I don't know, maybe people there's a general
maybe consensus that we don't talk that ship about ourselves.
But j Young is kind of a rebel, so he
was down to give us the context. I think in
the art board people or generally remained silent about it
(07:21):
because she was a curator at all a prestigious, you know,
private museum, and she was about to curate a section
of the Contrivinale, which is like a really really important,
you know position, or anyone. In the early two thousand's,
(07:42):
Shinjanga was a rising star in the Korean art world.
She had become the lead curator of an art museum
and soul she was a professor at a local university,
and she had ties to the office of the then
Korean president, and only thirty five years old, she had
been appointed as director of the Kuangju Bien l which
(08:02):
is one of the most acclaimed art events in Asia.
Shinjunga wasn't just a success story. She was a role model.
But then in the summer of two thousand seven, members
of the board of Reuniversity started questioning her academic record.
An entire television program was done to investigate her, and
(08:23):
even though she insisted that her records were true, it
was revealed that she had fabricated her resume. She had
been lying about receiving a bachelor's from the University of
Kansas and a pH d from Yale University. Shinjunga was
fired from all of her positions, and then she was
convicted of falsifying records and she ended up serving time
(08:46):
in prison for that. I asked j Young what he
thought of that punishment. Ah, that's a complicated issue like
all the other issues in the Korean society that I
think was like, um, like a showcase example of you know,
if you funk with the system, we're gonna punish you.
Her scandal set off a nationwide wave of allegations, investigations,
(09:11):
and confessions of diploma fraud, and then a massive crackdown
on credential forgery. For a while, it seemed like everyone
was accusing everyone of credential forgery, which seems ridiculous except
that a bunch of those cases ended up being true.
Hundreds of people were investigated, celebrities, soldiers, government officials, ended
(09:32):
up confessing to forging their credentials. Even a prominent Buddhist
monk was exposed for having lied about where he went
to school. I think that case just fully satisfied people's
fantasy that people in the art word are like that
they are either highly educated or trying to post themselves
(09:56):
as highly educated. I think it happens at not only
in Korea, but in Korea, maybe the intensity is much
much higher than you might expect. Shin Junga became a symbol.
She was guilty of lying and was now the poster
child for fraud. But she also confirms something something that
(10:20):
people already thought, that the elites are getting over on
the rest of us, that everything, the entire society, it's
all rigged, and then all of us we have to work.
But them, the people with connections, they can do whatever
they want. They don't even have to earn their degrees.
This isn't a new idea, and it's not even particularly Korean,
(10:44):
but there is a particular interpretation of this that's a
little more prominent in Korean culture, especially recently over the
past few years. It's almost kind of a meme that's
caught on among younger people. Hell Korea or hand Korea
or like people jokingly it's aself, that depreciating term to
(11:06):
describe one's home country, which is Korea as hell, like
living in Korea is like living in a hell. I
agree that Korea is a hellish place to live. To
be honest, it's a highly competitive and there's a lot
of social pressure, economic pressure, and so many um brutal
(11:29):
things happening. It's very misogynistic, I must say, it's not inclusive.
Sometimes I imagine myself as a being a foreigner in
this country, and then everything looks so interesting, like so
funny if I if I was a foreigner, the only
(11:51):
bad thing is that I'm actually a Korean citizen who's
living in this is actually I think that's what makes
Korean very interesting, dynamic place. People say like her duos
on mhm, which is like hell Korea. I've never liked
that phrase, um because you know, it singles out Korea
(12:16):
as a possible hell. You know, it puts it puts
that word on a on this whole country, which which
I really detest um because it's not it's not a
Korean problem. Is it's not a Korea problem. It's a
it's a modern problem. It's hellish everywhere, right to different
(12:37):
degrees in different um, you know, but it's hell pretty
much everywhere. It's there's it's not easy anywhere. But I'm
just worry of any umbrella terms, especially ones that are
so damaging to our identities as Korean. On paper, South
Korea looks like an incredible economic success story, and it is.
(13:02):
It went from a war torn, impoverished country into a
global powerhouse in the top ten largest economies in the
world over the space of a few decades. It was
only about seven years ago that the Korean War divided
the country into two halves. That might sound like a
long time ago from the outside, but in Korea that
(13:22):
memory is pretty fresh. The war was devastating. Um it's
an understatement, you know. It tore our country apart. My dad, uh,
you know, he grew well, he was an orphan, so
he had a really tough his whole life. Tableau doesn't
know what happened to his grandparents, His family doesn't talk
(13:46):
about it. But for him to have gotten to the
point where we were living in a fairly you know,
fairly middle class apartment by the time my brother was born,
and then a little bigger every time until I was born.
I can only imagine how how hard he hustled and
how how much he struggled. He had to like take
(14:08):
leaps to get a couple of steps up. Tablow's father
is like a lot of immigrant parents just looking for
something better for their child. That parents definition of better
is based on their past history, and Tablew's father's history
is intertwined with the way Korea came to be as
we know it today. There's no way that I could
(14:29):
explain the entirety of modern Korean history here, but the
short version is that there's a lot of things in
the background. One of those things is how South Korea
went from a poor, war torn country in the nineteen
sixties to an economic powerhouse all in the space of
a few decades. After the war, the Korean government invested
heavily into educational infrastructure. At the same time, they were
(14:53):
pumping relief funds and extremely favorable loans into certain businesses
that would commit to rebuilding the country. The plan worked
and the economy soared, but Korea also ended up with
powerful conglomerates run by incredibly rich families. You've definitely heard
of them, Samsung, Hyundai, l g those sorts. In Korea,
(15:16):
they call these powerful dynasties chibbles, which basically just translates
out to the phrase rich families. So when a massive
financial crisis hit Korea hard in the nineties and jobs
became scarce, but those rich families seem to be doing
just fine, it exposed something that people already knew that
(15:38):
there was an increasingly unfair hierarchy between the halves and
the have nots, and the only way to guarantee a
stable life was to get yourself as far up that
ladder as possible by getting the best educational credential that
you could. That's the road Tabloo's father went down. He
(16:03):
studied hard, and he got himself into Soul National University,
the Harvard of Korea. So Tableau gets why his dad
pushed him and his siblings so hard to do well
in school. So he probably felt like the only thing
that can get his kids further away from whatever he
was coming from where these professions and I and I
(16:26):
totally understand the thing is I also knew that I
wasn't born for that, like I I just I just
knew that I didn't fit into that picture. And uh,
for you know, most of my life I felt guilty.
(16:47):
I actually do even now. Really, yeah, I even now.
Yeah you feel that. Yeah, I actually still feel it
every once in a while, like maybe you know, maybe
rebelling against what they wanted caused all of it. Given
the deeper context of Korean society, where family and business
(17:10):
and success of the nation have all been intertwined, it's
no wonder what happened next. That's after the break, I
(17:43):
had to go to the hospital for like I think
it's because of my daughter. I don't know if it
was because of my daughter or me, but it was
something for something simple like maybe a cold or but
it required me to get a shot. While I was there,
the doctor that was there just kept looking at me
really weird, right, and and you know, like I'm a
(18:07):
famous persons in the midst of like extreme controversy, so
of course he's looking at me weird, That's what I thought.
And then I it's my turn, and he's like okay,
like like talking to me and like what do you need?
And then he stops typing, looks at me and says
something that sounded like you know, I see you're doing
(18:31):
better than you should be, then you should be That's
what it was implied to me. M He was like now,
which means like you're doing well. And the way he
looked at me, and the way he said it, and
like just his fingers like on the keyboard and stuff
convinced me that, like in that moment, that there's a
(18:54):
high possibility he's one of them. He's one of the
touch and you remembers, Yeah, and this guy is about
to m put a needle in my arm right and
possibly my daughter's like body as well, into her bloodstream.
So I had to leave the hospital, like, I just
(19:14):
just had to leave. In the fall, at the height
of the scandal, people were following Tableau down the street,
confronting him in public and making threats over the phone.
It was impossible for Tableau and his family to leave
the house. He thought if they left the country for
a while, things would calm down. But when he got
(19:36):
back that online forum Tajano had only gotten bigger. When
I got back to Korea, I looked, and I had
and then I realized that it had now spread to
my family. I checked the internet and now it had
become a campaign against my brother, my sister, and my
(19:57):
mom and dad, and I like, oh my god, and
not only is persisting, it's gotten like much worse. The
leader of the Tajano forum, what becomes posted for the
group to quote make Tableau and his family go crazy.
He then went on to say, quote, we have to
(20:20):
beat the ship out of these wild dogs in order
to taste the truth. This has gone beyond accusations and
conspiracy theories. They were talking violence. Tableau's mother was getting
intimidating phone calls at dinner. One night, she got a
call a man's voice telling her that she was a
whore and that she and her family should leave Korea.
(20:41):
And it didn't stop at phone calls. Some of these
guys dressed up as people working for the government, make
fake badges and stuff, came to my mom's hair salon
um trying to investigate her, trying to harass her. Taijano's
investigation into Tableau has spread to his entire family and
their credentials. At the time, Tablow's brother was working for
(21:03):
a large broadcasting channel called e b S, and his
about profile on the company website incorrectly said that he
had graduated with his Masters from Columbia University. Tajano looked
into this and realized that he had only attended the university,
he never graduated. The thing was this was a mistake
by EBS, but Tagano latched onto that supposed lie and
(21:26):
used it as more proof that Tableau's whole family was lying.
My brother was fired by EBS almost immediately upon uh
Tajanio claiming that he had also lied about his education.
It didn't matter that David had never lied, that it
was a simple company mistake. E b s still fired him.
(21:48):
The pressure for Tajano was that high. So my wife,
she was now the wife of a of a fraud
like immediately upon getting married and having a kid with
said fraud right, this obviously affects her career as well.
Tableau's father, Guangbo Lee, also became a target. Tajano was
(22:13):
sure the Tableous Stanford degree was fake and that suspicion
had spread to his father. Maybe Tableau's father had helped
him forge that document. And by the way, his father
said that he went to Seoul National University, and surely
the father of a liar must also be a liar himself.
So they started digging, and they found things things. Tabloo's
(22:37):
father probably never wanted anyone to see, especially his family.
He had been hiding something, but it wasn't a credential.
As a result of what I went through and what
the internet mob, what they dug up. One of the
first homes my dad had as an adult was in Korea.
(22:58):
We call it pun judge. It's literally like these homes
aren't homes. They have like you know, some people have
like cardboard. The roof is just something you just place over,
you know. They have these areas where all the all
the homes are like that. It's it's really heartbreaking. But
(23:22):
one of the things they dug up was where my
dad had lived, and we traced back the address to
that ear and he was that's where he was living.
And you found this out because of what happened. Yeah,
people were going through every whole history everything and uh
(23:44):
and you didn't know this beforehand. I knew he had
it tough, but I didn't I realized that I saw,
like how tough he had it. And for him to
have gotten to the point where we had an apartment
by the time I was born, I can only imagine,
you know, how many sacrifices he probably made right um, like,
(24:07):
how many of his dreams were if he had any
at all, like if he even had the time for
for dreams. But there wasn't really a lot of time
to talk about that. Years before this, Tablow's father had
been diagnosed with cancer. It had been treated and everything
(24:29):
had been fine. But right is all this was happening.
The cancer came back, and some of Tablo's family blamed
him when the whole scandal thing happened. Sadly, one of
the first things they said to me was sort of like,
and I told you so. Yeah. They they they were
(24:50):
basically telling me, you know you, your dreams have destroyed
our family, Your dreams have killed ours. It's weird because
for Tableau's parents, him going to Stanford was their dream.
They actually prayed for it, and Tableau fulfilled that dream.
Tableau never cared about that degree anymore than as a
(25:12):
tool just to get his parents off his back. The
degree only really started to have value for him when
he realized that it could help him toward his dreams
of becoming a musician. For Tableau, the degree was a
hurdle and then a tool. For his parents, it was
a symbol of a better life for their son. But
ta Jano read that symbol completely differently, because what kind
(25:35):
of person goes to Stanford, Well, an elite person in
elites or from rich families, And just like kids from
rich families suddenly appear on the boards of these big companies.
It was Tableau prance it around on TV doing something
that had zero to do with that fancy degree. Tajano
(25:55):
had a collective mental image of what an elite looked
like in Tableau fit. The description Hegian Lee from the
University of Southern California explains this better than I do.
He claims that he's a Stanford graduate, and Korean's perception
of a of a person who graduates from Stanford is
an elite, somebody who should be doing something greater than
(26:19):
a hip hop artist, somebody who should use their smart
brains for the betterment of society, Korean society. So his
career choice was kind of at odds with what people
expect from an elite. So that's how they defied common sense.
So he has all these qualities that are considered to
be a sign a privilege in Korea. Um, and the
(26:41):
thing is he's using that privilege to evade responsibility as
a Korean citizen. What I mean the the injustices, the
systemic just inequality and stuff like this. That you're saying
that you were sort of resonating with it that the
TAGO members are rarely against well because they they really are.
(27:06):
If you take their argument logically and rationally, what they're
saying is it is not fair that there are elites
gaming the system. This is Sean Limb Tablo's friend from Stanford,
and it is not fair that that they're covering for
each other, lying and allowing people to succeed through cheating
(27:29):
when we all tried our best to succeed and we failed,
but we tried our best. Honestly, you can never win
because they are always being compared to somebody else greater
than them. That kind of people, you know, used by
(27:52):
parents like children. What is this? What is this? That's
our producer Minji Ko. She's trying to explain that there's
a term for this kind of pressure the Sean is describing.
So you're referring to I'm China, So that means basically means,
my oh, my friend's son did this. My friend's daughter
(28:17):
was able to get an A plus, how come you
didn't get one? So it sounds so innocent. Actually that
omtin even in Korean that sounds like cute, but really
that though those are fighting words. Those are like, you know,
piercing words. You don't want to hear that. It's like
keeping up with the Jones is well, yeah, your kids
(28:41):
junior version or kitty version or how we want to
say it. Yeah, man, because in Korea, the way that
it's been set up is that there's only one route
to success. So even starting with the way that like
your tests are graded. After every test, I believe they
post the grades on the wall, right and just at school, Yeah,
(29:06):
one to the bottom. There's always only number one, number one,
and there's only one way to get to that number one.
So from an early age, everyone is just kind of
indoctrinated into just only one root of success. So yeah,
it's that whole crabs in a bucket mentality very strong here. Now,
(29:31):
if you've seen Parasite or Squid Games or any of
those dystopian films that have caught on in America, you
might be attempted to think that, man, Korean society is
so cut throat and dark and sort of but I
think it's a little more accurate to say that those
things have caught on in America precisely, because when we
(29:52):
see the despair and parasite, or the hopelessness and squid game,
we're seeing a reflection of ourselves and our own s
id I mean, the mega corporations, the shady government ties.
We got that here in America, the dark history that
isn't all that long ago, that still haunts our national conscience.
(30:13):
Think back to the protests a couple of summers ago.
We definitely got that. The idea that education is the
only way to get ahead, yep, and we've got the
student loans to prove it. There's been some unique factors
in both countries that have led to both places being
pretty grim and yet holding out a glimmer of hope
that feels fair, And just like in America, some Koreans
(30:37):
have just sort of accepted that as the way things are.
But some people are really really piste off. And when
people are piste off, they start looking for answers. So
when you lay it all out, maybe it goes something
like this. The Shinjunga scandal had proven what everyone suspected
(30:58):
all along, the society was unfair and that some people
were willing to lie their way to the top. But
now that they knew that what had changed, well nothing.
One person did go to jail, but society fundamentally hadn't changed.
Things were still unfair. There was still an elite them
(31:19):
and a downtrodden us. And the Tajo Tablow definitely didn't
look like any of us. It looked like another one
of them. And then when you have like these things
that lets them release their frustration, you're releasing it at
the wrong guy. But it didn't matter. The target might
(31:40):
have been wrong, but the campaign felt right. It felt good.
Maybe this time, if they could catch Tableau, Korea could
finish what they'd started with Shin jong A. Soon Korean
authorities were flooded with calls for justice. People were demanding
accountability and truth from Blow and it worked. Soon Tableau
(32:03):
was under investigation by the Korean police. That's next time
on Authentic. Authentic is a production of Vice Audio and
(32:28):
I Heeart podcast Network, produced and reported by Stephanie Kayuki,
Minji Coo, Kate Osborne and myself with Janet Lee, Stephanie Brown,
and Sam Egan. Sound design and original music composition by
Kyle Murdock, with additional support from Natasha Jacobs. Our supervising
producer is Janet Lee, editing from Lacy Roberts, fact checking
(32:52):
by Minji Ko and Nicole Pasuka. Our executive producer and
VP Advice Audio is Kate Osbourne from I Heeart Podcast Network.
Executive producers Nikki E. Tor and Lindsay Hoffman. I'm Dexter Thomas.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast so
you don't miss an episode, and if you dig it,
give us a rating and a review.
Do you remember when you first heard about tableau scandal? Oh? Yes, yes,
And I was like, whoa, what's happening? What's happening with
you know, our minds because I didn't give a time
about where he graduated from. He was just a good guy.
He was a good rapper, he was a good writer,
(00:24):
he was a good entertainer. Who cares? Ah where Let's say, like, um,
do you know where she graduated? You know, nobody cares.
It's a waste of your precious time. I met j
Young Park in one of Soul's oldest neighborhoods, Guangamon, on
this narrow back street that was lying with coffee shops.
(00:47):
The street itself was pretty noisy, but his friend happens
to run a yoga studio that wasn't open that day,
so we went in there to talk. Jean is an
art curator. He also went to an elite university in Korea,
so I figured he would be a good person to
talk to about the obsession with brand names and education.
But when I asked him about the Tableau scandal, he
started laughing, which I kind of had to laugh along
(01:09):
with him because it made me realize again that yeah,
this is all sort of ridiculous, I mean, being real.
When I first heard about all this, I kind of thought, wait, what,
why does anyone care about where a rapper went to college?
I mean, you're you're you're laughing about this, but and
I'm we're laughing about this now. But this was completely
(01:30):
dominating in Korean society. I mean, again, this is hip
hop we're talking about. Even if you're not a fan
of the music, you know that in hip hop we
prized street cred above pretty much everything, and Stanford is
not where you get street cred. That's not to say
rappers don't lie. They do, but it's usually in the
opposite direction, like saying they're from the hood or they're
(01:51):
in a gang or something like that. But lying about
being an elite university graduate that just sounds like hustling
backwards to me. There there were a lot of really
angry people. People war and are generally very angry, very
angry about other people. What do you mean if you
(02:13):
are a Korean citizen, you would totally understand what I
have just said. But we are very angry at all times.
We are angry. We are angry at the president. You know,
we take out the president because we are angry at
the president. You know, we are very angry at Japan,
for example, So we always have to win over Japan.
(02:38):
It's engraved in our way of thinking for the last
half a century that we have to be really angry
to achieve because if we remain without anger, our opportunities,
our resource, maybe our country or freedom are being taken away.
(03:06):
It's that anger, that emotion, and even the absurdity of
the situation. With Tableau that may be interested in all this,
they maybe want to know more what made an entire
country gets swept up into this frenzy? What drove it
to the point of criminal charges? With all that smoke?
