Are English Teachers Unhappy Here?

By Jon Huer
Korea Times columnist

Through this business of column writing for The Korea Times, I have gotten to know some foreigners, mostly through correspondence and reading their entries in response to my columns. This is an interesting experience that has raised some questions and insights about those who live in Korea as ``foreigners." For the sake of focus, I will limit my discussion to those ``English-speaking foreigners," say, Americans, Canadians, and the group called "gyopos" who may be American citizens but are in Korea as returning natives.

I am most impressed by some of these foreigners saying the nastiest possible things about their experiences in Korea. Their violent loathing of everything about Korea is in some ways quite shocking.

To read their descriptions of life here is to read some of the most negative and unhappiest of human evaluations and social experiences.

The degree of their bitterness and rancor is, on first encounter, quite incomprehensible.

Extreme Unhappiness?

Most thinking people would say the experience is molded by the foreigner's own personality, expectations and interpretations. This approach puts the emphasis on the foreigner himself or herself as an individual. It is the individual's unique background as a human being that determines how he is going to view his or her experiences in Korea, according to this approach.

I agree with this view, as common sense dictates that if one is open to exotic, alien experiences with a positive outlook and an affirmative, non-judgmental framework, the experience tends to come out positive and affirmative.

On the other hand, if one already possesses an ugly, negative outlook on life, then perhaps every encounter he or she experiences will be negative and nasty. According to this theory, Ebenezer Scrooge, before the Christmas conversion, would have hated everything about Korea, but, after the conversion, would have loved everything.

Although I like this personality model to explain why some, perhaps many, foreigners are happy in Korea and some, perhaps not many, are unhappy, this essentially ``psychological" model does not satisfy my ``sociological" way of looking at things. I want something based on social factors and conditions, not just individual personality typologies.

After some thinking about the issue, I came up with the following conclusion: Their unhappy recollection of life in Korea as English teachers has to do with the economics of their jobs.

The English teachers come to Korea to find work. This category makes up the absolute majority of those English-speaking foreigners who regularly inhabit the cyber community in a relatively tight circle and network.

For all economic intents and purposes, they are like ordinary Koreans. They just happen to look differently or speak English as their native tongue; their most compelling feature is that they are workers in Korea.

Some work for corporate clientele, some for public schools, many others at hagwon of various sizes and levels. They are freelance teachers who work for Korean employers and organizations, and thus come under the same conditions of life that all working men and women must endure.

Some of them marry Korean women and settle in the country for the long haul. Many of them live a transient life, moving from country to country, from one locale to another, from one place of teaching to another. Mostly, they are young and prone to wanderlust, generally carefree and adventurous. Many are, of course, compelled by economic imperatives to work in a foreign country.

How does this fact help to explain why some are extremely unhappy with their experience in Korea?

I've found the life experiences of those who come to Korea to be English teachers, although they think of themselves as ``foreigners" and expect to be treated as ``foreigners" by the Koreans they encounter, are really closer to being ordinary working Koreans. They happen to teach English, a somewhat exotic subject to most Koreans, but are workers and employees.

Now, Korea is not exactly the most wonderful host to foreign workers. Koreans can be pretty harsh to their workers, as all employers the world over tend to be. After all, they hire people for profit, not for love.

When foreigners come to Korea as workers and employees, working under Korean bosses, they subtly lose the ``foreignness" of visitors from wonderful English-speaking, superior foreign countries like the United States or Canada.

Korea's treatment of foreign workers from poorer countries is legendary, and those from the United States and Canada gradually lose their visitors privilege and rank. As they say in many countries, fish and visitors start stinking after three days. This naturally conflicts with the somewhat grandiose expectations of superiority that some of these Americans, Canadians and others similar to them may have prior to their arrival in Korea.

This perhaps explains, aside from having to teach mostly unmotivated, unresponsive kids, why many of these working foreigners are almost uniformly unhappy with their experiences in Korea. Did I hear that over 65 percent of them leave after one tour? Some gyopos, because of their obviously different connections and situations, and those foreigners who marry Koreans and settle down, tend to be more positive about their encounters with Korea.

Most of our human disappointments occur when our expectations and results do not match. Poverty is bearable if one doesn't expect to get rich. But third-class treatment is painful if a first-class reception was expected.

The would-be English-teaching foreigners hear about the legendary Korean hospitality to foreigners. But for most working foreigners, including English teachers, life in Korea can be Hell on Earth once the protective shield of being a "Western foreigner" is withdrawn under the imperatives of the working poor.

Koreans, for their part, face basically two kinds of ``foreigners:" those from rich, advanced countries like the United States and those in Europe and those from poor Third World countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines.

The first type comes to Korea to spend money and be treated as precious guests. The second kind comes to earn money as workers. This conventional classification used in Korea puts the English-teaching foreigners, many of whom come to Korea expecting a Shangri-La, in a peculiar position. They come to Korea to find work, not too different from the Bangladeshis or Filipinos, but they nominally bear the brand of their wealthier national origins.

The Korean employer, quite ready to exploit anyone for his or her profit, still thinks of all Western foreigners as basically wealthier, more civilized, and superior in all ways.

However, when he sees this ordinary foreigner, mostly a backpacked unemployed job seeker at his doorstep, looking for work in Korea, it is not the same Western visitor that he has admired and respected.

It's a totally different ball game that both the Korean employer and the ordinary working foreigner now face. From here on, it's nothing but a struggle for survival and advantage for both of them. The resulting feeling is naturally nasty, brutish, solitary and short for the foreign worker who expected to be treated with admiration and respect.

The extent of bitterness and the depth of rancor among some of the English-teaching foreigners in Korea toward things Korean are quite striking. With the few who find happiness in Korea, either due to their own sunny, modest and realistic outlook on life or lucky breaks with good employment, or, not uncommonly, happy romance with Koreans, the bitterness and rancor among this group can only be explained by the cold sociological factor of expectations vis-a-vis results.

I feel better now after having come to this discovery and understand the source of so many peculiarly unhappy English-teaching foreigners in Korea. From the manpower perspective of Korea, the unhappy English-teaching foreigners' population in Korea is insignificant, for happy ones far outnumber them, but they sure make a lot of noise in the cyber community, where they seem to congregate to vent their unhappiness.

"The opinions expressed and the observations described in these articles are strictly the writer's own and do not represent any official position of the University of Maryland University College or the USFK.'' The writer can be contacted at jonhuer@hotmail.com.