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There is one reason for this, and one only, despite the acrimony and scattershot accusations that fly around in waves whenever the Korean media decides once again — something happening at the moment, but I’ve promised myself that I won’t let this site go topical and start talking about news ephemera, so I’ll leave the able chest-beating to others — that some more ad units can be sold if they haul out the dead horse ‘foreign teacher as parasite’ strawman to give it another few whacks. The root of the problems is obvious, and it’s fixable, but the gordian knot of money and politics and attitudes towards education in Korea continues to keep it from being fixed.

You see, almost anyone can legally come to Korea to teach. We can omit the word ‘almost’ if we choose from a pool of native speakers of English who have graduated from a university, in any faculty at all. We can omit both the words ‘legally’ and ‘almost’ if we choose from a pool of native speakers of English who are willing to falsify their documents.

This is, to speak plainly, ridiculous.

Now, like I said, of the hundreds (thousands?) of foreign teachers (so called because of the jobs they’ve held, rather than any consistent set of qualifications or experience) that I’ve met here over the years, more than 99% had received either no formal training, or perhaps had attended a two-week TESL training course (special sale this week only at Bob’s TESL Hut™!). Of those, there were some who actually were adequate teachers, despite the absence of formal training. Some combination of dedicated, enthusiastic, articulate, language-aware, empathetic, smart. Most, however, were not.

And that isn’t to say that each and every teacher I met who had the heavy qualifications and experience was a great educator. Most teachers, when it comes down to it, just aren’t that good. But most of the paperholders I’ve met were at least better than adequate. There just aren’t many of them on the ground here.

Why on earth would this be the case? Why would a nation so obsessed with education and the perceived status that scholastic achievement confers allow a situation to develop where the overwhelming majority of foreign language teachers were unqualified, inexperienced, and often utterly disinterested in the actual profession of teaching?

Well, because the government said it was OK. Proof of graduation from a four year university, in any field, along with a job offer (which is, thanks to the unscrupulousness of most recruiters and the cluelessness, to be blunt, of most hogwan (private institute) owners) is enough to get you an E-2 (English teacher) visa.

Now this is good news for the thousands upon thousands (latest figures put the total number of foreign English teachers in Korea at 15000) of young recent graduates desperate for a little travel and some money to pay off their student loans. Great news, in fact. Nothing could be easier than to pop over to Korea for a year or two and babysit some cute Korean kids.

But it’s absolutely heart-breakingly bad news for students of English, whether they be kids forced to study after hours by their parents, university students looking towards a global future, or adults studying for their work or personal improvement or retirement or whatever. If they’re savvy, or lucky, they may be able to find a school that hires actual teachers, or find one themselves, through word of mouth or connections. But if my experiences in the last decade have been any guide, they’ve got about 1 chance in 100 of finding someone who’s both capable and qualified.

Editorials in newspapers like The Korea Herald have been suggesting recently that parents actually ask teachers at the private institutes their children attend for proof of their qualifications. Well, sure, but that conveniently ignores the lack of filtering assumed to have been done upstream, not to mention the fact that even if the parents could speak English, they might reasonably be assumed to be less than qualified to evaluate the veracity of any documents produced (assuming the teacher in question was not so offended that they refused to produce said documents, digging themselves in turn a deeper hole of mistrust). It’s tacit acknowledgement that the system is so badly broken that there’s nothing to be done but arm yourself, stockpile textbooks and pencils, and get ready for the education apocalypse.

But there’s an smarter, less ad-hoctastic way to fix it, and it would be win-win-win for everyone involved, except of course for the cowboys, the forgers, the sex-tourists, and the ‘native speaker teachers’ who are incapable of properly forming the simple past tense, let alone teaching it.

Raise the standards for E-2 visas. Raise them high. Qualified teachers only, with experience. Nothing less than a CELTA/DELTA or equivalent if the candidate is not university-educated to be a teacher. Interviews for those candidates, performed by people who understand English, understand western mannerisms and culture, and who can (as few Koreans seem able) winnow out the scam artists and freaks (hell, hire native-speakers for the job!) Interviews that actually ask them to do a quick spontaneous demo lesson, if you can imagine that.

What happens under the new regime? The quality of language education rises. Happy government, happy students, happy parents. Demand continues to outstrip supply for teachers, and the imbalance increases, but the pool of vetted candidates are quality, and their cachet and remuneration increases to a level similar to those of full-time Korean professional employees. Happy teachers. The (perceived or actual) number of ‘freaks and refugees’ decreases, leading to a decrease in lurid tabloid exposés, which might make the media unhappy, but to hell with them. Private institutes close in droves, of course, but there are far too many of them, and far too many solely concerned with turning a profit, anyway. On the hagwon-owner upside, they can guarantee quality instruction, and can charge more for it. Quality over quantity permeates the education system. It’s a Brand New Day!

I’m being facetious, a bit, as is my wont, and I leave details of implementation to people more energetic than I, but I’m serious about this. There is one easy way to fix most of what is wrong with foreign language education in Korea, and English education in particular, and the filthy cloud of confrontation, mutual wariness, distrust and resentment and angst that hovers over the language landscape: raise the bar. Go upmarket, and do the right thing, rather than the short-term economically expedient thing.

Because attacking symptoms rather than causes is a fool’s game.

[Update : Welcome, Joongang Daily readers. Nice of you to drop by.]

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Most people who come to Korea to teach, whether at a hakwon (the catch-all term for the private-study schools that can be found literally 10 to a city block, catering to the monomania not for quality but quantity of education here in Korea, many of which specialize in English and employ most of the short-termers in Korea), or a university or foreign school, or in-house at a company, or somewhere else entirely… most of them are provided with housing.

This is, few actually realize, mandated by the legislation controlling E-2 (English Teacher) visas. Which is not to say that this legislation is universally obeyed (’rule of law’ not being a concept that has achieved great penetration in Korea thus far), of course, but it goes some way to explaining why the feared-and-loathed, often dishonest and always money-struck hakwon owners actually do something that does not financially reward them in any tangible way. That is, provide housing for their English Monkeys.

There are some decent private schools around, and a fair number of goodish universities, at least in terms of working conditions, and they do occasionally provide their foreign employees with reasonable accommodation. Some very few go one better, and provide housing that is very comfortable indeed. This is the exception, rather than the rule, naturally.

Back when I was a bachelor in the mighty metropolis of Busan†, I lived for nearly two years — although I was working for one of the better schools — in a 3 metre by 4 metre closet in which there was room for a bed, desk and fridge, located right beside a textile factory. By right beside, I mean that my one window looked directly into a window on the factory floor, about 18 inches away. Right beside.

† I liked it better pre-2001 when Busan was romanized as Pusan, and pronounced Poosan by foreigners (’san’ being the Chinese character for ‘mountain’) so I could refer to the city as ‘Poo Mountain’ and actually be able to explain why without being quite as longwinded as I am right now.

The chatter of hundreds of sewing machines didn’t actually bother me much, as I tended at that point in my life to enjoy the tipple too much to care, and rarely at ‘home’ other than to sleep, anyway. Life was good, in a dissipated and aimless sort of way. It was the last gasp of a bachelorhood that was becoming less amusing, rapidly.

The last couple of years, though, have seen my wife (who I met as I was leaving behind that rocket-fueled lifestyle) in the lap of relative luxury, in Australia, and after our return to Korea, in the two large, brand-new apartments which were provided by the university where I worked until recently.

The other reason for schools to offer accommodation when you take a job with them — the one that people usually assume to be the primary one — is that it is effectively impossible to find your own, as a non-Korean. This is in part a manifestation of the blithely exclusionary attitude that has traditionally informed much of mercantile Korea’s dealings with the hairy barbarians. To be fair, it has been in part a reasonable response to the infamous behaviour exhibited by most GIs and many young, inebriate, wacked-out English teachers (of which I was once one, I admit). Stereotypes exist for a reason, after all. Not what you’d call the most-favoured tenant demographic, most non-executive expats in Korea. If you’re married to a Korean, yes, but alone : nuh-uh, unless you want to rent a room in one of the ubiquitous yogwan ‘love hotels’ on a monthly basis, which many single guys do.

I’ve known some of them, guys who were capable of ignoring the nasty omnipresent fug of stale sex and cut-rate detergent, the dim green and pink lighting (creating that ambience of a festive abbatoir that just screams romance) and the weekend puddles of pinkish kimchi vomit in the hallway, the drunken screams and shouts from 11 pm to perhaps 3 or 4 am each and every night from the short-timers. Better than they deserve, though, I’m sure.

So when my contract at the university ended with a whimper rather than a bang last month, it was a fairly stressful time, as I was forced not only to look for other work, which would then allow me to get a visa, but to do so before the beginning of September, in order for us to actually have somewhere to live (and put our worryingly large collection of furniture).

The right job didn’t materialize, and in between our (well, my) chicken-little panic-stricken thoughts of bailing to Canada, or Mexico, or Thailand, or anywhere, really, we decided the cheapest and wisest option was just for me to do a visa run to Japan (Canadians get 6 month tourist visas here, on entry) and come back, and to rent our own house. That sounds blindingly obvious to the good people out there in Normal, Illinois, I know, but being locked into the mindset of job=visa=house, it really hadn’t occurred to us. Plus, I was kind of keen on hitting the beach somewhere, somewhere other than Korea. She Who Must Be Obeyed had predictable thoughts on that idea, unfortunately, and the plan was dismissed out of hand.

So we wandered hither and thither and even over yon a bit, looking for places to live, even as I was going to first and second interviews with likely employers and finding them all wanting, in one aspect or another. Seoul, for those of you who might wonder, is not small. Hither is about 3 hours from yon, and thither is another couple of hours beyond that.

Anyone who’s been reading my stuff for any length of time knows how much I loathed the industrial nightmare of an area where we used to live, nuts deep in garbage and banana-peel-slipping-around on the constellations of comedy throat oysters horked up by the denizens of Gunpo City, south of Seoul, near Suwon. It was true that most of the other places around the city and its skirts that we looked were somewhat nicer, but mostly only in degree. Unpleasant, of course, but less so. Not precisely enticing, particularly when I had been thinking along the lines of Koh Samui or Whistler or Zihuatanejo.

