Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bucheon bum]

Ny Times article

[PigeonFart]

Yes, one of my 12 yr old students left Korea last week (with her mother) to move to Canada for 2 years....it must have been the same kind of thing.

Some of my other students have siblings that attend high schools abroad. Must be quite expensive, not to mention emotionally difficult for such young people.

[blaseblasphemener]

Many of the kids are happy to be away from parents that only care about pushing their children to study 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. They aren't parents, they're more like prison guards.

[Young FRANKenstein]

[nautilus]

its just so ridiculous.

I know one parent who went to NZ for 2 years (kid still can't speak a word of english) while the father sits in Korea, unable to cook for himself.

how can any married couple agree to separate for 2 years??
2 years without sex with your wife???
insane.

[tzechuk]

[mithridates]

Yeah, an article on the 기러기아빠s. Half the time though it's because the married couple is bored of each other and sending them abroad is a very good excuse for the two of them to live as if they were single again. Minus all the money the dad has to earn and send over. That's one part the article never mentions.

[Cheonmunka]

One father, a friend and my family's, and I, were talking about it. It's not a good thing when families as in mother and father split. So, many children have guardians when they are overseas, as in family members like an aunt with her own children there.
Rather than think the kids learn no English, for fluency development it's an amazingly quick way to pick up English. Far better than wasting time at hakwons - just go to elementary school in Aus or NZ for a year or two. It does work, I've seen it working with schools and with these kids.
A quirk or a problem of it is that some of the women don't ever return to Korea but cycle thru countries and schools maintaining the study abroad pattern for years.

[Beej]

All of this for what? So the kid can get a job at Samsung some day? Ridiculous and sad.

[Ya-ta Boy]

An earlier version of this was families from smaller cities/rural villages sending their kids to a big city for education. Many lived with relatives; many lived alone. At the age of 14.

I have a friend from a small town near Gwangju. One weekend when he was about 12 his family piled on the bus and came up to Seoul. At the end of the visit his family told him he was not going home with them. He stayed in Seoul. He is still angry 20 years later.

I've met at least a dozen people who lived alone when they were 14, 15 in a bigger city to go to a better school. They've all said how lonely and difficult it was. Most say they appreciated the sacrifices their family made for their education.

[JongnoGuru]

Well isn't that great. As if Korea's plummeting birthrate wasn't already .... petrifying? ossifying? calcifying? hollowing out? (gd it, what word am I looking for here??) the country's education infrastructure fast enough, they're also tripping over each other to pull their kids right out of the country. And for a nation where, let's be honest, the average citizen down deep really doesn't like us or want us here, they sure as *beep* seem to think, act & live like the entire outside world is their very own 24-hour open playground, do they not? Yeah, they pay a lot for it; that ain't my point.

[princess]

[mithridates]

[Gamecock]

[excitinghead]

Japanese married couples have much the same attitudes towards sex. You can read an interview of Sumie Kawakami who recently wrote the book Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage and the Modern Japanese Woman on the subject here if you want. I discuss it on my blog here too.

Personally I think those attitudes, and the acceptibility of families being split for years, is a result of the salaryman system. Korea was actually the only country in the world that ever had more than 50% of male workers being one (pre-1997); Japan, with which the style of work is associated, actually only ever had 20%. But in both countries the idea of men going off to chaebol or keiretsu for sometimes 14 or 15 hours shifts (albeit not actually working for much of those), drinking often afterwards with colleagues, making enough through salary and side-benefits to support but virtually never see a family remains what many people regard as "normal".

Although Korea's numbers of salarymen has dropped like a stone in the last ten years and increasing numbers of couples need two incomes now, those attitudes still remain very strong. I can't remember where I read it sorry, but with workers still staying at the office pretending to work until the boss leaves every night, then its no great surprise that they have little interest in or energy for sex coming home at 10 or 11 after leaving at 6 in the morning.

So, Dad at work all day, drinking and maybe seeing prostittutes at night, Mum at home looking after the kids and none of them ever seeing him...hell, why wouldn't they be in an English-speaking country if they could afford it?

P.S. Forgot to mention that Japan too is one of those countries where it's perfectly normal for Dad to live in a completely different city to his families, and only see them on weekends. Again it's a side effect of the salaryman system, as promotions being based on seniority means that when the company says "you move to the Busan branch" than you do, but it makes sense for the family to stay where good schools are an so on. I think it has a knock-on effect on so many Korean unmarried couples living in different cities and only seeing each other once a week in love hotels too. Fun for sure, but not a real relationship in my book.


An irreverent guide to Korean social issues:
http://thegrandnarrative.wordpress.com/