Where's the fire and who or what started? But like
(03:31):
with everything in life, there's a context here, a background history.
What figs my name? Whatever? I can be drum I
can I can writing there. My book runs on the
first past the mark Yeah, a boon box boat from
(03:58):
Vice and I heart I'm Dexter Thomas. This is authentic
episode four Hell career. Where was this? I rarely spick
up rich University. You know I was in because I
am aware of this issue that when I first sat
(04:20):
down with j Young, my first thought was and I
mean this in the most genuine way. I swear this
dude is just unfairly cool. I mean shoes, his outfit,
his glasses. He looks like the kind of dude who
could talk philosophy with you but then also tell you
a place to get some new kicks. At first, it
was just small talk. I was asking about himself, and
(04:43):
everything was fine until I asked him about school. I
had to actually press him to say where it was
that he went to college. I mean, I think he
almost started blushing when I when I say that, you know,
I graduated from university in Korea, you know, to be specific,
probably ah, you know, ah, you know, you have a background.
(05:05):
It's a good school. Kind of yeah, it's a good school.
But what I don't really want to the fact that
I graduated from this school with multiple degrees affects people's judgments,
you know, on me as a person. Interesting. It's very
ironic because I want to let people know that I
(05:26):
am really serious into studying and researching different stuff. But
at the same time, I don't really want to, you know,
wave the flag that you know I got this thing.
So it's really twisted desire. The reason I was talking
to Jayong wasn't really about Tableau specifically. It was because
(05:48):
of a totally different scandal, something that happened around the
time Jayong was getting out of school with his own
multiple degrees and breaking into the art world in two
thousand seven, which was a couple of years before what
happened with table If you talk to enough people in
Korea about Tableau, at some point someone will point out
that it's kind of like what happened with this really
prestigious art curator named Shin jong A. And when someone
(06:11):
explained that to me, things not only started to make
more sense, but it actually made Tableau story a lot scarier.
I wanted to talk to an expert, somebody who knew
Shinjunga's story. But when we were looking for someone to interview,
someone who was in the art world at that time
and could really paint the picture of how devastating her
story was, almost no one wanted to talk, which is
(06:34):
weird because this was a national case. It was so
big that people called it shin Gate, as in shinjong
A and Gate, because Koreans also used gate from Watergate
like we do for big scandals. But even though this
was all public knowledge, nobody seemed to want to talk
about it. I guess the reason why, especially the arts people,
(06:59):
is that I don't know, maybe people there's a general
maybe consensus that we don't talk that ship about ourselves.
But j Young is kind of a rebel, so he
was down to give us the context. I think in
the art board people or generally remained silent about it
(07:21):
because she was a curator at all a prestigious, you know,
private museum, and she was about to curate a section
of the Contrivinale, which is like a really really important,
you know position, or anyone. In the early two thousand's,
(07:42):
Shinjanga was a rising star in the Korean art world.
She had become the lead curator of an art museum
and soul she was a professor at a local university,
and she had ties to the office of the then
Korean president, and only thirty five years old, she had
been appointed as director of the Kuangju Bien l which
(08:02):
is one of the most acclaimed art events in Asia.
Shinjunga wasn't just a success story. She was a role model.
But then in the summer of two thousand seven, members
of the board of Reuniversity started questioning her academic record.
An entire television program was done to investigate her, and
(08:23):
even though she insisted that her records were true, it
was revealed that she had fabricated her resume. She had
been lying about receiving a bachelor's from the University of
Kansas and a pH d from Yale University. Shinjunga was
fired from all of her positions, and then she was
convicted of falsifying records and she ended up serving time
(08:46):
in prison for that. I asked j Young what he
thought of that punishment. Ah, that's a complicated issue like
all the other issues in the Korean society that I
think was like, um, like a showcase example of you know,
if you funk with the system, we're gonna punish you.
Her scandal set off a nationwide wave of allegations, investigations,
(09:11):
and confessions of diploma fraud, and then a massive crackdown
on credential forgery. For a while, it seemed like everyone
was accusing everyone of credential forgery, which seems ridiculous except
that a bunch of those cases ended up being true.
Hundreds of people were investigated, celebrities, soldiers, government officials, ended
(09:32):
up confessing to forging their credentials. Even a prominent Buddhist
monk was exposed for having lied about where he went
to school. I think that case just fully satisfied people's
fantasy that people in the art word are like that
they are either highly educated or trying to post themselves
(09:56):
as highly educated. I think it happens at not only
in Korea, but in Korea, maybe the intensity is much
much higher than you might expect. Shin Junga became a symbol.
She was guilty of lying and was now the poster
child for fraud. But she also confirms something something that
(10:20):
people already thought, that the elites are getting over on
the rest of us, that everything, the entire society, it's
all rigged, and then all of us we have to work.
But them, the people with connections, they can do whatever
they want. They don't even have to earn their degrees.