Until we found the area we decided to plant our flag for a few months. I’m telling you, angels descended and blew their tinny trumpets in my ears when we started looking around there. It was the first place — anywhere in Korea — that I’d seen that shows evidence of actual urban planning, where things are built on an almost-human scale, neither crowded together like brobdingnagian barnacles nor consisting of streaked domino concrete slabs looming over echoing concrete courtyards, brutalist Pyongyang retro-soviet style. No, this area was clearly designed for cyclists and walkers as well as cars, and wasn’t outright antagonistic to its residents, unlike most other places in Seoul I’ve been.

Seoul is a city (like most other urban environments in Korea) that hates its residents.

I could tell this suburb was different, though, as soon as we’d walked around a bit. About as far to the west of downtown as we were to the south in Gunpo, I saw the full bike-racks beside the subway station (something I’d never seen before in Korea, as there are few cyclists in most places, it being simply too dangerous and heavily trafficked to bother) and tree-lined paths winding through each block, expressly for pedestrians. Trees everywhere, in fact, not just on top of the fortunate stubs of mountains that hadn’t yet been leveled to feed into grinders and rise again as the vast human beehives where 70% of the population of the country live. Wide, straight roads. And, astonishingly, people who didn’t perform the ‘oh-my-god-he’s-not-Korean‘ doubletake that had left me so unwilling to dare set foot outside our apartment for the last couple of years.

Even my wife, who’s spent almost her entire life in Korea, said she didn’t know there were places like this here.

So we found an apartment, in one of the newer style buildings that have started springing up all over Korea, geared to singles and young couples, called ‘Officetels’ in Konglish. Basically — and completely unlike the standard, cookie-cutter ‘apart’ concrete beehive family apartment buildings that rise everywhere out the earth like buboes on a plague victim — they’re like western-style apartment buildings, down to the gardens on the roof, the hot-water-on-demand, and the emphasis on sky-light, and air, and brightly lit cleanliness.

We found a small loft, with west-facing 4 metre windows taking up one entire wall, and rather than sucking car-exhaust from the perpetually-roaring highway that was behind our first apartment, or looking straight into the baby-factory slum windows over which our second apartment had a glorious low-rise, low-rent panorama, I can watch the sun go down out over towards the West Sea. I honestly never thought we’d live in such a lovely place, here in Korea. I hadn’t thought they existed, except for the rich in downtown Seoul, and on TV. We gave our huge fridge and washing machine to the wife’s bachelor brother, and left some furniture in the apartment for the new (cheaper and more malleable, more bible-thumping) university hire to use (rather than just chuck it all), and moved on up. To the top. To a deluxe apartment. In the sky-eye-eye.

It’s no Sydney, or Vancouver — hell it’s not even Toronto – but it’s pretty nice.

One of the only good points of our previous university-supplied place, other than the fact that we had been the first to live there and thus didn’t need to deal with accreted filth, was the proximity of a small mountain ridge, up and along which we (and thousands of others, it seemed) could walk, escaping the apocalyptic vision, if not the all-pervasive noise, of the concrete wasteland that is Gunpo. That had been pleasant, and walking there in unaccustomed green along the trail that wound its way a few kilometres along the ridge had been enough to recharge my batteries, at least when there weren’t too many shrieking, pudgy children up there too, dragged away from their computers and compelled to exercise by their parents.

The new area, Songnae, had a few wooded mini-mountains within walking distance as well, and I resolved one day, after failing to find my way through a military base to a likely trail at another nearby mountain to the west, the week before, to attempt to find my way up the closer megahillock to the south. The wife begged off, and I headed out, with my usual lack of preparation. I crossed the subway tracks – on the surface, that far from downtown – and wandered around for a good hour before I found a trail that led upwards.

The weather had been flawless for a good week after a miserable summer — unsmoggy blue skies, dotted with fluffy cumuli, hot sun cool shade. It was gorgeous; the sun spattered through the leaves as the wide trail wound its way up to higher heights, at a much steeper grade than our old daily walk in Gunpo. I got past the thundering-heart first ten minutes, and fell into the euphoric groove that exercise almost always brings, when I’m out in nature, senses heightened, brain clear. There were only a couple of people around, trudging down as I headed up. Past small plots of vegetables the trail rose, and soon became almost alpine, studded with those massive, rounded rocks protruding from that tightly-packed, cafe latte-coloured dirt that always make me think of Korea and Japan. The perfume of pines baking in sunlight. I was happier than I had been in a while, and it was good.

I reached the first summit, and there were a number of smaller trails heading off from the glade atop the ridge, wandering off to various points of the compass. Thinking one might lead to a vantage point unscreened by greenery, where I could get a good look at the geography of our new home, I struck out along one of the paths, towards the sinking sun. I realize now that that military base I’d been unable to find my way around last week was to the west, too. You know, the direction I was walking.

After about 5 minutes of blissed-out traipsing along the trail, all Homer-in-Chocolate-Land, and before I quite knew what was happening, there were shouts in Korean, and as I abruptly came back to earth, I noticed in quick succession that: the clearing ahead of me had a tall chicken- and barbed-wire fence along it, that there various dishes and antennae and stuff behind that, and that the half dozen camo-clad Korean men approaching at a trot were all carrying weapons that I could only presume were automatic.

