Attitudes to English Study among Japanese, Chinese and Korean Women

Motivations, Expectations and Identity

Yoko Kobayashi, Yoko Kobayashi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000221121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

This edited book comprises chapters integrated around a central theme on college-educated Japanese, Korean, and Chinese women's orientation to English study. The collection is composed of two parts: (1) East Asian women's motivation to study in the West and (2) East Asian women's dream to use English as a career. The first part discusses their international migration as facilitated by factors characteristic of East Asian nations (e.g. middle-class women's access to advanced education and yet unequal access to professional career) and other factors inherent in each nation (e.g. different social evaluations of women equipped with competitive overseas degrees and English proficiency). The second part sheds light on the dreams and realities of East Asian female adults who, having been avid English learners, aim for "dream jobs" (e.g. interpreters) or have few other career choices but to be re-trained as English specialists or even as Japanese language teachers working abroad. This collection is suitable for any scholar interested in the lives and voices of young educated women who strive to empower themselves with language skills in the seemingly promising neoliberal world that is, however, riddled with ideological contradictions.

Part I
East Asian female students’ motivation to study in the West

1
Study abroad, media, and digital diaspora of Korean women

Youna Kim

Introduction

In the 1970s and the 1980s, most Koreans who left the country were of the lower middle class and working class who were seeking to improve their economic status, whereas since the 1990s there has been a strong tendency among upper- and middle-class Koreans to leave the country. A new wave of migratory movement has emerged since the government’s liberalization of overseas trip regulations in 1989. Korean migration has changed in character through the educational exodus of upper- and middle-class younger generations yearning for a differentiation of lifestyle and the power of social and cultural capital through study abroad (Kim 2011, 2016). Educational migration has generated a new form of global householding (Lee & Koo 2006), in which sustaining a new transnational family structure is emerging as a flexible, yet complex and continuous process of social reproduction and transnational practices among Korean upper-class and middle-class families. Now, educational migration is a widespread and almost normal middle-class phenomenon, including short-term frequent travel and study abroad sojourning, not only by university students but also by pre-university students for early study abroad (Lo, Abel-mann, Kwon, & Okazaki 2015; Lee 2016). This is driven in part by valorized ideologies of English (Park & Bae 2009), the practical and symbolic value of the English language as a marketable commodity, and upward occupational mobility in the globalizing labor market. The possession of a foreign degree and advancement in English as a linguistic capital are expected to be competitive factors for obtaining a better-paid job in urban centers. Study abroad is intrinsically linked to social stratification and status mobility since it possibly enables individuals to accumulate various types of capital and further lifts them to a higher scale of capital conversion. English is a language of inequality, supporting and renewing relations of power, including the capitalist relations of oppression (Park & Wee 2012). Unequal access to opportunities, resources, and social capital in the global chain of connections constitutes a critical social divide (Tsai 2016). Class-specific educational disparities and subsequent consequences continue to reinforce socioeconomic inequality and undermine social cohesion in Korea.

This new trend of migration has been intensified by the mainstream media, particularly the class-specific media discourse of neoliberal personhood (Park 2010) within Korea’s social transformation; neoliberal logic of human capital development; and neoliberal capitalism, pervaded by massive inequalities of resources, differential power, and opportunities in life politics. Media cultural discourses informed by the identification of a vaguely cosmopolitan stance create a multimodal realization of the world, which may allow a particular kind of agency aligned with the world to signify power and competency, a differentiating marker of identity, and social mobility in a global order (Kim 2005, 2011). The emerging cultural cosmopolitans tend to be highly educated, career-motivated younger generations, who are in part influenced by the significance of cultural globalization, particularly Western influence through global media discourses, with new forms of global consciousness and cultural distinction through discriminating class taste and the increasing dominance of the English language. In a cultural realm, this decisive shift towards the outward-looking disposition towards the world is intimately linked to capitalist and market-driven, globalized cultural expressions of media images and narratives – a major embodiment of the transformation of national culture. The globalization of media imaginary and its signification appears to suggest that the self is now capable of reinventing itself through the unrestrained consumption of the self in urban consumer culture, as a kind of aesthetic and cultural cosmopolitan in this mediated, blurred, and borderless landscape. It gives rise to individuality and diversity of the self, the heightened awareness of the self in relation to global Others in the everyday imagination beyond national borders. The urban spaces and cultures of contemporary Korea have increasingly been affected by globalization as a mediated cultural force, evidenced in the mobilizing patterns of everyday life, media cultural practices in an extended relation to global Others, lifestyle choices, and new identity formations (Kim 2005, 2011, 2016). These extended cultural resources and frameworks of non-local mediated knowledge in urban consumer culture can alter the conditions for the construction of social identity and enable youths and women to have the capacity to move away from a singular location of the homeland.

It is important to recognize that there has been a rising trend of Korean women leaving their country to experience life overseas as either tourists or students, eventually surpassing the number of men engaging in foreign travel (Kim 2011). For young women today, study abroad remains a major vehicle for entry into Western countries, and rapid economic growth in Korea has shifted the patterns of international migration towards the movement of the highly skilled and knowledge-intensive into Western countries. Investment in higher education overseas is seen as a legitimate channel and a strategy to move beyond boundaries or to resist a traditional gender role-oriented, collective biography. These new generations of women, who depart from the usual track of marriage, are markers of contemporary transnational mobility, constituting a new kind of diaspora – knowledge diaspora. Globalization of educational institutions in the West includes recruiting more and more students from around the world, resulting in diversified student demographics and the rise of student diaspora. The current trend towards temporary migration of highly qualified students constitutes the complex phenomenon of global knowledge diaspora, a new contemporary formation that does not fit into the traditional conditions, experiences, and communities of permanent migrants, or the traditional categories of diaspora, which are characterized as relatively poor, uneducated, oriented to physical labor, and permanently diasporic peoples. This new form of migration and displacement tends to form a prolonged temporary status or diasporic sojourner mentality, thus calling for an understanding of differentiated forms and experiences of migration today with unpredictable consequences on women’s lives.

Significantly, the development of global knowledge diaspora has been enabled and perhaps accelerated by the rise and ubiquity of the digital media, information, and communication technologies today. The multi-vocal and multi-directional flows of the ethnic media and digital technologies facilitate people’s transnational, nomadic, back-and-forth movements, creating new and complex conditions for identity formation in digital diaspora (Kim 2011). Since the 1990s, the mediated networks established through the Internet and the transnational ethnic media, such as the “Korean Wave” media culture (Kim 2013), have been instrumental in facilitating these changes in contemporary movements, allowing dispersed yet networked migrants to maintain transnationally their home-based relationships and to regulate a dialectical sense of belonging in host countries. The media, mostly taken for granted, go along with diasporic subjects in a digital age. These new kinds of transnational networks, connections, and various capacities of mobility are now changing not only the scale and patterns of migration but also the nature of migrant experience and thinking. The present wave of migration differs significantly from previous waves in that contemporary trans-border movements have been intensified, diversified, and feminized to some extent, and the process of digital diaspora has created new meanings of diasporic subjectivity and new consequences that are yet to be known and understood in detail.

This important phenomenon is part of a larger trend described as the feminization of migration, yet there remains a striking lack of analysis on both the gender dimension and the role of the digital media in this migratory process. Why do women move? Starting with this question, this chapter explores the unstudied nature of digital diaspora among young Korean women living and studying in the West. What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the digital media? This study documents and analyzes the highly visible, fast growing, yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational mobility and its relationship to the impact of media consumption in everyday life. Questions of identity are refigured in flows of desire that now operate transnationally, enacted by Korea’s economic growth and integration into globalization, which have enabled new generations of women to experience and then create a different life trajectory. This study brings forth a deepened understanding of the consequences of trans-national mobility and the role of the digital media, providing detailed empirical data on the nature of the women’s diaspora. Today’s proliferation of the media, with new imaginations, new choices, and contradictions, generates a critical condition for reflexivity, engaging everyday people with a resource for the learning of self, culture, and society in a new light (Kim 2005, 2008, 2011, 2019). As the study will argue, this plausibly powerful capacity of the media, deeply ingrained in what people take for granted, should be recognized in any attempt to understand the present phenomenon of transnational mobility in a digital age.

