There is no escaping the occupational dynamics of a group whose primary descriptor – foreign teacher – encapsulates what they have in common. Additionally, both parts of the label are important as they describe the two areas that comprise the main work of being a foreign teacher, which is to say, both living in Korea and teaching make up the occupation of this
community. It was my research into occupational folklore that led me to the conclusion that both the job and the life were important in researching this occupational folk group. In Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded: Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire, Alan Dundes and Carl R. Pagter (1975) argued that office workers constitute a folk group and that the definition of folklore needed reexamination and expansion to include those objects of material culture that exhibited all the factors commonly used to define folklore except the criterion of orality. The
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variation, repetition, and informal transmission of tangible items such as photocopies of hand- drawn cartoons qualified them as folk materials worthy of being studied. Their work
demonstrated that occupational folklore and folklife were not restricted to rural, agricultural or poor peoples, but were typical of people sharing situational space and time in virtually any place of employment. I had expected Dundes and Pagter’s research to be applicable to the foreign teacher community, as their jobs are white-collar, professional work in a business environment. While foreign teachers do constitute a folk group, they generate and transmit little in the way of folk material culture, share space with Korean colleagues without having much input in office cultures or business decisions, and are as marginalized in their work culture as they are in
Korean society. Interestingly, even though foreign teachers work in this type of setting described in Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded (1975), they are not well-incorporated in the social structures of their schools and often remain outsiders, possibly due to cultural or language barriers, or because they will so soon be gone. They share situational space and time, but not in the sense that Dundes and Pagter delineate – they share space in that they reside and are
immersed in the same country and culture for bounded, overlapping periods of time. Their workplaces may be distant from each other, but they must come to grips with the same problems while they are in Korea and this contributes to a shared point of view and sense of belonging to the same community. Once they leave, of course, that time ends, the community is fragmented, and most of them will never see or hear from each other again.
A.E. Green’s 1978 essay “Only Kidding: Joking Among Coal Miners,” originally presented at the Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association, addresses humor among coal miners and the oppositional power it has in the work environment. Green's miners use caustic humor both to express their resentment of workplace practices and conditions and as
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an expression of the group's solidarity. Foreign teachers’ narratives and joking asides often have similarly scathing overtones, which are not often understood by those who do not share their experiences or perspectives. More than one reader of this thesis has asked what my informants would think of it, because the narratives herein seem harsh. They, like me, accept the tales as par for the course and relatively unremarkable, as we have all heard numerous similar tales presented in a like manner. Like the New Yorkers in Eleanor Wachs Crime-Victim Stories: New York City’s Urban Folklore (1988), they are “telling stories about significant events in their daily lives” (xi) and “[the] audience accepts these stories without question because they reinforce something that they already know: being streetwise or street smart is essential when living in New York” (7). Foreign teachers’ narratives manifest a similar philosophy in that it behooves
waegooks to understand the surrounding culture, to be wary as they participate in it, even as their
stories reveal their suspicion and distrust. Friends and relatives, on hearing such stories, will often ask why the teller would return to Korea, as so many of us do. In a similar vein, Cornelia Cody’s “‘Only in New York’: The New York City Personal Experience Narrative” (2005) explores how the stories New Yorkers tell to and of themselves reflect their knowledge of place, even the unpleasant bits. Cody asserts:
If tellers of New York personal narrative foreground the negative, they do so
humorously. They have to, in order to reconcile the dangers, threats, and inconveniences of the city with the fact that they have chosen to live here. Finding the humor in everyday travails also transforms narrators from victims to survivors. ‘Yes,’ they imply, ‘I was scared, hassled, annoyed, or threatened … but I lived to tell the tale. (2005, 220) Like the stories of the New Yorkers that Wachs and Cody studied, foreign teachers’ narratives reflect their awareness of what it means to be a waegook, along with a certain pride in having conquered the challenges of life in Korea, even as they spotlight the very things that make life there so exasperating. As part of their esoteric occupational folklore, these narratives prepare
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listeners for situations they may not have encountered and provide “mechanisms by which the group can psychologically handle the unexpected” (Wachs, 1988, xii).
Similar to A.E. Green’s essay, Santino’s exploration of narrative, work, and hierarchical structure in “Characteristics of Occupational Narratives” is concerned with “being on the wrong end of a status hierarchy lead[ing] to some very real resentment” (Santino 1978, 211). As with the miners, engineers, and trainmen, foreign teachers and their Korean employers have “a relationship of interdependence” with “an explicit hierarchy of responsibility and status” (Santino 1978, 211). Society in Korea is hierarchical in nature, due to Confucian influences described more fully in Chapter 3, so any relationship foreigners have with Koreans is also hierarchical (whether the foreigner understands this or not) and thus exhibits subordinate and superordinate characteristics. This contributes to intercultural difficulties in the workplace, and the differences between Western and Korean workplace culture mean that pranks by Westerners on Korean supervisors or employers scarcely ever occur on the job. This carries over into everyday life in Korea, as well, which also constitutes part of the work of being a foreign teacher, with equally little recourse for venting frustrations. Foreign teachers are thus denied an outlet for the stresses they are subject to and are more likely to “seek vicarious release for their resentment of subordination in narrative” (Santino 1978, 211). Doing a midnight run is indicative of individuals having reached the threshold of their tolerance and, when regarded as a rejection of subordination, is the ultimate prank in its finality as it denies the superordinate the opportunity to respond or reassert authority.
