Is 보쌈 good or bad?

 ANSWER: It depends. If you are talking about the Korean dish 보쌈 or 보쌈김치, then it is good, but if you are talking about the old practice of kidnapping a young man, forcing him to sleep with your daughter, and then killing him to cover up the dirty deed, then it is bad.

The Chinese character 褓 (보) means 포대기, which is the kind of quilt that Korean mothers used to use and still use to carry their young babies around on their backs. 쌈 is the noun form of 싸다, which means "to wrap up" or "to bundle," so 보쌈 literally means "a quilt (보 褓) wrap (쌈)," which was apparently the way they used to transport the young men that were kidnapped.

In the past, if the daughter of an influential Korean family was fated, according to a fortuneteller, to serve two men [in bed], the family might kidnap a young man of no importance, force him to sleep with their daughter, and then kill him to hide the dirty deed. By doing that, the family eliminated one of the two men the daughter was fated to serve [in bed], leaving her available for a more suitable husband. In other words, the family did a 액땜 or 팔자땜, which in this case essentially means the family transferred their daughter's unfortunate fate to the man they killed, though his unfortunate fate was a violent death.

The word 보쌈 was also used to refer to a man kidnapping, in a similar fashion, a widow or a woman he wanted to take as his wife. Many times young widows wanted to be kidnapped instead of having to live alone without a man for the rest of their lives, so the women who were kidnapped might pretend to be asleep or might put up only half-hearted resistance while they were being carried away. 

The pure Korean word 업다 means "to carry on one's back," and 모르다 means "to not know," so the Korean idiom 업어 가도 모르다 literally means "to not know one is being carried away on someone's back." It refers to a woman who pretends to be asleep while she is being carried away because she secretly wants to be kidnapped.

Here is the example sentence for the idiom from a book entitled "우리말 숙어 1000가지." The English translation is mine.

점순이가 대문을 열어놓고 업어 가도 모르게 자고 있다.

Jeomsuni leaves the front gate open and is sleeping as if she wouldn't know she was being carried away.

NOTE: 점순이 is the name of the 17-year-old female character in Kim Yu-jeong's (김유정) 1936 short story "Camellia Flower" (동백꽃). An English translation of the story can be read HERE, though I don't really like the translation.