My meagre command of Korean being what it was, I had no idea what they were saying, but from their tone I could infer that they weren’t asking me in for a cup of tea. They were young, of course — just the age of many of my university students, and no doubt doing their two years of compulsory military service and quite happy to have pulled light duty sitting on top of a mountain somewhere. Nonetheless, their excitement coupled with their tendency to gesticulate with their guns was making me a wee bit nervous, I have to admit. In response to what I thought was an inquiry as to precisely what the f**k I was doing, I shrugged, and made the two-fingers-walking gesture, which in conjunction with a goofy grin and vacant swinging of the head, as if communing with butterflies, was what I hope was the universal sign-language for ‘just, you know, wandering around, being a nature-boy doofus’.

They peppered me with more questions in Korean, none of which I understood sufficiently to make any attempt at answering, in sign-language or otherwise, and eventually the eldest, who couldn’t have been more than 25 or so, said “OK” quite clearly, waved the back of his hand in the general direction of the trail along which I’d been walking, and said something in Korean which, near as I could tell translated roughly to “Get the hell outta here, and you’re lucky we don’t arrest your ass. Sir.”

I got the hell out, and continued my walk, no worse for wear, up into the almost-alpine and the green, blue and white, being extra-careful to stick to the main trail.

And so, my lesson for the day, one that all Koreans seem to learn at some point: stray from the well-trodden path at your own peril, smart boy. A lesson that came complete with a moderately-sized brown spot in my boxers, for punctuation.

[originally published September 2003, revised and updated June 2006]

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It might be described as the part of you that goes beyond your physical presence, that not only permeates your being but surrounds you, invisibly, like a cloud. But it can be damaged, by unhappiness or disrespect, by losing face, by thoughtlessness or humiliation, by anything that’s disruptive to the harmony you feel with other people. Damage to your kibun is damage to your essence, and can have negative effects both mentally and physically.

It is this consciousness of an inner life, one that is molded by the degree of harmony one achieves in one’s relationships with other people to whom one feels any degree of responsibility, that gives Koreans their almost preternatural ability to sense peoples’ mood, and their character, and modify their own behaviour to lubricate the social gears. That’s the nice part. The infuriating flip side of that, though, for many foreigners, is the tendency to dance elegantly away from any potential confrontation. An angry waeguk-in, until they understand what’s happening, is likely to become angrier when the Korean with whom they have a bone to pick says ‘Maybe’ when they mean ‘No’, or ‘tomorrow’ when they mean ‘never’, in order to try and re-establish harmonious dealings. The accompanying, ever-present potential too, is that when someone is pushed too far, and they lose face, in which case ’social harmony’ can take a flying leap, and the only way to regain face and salvage personal kibun is to blow up and stomp and yell. This happens a lot, too.

In this consciousness of the relationships between people and its effect on your own wellbeing, rather than the ‘correctness’, ‘objective truth’, or self-interest of an individual or his arguments, there is a minefield of potential misunderstanding. Most foreigners to Korea trip through it over and over again, myself included, before they realize that putting the kibun of the people around you first, even in a situation of confrontation, will bring results.

(As an aside, this is what the Americans do not seem to understand, or care to, when they deal with North Korea. The patterns of seemingly-irrational behaviour on the part of the DPRK negotiators isn’t (always) irrational at all, from their own perspective.)

The importance of kibun for Korean people should never be underestimated. It’s not merely convention, it’s baked-in. Koreans can make crucial, important decisions based on kibun. Business decisions, choice of a mate, career and employment choices, all may be taken on the basis of what feels right, or what will result in the most socially harmonious outcome for all concerned. Koreans will discuss kibun, but rarely attempt to analyze it in this way. To do so would perhaps damage their kibun.

This is not to say that decisions, important or otherwise, are made strictly on a non-rational, intuitive basis. Things like love and marriage, about which westerners can be decidedly irrational, are approached with a combination of cold, rational analysis and intuitive leaps here, for example. It is another of the contradictions that make up so much of what it means to be Korean.

In future, look for more on this from me. Kibun is only one of the six controlling concepts of the Korean psyche : chemyeon, neunchi, kibun, bunuiki, jeong and han, and the interplay between these guiding forces is what makes Koreans so unique, and, at times, so difficult for the non-Korean to understand.

[originally published January 2002, revised and updated 2006]

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Korea was, until recent decades, a mostly agrarian society. The poorer segments of society scratched out a living by farming, and of course, this is still the case, although the farms and farmers are almost without exception aging and marginalized, because all the young folk have moved to the cities to seek their fortunes and educate their own children. What happens to your skin when you’re out in the sun every day, working in the rice paddy or the vegetable beds? It burns, it tans, it gets leathery and brown. If you’re rich — more importantly, if you want people to think you are affluent — you cannot have tanned skin. That’s the mark of the poor farmer, not the badge, as it is in the west, of ample free time with which to loll about in the sun.

Sunscreen makers have excellent opportunities to succeed in the Korean market. Beach towel manufacturers, not so much, although young people, as with so many things, are beginning to pick up the sunbathing habits of their western friends.

