Jaran Shin’s Expanding ecological approaches to language, culture, and identity: Politics and power in South Korean multicultural youths’ experiences’ is not just a timely book, it is a necessary one.
With South Korea (hereafter, Korea) facing plummeting birth and marriage rates alongside a rapidly aging labour force, and the current administration advocating for legislation which would only further marginalise minorities, this volume of multicultural youths’ narratives provides invaluable insights into the daily struggles of the ‘other’ in Korea.
More specifically, by observing how societal discrimination and structural inequality are broken down and reconstituted in the everyday lives of six teenagers branded ‘multicultural’ by the Korean government on account of their mixed parentage, the book succeeds in the challenging task of evincing coherence from chaos, resulting in an empirical and emotional account of becoming and being ‘different’ in contemporary Korea.
The book is divided into three parts. The first opens with the introduction of the book’s conceptual and theoretical framework, including a range of concise definitions of language, culture, and identity, conceived as being non-essentialist, non-binary and not fixed. Here, Shin also sets out her argument that any study of human existence needs to explore ