ESTANDARIZAR Y ESTABLECER CONTROL

There are similarities and parallels among the experiences of itinerant teachers, exchange students, tourists, and ethnographers during their time abroad, some more obvious than others. All are visitors abroad, far from their homes and familiar locales, conspicuous in their activities and/or appearance, often transient, rarely conversant with local customs, and immersed

in/engaging with cultures different from their own. All of these travelers have “passed out of the security of the relatively fixed identity of home and into a far less clearly defined liminal zone” which is “not at home and yet partly still there; elsewhere but only passing through on an always-returning-home trajectory” (Phipps 2004, 76). Their circumstances on that trajectory are marked by “temporality, displacement, language difference, and perception of ‘distance’” from the locals who surround them (Abbink 2004, 278). The tourist travels to learn from new

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Those working abroad occupy a space that incorporates aspects of both these approaches, but conforms to neither. The reactions of tourists landing in a foreign locale are not markedly different from those of incoming foreign teachers, students, or ethnographers, though in the case of the latter, training and education have prepared them for the experience. Foreign teachers experience life in Korea and learn its culture and language to some degree, but their experience is neither as superficial as that of tourists, nor as profound as that of enthnographers, since they are not conducting research. For tourists, the work is travel; for ethnographers, the work is research; for waegooks, the work is surviving day-to-day life in and amongst Koreans, with all that entails, while emplaced in the locale.

There is as much difference to be found among different sorts of travelers as there is similarity. Bruner remarks of the difference between locals and tourists that “the perceptions of the two groups are not the same, because what for the tourists is a zone of leisure and

exoticization, for the natives is a site of work and cash income” (2005, 192). This is the fundamental, underlying difference between migrants and tourists or ethnographers, because these non-tourists emplace themselves within a locality and participate in the same activities as its inhabitants. They shop alongside locals, cook meals in their own abodes, work and live in a native community, and do most of the things that they would in their homelands, yet they are not. Even the word “home” acquires layers of meaning, as choosing which locale it will refer to is an indicator of where they feel rooted. Often, “home” is the place left behind that persists as an identity anchor while the individual resides or travels abroad; it is not their current abode. Perspectives change as they grow accustomed to their locale and the local language, to new behaviors and appearance, and it all becomes usual and thus somewhat less interesting as emplacement develops. The newly arrived foreign teacher in Korea visits temples, palaces, and

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other popular tourist attractions as they learn about the land. Longtime residents find these excursions less enticing, even tiresome, and domestic travel diminishes in their foreign home. For example, my informants rarely traveled much within Korea and when they did, there was a sense of purpose to that travel, often for shopping or just to get away for a bit, not to see the sights. Melanie Steyn said that she finds most of what she needs locally or via the Internet and that trips to shop in Seoul occur, “twice a year at the most, [maybe] once a year” (I*M. Steyn 2007). When I visited Suncheon, my informants would take me to their favorite restaurants, but while the cuisine was mostly Korean, these sites were familiar to them, not a glamorous or unusual treat for a tourist.

For foreign teachers in Korea, travel outside of the city might mean a day trip to the coast, or a visit to a friend in another area, which does not differ from that of any other inhabitant of any other place, and my informants did not refer to these activities as travel. By the end of their first year, most foreign teachers have “done” Korea and are more interested in taking advantage of its proximity to other travel destinations. Thus discussions of travel frequently focused on locations outside Korea’s borders –trips to Thailand, Vietnam, Guam, China, Japan, and the Philippines were common. When Kim and I planned a five-day holiday in Beijing, the group became a resource for information as friends who had been there provided

recommendations of itineraries, tour companies, sites not to be missed, or desirable souvenirs. Travel within Korea was no longer worth the bother it entailed after that first year, when interest in the major tourist sites is at its peak. Yi-Fu Tuan contends that while uniqueness can be a source of pride, it “also isolates, causing loneliness and, potentially, despair. It can therefore be undesirable from an individual’s point of view” (2002, 307). To be visibly different on the crowded streets of a city far from all that is home is to feel isolated, exposed, vulnerable, and/or

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exotic. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett asserts in Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage:

The everyday lives of others are perceptible precisely because what they take for granted is not what we take for granted, and the more different we are from each other, the more intense the effect, for the exotic is the place where nothing is utterly ordinary. Such encounters force us to make comparisons that pierce the membrane of our own quotidian world, allowing us for a brief moment to be spectators of ourselves, an effect that is also experienced by those on display. (48)

However much waegooks immerse themselves in their “exotic” locale, there is no escaping the fact that they are the alien visitors, the exotic. Yi Fu Tuan notes, a “widely used technique [for ensuring cohesion] is the drawing of boundaries. Fences and walls, even conceptual lines, have the effect of promoting difference between groups and sameness within the group” (Tuan 2002, 310). By moving together as a unit, waegooks create a closed company with attention focused inward, generating boundaries that separate the foreigners from the Koreans who stared, enabling us to ignore a circumstance that was otherwise discomfiting. George Gmelch describes

analogous circumstances among American exchange students, remarking:

Walking around European cities in groups limits students’ contact with local people. It also means they spend much of their time interacting with each other and less time observing their surroundings. Their conversations…are often about people, places, and events back home rather than where they are at that moment. And local people are less inclined to start a conversation with a group of students than they would be with one or two. (G. Gmelch 2004, 423)

Gmelch sees this behavior as unfortunate in students who are meant to be immersed in a foreign culture, but it can become a deliberate strategy for establishing boundaries around expatriates in order to buffer themselves from their environs, at least occasionally. Unlike Gmelch’s students, foreign teachers moving in a phalanx are as likely to be talking about Korea as about life back home, because they are not just visiting and seeing the sights – it is the context in which they operate. The boundary created by such a formation, although permeable from within – as when

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one person in the group stops to buy something from a vendor –is more difficult to penetrate from without. Long after foreign teachers have become comfortable in their neighborhood and familiar to its denizens, leaving these areas for touristic purposes draws the local gaze again and reminds them that, still, they do not belong.

Expatriates become amateur ethnographers in advancing their understanding of the culture in which they are immersed, in the face of which the sense of wonder, the feeling of separation and difference, and the fascination with otherness is unsustainable. Eventually, growing familiarity leads to that sense of emplacement Shutika describes in Beyond the Borderlands: Migration and Belonging in the United States and Mexico (2011, 3). This, of course, is the goal for successful fieldworkers/ethnographers – to integrate with the community and surroundings in order to achieve the clearest understanding of the people being studied. The long-term expatriate achieves this as a matter of survival, though not always as enthusiastically, voluntarily, or readily as an ethnographer might and maintaining objectivity can become

difficult. Kim referred to the Korean custom of bowing in greeting and presenting a deferential demeanor to authority figures as the “bloody bowing and scraping” (I*Crosby 2007), and it frustrated her. She perceived these external indicators of respect as superficial and even hypocritical, a polite façade to hide what they were thinking and feeling. Far from objectively analyzing them, as would a trained ethnographer, she instead lost patience with both the

behaviors and the people exhibiting them, as most members of the foreign teacher community do at times.

Ethnographers, of course, are expatriates when they conduct their fieldwork abroad. Like foreign teachers, they form extensive local connections, yet they are not immigrants and do not intend to reside permanently within the communities they study. However long their stay or

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strong their relationships with their informants, they, like the tourists Phipps describes, are “on an always-returning-home trajectory” (2004, 76). In essays by ethnographers studying tourism, they describe their efforts to distinguish themselves (among locals as well as tourists) from the tourists they study. Susan Bohn Gmelch’s student ethnographers are:

always horrified when they leave the villages they live in and are mistaken for tourists. They are embarrassed by the insensitivity and ignorance tourists sometimes display and are eager to disassociate themselves. After all, they are in Barbados to work, not vacation, they are learning the culture and living with the local people, not lying on the beach being served by them. Their experiences are deeper and obviously more valuable than those of

tourists. (S. Gmelch 2004, 3, emphasis mine).

Implicit in her remarks are value judgments about the status conferred by the different types of experience these groups have. Like other expatriates, Gmelch’s students have something to lose by being identified as tourists in their foreign milieu, and they are made particularly aware of this when they leave the community where they have worked so hard to make themselves familiar and respected (if always foreign). In being mistaken for tourists, their “deeper” and “more valuable” experiences are no longer relevant status markers and must be reasserted in some way, whether by speaking the local patois or behaving as a resident would. Their research makes them especially conscious of how locals regard tourists and eager to differentiate themselves. While no length of residence confers native status, there is a tacit recognition that foreigners who reside among local people and learn indigenous language and customs acquire greater cultural capital, or social assets and knowledge that allow them to move with ease through that society. They are perceived as having different status from tourists, because they are invested in the community. Koreans tell foreigners who use chopsticks skillfully, speak some Korean, enjoy eating kimchi, or demonstrate proper social etiquette, “Oh, you are Korean now!” Given that the successful foreigners’ ethnicity and culture have not changed, nor has their immigration status, this is obviously a platitude intended as a compliment, indicating that they have differentiated

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themselves from the average foreigner (read: tourist or newcomer). This provides incentive to conform to local culture and customs and reinforces a sense of elevated social status for

successful foreigners who, while aware of the superficiality of the compliment, are proud of their competence and of blending in socially where they will never blend in physically.

This status differentiation takes place not only in local/foreign interactions, but also among various types of travelers. Errington and Gewertz describe their own friendly but

competitive interactions with backpackers during their fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Chiding from backpackers about the amount of baggage they had brought roused them to defend

themselves and their status, as they describe in the following passage:

We promptly responded to this taunt. We said that we were anthropologists who had come not to travel but to stay … Moreover, to ensure our victory in what was obviously a contest, we added that this was our fourth trip to Papua New Guinea during the past twenty years.