This isn't a new idea, and it's not even particularly Korean,
(10:44):
but there is a particular interpretation of this that's a
little more prominent in Korean culture, especially recently over the
past few years. It's almost kind of a meme that's
caught on among younger people. Hell Korea or hand Korea
or like people jokingly it's aself, that depreciating term to
(11:06):
describe one's home country, which is Korea as hell, like
living in Korea is like living in a hell. I
agree that Korea is a hellish place to live. To
be honest, it's a highly competitive and there's a lot
of social pressure, economic pressure, and so many um brutal
(11:29):
things happening. It's very misogynistic, I must say, it's not inclusive.
Sometimes I imagine myself as a being a foreigner in
this country, and then everything looks so interesting, like so
funny if I if I was a foreigner, the only
(11:51):
bad thing is that I'm actually a Korean citizen who's
living in this is actually I think that's what makes
Korean very interesting, dynamic place. People say like her duos
on mhm, which is like hell Korea. I've never liked
that phrase, um because you know, it singles out Korea
(12:16):
as a possible hell. You know, it puts it puts
that word on a on this whole country, which which
I really detest um because it's not it's not a
Korean problem. Is it's not a Korea problem. It's a
it's a modern problem. It's hellish everywhere, right to different
(12:37):
degrees in different um, you know, but it's hell pretty
much everywhere. It's there's it's not easy anywhere. But I'm
just worry of any umbrella terms, especially ones that are
so damaging to our identities as Korean. On paper, South
Korea looks like an incredible economic success story, and it is.
(13:02):
It went from a war torn, impoverished country into a
global powerhouse in the top ten largest economies in the
world over the space of a few decades. It was
only about seven years ago that the Korean War divided
the country into two halves. That might sound like a
long time ago from the outside, but in Korea that
(13:22):
memory is pretty fresh. The war was devastating. Um it's
an understatement, you know. It tore our country apart. My dad, uh,
you know, he grew well, he was an orphan, so
he had a really tough his whole life. Tableau doesn't
know what happened to his grandparents, His family doesn't talk
(13:46):
about it. But for him to have gotten to the
point where we were living in a fairly you know,
fairly middle class apartment by the time my brother was born,
and then a little bigger every time until I was born.
I can only imagine how how hard he hustled and
how how much he struggled. He had to like take
(14:08):
leaps to get a couple of steps up. Tablow's father
is like a lot of immigrant parents just looking for
something better for their child. That parents definition of better
is based on their past history, and Tablew's father's history
is intertwined with the way Korea came to be as
we know it today. There's no way that I could
(14:29):
explain the entirety of modern Korean history here, but the
short version is that there's a lot of things in
the background. One of those things is how South Korea
went from a poor, war torn country in the nineteen
sixties to an economic powerhouse all in the space of
a few decades. After the war, the Korean government invested
heavily into educational infrastructure. At the same time, they were
(14:53):
pumping relief funds and extremely favorable loans into certain businesses
that would commit to rebuilding the country. The plan worked
and the economy soared, but Korea also ended up with
powerful conglomerates run by incredibly rich families. You've definitely heard
of them, Samsung, Hyundai, l g those sorts. In Korea,
(15:16):
they call these powerful dynasties chibbles, which basically just translates
out to the phrase rich families. So when a massive
financial crisis hit Korea hard in the nineties and jobs
became scarce, but those rich families seem to be doing
just fine, it exposed something that people already knew that
(15:38):
there was an increasingly unfair hierarchy between the halves and
the have nots, and the only way to guarantee a
stable life was to get yourself as far up that
ladder as possible by getting the best educational credential that
you could. That's the road Tabloo's father went down. He
(16:03):
studied hard, and he got himself into Soul National University,
the Harvard of Korea. So Tableau gets why his dad
pushed him and his siblings so hard to do well
in school. So he probably felt like the only thing
that can get his kids further away from whatever he
was coming from where these professions and I and I
(16:26):
totally understand the thing is I also knew that I
wasn't born for that, like I I just I just
knew that I didn't fit into that picture. And uh,
for you know, most of my life I felt guilty.
(16:47):
I actually do even now. Really, yeah, I even now.
Yeah you feel that. Yeah, I actually still feel it
every once in a while, like maybe you know, maybe
rebelling against what they wanted caused all of it. Given
the deeper context of Korean society, where family and business
(17:10):
and success of the nation have all been intertwined, it's
no wonder what happened next. That's after the break, I
(17:43):
had to go to the hospital for like I think
it's because of my daughter. I don't know if it
was because of my daughter or me, but it was
something for something simple like maybe a cold or but
it required me to get a shot. While I was there,
the doctor that was there just kept looking at me
really weird, right, and and you know, like I'm a
(18:07):
famous persons in the midst of like extreme controversy, so
of course he's looking at me weird, That's what I thought.
And then I it's my turn, and he's like okay,
like like talking to me and like what do you need?