As mentioned earlier, Robert McCarl’s The District of Columbia Fire Fighters’ Project: A Case Study in Occupational Folklife (1985) was pivotal in my examination of foreign teacher’s work culture, though it presented a conundrum at first. Without a locus or shared
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traditions, scattered as they are across the country, it was difficult to see how McCarl’s canon of work technique applied to foreign teachers. McCarl’s notion of a “canon of work technique” is a set of skills:
perceived as being central because in their daily performance and the verbal evaluations of [their] performance, they comprise a focused body of informally held standards that reveal in their detail and specificity what the workers themselves see as most crucial to the successful execution of [their] tasks. (McCarl 1985, 28)
Such canons are particularly crucial in dangerous occupations such as police work or
firefighting, as McCarl studied, or heavily industrialized occupations like foundry work, logging, or oil drilling. Foreign teachers have little opportunity to observe each other working or to share information to improve teaching success, but they do observe one another’s interactions with Koreans and hear in their narratives how such interactions are presented. By framing the idea of a canon of work technique in a new context I was able to see that it manifested at the intersection of work and Korean culture and that its standards were linked to the job, but not necessarily to the work. Successful navigation of Korean culture and expatriate life were the canon by which individuals were measured. Deviation from the canon or failure to meet the necessary standards could very well result in loss of life in the heavy industries McCarl discussed, but is rarely a concern in white-collar settings. In the contextually-adapted canon of work technique I have proposed for foreign teachers, however, failure to thrive in Korean culture results in departure, which essentially renders that individual “dead” to the community. Dearly departed, if you will.
For my purposes, especially valuable sources relating to occupational folklore include Gary Alan Fine’s “Justifying Work: Occupational Rhetorics as Resources in Restaurant Kitchens” (1996), particularly in regards to identity in the workplace, Jack Santino’s
“Characteristics of Occupational Narratives” (1978), and Martin Laba’s “Urban Folklore: A Behavioral Approach” (1979). In discussing “work as a bulwark of identity” (1996, 90-91; after
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Snow and Anderson 1987), Fine’s examination of restaurant employees led me to consider to what extent this is true of foreign teachers. In particular, if “[t]hrough occupational rhetoric, workers justify their work and explain to themselves and their public why what they do is admirable and/or necessary, a form of impression management” (Fine 1996, 90), what does this mean for a group that often complains of how little impact they are able to have at work? “Arguing that the choice of an occupational rhetoric solves identity problems for the worker” (1996, 92), Fine provides a means of unpacking the implications of foreign teachers’ rhetoric about their work. Even jaded foreign teachers are able to emphasize those positive effects they are able to achieve, despite the conditions in which they are working. Like the cooks Fine describes, foreign teachers “use a range of occupational rhetorics as resources to provide a sense of self-worth” (1996, 111), often touting success with their classes or positive connections with their students, despite the obstacles to effective teaching they encounter. Their ability to
persevere and survive in the work and culture despite feeling unappreciated or expendable becomes laudable. In conjunction with the canon of work technique I propose, it would be expected that narratives of interactions would comprise a portion of foreign teachers’
occupational rhetoric of admirable or necessary behavior, and they do. Like Wachs’ crime victim narratives (1988, 12), their stories are testimonials to their resilience and ability to survive, and even thrive, in difficult circumstances.
Robert P. Kearney’s book The Warrior Worker: The History and Challenges of South Korea’s Economic Miracle (1991) and Roger Janelli and Dawnhee Yim’s essay “Gender Construction in the Offices of a South Korean Conglomerate” (2002) were helpful in clarifying some of the power structures in the Korean workplace. Hierarchical relationships in Korea are ubiquitous, so understanding them comprises an essential part of Westerners' adaptation to the
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culture and analyses of them are conspicuous in the folklore of the group. Because the folkloric material that I collected within this particular occupational niche consists almost entirely of personal experience narratives, material on that subject was as important in understanding the working world of foreign teachers in Korea as other research on occupational folklore. Thomas Dunk’s book It’s a Working Man’s Town: Male Working-Class Culture (1991) provided additional insight to occupational narratives and what they reveal about the narrators, their perception of their status in the work environment and the local community, and the attitudes and perspectives they may serve to perpetuate. In the case of the men Dunk studied, the group’s folklore incorporated sexist and racist subtexts, while the foreign teachers I studied (or have known) often manifested orientalist, sexist, and racist attitudes through their narratives. All of these materials enriched my understanding of foreign teachers’ occupational culture and narratives and, most especially, enabled me to discern that the work of the community takes place not only in the schools, but also in everyday encounters with all manner of Koreans.