Keeping up with the Kims 1

cross post with: http://printculture.com/item-2099.html

Part 1: The Arms Race (*metaphor stolen from Henry Em)

Before I left Seoul I had planned to write a follow-up portrait of my experience with the education system there. If first grade was about the training of protocol and relationships between people in the system, second grade, for me, was about the training of academic anxiety. In my first-grade post I was able to watch the jockeying for status and alliance as well as the expression of academic anxiety with a sense of humor and distance, but the longer I lived in Seoul the more I found myself acting and thinking in ways which betrayed an unconscious assimilation of the values of the system.

Even though I knew I would leave, five years spent breathing the air of the pressure cooker system has reshaped my sense of what a well-rounded childhood should be, has molded my sense of what a responsible parent should teach his or her children, and has provided me with an additional set of narratives to draw upon when thinking about success and failure, class difference, and global power dynamics.

It would be easy to blast the Korean education system. I could, as others have, talk about the unnecessary competitiveness, the fixation on Seoul National University and a job at Samsung, the rampant bribery, the reliance on private tutoring which impedes social mobility, the use of violence in schools, the problems with bullying, the over-reliance on testing and memorization. It is harder, I think, to describe and appreciate the difficulty of opting out.

A few months ago W came home with the assignment to write four bars of music in 3/4 time which he, having taken no music lessons, didn’t know how to do. I hadn’t looked at a piece of music in two decades and it took a while to pry the necessary teaching out of my crusty brain. I realized with surprise that we were in the situation I had heard so much about — because hakwon (sometimes translated as “cram school”) attendance is assumed, kids who don’t go to hakwon can’t keep up at school. When I think of hakwon I usually think of English hakwon; although public schools start teaching English from at least 3rd grade, kids who actually begin at that age are already far behind. But music, art, math, and early preparation for the next year of school are also common enough to become standard. Since almost all the kids in W’s class have studied a musical instrument from first grade, the teacher expected that they would all know how to do the assignment. Although my husband and I, concerned with possible ADD and with W’s stress level, had just several weeks adjusting W’s schedule in order to give him more consistency and more playtime, I immediately began thinking of ways to squeeze in some piano lessons. My instinct was not to spend time raging at the system but to think of ways to win for W the ability he needed in order to keep up.

It is in moments like these that the unarticulated desires emerge. I have long term goals for W, driven by an ongoing wish to correct the deficiencies of my own childhood and education, which shape the small tortures I put him through now. And while language is a big part of those goals, protecting his sense of self-worth for the long term is a bigger priority. I’ve read those books that talk about how boys in particular can check out of school from an early age if they start to feel stupid or incapable of doing the work. I have to decide, in that moment, whether it is better for my son to have less free time and take more lessons in order to keep up with the standard, or if it is better to guard and guarantee for him a childhood in which he has time to follow his own interests and play. Until now I have fallen on the “play” end of the spectrum, but how many hours of daily play do I cordon off for him? The longer I am surrounded by people whose 8-year-old kids come home from hakwon at 10pm the more my concept of the number of acceptable hours diminishes.

Second grade in Korea was hard for my son. His first grade teacher was strict but caring; when W (who hadn’t studied much hangeul before) went from 20% to 80% on his dictation tests she was full of praise for his improvement. W’s second grade teacher ruled like a dictator, hitting the kids’ hands with a ruler when they misbehaved and scolding them for every small infraction. One night when I was putting him to bed he told me with despair and certainty that he must be a 멍청이 — stupid, a dullard. “I don’t understand everything the teacher says.”