The surface appearances of appropriated western or Japanese cultural items are mimicked rigorously, but the meaning behind it is almost entirely lost, or deliberately subverted, or, as in the example of tanning, neatly inverted. A stage performance of heavy, industrial Nine-Inch-Nails-like industrial metal by a growling, pvc-clad singer is backed up by a troupe of balletic dancers. Education is all-important, but the ultimate goal is to pass tests, meet the correct people, and join a good company. Health potions and folk remedies are a daily concern, but the fattiest beef and pork is the conspicuous-consumption dish of the day.

Lapdogs are favored pets, cozened and dressed up and fetishized, but the flatbed truck stacked with wire cages crammed overfull of meat-dogs on their way to restaurants is studiously ignored, as is the evening TV magazine program piece featuring restaurants famous for their inovative dogmeat cuisine.

The careful attention paid to surface appearances diverges radically into schizophrenia when it comes to one’s surroundings here, too. Piles of garbage are everywhere, as are morning puddles of vomit, even in residential areas, that attest to the excesses of the night before. Construction is slipshod, somehow temporary in appearance. Windows, even on shops that have opened that very day are often streaked and dirty, and left that way. Litter abounds, and people casually throw more atop it. Men hork and spit great nasty oysters of mucous on the sidewalks, everywhere, which makes it not only traditional, but downright mandatory to take your shoes off when entering someone’s house. Industrial filth and noise back onto residential beehive towers at random. Streets are unnamed, and addresses as we are accustomed to in the west simply do not exist. Traffic rules tend to be a matter of ‘whatever feels right’ rather than any enforceable set of regulations.

So why is this? Why is there this enormous gap between the attention paid to detail and appearance at one end of the spectrum — one’s personal appearance — and what would seem to be a complete lack of it at the other? And why is it so obviously different than the (cliched, certainly, apocryphal somewhat, but not entirely illusory) approach of the Japanese, who seem to have a greater focus on harmony and order in their surroundings?

Although the cultural influence of the Chinese, cannot be underestimated, I think it’s the legacy of the recent climb out poverty for many, and rapid, pell-mell industrialization, in great part. More affluent, modern areas are much less littered and polluted, as are more stolidly traditional ones, of which there are not many left. The modernization-at-all costs drive of the Park Jung Hee era in the 1970’s paid scant attention to consideration of the environment, or creature comforts, or quality of life — industrialization, urbanization, and wider affluence were the goals, and they were achieved, at no small cost.

I wonder too if there is something historical, a legacy of the invasions and wars and widespread destruction that happened over and over again throughout the history of the peninsula, that left the culture with a feeling of impermanence, a sense that building for the ages, or even for the medium-term, was a fool’s game. All will be destroyed, probably, in short order, so why try?

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Truth : I have been working on (OK, thinking about) writing a book, one digging into the topics whose merest surface I scratch here, and one that also answers some of the million questions of general survival (”Oh sweet lord, where do I get real cheese?” “When my male adult student just told me he loves me, what did he mean, exactly?”) that loom large in the minds of new arrivals to Korea. A few thousand people a year show up here to teach, at a minimum — there’s gotta be a market for a book like that.

So here’s a taste, hot off the keyboard, so that in the future I can answer questions about teaching in Korea with a hyperlink rather than repeating myself all the damn time :

The Skinny

It’s pretty often the case that Teaching English in Korea involves very little teaching and not a whole lot of English. This is perhaps the most important thing about all this that nobody ever tells the newbies. In other words, for a very large proportion of people coming to Korea thinking they’ll be teaching the English language, the reality is that they probably won’t, really. If they have been hired by a kiddie hakwon (variously romanized, a ‘hakwon’ is a private cram school, and every city, town, village, hamlet and roadside rest stop has 2 or more in any given building), they may well end up in reality as a babysitter, thrown like human chum into the toothy screeching kindy shark pool with no guidance whatsoever from management and no means of self-defense. The actual English teaching that gets done in this situation may be minimal, while the neophyte teacher is busy struggling for survival. These teachers, with no training and no idea of what’s expected, end up relegated to the position of entertainers. Many, having had no experience teaching, are completely OK with this.

Some do end up actually teaching, and teaching older children, or university students (who, in Korea, have for the most part an emotional age of about 13, from the western perspective, except that the boys are required to interrupt their schooling to do military service for more than two years, which bumps them up to the level of, say, extremely sullen abused 16 year olds, perhaps, on their return), or even adults. Whatever the age, these students are for the most part veterans of the hakwon churn, and if they’ve studied English for any length of time, have seen a rotating cast of wide-eyed foreigners go through the Korea Newbie Cycle :

1. Wide-eyed wonder
2. Blissful confusion, pleasant buzzy disorientation
3. The three-month barrier : missing home, missing food, missing easy conversation
4. Unblissful confusion, culture shock, isolation
5. Resentment of Korea as personified by one’s boss, xenophobia, alcohol abuse, ranting
6. …

The next stages depend on the person.

Not a few freak out entirely, experience a psychotic break, and go wobbly. This is sometimes a permanent condition. Many of those who flip their noodles leave Korea, either suddenly or at the end of their contract, broken and dull-eyed or raving and newly-racist. Of that group, many nonetheless return, finding themselves unable to function properly back home. A self-perpetuating cycle of odd activity (which finds little to no censure in Korea, as most Koreans expect foreign devils to behave in inexplicable and aberrant ways anyway, and most expats tend to have a degree of quirkiness already, and are unwilling to criticize others in their small groups as there are so few around) begins, the end result of which is Freaky Waeguk-in (”way-goog-in” – Korean for “foreigner”) Syndrome. This is epidemic.

