The Book of Human Emotions: From Ambiguphobia to Umpty - 154 Words from Around the World for How We Feel - Tiffany Watt Smith 2016

Han

According to the novelist Park Kyung-ni, the emotion han is deep within the Korean psyche. Attributing it to the country’s long history of being colonized, she characterizes it as a collective acceptance of suffering combined with a quiet yearning for things to be different—and even a grim determination to wait until they are. “If we lived in paradise,” she wrote, “there would be no tears, no separation, no hunger, no waiting, no suffering, no oppression, no war, no death. We would no longer need either hope or despair.… We Koreans call these hopes han.… I think it means both sadness and hope at the same time.”

See also: LITOST.