Text: 고래 싸움에 새우등 터진다

Translation: Shrimp’s back breaks while caught up in a whale’s fight

Context: It’s a proverb that my mom just uses a lot. A lot of the older Korean generation uses it to reference how Korea as a whole country was sandwiched between China and Japan and was fought multiple times over between the two countries. But for me and my brother, it was used to break us up when fighting or as my mom would say it, to not pick useless fights that we can’t win.

Analysis: This Korean proverb has some historical background. Famously, the Republic of Korea was plunged into many wars due to multiple countries trying to take it over for themselves; constantly destroying the country for years in the process. So in that sense, people take it as a warning to not pick fights with entities bigger than themselves unless they want to get hurt in the process.