It sounds like a campaign slogan and is most likely just a bastardized form of “Too Cool for School,” but at face value I have questions, namely, who is Chooi? And why should we “do cool” for him?
Choi, a name similar to Chooi, is a common last name in Korean (최) and Chinese (崔), meaning top or most. According to the ever-helpful Wikipedia, 최 and 崔 are anglicized to be Choi, and sometimes also Choe. Choi is a surprisingly popular last name in Korea, the country’s fourth most popular after Kim, Lee, and Park, though it accounts for just less than five percent of Korean surnames.
The Korean concept of clans, or bon-gwan, used to distinguish different groups of people that happen to share the same family name becomes relevant here, as there are over 150 distinct clans that use the Choi name. Maybe one of them even sports the ‘Chooi’ derivative. Different clans trace their lineages back to different Chois, among them scholars, military generals, and leaders, mostly during the Silla period in Korean history.
Silla was one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, arguably the most interesting not only for it being one of the world’s longest sustained dynasties but also for its use of bone ranking, a wild Korean caste-like system that dictated everything from who you could marry to the color of your clothing, size of your crib, and what type of whip you could be pulling around — if your bone was ranked high enough, maybe your carriage would be pulled on humanback. Silla spanned almost a millennium, from 56 BCE until 935 CE, as described in the chronicle of early Korean history, the Samguk Sagi, and by the time it was over and done with everyone breathed a massive sigh of relief.
The most badass of the Chois was undoubtedly Choi Chi-won, or Choe Chiwon, noted philosopher, poet, and Confucian official. After being pretty unsuccessful at trying to reform the then-declining Silla state in his youth, old man Choe decided to become a Buddhist hermit and lived out his days building pavilions, spreading around bamboo, and composing odes to the natural world.
It’s this most famous Choi that our Chooi is probably referring to. But what does “doing cool” for him mean? Given that he was essentially a failed reformer, the Silla government being too backward by the time he returned home after spending his twenties in China, doing cool in its current sense of relaxed and calm would probably mean living and letting live, to stop trying to change an already flawed system.
An older Choe might say that doing cool encompasses the things one does to relax; for him it was scattering about trees, reading more, and doing what he loved: writing poems and history. After he fell in love with one particular vista, Choe built a pavilion overlooking its beach and engraved some calligraphy into one of its rocks. This must be what it means to do cool.
Whether it’s for Choe, for Chooi, or for you, hopefully this page from Korean history is enough to remind you that to do cool is ultimately about being good to yourself.