Some, after going a bit loopy temporarily, settle down, get a grip, and fall into one of two general patterns. They go native, learn the language, marry a Korean, and in a range of different ways further their isolation (or not, and try to maintain a balance) from their countrymen and mothertongue siblings, or they shrug, accept, and learn to enjoy the chaos, ferment, stares and prejudices and insults, and take it all with a sense of humour. Some of these stay for a while, some go elsewhere, or back home, after a year, or two, or three. If they’ve been cautious, they’ve been able to pay off their student loans, if they had them, and more. It is commonplace, although illegal (if caught, you will be at least fined and at most fined and deported), to teach private lessons at rates ranging from $30 an hour on up. I do not personally do this, but most people I know do, and you can double your income quite easily this way. I’ve known some people who have left Korea after 5 years with enough cash to buy a house back home. How they dealt with issues of taxation on their return was their business.

But that may not be what most people are reading this for, especially if they’ve arrived on the wings of Google. You probably want to know what the deal is with working in Korea, in one handy, pre-packaged essay. The dirt, the skinny, the Good Oil. You’re probably in your 20’s, and you probably have student loans to pay off. You might be looking a first adventure overseas, or you may be an old hand at the backpacker trail, and need some ready cash.

OK, here’s the story, in a very very small nutshell.

You will be offered the following, with some variations.

Anywhere from a bottom end of 2,000,000 won per month to a high end of 2,500,000 or more (this being winter 2008), usually for a contact-time workload of 25-35 hours per week. If you have any teaching qualifications, you should be able to negotiate your way towards the upper end of that salary range, but there is no guarantee. Some people make more than this without qualifications, and some less, I am aware. University positions, for which the required qualifications are sometimes MA degrees, but more frequently BA/BSc degrees with 3 or more years experience (in Korea), usually pay at the low end of the scale, but often have very generous holidays (12-16 weeks per year) and low contact hours (12 – 18 hours) per week. There are growing numbers of exceptions to this rule of thumb as Korean universities become ‘hakwonized’ and cash-flow oriented. Many university teachers are asked to ‘teach’ children these days, and are working as hard for their salaries as hakwon teachers.

Although some teachers will fly into a foaming frenzy of resentment if it is suggested, it is nonetheless true (again as a generalization) that there is a hierarchy of job desireability in Korea, which may be different for different individuals, depending on factors like how much they like children, how important free time is to them, how much money they want to make, or how professional a teacher they consider themselves. It does exist, in general terms, nonetheless. Remember, success and relationships in Korea are all about hierarchy, and assessing hierarchy requires assignment of status. You may not like it, but it is the reality of the situation.

At the bottom of the scrum are the kiddie hakwons, and the elementary/middle-schooler hakwons. These make up the vast bulk of teaching opportunities in Korea, and as a newbie, chances are this will be the kind of job you are offered. There are good schools and bad, and good bosses and (very, very) bad. Whether you get a good one or a bad one is often a matter of sheer, dumb luck. If you get a personal recommendation about a school, that makes all the difference, although it is not unknown for people to talk up a school in order to find their own replacement, nor is it unknown for people to keep the names of good schools to themselves and their circle of friends incountry. The best jobs are frequently not advertised, as in many industries.

Next up are the more reputable chain schools (which often have individual branches that are hellholes, so being part of a chain is no guarantee of quality), where you may teach kids, university students, and/or adults. Adult classes almost invariably mean an early start (before they go to work) or a late finish (after they finish work) or, in the most horripilating of cases, both. Split shifts — where you work from, say, 6:30 am to 9 am and then again from 6 pm to 9 pm — are less common than they once were, but still almost the rule in adult hakwons. This kind of schedule may well drive you insane, even if you are allowed to go home and sleep during the day, if you do it for any length of time. Some of these hakwon jobs are good, and some lucky new srrivals find great bosses or great salaries, or truly love teaching kids, and stay at the hakwons for many years. Some.

For many, the next step up the food chain is getting a university position. The workload is easy, the students are, if not motivated, at least generally quite pleasant, and although the money isn’t great, such a position leaves plenty of time for travel, writing, study, drinking, or whatever. At my last university position I worked four hour days four days a week, with four months paid holiday (plus national holidays etc), and made in the lower mid-range of the salaries quoted above.

Top of the heap for many is corporate jobs, teaching, editing, proofreading, developing curricula, and so on. These positions are few and far between, and unless you’ve been incountry for a number of years and have a great deal of experience with teaching Koreans and knowledge of Korean cultural norms, you might not even get an interview. There are exceptions, but they are few. Your alma mater means almost as much in this situation, as it does for Koreans, as anything else.

You will pay tax, healthcare and pension from this. For Americans and Canadians, it is law that your employer must deduct 4.5% of your salary for pension, and kick in an additional 4.5%. This money will be refunded (but you must apply) on departure from Korea. After a year, it will be somewhat more than a month’s salary. Antipodeans may not be able to reclaim their pension — the law may be changing there. Some universities use a private pension plan, so your contribution may vary.

