David Tizzard is a professor at Seoul Women’s University, holds a PhD in Korean Studies, and hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast. He has lived and worked in Seoul for more than two decades. Reach him at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.
Who gets to be called 'us' in modern Korea?
Courtesy of David Tizzard
By David A. Tizzard
I recently had to serve as the MC for an important event, placed on stage in front of a large crowd of important Korean people. As we began, everyone was asked to stand, face the Korean flag, and sing the national anthem. With hundreds of eyes on me, I was faced with a question: Do I put my hand on my heart like every other Korean in the room? Or does my foreignness exclude me from that? I had but seconds to decide. It wasn't really about etiquette. It was about whether I was expected to perform belonging or acknowledge exclusion.
Korean people will often jokingly remark that I’m more Korean than them. It happens so often that I’m sure anyone with a reasonable grasp of Korean will have experienced it, too. It happens when I’m wearing my Korean football top, drinking sanghwacha, lecturing on Korean history and culture, and so on. They say it in jest but also with feeling and respect. And it’s okay because we both know that what they say is not really true. It’s like when a tourist stumbles through ordering a coffee and the owners smile and compliment them on speaking Korean so well. It’s easy to be praised here if you try to do Korean things.
The real struggle, however, is to be accepted as Korean.
Korean society has long defined itself in simple binary terms. There’s “woori” (our/us) and then everyone else becomes a waygookin (foreigner). The woori feeling is very powerful. It unites, it creates bonds, it’s part of a belief that every Korean is connected through blood, history and culture. The domestic news will begin by saying “Today in our country”; students will talk about “our professor”; wives will lament “our husband” for smoking and other such behavior. When I’m out with my kids, I often hear a grandmother remark about how “our kids” are so cute and adorable. A part of my brain wants to retort, “They’re not ‘our’ kids; they’re my kids. I made them. I pay for them. I sit with them while they moan about having to do Gumon homework.”
Of course I don’t say this. I just smile. Nod. And nudge the little ones so that they bow in unison and let out one of those overly high-pitched thank yous that works so well.
At the same time, I can have a room full of students from all over the world: some in hijabs, some with face piercings, some with gender neutral pronouns and so on. Rooms so diverse in race, sexuality, religion and values that it makes you marvel at the world. And yet despite this outrageous diversity, they often collapse into the same broad category here: waygookin.
Of course, there are permanent residents, multicultural families, naturalized citizens and foreign spouses in real life but they come up against the power of a society built on a myth of a single ancestor and a bloodline carried down. It unites everyone inside it and then excludes everyone else. For the most part, this distinction has worked quite effectively. That strong in-group identity helped Korea survive colonization, war, dictatorship and rapid industrialization.
However, it’s now being challenged because we are seeing more and more people who don’t quite fit into the binary categories of Korean or foreigner. I have so many students who are Korean but grew up abroad. They have all the physical and ethnic characteristics, even the name, but they don’t always feel Korean or feel comfortable with the language. I have students who come from multicultural families, with either a father or mother who is Korean. I have students who are ethnically Korean but speak with the thickest Russian and Kazakh accents you’ve ever heard.
This is where we get into territory not easily defined by “us” and “them”. The students with Korean ethnicity who grew up abroad, the third culture kids, or those foreign-born people who have lived their virtually their whole lives here evade categorization. Sociology has a useful term for people who don't comfortably fit either category. The Polish thinker Zygmunt Bauman called these people “strangers.”
Strangers are those who are not fully us but, conversely, not the other either. They are like us, they live among us, but they are not us. And this causes confusion and fear. To solve the situation the stranger has to either adapt themselves to a binary category and give up part of their identity or Korea has to change who it includes under the banner of Korean.
Neither is easy. And, furthermore, I’m not sure which is more desirable. It’s not really my place to say how this country and its people should respond to the challenges of the current age. Especially considering it’s been so welcoming to me over the past two decades.
But the challenge remains. Globalization means more and more people find themselves as part of multicultural families or living in different places. Meanwhile, democratization in Korea means that the government can’t just silence people. It has to allow them their voice. And it’s these two factors that have given rise to a growing number of ‘strangers’. The strangers, it should be said, have largely always been here. It was just that a military government found it easy to ignore people or manage the conversation in such a way so that the narrative was never challenged. Korea and social media are well beyond that stage now.
My two children fall into this category of stranger, though I’m not sure they really recognize that yet. They still likely think of themselves as fully Korean but with a weird British father and all his relatives we frequently visit. However, they are not "Korean Korean" and neither are they waygookins. They are something else. And while sociology uses terms like ‘stranger’ to define them and the local language has all sorts of variations on “gyopo,” more and more of these individuals are growing up here, achieving levels of influence, and thus forcing the conversation. Modern Korea increasingly contains people whom its traditional vocabulary cannot comfortably describe. It’s no longer really effective to use the term “si-gi-sang-jo” (now is not the time) and push the topic down the road for a later date.
So what does the country do with all the strangers? Whether or not the category of "Korean" expands to embrace the stranger, the demographic reality is already here. The question is no longer if the society will change, but how it will choose to define its own evolution. And if studying, living and breathing in Korea for the past 21 years has taught me anything, it’s that you should never write off the Koreans when it comes to anything. Irrespective of where they were born, who their parents are or whether they put their hands to their heart when the national anthem plays.