어떻게 왔어? or, Wine and Sympathy

Last night while I was out running an errand, I ran (almost literally) into an exchange student from the States. As we were crossing the street, this unknown girl suddenly stopped, waved, and called out to me. "Hey," she asked, "Would you like a bottle of wine?"
Silly question! If nothing else, it will fuel another episode of Bomb English!
Turns out she was a music student doing an exchange at a local university, and it was her last night before heading home. Her Korean friends came to check out what was taking her so long, and we all got to talking. That inevitably led to The Question:
How did I end up in Korea?
By and large, unless you're a hyphenated Korean-Japanese/Chinese/American/Russian/Gambian/whathaveyou, people wonder how you got here. Especially if you're a guy, people wonder if you're here because of your significant other's ethnicity or background. If you're a girl, they're just confused. Certainly even back home I was in the minority as a non-ethnically Korean person studying Korea. It seems to be a country where foreigners end up almost by accident.
My arrival was nearly accidental as well. Way, way, way back in high school I'd been on a summer exchange program to our sister school. I had a wonderful time, and the school I studied at suggested that I come back and study there for a full year after I graduated from my school in the US. I came home and proceeded to beg, plead, cry, and sob miserably in an effort to persuade my parents this was a good idea. But I had already started accumulating college credits (through the Running Start program), and my dad especially didn't want to see me waste the time I was putting in at the local college just to go back and do more high school. Instead, he made a deal with me: If I would wait, they would let me do an exchange as a college student. Deal!
I'd planned on going back to Japan, but my Asian History prof. suggested that I go on a new program to Korea. Korea . . .? I hadn't the foggiest notion of what Korea was like, but my professor persuaded me that that was a point in favor of going. I should experience something new while learning about a country that wasn't being studied as much as surrounding nations.
Well, the fact that the program was free didn't hurt either.
So I and a few friends applied that very day, and voila! we found ourselves Korea bound that summer. It was fabulous! It was a one month introductory Korean cultural program, and by the time I went home my research aims within anthropology had shifted west by a few hundred kilometers.
I was very lucky to be encouraged by a number of people both in and outside the field when I returned to the states. My adviser, an economic anthropologist who did all her fieldwork in Mexico, was wonderful and open even though I was the only person in the department interested in Asia. The only Asian history prof. at our school really took me under her wing, and deserves special thanks for being the one who initially proposed Korea as a place of study. Finally, huge thanks goes to the then-president of my college, who was born in Korea and took special pains not only to help me advance in my studies and give me opportunities to come here, but also consulted with me when I got back in how to best advance Asian studies at our own small school (the idea was that even though there was no formal major or minor in EAS, I had done a darned good job of getting so many Asia-related classes at my belt that there might be hope of having one in the near future at our school.)
To my booze-bestowing new almost-friend: Good luck, and I hope you make it back here. When you get home, be sure and thank the prof who sent you here for helping you find something a little more off the beaten path.

Why aren't we doing this for ALL Korean students?

Excerpted from the Korea Herald article:

Teaching Pupils from Diverse Backgrounds

Bogwang Elementary School has 34 students of foreign nationality or mixed ethnic background. Fourteen of them in first or second grades take extra lessons to help them read and write in Korean.

Most of them are children of expatriate workers or Koreans who are married to non-Koreans. Their parents are from Japan, China, Mongolia, the Phillippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Russia.

Over 2,200 children of Koreans with foreign spouses are enrolled at local elementary, middle and high schools in Seoul, according to the Education Ministry. Nearly half of their non-Korean parents are from Japan. Almost a quarter (501) are from China, followed by 230 from the Philippines, 73 from Vietnam, and 71 from Mongolia.

Nationwide, the number of children with a non-Korean parent more than doubled over the past two years to nearly 19,000.

Beatrice and Julia from Brazil are attending Bogwang Elementary School to learn Korean culture and the language.

"I think it's a great opportunity for my children because Korea is so far from Brazil and there may not be many chances to live in this part of the world again," said Nicolau Carol, the mother of Beatrice and Julia. Carol's family will be staying in Seoul for about a year because her husband is doing a medial fellowship here.

A Turkish girl named Sehra Zunbul made headlines last year for being elected class vice leader in the fourth grade. Sehra's father Faruk Zunbul is an Islamic missionary at the mosque in Itaewon.

With students from United States, Japan, Bangladesh, China, the Philippines, Russia, Indonesia and Iraq, Bogwang has frequent events and courses to help students learn about different cultures.

Students learn to cook dishes from around the world, and they visit places like the mosque and foreign embassies in Seoul to broaden their horizons.

