In order to develop a thorough understanding of the subculture of foreign teachers in South Korea, I wanted to pursue multiple avenues of investigation. I reviewed my journals and ephemera from my days in Korea in the 1990s, hoping they would provide valuable insights to my experience, but while these materials jogged my memories (my address book was a gold mine of lost names), at that stage I believed the data they contained was of limited use for the study I’d envisioned. I thought that letters I sent home might be revealing, but most of the recipients did not save them and those my mother gave me showed that I was writing for a very different audience than the folk group I was part of in Korea. The journal I kept in 1994 was revealing, though, detailing challenges, shocks, and failures during my first few months there. In it I found my own first-year horror stories and, in re-reading them, relived the confusion,
frustration, and powerlessness of my own first culture contact with Koreans. As I adjusted, adapted, and socialized more and more with my peers during those days, these feelings
diminished and my writing tapered off and then stopped. My last two entries were months apart, amusing and exuberant descriptions of fun excursions with other waegooks that had occurred weeks earlier, and had a completely different tone from the first four months. The demarcation of my own transition from isolated, ignorant, anxious newcomer to comfortable expatriate was
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clearly laid out in those pages. I went from detailing unhappy incidents and my reactions to them, to having too much fun to bother writing about it. This brief journal of my introduction to expatriate life in Korea allowed me to revisit that time and reflect on how it compared with my informants’ experiences.
My plan was to return to South Korea and connect with other foreign teachers and
waegooks as I had during my years there previously, and to that end I began my Korean job
search in the fall of 2005. Several online applications for a position as an English professor failed to bring results, so I joined an organization for English teachers, attended their conference, and applied for positions with company representatives on site. My attendance at the TESOL conference had the desired result, netting me a job in Seoul as an editor with a publishing company. After months of delay in lining up work, this constituted a very positive beginning to my fieldwork, and I began to prepare for my move to Korea. In early May of 2006, I represented the company at the International Reading Association conference in Chicago and, about three weeks after that, I was living in Seoul and settling into my new routine. I was actually surprised by the ease with which I settled into life in Korea again, recalling vocabulary and expressions without being entirely sure from where in my brain the information was being dredged, shopping and getting around without too much difficulty, and providing satisfactory performance in my editorial work. Nonetheless, despite the initial success of my fieldwork arrangements, things soon began to go awry and the choices I’d made impacted the results.
About two months after I started in Korea, when I was beginning to feel confident in my work, a wave of personnel changes altered both my position in the company hierarchy and the responsibilities assigned to me. I was tasked with initiating and overseeing multiple projects and, given the limitations of my experience in publishing, I was overwhelmed. While the company
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had other experienced editors at a sister company in Seoul, the structure of the workplace hierarchy made me their top choice to replace the departing editor because I was older and more educated than any of the others and was perceived as a more appropriate choice. Despite my objections, the Confucian requirements of respect to elders, subordination of juniors, and
reverence for education conspired to push me into a job that I was too inexperienced to perform. So, as I was feeling settled and confident enough in my position to start approaching some of my new acquaintances for interviews, I was put in a high-pressure situation that ate up my time and resources as I tried to cope with the new demands.
For the next eight months, I put in long days to get publications out on time, leaving me little time and even less mental energy for my fieldwork, my primary purpose in being there. Rather than detail the events of those months, I will sum it up by saying that some aspects of my work were never quite satisfactory to my employer and the pressure on me, along with my feelings of failure, was profoundly disheartening and exhausting. My research took a backseat in my endeavor to remain employed in Korea so I could conduct my fieldwork. When the
opportunity arose in February of 2007 to take a position at a rural university, I leapt at the chance, even though it was a last-minute hire and would leave me almost no time to prepare before the new semester began. I left Seoul with my field notes and letters, personal experiences, and various unrecorded conversations with coworkers, but no recorded interviews. Having obtained insufficient fieldwork materials to that point, I revised my plan, hoping that the more limited hours of a university professor would allow me to gather data and conduct interviews over the following year. This would prove true, to a degree.