In order to explore the nature of women’s transnational mobility, media, and digital diaspora, this ethnographic project undertook a two-stage approach to data collection: personal in-depth interviews and diaries. Interviews were conducted with 20 Korean women who had been living and studying in the UK/London for three to seven years. The women’s ages were between 26 and 33 years; they were all single women of middle- and upper-class positions. They were recruited by the snowball method of sampling, based on friendship networks of the participants, and several snowballs were used to ensure that interviews were conducted with women from different universities. Interviews were open-ended and unstructured, supplemented by some fixed questioning on the social and cultural backgrounds of the participants. Each interview lasted between 1.5 and 2 hours, with four to five follow-up interviews on average to ensure a maximum flow of relevant data. Their longing to tell stories or the evocation of traveling narratives from the marginal spaces of diaspora, as manifested in the interviewing context, mutually led to another method of conversation – email diaries. A panel of ten diarists were recruited from the women interviewed; they were asked to write/email diaries about their experiences and to express in detail key issues raised by the interviews. This method was designed to generate biographical material accounts from the women and incorporate a reflexive biographical analysis. The women willingly participated in this study on the condition of anonymity and confidentiality. Throughout the text below, all names of the women in this study have been withheld to protect their identity and vulnerability.

Female individualization and transnational mobility: “it’s the only exit”

The feminization of international migration is not merely a matter of individual choice entailing individual causes and consequences. Rather, it is a much more complex intersecting reality that is emerging as a reaction of circumscribed gendered situations against women. Migration can be understood as a systematically gendered process intertwined with socioeconomic and cultural constraints, and with women’s marginalized experience of the gendered society. This salient phenomenon of female migration is closely linked to some aspects of cultural resistance to the society; persisting gender inequalities embedded in everyday life, such as oppressive corporate and family structures; and limited employment opportunities and career prospects (Kim 2005, 2011). Women in this study envisage a free, independent, individualized way of life through participation in work. They demand the right to control and build up a life of their own through a career choice. Therefore, the most pivotal concern to these women is employment.

Education guarantees nothing. In Korea, the more women are educated, the more we would find it difficult to get a job. Not just any kind of job that doesn’t need a university degree or just a low-paid secretary…. There was no job future, no hope to make my own life. It’s the only exit.

I am doing another MA degree (in the UK), moving from this country to another country, until I find a solution. Don’t know if another degree will give me a better job in Korea, or the same job, or a jobless life…. I don’t think higher education in Korea gives a good job opportunity. I also don’t believe higher education overseas will necessarily promise a better job opportunity, but I will give it a try anyway as there seems no other choice.

If work life is not fulfilling, mothers’ generation would choose marriage. We try to find an alternative, such as studying abroad, hoping to find better work. Work comes first, marriage later.

“Education without a guarantee” is illustrated in gendered Korea, where the dualistic labor market, with non-regular workers accounting for a third of employment, and the under-employment of women remain labor market challenges (KWDI 2009; OECD 2014; Kim 2016). The low female employment rate (53.5%, the tenth lowest in the OECD) in contrast to women’s high level of tertiary education (64%, the second highest in the OECD), and the gender gap in female earnings (64%, the largest gap in the OECD), reflect Korea’s under-utilization of its human capital, the high share of women in non-regular jobs, and the far lower share of women in management leadership positions. Many women are employed in traditional female tracks, non-managerial and secretarial positions unrelated to their educational qualifications. Young women have grown increasingly frustrated and angry at their precarious reality and bleak future of low wages, insecure employment situations, gender inequality, and scarce opportunities for advancement. A unique concern within Korea is to address a crisis of over-education in a way that does not reduce young people’s opportunities to undertake tertiary study, and to improve the connections between tertiary education and the labor market (OECD 2009). The labor market remains under considerable stress, with a large share of workers in non-standard or non-regular jobs and a developing mismatch between the non-regular jobs on offer in the service sector and the increasingly younger, university-educated entrants to the job market with skills beyond those used...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I East Asian female students’ motivation to study in the West
• Part II East Asian women’s lives after their English study at college
• Index