Last year as part of my classroom duties I served as a volunteer teacher, teaching English conversation to 6th graders in W’s school twice a month. I spent the first class sussing out their ability and interests in order to make the syllabus and was surprised that the students suggested debating topics like euthanasia and the FTA agreement. But there was a huge gap in ability between the students who had lived abroad (perhaps a fourth of the students in that class) and the students who had not. (The numbers aren’t representative because my son went to school in a district that is wealthier than most.) There was no way for the students who had not lived abroad to compete with those who had; they were doomed to lag behind. The practice of sending kids abroad to escape the pressure-cooker Korean education system has become common enough that kids who haven’t had that privilege cannot compete, and in a system in which kids are constantly ranked against each other, the gap between rich and poor is only growing larger. Parents send their kids abroad so that their kids can learn English (seen as necessary both for college entrance as well as job prospects) and also in order to have something of a real life (playing, exercising, etc.), but many also make sure that the kids eventually return to Korea so that they gain both the academic and social skills/connections required to be successful in Korea. However difficult this may be on the kids themselves, the parents feel they have covered all their bases; the kids will have the option of living in either society. A difficult childhood is seen as a fair trade for a more certain future. But the unintended side effect of that practice is an upward spiral of academic pressure in Korea itself. In some neighborhoods, being fluent in English and Korean and having lived abroad is becoming the standard, especially among those in the upper or upper-middle classes. And for those who are just middle class, sending a kid abroad (even if it is alone) is seen as the ticket to breaking through to a higher social-economic status.

A new hakwon market now caters to kids who have spent a few years abroad. My younger son’s kindergarten now runs an after-school program which teaches the American curriculum to elementary school kids. Most of these kids have lived in the U.S. for one or more years and are now attending Korean school, but their parents don’t want the kids to lose their language ability nor their familiarity with the vocabulary and methodology of the American educational system. The kids are effectively getting schooled twice, maintaining a foothold in both Korean and American educational and cultural systems.

As familiarity with both English and Korean becomes more of standard, parents and college students soon to be on the job market are looking increasingly towards other languages as a way of getting ahead of the pack. My Chinese classes in Seoul were populated by college students who told me that because the job market was flooded with English speakers, they were relying on their ability to speak Chinese in order to stand out and get a good job. When I found a Chinese teacher for my older son I needed to recruit some other kids his age to study with him in order to defray the cost of having the teacher come to our neighborhood. I was surprised how eager his classmates’ moms were to have their kids take on another language; the class ended up being composed of kids who already spoke English quite well (although for the most part hey hadn’t lived abroad).

My neighborhood, as I noted, isn’t typical, but I think it speaks to larger interpretation of the position of Korea in the world and the ways that people respond to pressures of this historical moment. Korea has only recently been awarded “first-world” status, so on one hand I think there is a sense that Korea has arrived economically, but with the giant of China trailing close behind, Japan still looming out of reach in front, and the U.S. (to whom Korea is tied economically, militarily, and politically) teetering, this status is tenuous and ethics of self-sufficiency, intense work, and social cooperation have a make-it-or-break-it kind of urgency. The willingness to force kids to maintain educational footholds in multiple languages and cultures is evidence of distrust in Korea’s educational system, of recognition that schooling is about cultural and social indoctrination as well as facts and skills, and of a sense that success (individually and culturally) in the next few decades will depend on the ability to forge international ties and to move back and forth between countries, cultures, and languages.

The sense I get from the parents I talk to is that they consider the education they provide for their children as the primary factor in the children’s future success or failure. They tell me stories about Korea’s historical domination by China, Japan, and the U.S. and how Korea doesn’t have any natural resources, so people are its only resource. A palpable consciousness of Korea’s place in the global order and the connection between individual and national fortune structure these stories and inform the seriousness with which they are told.

We are moving in an opposite direction from most of the families I know. They are spending a few years in the U.S./Canada/Australia and returning to Korea, instead of leaving the U.S. to spend some time in Asia. I can’t say for sure how people perceive us except to say for certain that they envy the ability to move with such freedom and to have such a good grasp of English. Our motivations in the beginning were more personal than educational; my husband and I wanted to make sure the kids could speak their grandparents’ languages, both literally and figuratively. Having grown up with something of an inferiority complex about being Asian, it was important to me that my kids spend some time in a place where everybody else is Asian. But that world no longer exists; the world in which my kids are growing up is a world in which the ability to speak and move across borders is an asset. Here, the decline of the U.S. (or “the rise of everywhere else”) is just a self-evident fact; the longer I spend in this place the more I see our efforts to educate the kids on two continents as the only logical way to prepare them for adult lives and good jobs.