In order to begin my work at Geumgang University in Nonsan, I needed to make a “visa run” to another country, as work visas are not issued within Korea. After consulting some of the
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foreigner websites for information (Sperling, Pusanweb) the consensus was that Fukuoka, Japan, was generally considered the cheapest, most efficient, and convenient location for a visa run with a fast turnaround. It would prove fortunate that I had already researched this as I would have little time to waste. I arrived at my new home on a Monday with classes due to begin a week later, but learned on Tuesday that the only way to get my visa in time would be if I left by train for Busan that afternoon, took the ferry from Busan to Fukuoka early Wednesday morning, dropped off my papers that afternoon, and picked them up on the next business day. As that Thursday was a national holiday in Korea, it meant the consulate would be closed and I would not be able to retrieve my passport until Friday. With the ferry back to Busan on Friday night and an overnight stay before traveling back to the university on Saturday, this left me with just
Sunday to settle in and prepare for classes the following day. This sort of frantic scramble to get paperwork filed is not unusual and other foreigners I met on the ferry and at the consulate were under the same type of time pressure.
My connection with Kim Crosby, the South African woman in her late forties described previously, began in the lobby of the Busan ferry terminal on Wednesday morning, when she approached me to ask if I were making a visa run to Fukuoka. People surrounded by such
uncertainty are likely to be open to communication in order to reassure themselves that they have found the right place and are on the right track. Interestingly, Goudge describes a similar incident from her time in Nicaragua, saying:
It was extraordinary how all of us ex-pats gravitated towards one another on the ferry – a completely unspoken but powerful coming together, drawn by the visual identification of shared skin color and enhanced by our recognition that even the most cash-strapped of us was distinguishable by the expensive rucksack, money belt and the ubiquitous camera. Thus we marked each other out from the rest. (2003, 39)
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While we did not segregate ourselves in the manner she goes on to describe, there was a definite sense of shared purpose, position, segregation, and thus identity among the foreigners present. We were all on the same mission. Within a short time the ten or twelve foreigners present, all of whom were making a visa run, had congregated in one area, introduced themselves, shared what they knew about this particular consulate, and discussed the problems posed by the holiday. After the initial exchanges of information, the group broke into smaller units of two or three, generally based on first impressions of compatibility. On the ferry crossing, some moved from group to group, but Kim and I spent the bulk of the crossing in conversation. As the time for arrival approached, some of those who had done the run before began to seek out cab-mates for the final leg. By the time we arrived in Fukuoka, Kim and I had found two others to share a cab to the Korean consulate with us, a plan which was determined to be comparable in price and more convenient than figuring out the bus system. It is in these spaces that the value of connection and shared circumstances comes to the fore, as collective knowledge makes the experience go more smoothly for all concerned.
I would have made the acquaintance of a willing informant to work with regardless of where I made my visa run, or, if not on the run, at some point in my local excursions once I returned – an effect that Dorson called the “random and serendipitous” nature of fieldwork (1981a, 151). Nevertheless, encountering Kim was fortuitous given how dreadfully my first ten months had gone. Throughout our wait in the terminal, the three-hour ferry crossing, the taxi ride, the wait at the embassy, over meals at our hotel, and playing tourist in Fukuoka together, we swapped our stories. When I explained my purpose in Korea and the difficulties I had had, she enthusiastically asked questions, and encouraged me to conduct my fieldwork within the foreigner community at her university, offering me a place to stay and introductions to her
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colleagues and friends. As Dorson points out, generally “the fieldworker will encounter a sympathetic soul who interests himself in the project and sets up interviews for the collector” (1981a, 149), which is exactly what happened. My experiences in Seoul had discouraged me and I was anxious about my prospects for completing this thesis, particularly as I had already been in Korea for ten months and felt I had little to show for it. But, in discussing with Kim Crosby my purpose in coming to Korea, her enthusiasm re-inspired me at a time when I needed it and provided a conduit to a community of English teachers in the southern town of Suncheon.