Income tax will be deducted, at a rate that should not exceed 5%. Healthcare should be provided through the employer, and deductions will be on the order of 50,000 won per month, perhaps less. You will receive a paper healthcare booklet with a plastic sheath that you must take to clinics and hospitals to receive coverage.

You will often be promised training when you are offered a hakwon job, but there is a 90-100% chance you will not receive any. This is a cruel joke, but every time someone new to Korea complains about it, I am compelled to laugh nastily, mostly because I’m a complete bastard. Buy a book or two before you come, is my best advice, if you’ve never taught.

You will be offered accommodation, and you will in almost all situations be required to pay utilities for your apartment. Gas, water and electricity can be very expensive here. If you consume them to the same degree you’re used to in North America or Australia (or…) you will probably be paying between 100,000 and 200,000 won per month. Your accommodation may be single or shared, and this is something you should verify up-front. Many schools, understanding the preference of many for single housing, are offering it these days. Asking for pictures of your housing may be a good idea – it will in many cases be incredibly tiny, old and dingy. This is by no means always the case – it is increasingly common for good schools and universities to offer quite attractive, modern housing – but it is something to look out for. Nothing will depress you faster than a dim, mildewy closet to go back home to after an exhausting day of teaching.

Most schools offer airfare, either upfront or on a reimbursement basis. None will pay your return airfare if you break your contract, and if you notify them that you are quitting early, rather than just disappearing (as many do, which makes the level of trust for the rest of us grind down another notch), the school may well try to deduct the inbound airfare from your salary. Some school have begun withholding a portion of the first few months’ pay as a kind of insurance policy, usually because they’ve had teachers to a Midnight Run before. This is technically illegal, but if you sign a contract that mentions it, you really can’t complain too much. Read your contract carefully before you sign it, is the lesson here.

Most schools offer a contract completion bonus, usually equivalent to one month’s salary. This is sometimes finessed by claiming that the bonus was built in to the salary, and paid in installments. This is a scam, but a common one, and needs to be verified up front.

Bosses

Korean hakwon owners are almost universally reviled, and with good reason. The vast majority are entirely unconcerned with education per se, and obsessed with making (and scrimping to save) money. That’s why they got into the business, in almost all cases, and it is a lucrative one, if they play their cards right. There are horror-stories galore available around the net, and many of them are true, so I won’t bother getting lurid here, but a warning : caution is advisable. Treat your boss with deference and respect, and never disagree with him (chances approach 100% that it will be a ‘him’) in public. Don’t trust him until you’re sure you can, but not in a negative way, until you’re given reason. Just be sensibly cautious. Buy a book like ‘Ugly Americans, Ugly Koreans’ to learn about some norms of behaviour and how accidental offense happens in both directions, before you come. It is better to err on the side of overcaution and over-solicitiousness than to give offense, because once you do it, you may well be cast into the ‘waeguk-in who will never understand Korea’ bin, never to be recycled. Koreans love to label others, as do most folks, but their labels can be very sticky indeed.

That said, your Korean boss may just be a total psycho. It really isn’t that uncommon.

Do not assume that your director is cheating you by default, but have a clear understanding of what your mutual responsibilities are, and be vigilant (in a polite and professional way) to ensure that if you are upholding yours, he is similarly upholding his. Never accuse him of anything to the contrary in public, unless you have gotten to the bridge-burning stage. Try and remain calm in the face of apoplectic bluster, rather than giving back as good as you get. Korean men are brought up to believe that temper tantrums are an effective and acceptable means of dealing with confrontation and frustration, particularly with those who they perceive to be beneath them in the social, Confucian strata.

Confucian ideas are an important substrate to dealing with people here, particularly older males. Understand (even if you don’t agree), and try to leverage the fact that your only hook into the hierarchy (especially if you are young, female, and foreign, or any combination of the three) is that you are a teacher, and teachers are to be given respect. At least when they behave in a manner deserving of respect, where people can see ‘em.

Paperwork

You will be asked for originals of your qualifications and other paperwork, if you get to the contract signing stage. This paperwork is sometimes lost. Korean immigration recently lost my original university diploma. Yeah, I know. It happens, but these things can be replaced, although it generally does cost. Once immigration approves you and you have signed a contract, one of two things will happen — you will either be sent a document which authorizes the local Korean consulate to issue you an E-2 Teacher visa, good for one year, or you will be told to fly to Korea (no visa is required for most nationalities to enter as a tourist) and, once here, be sent to Japan to get the visa. The school should pay for both trips, although many schools try to refuse, often successfully. Be aware that if you teach after arrival in Korea and before you have that E-2 in your passport, you are breaking the law, and can be fined or deported.

To start a job at a new employer, you must receive your E-2 outside of Korea. Signing a new contract with the same employer only requires a trip to the local immigration office.

Recruiters

The Dave’s ESL Cafe Korean Jobs list, which is probably the single best resource for finding a job for people both outside Korea and already incountry, has been swamped in the last year or so with recruiter ads. “We have best jobs! All wonderful happy time fun! Beautiful city most good living in Korea!” and so on. The community is divided on recruiters – some have had positive experiences, and experienced no problems in finding jobs through them. My first job in Korea was through a recruiter, although I did not realize it at the time, and in many ways the job was a good one. But there are many who will tell you to never, ever use a recruiter, just because of the sheer number of unscrupulous, unprofessional agencies out there. I tend to agree, but if you take care, you may get lucky.