And then he stops typing, looks at me and says
something that sounded like you know, I see you're doing
(18:31):
better than you should be, then you should be That's
what it was implied to me. M He was like now,
which means like you're doing well. And the way he
looked at me, and the way he said it, and
like just his fingers like on the keyboard and stuff
convinced me that, like in that moment, that there's a
(18:54):
high possibility he's one of them. He's one of the
touch and you remembers, Yeah, and this guy is about
to m put a needle in my arm right and
possibly my daughter's like body as well, into her bloodstream.
So I had to leave the hospital, like, I just
(19:14):
just had to leave. In the fall, at the height
of the scandal, people were following Tableau down the street,
confronting him in public and making threats over the phone.
It was impossible for Tableau and his family to leave
the house. He thought if they left the country for
a while, things would calm down. But when he got
(19:36):
back that online forum Tajano had only gotten bigger. When
I got back to Korea, I looked, and I had
and then I realized that it had now spread to
my family. I checked the internet and now it had
become a campaign against my brother, my sister, and my
(19:57):
mom and dad, and I like, oh my god, and
not only is persisting, it's gotten like much worse. The
leader of the Tajano forum, what becomes posted for the
group to quote make Tableau and his family go crazy.
He then went on to say, quote, we have to
(20:20):
beat the ship out of these wild dogs in order
to taste the truth. This has gone beyond accusations and
conspiracy theories. They were talking violence. Tableau's mother was getting
intimidating phone calls at dinner. One night, she got a
call a man's voice telling her that she was a
whore and that she and her family should leave Korea.
(20:41):
And it didn't stop at phone calls. Some of these
guys dressed up as people working for the government, make
fake badges and stuff, came to my mom's hair salon
um trying to investigate her, trying to harass her. Taijano's
investigation into Tableau has spread to his entire family and
their credentials. At the time, Tablow's brother was working for
(21:03):
a large broadcasting channel called e b S, and his
about profile on the company website incorrectly said that he
had graduated with his Masters from Columbia University. Tajano looked
into this and realized that he had only attended the university,
he never graduated. The thing was this was a mistake
by EBS, but Tagano latched onto that supposed lie and
(21:26):
used it as more proof that Tableau's whole family was lying.
My brother was fired by EBS almost immediately upon uh
Tajanio claiming that he had also lied about his education.
It didn't matter that David had never lied, that it
was a simple company mistake. E b s still fired him.
(21:48):
The pressure for Tajano was that high. So my wife,
she was now the wife of a of a fraud
like immediately upon getting married and having a kid with
said fraud right, this obviously affects her career as well.
Tableau's father, Guangbo Lee, also became a target. Tajano was
(22:13):
sure the Tableous Stanford degree was fake and that suspicion
had spread to his father. Maybe Tableau's father had helped
him forge that document. And by the way, his father
said that he went to Seoul National University, and surely
the father of a liar must also be a liar himself.
So they started digging, and they found things things. Tabloo's
(22:37):
father probably never wanted anyone to see, especially his family.
He had been hiding something, but it wasn't a credential.
As a result of what I went through and what
the internet mob, what they dug up. One of the
first homes my dad had as an adult was in Korea.
(22:58):
We call it pun judge. It's literally like these homes
aren't homes. They have like you know, some people have
like cardboard. The roof is just something you just place over,
you know. They have these areas where all the all
the homes are like that. It's it's really heartbreaking. But
(23:22):
one of the things they dug up was where my
dad had lived, and we traced back the address to
that ear and he was that's where he was living.
And you found this out because of what happened. Yeah,
people were going through every whole history everything and uh
(23:44):
and you didn't know this beforehand. I knew he had
it tough, but I didn't I realized that I saw,
like how tough he had it. And for him to
have gotten to the point where we had an apartment
by the time I was born, I can only imagine,
you know, how many sacrifices he probably made right um, like,
(24:07):
how many of his dreams were if he had any
at all, like if he even had the time for
for dreams. But there wasn't really a lot of time
to talk about that. Years before this, Tablow's father had
been diagnosed with cancer. It had been treated and everything
(24:29):
had been fine. But right is all this was happening.
The cancer came back, and some of Tablo's family blamed
him when the whole scandal thing happened. Sadly, one of
the first things they said to me was sort of like,
and I told you so. Yeah. They they they were
(24:50):
basically telling me, you know you, your dreams have destroyed
our family, Your dreams have killed ours. It's weird because
for Tableau's parents, him going to Stanford was their dream.
They actually prayed for it, and Tableau fulfilled that dream.
Tableau never cared about that degree anymore than as a
(25:12):
tool just to get his parents off his back. The
degree only really started to have value for him when
he realized that it could help him toward his dreams
of becoming a musician. For Tableau, the degree was a
hurdle and then a tool. For his parents, it was
a symbol of a better life for their son. But
ta Jano read that symbol completely differently, because what kind
(25:35):
of person goes to Stanford, Well, an elite person in
elites or from rich families, And just like kids from
rich families suddenly appear on the boards of these big companies.
