For English Studies, Koreans Say Goodbye to Dad

[Harold F. Schiffman]

June 8, 2008
For English Studies, Koreans Say Goodbye to Dad
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

AUCKLAND, New Zealand  On a sunny afternoon recently, half a dozen South
Korean mothers came to pick up their children at the Remuera Primary
School here, greeting one another warmly in a schoolyard filled with New
Zealanders.

The mothers, members of the largest group of foreigners at the public
school, were part of what are known in South Korea as wild geese, families
living separately, sometimes for years, to school their children in
English-speaking countries like New Zealand and the United States. The
mothers and children live overseas while the fathers live and work in
South Korea, flying over to visit a couple of times a year. Driven by a
shared dissatisfaction with South Koreas rigid educational system, parents
in rapidly expanding numbers are seeking to give their children an edge by
helping them become fluent in English while sparing them, and themselves,
the stress of South Koreas notorious educational pressure cooker.

More than 40,000 South Korean schoolchildren are believed to be living
outside South Korea with their mothers in what experts say is an outgrowth
of a new era of globalized education. The phenomenon is the first time
that South Korean parents famous focus on education has split wives from
husbands and children from fathers. It has also upended traditional
migration patterns by which men went overseas temporarily while their
wives and children stayed home, straining marriages and the Confucian
ideal of the traditional Korean family. The cost of maintaining two
households has stretched family budgets since most wives cannot work
outside South Korea because of visa restrictions.

In 2006, 29,511 children from elementary through high school level left
South Korea, nearly double the number in 2004 and almost seven times the
figure in 2000, according to the Korean Educational Development Institute,
a research group that tracks the figures for the Ministry of Education.
The figures, the latest available, did not include children accompanying
parents who left South Korea to work or emigrate, and who could also be
partly motivated by educational goals. South Koreans now make up the
largest group of foreign students in the United States (more than 103,000)
and the second largest in New Zealand after Chinese students, according to
American and New Zealand government statistics. Yet, unlike other foreign
students, South Koreans tend to go overseas starting in elementary school
in the belief that they will absorb English more easily at that age.

In New Zealand, there were 6,579 South Koreans in the countrys elementary
and secondary schools in 2007, accounting for 38 percent of all foreign
students. We talked about coming here for two years before we finally did
it, said Kim Soo-in, 39, who landed here 16 months ago with her two sons.
It was never a question of whether to do it, but when. We knew we had to
do it at some point.

Wild geese fathers were initially relatively wealthy and tended to send
their families to the United States. But in the last few years, more
middle-class families have been heading to less expensive destinations
like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Now, there are also eagle fathers,
who visit their families several times a year because they have the time
and money. Those with neither, who are stuck in South Korea, are known as
penguin fathers. The national experience is considered enough of a social
problem that an aide to South Koreas president recently singled out the
plight of the penguin fathers.

President Lee Myung-bak said he would start to address the problem by
hiring 10,000 English teachers. This is unprecedented, he said. Korea is
actually the only country in the world undergoing such a phenomenon, which
is very unfortunate. South Korean students routinely score at the top in
international academic tests. But unhappiness over educations financial
and psychological costs is so widespread that it is often cited as a
reason for the countrys low birthrate, which, at 1.26 in 2007, was one of
the worlds lowest.

South Korean parents say that the schools are failing to teach not only
English but also other skills crucial in an era of globalization, like
creative thinking. That resonates among South Koreans, whose economy has
slowed after decades of high growth and who believe they are increasingly
being squeezed between the larger economies of Japan and China. It could
take years to see how well this wave of children will fare back in South
Korea, especially since they are now going overseas at the elementary
level. But earlier this decade, when the wild geese children tended to be
high school students, many succeeded in plying their improved English
scores to get into colleges in the United States or other English-speaking
countries, education experts said. For others, their years overseas was a
roundabout way to get into top South Korean colleges, like Yonsei
University in Seoul, which increasingly offer courses or entire programs
in English.