By Kim So-hyun

My question is, why don't all Korean students go through some kind of cultural diversity training? When I was in elementary school, I spent large chunks of time researching and learning about life in other countries. I'm not going to say that it was the most comprehensive and detailed studies, but I had at least a vague idea that other people existed in other places, and that their lives were pretty interesting. Also, since we learned about many different places, it helped de-exoticize it. Admittedly, coming from the US it's easier to have had multicultural experiences. All but the smallest towns will have a mosque or temple or community center or something that goes beyond white-bread middle class Normal Rockwell ideas about what it is to be American, and even my hometown (the whitest city in America) there were still opportunities to meet and be friends with people from other neighborhoods, other backgrounds, other countries, other classes, etc.
But that's why Korea needs these classes for their children even more. Religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity are not going away, and considering the amount of bitching that goes on and the myriad large and small complaints that most foreigners here have, I think it's fair to say that Korea needs a little more understanding of and appreciation of diversity. And now, thanks to demographic shifts, they can start doing it in the comfort of their own back yards. This is not something that should be just for international students, or students with parents from overseas. Stop sticking these kids in "special" classes to learn about Korea, and start teaching regular Korean kids about lives outside the kimchi bubble. Give them a sense that people who aren't 100% 우리민족 are real people, too, and not freaks of nature.

In the meantime, I wish adult Koreans would step outside the sanitized kimchi bubble to find sources about foreigners from something other than the vapid and idiotic 미녀들의 수다. God, even just the title of that show is condescending.

Everybody Else Is Doing It (So Why Don't I?)

English teaching.
The mainstay occupation of a good chunk of the westerners here in Korea, teaching English can be lucrative, fun, and a rewarding professional career. Or, of course, it can be a hellish nightmare that leaves people screaming in terror as they run towards the exits. It's not the only occupation represented in the Korean blogsphere (Marmot, Metro, Korea Law Blog, etc. are all run by people who don't rely on the English language teaching industry) but between the remaining blogs and the majority of commenters on major blogs, the English teaching industry here is very well represented in the digital never-never land, as well as in other forums. So well represented, in fact, that everyone assumes I am an English teacher.
I'm not at all insulted by this. English teaching is cool. Some ESL teachers here are good, some are bad, and some are weird, but every occupation is like that. I'm a bit annoyed though, in the same way I am when I'm asked if I'm Canadian or Russian (ok, I am a bit insulted by the Russian bit, but not because Russians are some kind of primitive species I wouldn't want to be associated with. Rather, the question here when posed towards women tends to mean, "Are you a hooker?") I'm annoyed just because I'm not, and it gets boring to keep repeating who I am and what I do. Sometimes I wish I were an English teacher because it would make conversations with taxi drivers much more concise.
I've been an ESL teacher here in Korea before. I spent two years on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) grant, which places recent US college graduates in Korean middle and high schools to teach part time and spend the rest of their time doing . . . .well, something constructive. Research, language studies, something - We had a vague requirement to produce a short paper over our winter breaks. I wrote about ritual in Korean vs. Japanese new year celebrations, took photos of historically important buildings, studied Korean, learned how to perform a tea ceremony, and traveled, but the bulk of my time and attention was on teaching. I taught at boys' high schools, and loved every minute of it that didn't see me locked in the bathroom, crying. Teaching was fun and very, VERY challenging. I have a lot of admiration for people who teach well.
Still, that experience came to an end, and when it did I very happily rejoined an academic community that was interested in other things. Returning to Anthropology and Asian Studies as formal disciplines gave me a mental charge that teaching ESL didn't. I'm still very, very interested in English education and how it's conducted in Korea - but not from the angle of a participant. I've already written a grant proposal that I'll be schlepping around this next year for funding (please, God, please?) and I think that while I had fun teaching, there are people who are better at it and more interested in the actual communication of English language knowledge. I leave it to them. I always had more fun asking my students slightly inane questions about social constructs or pontificating on esoteric aspects of American life than I did actually making them construct grammatically correct sentences.
Someday I'll go into a long post about the regulations regarding visas for ESL teachers here and the incredibly exploitive 학원 system, but all in all it makes participating in the system kind of obnoxious. And with a degree in Asian Studies I wanted to find work that would use my skills instead of working in a field that I didn't intend to make my profession.
Have you ever tried to find a non-English teaching position in Korea? Needle in a haystack doesn't even begin to describe it - visa regulations are draconian, and what little work there is that's not teaching tends to require real, viable job skills that my grad school didn't prepare me for: Business, law, marketing . . . and I didn't qualify for any teaching outside of ESL because I only hold a masters.
In other words, I could earn a heck of a lot more money if I taught English, but at the cost of not pursuing more academic studies. I'm preparing (slowly) for a PhD program, but before I start I think I need a more solid base of experience and research and language, and I want to get that here. Hence my current position as researcher. The pay is lousy, but the hours are great and I feel like I'm participating in something that advances my studies and my prospects within Asian Studies.
God, it would be nice to earn money though!