This proved fortunate, because my university had only one other Western professor and he had been in Korea for so long that he no longer knew any other foreigners nor had contact with any part of a network, relying on his colleagues and his Korean wife and her family for social interaction and support. The university is located about thirty minutes from the nearest small town and an hour from the major city of Daejeon, so finding informants locally would have been challenging. Connecting with an informant group in Daejeon would not necessarily have been easier or provided me with a more accessible research population, either. In any event, the serendipitous encounter and mutual support, which are such characteristic aspects of
establishing connections in Korea, made me feel that I was on the right track, working with a community I had already connected with rather than trying to track down a different one in the nearest urban center.
I had intended to conduct interviews with an emphasis on newly arrived teachers, but the group I encountered was already well established. A couple members of the group left shortly after I met them, but Kim had already been hired and no other new hires came at that time. It was not until the end of my fieldwork in Korea that seven members of the community dispersed and replacement teachers were brought in, some of whom were newcomers. In fact, the closest I
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came to working with a recent arrival was Kim, who had been in Korea about a year. As she had neither adapted well to Korean life nor fit in comfortably with her community, she was still experiencing some of the same issues that plague newcomers. So, rather than dealing with the issues of initial culture contact among new arrivals, the community I worked with was composed of successful, long-term resident teachers in South Korea. Because their initiatory experiences left a strong impression, my informants did share stories that reflected their early reactions to Korea and its culture. However, lengthy residence results in adaptation and emplacement, so these narratives incorporated mature reflection on the events described. The emphasis was less on the shock or indignation they had felt, as is often the case with new arrivals telling their horror stories, and more on how they now interpreted the cultural differences at play or on playing up those differences for laughs. The perspectives and narratives gathered with this group differed from those I might have collected among a younger cohort more recently arrived in Korea. Long-term expatriates in Korea also comprise the bulk of active participation in the foreign teacher community as it is represented on the Internet. As mentioned previously, Dave’s ESL Café is the primary locus for such interaction, though more new teachers are building their own blogs and sharing videos about their experiences, particularly during the first year of residence. At several points in this thesis I discuss the impact of the Internet as it affected the community I worked with and I also cite some websites, Dave’s ESL Café in particular, but my focus was never intended to be on virtual communities. While such online resources
represent a fruitful area for further research, the massive amounts of data available merit a study of their own – Dave’s ESL Café alone provides hundreds and hundreds of pages of discussion on a wide range of topics. In keeping with my original purpose and interests, I have kept my
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Figure 7: A view of Geumgang University's courtyard, as seen from the balcony of my room. (Photo by K. Roubo 2007)
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emphasis on face-to-face interactions with individuals encountered during my research period in Korea. The data I gathered present a challenge as they touch on a wide variety of folkloristic genres, and the interstitiality of the group meant that parallels in the literature were rare. Withthese data in mind, I chose to address those which seemed most salient, including narratives, foodways, occupational folklore, and the character of this folk group specifically. Personal experience narratives, in particular, fortify bonds within the occupational folk group at the heart of this thesis. They function as a form of social currency in most interactions and are a key factor in establishing personal and collective identity within the community. There is a sense of wandering to life in Korea, a feeling that so much happens through serendipity and chance. As Greta Wilson described it:
You know, I would say to myself, hey, you know … my progress through this country has all been some kind of haphazard … I mean, hey! The two of us met just by [Kelly:
starts laughing] being in the store at the right moment and then we ended up talking, so I
just, things like that happening. (I*Wilson, 2007)
This thesis reflects that feeling, from people drawn to Korea from all over the world, to its lack of respect for disciplinary boundaries, to the way it touches on so many genres, and I have found myself researching along multiple vectors, not all of which occurred to me initially. The nature of the community I studied, its particular situation, and the connections I’ve made required an equally wide-ranging review of literature in Chapter 2 in order to address divergent perspectives and build a sense of the whole.