Becoming what we're called.

I stole this title from an essay by Alice Walker about being called “dude.” I don’t really have any problem with the word “dude” but it is a lovely essay. But I am only slowly getting used to be being called “ajuma.” The title makes me cringe a bit, because I don’t want to be automatically incorporated into notions of bad driving, rabid consumption, visor-wearing, etc. (no offense Queen Min).

As some of you know, we have recently moved to China. I’ve written a bit on my own blog about how we’ve leveraged the knowledge and connections in the Korean community to hit the ground running here, but last week I really experienced the power of the ajuma network in particular.

Last Friday I took my older son Aiden for his school health check. The two of us moved as one wave towards the entrance of the school with all the other new students and their parents only to halt abruptly a few feet through the door as everyone in front of us stopped to survey the surroundings and figure out where to go. I said, “jian kang jian cha” to the matron standing there and she pointed me to one of the doors to the left. I went into a small room where parents and kids were crowded around a woman with a cashbox and a roster. The mom directly in front of me was a foreigner, I could tell, since her Chinese wasn’t smooth, but I didn’t know where she was from until the two kids next to her started arguing with each other in Korean. Look, I said to Aiden, Korean kids! He watched them from a position mostly hidden behind my body.

I had to fight my way into the cashier’s attention and by that time they were gone. I paid my money for “Jang Xiong Zai” and she told me where to go but I didn’t understand the directions. I figured I’d follow the flow of people, but after stepping out of the office I realized there was no flow, people were going in all different directions. I stood there in the lobby a little lost, Aiden looking at me with utter faith that I would figure things out. I waited until the people who had been behind us came out and asked them where we were supposed to go. That mom also didn’t know and went in to question the cashier again. She came back out and said something to me that I didn’t understand but I followed her and her daughter down the long hall into the gymnasium.

The gymnasium was set up with stations all around the perimeter: one table for blood, one for urine and stool samples, one for a vision test, one for blood pressure, etc. The room was full of kids, some with their parents and some in large groups with a teacher. I took my fa piao (receipt) and showed it to the people manning the front table who checked Jang Xiong Zai’s name off the list and gave me a stack of papers. She instructed me (I think) to visit each station and then bring the paper back to her.
At this point I began to feel like I could use an ally. Not that the situation itself called for any combat, but I felt I needed a cushion from the mass of people and noise. The Korean mom and her two kids were at the blood test station close to us so I went up to her and said, “최송하지만, 저희가 따라가도되요?" I picked the right person. She was surprised and a little confused to find that I spoke Korean, but not as surprised as people usually are in Korea. Her boys are twins, the same age as Aiden, but they tested into different grades, one into 3rd grade and one into 2nd grade (but not in the same class as Aiden). It turns out they live in the apartment complex next to us. (I REALLY met the right person.) The kids immediately started joking around and punching each other; they were already friends. They watched each other with fascination and a bit of pressure during the blood draw and none of them cried.

We went as a group through all the tests, meeting other Korean moms and their kids along the way. The twins’ family have lived in Shanghai for 2.5 years already and their mom (who had her youngest child, now 2, here in Shanghai) was familiar with medical terminology and the system of health checks. If I had been by myself I could have done it (I took Max for his kindergarten tests at the local hospital by myself and survived psychologically unscathed) but meeting her, the other moms, and those two boys made the process so much more comfortable. And it made the prospect of going to this new school seem far far better for Aiden. Standing in line for the chest x-rays the Korean moms and I were working out which taekwondo class to send the kids to and explaining which homework was supposed to be done during vacation. There was one pale little girl and her mom standing in line in front of me who was sort of caught in the middle of this group of Koreans.

After the health checks they came to our place to play with Legos and the Game Cube. We ordered 자장면 and spent hours talking about different schools, about language acquisition, about siblings and birth order, about raising boys, and other typical ajuma topics.