I recommend dealing with a school directly. The fewer intermediaries there are between you and the person you’re actually going to be working for, the better. Recruiters receive a payout for every warm body they deliver to a school, and sometimes a cut of the salary paid, which inclines them to push candidates toward positions regardless of the quality of that position, which is not a situation that should inspire trust. Using a recruiter may make your job search easier, but that is not necessarily a good thing.

Contracts and their importance (or lack thereof)

Contracts are a mixed bag in Korea. Some are stuffed with pages and pages of badly-written minutiae, all inserted, in most cases, because some previous employee behaved badly or performed poorly or drank too much or something of the kind, and the school is trying to close loopholes that might allow such things. Some contracts will have clauses that are outright illegal in Canada or America (or…), and these can be argued against but will rarely be changed. They are for the most part left unenforced, anyway, but when it is in the school’s interest, your director will not hesitate to point out the letter of the contract, and demand compliance. In no uncertain terms.

The other side of this is that with most Korean employers, the relationship between the parties to a contract is more important than the agreement on paper. This happens not only at the level we’re talking about, but manifests itself in the frustration that many western business people experience when negotiating with their Korean counterparts – Koreans frequently want to revisit language and conditions of an agreement long after, from the perspective of the westerner, all pertinent discussion has been finished, and the agreement has been ‘put to bed’.

This puts the employee into a difficult situation : when making a complaint about conditions of employment that appear to breach the agreement signed, many Korean directors will explain that ‘that’s not way do in Korea,’ and attempt to get out of their responsibilities, which the teacher assumes, rightly, are legally binding. On the other hand, when a teacher does or requests something that is outside the contract language, the director may turn around and say that ’sorry, not in contract’ as a reason to refuse the request or censure the activity. It can be maddening.

The EFL-law website is a good resource of last resort in this situation, but it must be said that in 9 cases out of 10 pushing a dispute to the point where legal or human rights recourse is necessary will mean that the foreigner loses. Not that you can’t win, but that you probably won’t. You should be aware that the system is strongly weighted in favour of your boss, and chances of prevailing are not good.

Which means that you should do everything possible to avoid getting to the point where conflict is inevitable. Flexibility, sensitivity to the concept of ‘face’, reasonable and professional behaviour in the workplace, and care to develop a positive relationship with your employer, on their terms, will help this. It’s a cultural minefield, but if you learn the rules of the game upfront, almost all conflict can be avoided before it occurs.

Your job

The failings of the Korean education system are manifold, but with regard to language teaching, they are quite specific. In the past, and to a large degree in the present as well, many people studied English with people who couldn’t speak it. They studied in the ‘traditional’ Korean style, which is firmly in the model of ‘teacher as source of knowledge and wisdom’, lecturing. They studied grammar, translated passages with dictionaries, were taught incorrect pronunciation and in many cases incorrect idioms and grammatical constructs (older Koreans without fail use ‘as possible as’ when they mean ‘as much as possible’ as a result of the former being nominated as the correct formation and taught as such in the all-important university entrance exams for years, for example), by Korean teachers of English.

As a result, most students, at most levels, need practice speaking, and listening to a lesser degree. Getting Koreans to speak in class, though, is frequently an exercise in frustration, as the learning style they have had beaten into them over years or decades is in complete opposition to the idea of speaking up in class. Asking questions of one’s teacher is considered, traditionally, as a challenge and a sign of disrespect.

New teachers believe their students to be taciturn and sullen — in fact, in most cases, they’re just showing respect in the only way they’ve been taught to do so in the educational context, by attentive silence.

So strategies must be devised to overcome the pedagogical catch-22. Each teacher approaches it different ways, and those ways vary with different student ages, but providing structure and clear examples to model expectations so that the student’s chances of failure are minimized is a good start, and is a wise strategy at all levels of language teaching. It’s all the more important in the Korean context.

People

Although many teachers in Korea — most, perhaps — make an avocation of complaining bitterly about the country and the people, and some leave with anger and a sense of relief at having ‘escaped’, a lot of those same people miss the Korean people and their nation, and inevitably return. Some others just settle in, bitching all the while, broken expat records, and they can be annoying to have a beer with, and are best avoided. Others choose their targets a bit better.

It seems to be the lot of foreigners living here to have a love-hate relationship with Korea, and with Korean people, who can be so xenophobic and yet so hospitable and kind, so abrasive and impolite yet so conscious and careful of the niceties and minutiae of feeling and mood, so puritanical but so boozy and sexy and free, so group-focussed yet so individualistic, so backwards but so modern. The contradictions never cease to fascinate, and for a foreigner who makes even a cursory attempt to understand the old, odd, and ornate monoculture he or she is leaping into, and to read and understand a modicum of the nation’s history, and to make an attempt to learn a little of the language, the rewards are great.

I won’t lie — it’s hard as hell to live in Korea, perhaps harder than anywhere else in the world with a similarly high standard of living, for the westerner. But it’s equally hard, once you’ve gotten under the surface a bit, to leave it behind. And if you’re young, and looking at a Nametag Nation job back home, the money, once you’ve added in all the benefits, is undeniably great.

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