For New Zealands public schools, which charge foreign students annual
tuition of $8,700, South Koreans provide an important source of revenue.
The economic benefits have helped offset resentment toward an Asian influx
that has remade many schools in Auckland, the countrys largest city,
lending an Asian character to the business district and raising home
prices in the wealthier suburbs. At Remuera Primary, Ms. Kim said she
believed that English fluency would increase her sons chances of gaining
admission to selective secondary schools in South Korea and ultimately to
a leading university in Seoul.  Her husband, Park Il-ryang, 43, graduated
from a little-known Korean university, and he said that the resulting lack
of connections had hampered his own career.

Before coming here, the parents had sent one son, Jun-sung, now 10, to
evening cram schools and their other son, Jun-woo, now 8, to an English
preschool. Parents in their apartment building talked incessantly about
their childrens education. Even so, the sons were not making sufficient
progress in English, the parents said. They hired a private English tutor
to supplement the supplementary cram schools. We didn't think the cram
schools were doing any good, but we were too insecure to stop sending
them, because the other parents were sending their children, Ms. Kim said.

At their house recently, the sons peeked through the living-room blinds to
see whether their neighbor, Charles Price, was free to play. In no time,
the boys were coming and going, barefoot, between the houses, carrying
Bionicle action figures. The parents were pleased that their sons had
integrated well into the neighborhood and school, and were now even
speaking English to each other.  But Ms. Kim was worried that her younger
son was making shockingly simple mistakes in his spoken Korean and might
not form a solid Korean identity. Striking the right balance would be
critical to the brothers re-entry into South Korea, with its fierce
competition to get into the best schools.

South Korean womens rising social status and growing economic power have
fueled the wild geese migration, according to education experts like Oh
Ook-whan, a professor at Ehwa Womans University who has studied the
separated families. Conservatives have criticized the wild geese mothers
for being obsessed about their childrens education at the risk of
destroying their marriages. The womens real intention, they say, is to get
as far away as possible from their mothers-in-law. The mothers say they
are the modern-day successors to one of the most famous mothers in East
Asia: the mother of Mencius, the fourth-century Chinese Confucian
philosopher. In a story known in South Korea, as well as China and Japan,
Mencius's mother moved to three neighborhoods before finding the
environment most favorable to her sons education.

I don't know why Mencius's mother is so revered and why we wild geese
mothers are so criticized, said Chang Soo-jin, 37, who moved here with her
two children nearly two years ago. Our coming out here is exactly the same
as what she did. Here, the English skills of her 6-year-old daughter, Amy,
have improved so much that she now has the reading abilities of an
8-year-old, said her teacher at Sunderland, a small private school where
all 16 foreign students come from South Korea. Yet Amys father, Kevin
Park, 41, was not totally convinced that the benefits had been worth
splitting up the family. He had reluctantly agreed with his wifes decision
to come here with the children and then extend their stay, twice.

After his family left Seoul, Mr. Park, an engineer, moved into what South
Koreans call an officetel, a building with small units that can be used as
apartments or offices. Hearing about wild geese fathers becoming dissolute
living by themselves, he stopped drinking at home. I'm alone, I miss my
family, Mr. Park said grimly in an interview in Seoul.  Families should
live together. Living apart for years strains marriages and undermines the
role of a father, traditionally the center of the family in South Koreas
Confucian culture, education experts and psychologists said. Some spouses
have affairs; some marriages end in divorce.

Even if there are problems, some couples choose to ignore them for the
sake of their childrens education, said Choi Yang-suk, a psychologist at
Yonsei who has studied wild geese families in the United States and
Canada. Here, Park Jeong-won, 40, and her husband, Kim Yoon-seok, 45, an
ophthalmologist who was here on a visit, said their marriage had grown
stronger despite living apart for four and a half years. Every reunion,
they said, was like a honeymoon. But while Ms. Park said she talked to her
husband a couple of hours daily by phone, she said her son and daughter
never asked to talk to their father. He, in turn, never asked to talk to
his children, the couple said.

We may be a strange family, Ms. Park said. Dr. Kim said his own father had
always been too busy with work to spend much time with the family, and on
weekends woke up at 4 a.m. to play golf. Maybe that's why, now that I'm a
father, I have a similar relationship with my son, he said. Asked whether
she missed her father, Ellin, 11, said: I don't miss him that much. I see
him every year. Do you think that's enough? her mother asked, a little
surprised. Ellin corrected herself and said she saw him twice a year.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/world/asia/08geese.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

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