On Sunday we reported to the school for orientation. I met the twins’ mom in the room to pay for taekwondo and bus service. She had gotten there earlier and was waiting for me to sign up for taekwondo too. I went to pay for the bus first and found that Aiden’s name wasn’t on the list. The woman there told me that if he wasn’t on the list I must not have registered properly and he would be put on the waiting list. I started to get upset; I had told them we needed bus service, how could I possible take him to school every day and send Max on time too? The twins’ mom saw I was in trouble and came over to help me argue, and a few other moms followed. Them stepping in to do the talking for a little bit gave me some time to collect myself and recover my Chinese a bit; being upset doesn’t do anything for my language ability. Eventually I went to talk to the admissions director who knows me and she sent her assistant who told the bus people to let Aiden on the bus and that was that. More rigid here than in Korea and you have to know the right person to talk to; I have a lot to learn about negotiation.

But I was impressed by these Korean moms. They seem to speak Korean really well, they know how to finesse a situation, they know when to raise their voices and argue and they know when to sit back, smile, and pal around with the person. KC calls his “전투" Chinese (“combat” Chinese), not because it is necessarily confrontational but because it’s language learned in the trenches, necessary for negotiation but also ready to dig in until one side gets what it needs. Having just spent the last week relying on KC’s tutor to help us resolve issues with our shipment and our broken air conditioning, I was impressed.

We met Aiden’s teacher and received his uniform. It turns out that the pale girl who had been in the x-ray line in front of us is in Aiden’s class and I got to meet her parents who are Taiwanese but spent years living in Boston. I liked them very much and reflected that being in that bubble of Korean speakers had prevented me from making friends with anyone else -- we had spent all that time standing in line next to each other but didn’t actually meet until I was without my new entourage.

Tuesday was the second day of school, and after hammering out further bus problems on Monday we reported to our new bus stop at 7:20 sharp. The bus arrived and Aiden stepped on, then a mom and boy came running up from behind. What have we here? Another Korean! I spent about 20 minutes talking to that mom after the bus left; she had just moved to this side of town from Puxi and has lived in Shanghai for about a year, but was full of worries after switching her son’s school. I told her I had to go take a level test at Marine University where I had enrolled to take Chinese classes and somehow (did I convince her?) she decided to enroll too, so we met a third woman (also Korean, but young and relatively newly married, no kids) and went together. Then we had lunch and ended up talking for 5 hours afterwards. I introduced her to KC’s tutor, who came over to the apartment to teach KC, and she promptly hired KC’s tutor to hire her own children.

Next day. I had to pay the twins’ mom back some money I had borrowed to pay for bus service (yes, I was unprepared, despite finding nearly every day that I need to carry more cash because China is such a cash society) and I thought I should introduce the twins’ mom to the mom I had just met; their sons are in the same class. The three of us enrolled at Marine University were planning to meet and go and buy books together anyway so I asked the twins’ mom if she wanted to come to the meeting place and 인사 to the others. She ended up coming along for the ride and again we spent about five hours talking, adding another mom (whose son is also in the same 3rd grade class) around 11am. The group was snowballing, picking up new members here and there, and I was playing an active part in making that happen, hooking up the people I know and actively incorporating them. I felt empowered by the process; in less than a week I had found a community to fall back upon. After the bus problems I hadn’t had any big problems but the 3rd grade moms were having issues with uniforms, schedules, and classes and they set about pooling their resources to solve them.

This is the information gathering power of the ajuma network. It was a network I benefited from while I was living in Korea, without working very hard to create and sustain it. The neighborhood ajumas had already done all the footwork to figure out the best soccer programs, swimming lessons, teachers, the way to get certain homework assignments done, etc., and I just leeched the knowledge from then, offering my English expertise in return. Now I find myself here in China actively hooking up moms I know from different places who have similar anxieties or interests, building layers of a support system that help me deal with the largely unknown Chinese aspects of living here but also buffer me from those aspects. It is both a blessing and a source of danger, as it allows me to get a lot of things done in a short time (we’ve only been here a month) but decreases my need to interact with locals.

I guess I am an ajuma after all.