Below the Han is a ward of the city, called Gangnam, which is nearly three times the size of Beverly Hills.
In the most literal sense, Gangnam constitutes half of Seoul: the word means “south of the river”-that is, the Han River that runs through the city in the manner of the Seine or the Thames.
Psy once likened Gangnam to “the Beverly Hills of Korea,” which conveys the area’s associations with wealth and fame but downplays its size. (The global phenomenon that is BTS wouldn’t officially début until the following year.) Even more surprisingly, Psy did it with what amounted to a Korean inside joke: his big hit lampoons the garish and culturally incongruous pretensions of Seoul’s nouveau riche, a class in evidence nowhere more so than Gangnam. Yet it was he-not 2NE1, not SHINee, not Wonder Girls, not Big Bang-who finally cracked the West. The singer-rapper-jokester seemed to exist in a reality apart from K-pop, with its impeccably turned-out young performers, organized into boy bands and girl groups precision-engineered for international appeal. At the time of the release of “Gangnam Style,” he was a thirty-four-year-old Berklee College of Music dropout unknown outside Korea and censured more than once in Korea for both his musical content and personal conduct. Psy was not an obvious pop-cultural ambassador. On one platform wall, a large and somewhat amateurish mural pays homage to the pop star Park Jae-sang, better known as Psy, whose viral hit “ Gangnam Style” introduced the eponymous section of Seoul to the world ten years ago. (In search of coffee there one morning, I passed up the three or four closest cafés, intimidated by their location inside the clinics themselves.) The southernmost, Gangnam, needs no introduction. The northernmost, Sinsa, lies in an area popularly associated with South Korea’s world-renowned cosmetic-surgery industry. This May, Seoul’s ever-expanding subway system opened another addition, an extension of the Shinbundang Line that connects four existing stations. The capital of South Korea makes a good first impression, not least with its infrastructure.
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