Thinking over the incident we were amused to see how easily these tourists had been able to pull us into competition over which, they or we, had had the most authentic experience with the native people in Papua New Guinea. (Errington and Gewertz 2004, 195)

Ethnographer Edward M. Bruner, an anthropologist who specializes in deconstructing the theatre of tourism, demonstrates that he is not immune to the need to stake his own claim to nearer- native status when mistaken for a tourist, saying:

“Tourist” and “ethnographer” are roles that one plays and manipulates. At times, when our tour group approached a new site, the Indonesians would behave toward me as if I were another tourist, and I could rupture that attribution by speaking the Indonesian language, which in effect said, ‘don’t confuse me with these tourists,’ or I could choose to remain silent and to accept the designation. At other times, by emphasizing my role as a working tour guide, I could identify with the Indonesian performers and locals, saying, in effect, that we are in the same situation, catering to tourists, who are our source of income. I stressed to the Indonesians that we were on the same side, as it were, in opposition to the tourist, but I was never sure whether the Indonesians accepted the argument. (2005, 204)

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In the situation Bruner describes here, multiplicity of choices for self-identification available to the ethnographer are equally appropriate to the long-term expatriate or migrant because persistent residence promotes familiarity with local culture regardless of one’s purpose in staying. Shutika describes this as “multilocal belonging” (2011, 39), where lengthy residence in multiple locales engenders a high degree of familiarity with “the complexities of adjusting and belonging” (2011, 39) in more than one place. The expatriate-as-ethnographer, by remaining in

situ for years, is at least as qualified to claim deep-seated familiarity as an ethnographer who

stays for long periods, but then leaves for years or even decades. Bruner expresses the options available to the ethnographer, as opposed to the tourist, and his ability to choose how he wishes to position himself in any given encounter with either the tourists or the Indonesians. In effect, he is highlighting the fact that the average tourist does not have a choice, another indicator of status. His use of the words “as if I were a tourist” serve to emphasize his assertion that he is not and that it is a mistake to perceive him as one.

Expatriate Karin Muller, in her memoir Japanland, describes an encounter with a stranger on a train and her own reluctance to engage in “a couple of hours of superficial conversation” with a Japanese woman. Instead, she constructs an elaborate story of her life in keeping with traditional roles for women in Japan in order to avoid difficult personal questions and awkward explanations (Muller 2005, 134-135). Muller describes herself as exhausted and tempted to feign sleep, but she feels a sense of obligation to show good manners, so she amuses herself by

creating an illusory life. Yet her rejection of real intimacy with the Japanese woman (precluded by the contrived life story) generates dissonance. As they are supposedly getting to know one another, one must assume the Japanese woman feels she is achieving a sense of connection through learning about Muller’s husband and family and so on. Muller, however, is increasing

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her sense of distance because she is fully aware that the family she describes does not exist; it is a fabrication designed to satisfy the cultural expectations of her listener. She is of an age when a Japanese woman is expected to have married and had children and, because she has not done this and it is unlikely she will ever encounter this woman again, she finds it less stressful to invent such a life than to explain her own.

Foreign teachers choose, in such chance encounters, whom they will be and what they share with their native interrogator. It is an area in which they have great creative liberty, a freedom unavailable to them during their usual interactions with coworkers and locals in their area of residence. A new environment requires amateur ethnography, because the quickest route to adaptation is through querying local people regarding any matter of culture or behavior that confuses the newcomer. At the same time, knowledge of cultural expectations, as seen with Muller and Bruner, allow the well-informed traveler or ethnographer to engage with or avoid a variety of situations, whether that means being seen as (or mistaken for) a tourist, pretending ignorance of one’s own native tongue, constructing an imaginary life that meshes with local expectations, or other ploys.

Muller chooses interaction over rebuffing her Japanese seatmate, in accordance with her culture’s expectations, saying, “I wasn’t raised to ignore a polite request from someone who looks like my first-grade teacher” (2005, 134). However, she, like Bruner, is aware of the other alternatives available to her. In each case, their choice is based on perceived advantages and disadvantages and demonstrates how the long-term expatriate develops tools to cope with life abroad. In his memoir, Learning to Bow: An American Teacher in a Japanese School, Bruce Feiler underscores the problem when he remarks, “As I lived in Japan, I struggled with this question: how much should I follow the unwritten rules that controlled the society around me,

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and how much should I remain attached to my own customs?” (1991, 89). This is certainly not a concern encountered by tourists as they move from one culture to another, safe in the knowledge that any intercultural contact will be short term and require little accommodation on their part.

The status differentiation I have outlined between types of travelers is further evidenced by the many individuals who go to great lengths to compare notes and determine who has spent longer in a culture, knows it more intimately, and feels entitled to speak regarding it. My interactions with each of my informants included such competitive maneuvering and I was no more immune than the ethnographers mentioned above. My interview with Ken, for example, included a debate on the pronunciation of a Korean word, with each of us presenting contextual evidence to support our positions, in essence defending the superiority of our personal

knowledge of Korea. While I conceded during the interview, I later discussed it with a Korean colleague in order to verify that I had been correct, just in case the topic should ever arise again,