It was Tableau prance it around on TV doing something
that had zero to do with that fancy degree. Tajano
(25:55):
had a collective mental image of what an elite looked
like in Tableau fit. The description Hegian Lee from the
University of Southern California explains this better than I do.
He claims that he's a Stanford graduate, and Korean's perception
of a of a person who graduates from Stanford is
an elite, somebody who should be doing something greater than
(26:19):
a hip hop artist, somebody who should use their smart
brains for the betterment of society, Korean society. So his
career choice was kind of at odds with what people
expect from an elite. So that's how they defied common sense.
So he has all these qualities that are considered to
be a sign a privilege in Korea. Um, and the
(26:41):
thing is he's using that privilege to evade responsibility as
a Korean citizen. What I mean the the injustices, the
systemic just inequality and stuff like this. That you're saying
that you were sort of resonating with it that the
TAGO members are rarely against well because they they really are.
(27:06):
If you take their argument logically and rationally, what they're
saying is it is not fair that there are elites
gaming the system. This is Sean Limb Tablo's friend from Stanford,
and it is not fair that that they're covering for
each other, lying and allowing people to succeed through cheating
(27:29):
when we all tried our best to succeed and we failed,
but we tried our best. Honestly, you can never win
because they are always being compared to somebody else greater
than them. That kind of people, you know, used by
(27:52):
parents like children. What is this? What is this? That's
our producer Minji Ko. She's trying to explain that there's
a term for this kind of pressure the Sean is describing.
So you're referring to I'm China, So that means basically means,
my oh, my friend's son did this. My friend's daughter
(28:17):
was able to get an A plus, how come you
didn't get one? So it sounds so innocent. Actually that
omtin even in Korean that sounds like cute, but really
that though those are fighting words. Those are like, you know,
piercing words. You don't want to hear that. It's like
keeping up with the Jones is well, yeah, your kids
(28:41):
junior version or kitty version or how we want to
say it. Yeah, man, because in Korea, the way that
it's been set up is that there's only one route
to success. So even starting with the way that like
your tests are graded. After every test, I believe they
post the grades on the wall, right and just at school, Yeah,
(29:06):
one to the bottom. There's always only number one, number one,
and there's only one way to get to that number one.
So from an early age, everyone is just kind of
indoctrinated into just only one root of success. So yeah,
it's that whole crabs in a bucket mentality very strong here. Now,
(29:31):
if you've seen Parasite or Squid Games or any of
those dystopian films that have caught on in America, you
might be attempted to think that, man, Korean society is
so cut throat and dark and sort of but I
think it's a little more accurate to say that those
things have caught on in America precisely, because when we
(29:52):
see the despair and parasite, or the hopelessness and squid game,
we're seeing a reflection of ourselves and our own s
id I mean, the mega corporations, the shady government ties.
We got that here in America, the dark history that
isn't all that long ago, that still haunts our national conscience.
(30:13):
Think back to the protests a couple of summers ago.
We definitely got that. The idea that education is the
only way to get ahead, yep, and we've got the
student loans to prove it. There's been some unique factors
in both countries that have led to both places being
pretty grim and yet holding out a glimmer of hope
that feels fair, And just like in America, some Koreans
(30:37):
have just sort of accepted that as the way things are.
But some people are really really piste off. And when
people are piste off, they start looking for answers. So
when you lay it all out, maybe it goes something
like this. The Shinjunga scandal had proven what everyone suspected
(30:58):
all along, the society was unfair and that some people
were willing to lie their way to the top. But
now that they knew that what had changed, well nothing.
One person did go to jail, but society fundamentally hadn't changed.
Things were still unfair. There was still an elite them
(31:19):
and a downtrodden us. And the Tajo Tablow definitely didn't
look like any of us. It looked like another one
of them. And then when you have like these things
that lets them release their frustration, you're releasing it at
the wrong guy. But it didn't matter. The target might
(31:40):
have been wrong, but the campaign felt right. It felt good.
Maybe this time, if they could catch Tableau, Korea could
finish what they'd started with Shin jong A. Soon Korean
authorities were flooded with calls for justice. People were demanding
accountability and truth from Blow and it worked. Soon Tableau
(32:03):
was under investigation by the Korean police. That's next time
on Authentic. Authentic is a production of Vice Audio and
(32:28):
I Heeart podcast Network, produced and reported by Stephanie Kayuki,
Minji Coo, Kate Osborne and myself with Janet Lee, Stephanie Brown,
and Sam Egan. Sound design and original music composition by
Kyle Murdock, with additional support from Natasha Jacobs. Our supervising
producer is Janet Lee, editing from Lacy Roberts, fact checking
(32:52):
by Minji Ko and Nicole Pasuka. Our executive producer and
VP Advice Audio is Kate Osbourne from I Heeart Podcast Network.
Executive producers Nikki E. Tor and Lindsay Hoffman. I'm Dexter Thomas.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast so
you don't miss an episode, and if you dig it,
give us a rating and a review.
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