Culture Quiz!

Culture quiz!

A Korean movie contains the following scene:
A man goes to the store and buys a container of seaweed soup. He then sits in his apartment alone eating the soup.

The reaction of Koreans in the audience: sobbing.

Why?

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In the United States, we celebrate birthdays with cake. In Korea (and Japan, too) the birthday treat is a bowl of soup (this in and of itself might be enough to make me cry.) The Koreans in the audience were crying because they knew that it was the man's birthday, but he was all alone and had to buy himself the soup and eat it by himself in his apartment. In an American movie, the comparable scene would have the man perhaps lighting a candle on a cupcake, wearing a limp and crooked party hat, and singing a particularly tragic rendition of "Happy Birthday to Me." Oh, man, now I'm going to cry.