My friend Teresa was interested in my opinion about something she saw online, about something that Koreans say. In the video she was referring to a Korean American lady was talking about the particular Korean word of “sugo”, which literally means receiving suffering. Her point was that instead of acknowledging “good job” or “good work” like Americans, Koreans acknowledge hard work by saying “sugo hatsuh”, which translates to something like “you worked hard”.
Do Koreans say this? Yes! We say this all the time. In fact there’s a bit of a modern dispute about this term and the dispute is SO Korean I’ll need to explain this a bit. The Korean language has honorific form and informal form. But the tonal gap between the two tends to be super wide, and it sounds extremely rude and offensive if you say the informal tone to someone you should be respecting.
The dispute is, should you say this to someone older than you? The problem is especially more pronounced because the phrase is so ubiquitous and we’re used to saying it all the time to everyone. When you console your friend who didn’t get a job you say “sugo hatsuh”. When a junior sales associate comes back to the office after a sales call you greet them with “sugo hatsuh” before asking how the call went.
Now what do you do when your mom had a rough day? People used to say “sugo hashyussuhyo” which is respectfully saying you worked hard. This is fine, because it’s acknowledgement of the hard work. Things start to get complicated when we use the word “sugo” but not for acknowledgement.
Going back two paragraphs, what do we say to a friend who’s about to go into an interview? “Sugo haera”, which literally means “go receive suffering” but means more along the lines of “go work hard and give it your best”. That seems fine. You’d also say this before the junior sales associate goes out on the sales call: “Sugo hago wa”, which means “come back after doing sugo”.
Going back to older, higher people: is it okay for me to say “go out and receive suffering”? People used to say “sugo haseyo” all the time, but one day we collectively started wondering if that was an okay thing to say when we take the meaning literally. Imagine telling your mom “go out there and suffer!”. Even with the best intention it is a bit jarring.
But I will say it does feel really good to have your hard work acknowledge. It makes me feel like I did a good job. It’s validating, and as I wrote a few days ago nothing really comes close to the satisfaction of feeling like you did the right thing in a good way.
Read more about validating experiences I had:
A side note I have is, while we say “sugo hatsuh” a lot to acknowledge our hard work I can’t quite agree with the idea that we don’t acknowledge results. Something you’ll hear super commonly in Korea is “jal hassuh” which literally means: good job! In fact I’d even argue that we tend to celebrate good results even more than Americans. There’s a reason why our suicide rate is among the highest in the world while the fertility rate is among the lowest in the world.
And what’s the best way to acknowledge someone’s hard work and suffering? Of course, verbal acknowledgment is a simple kind gesture you can always do. But I think it’s better to remember that in the end everybody is carrying their burden of life, and nobody deserves my misplaced anger that comes from misunderstanding. I don’t want to make anyone’s life harder than it already is, and I think a world full of people who make others’ lives not more difficult is a pretty good world to live in.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
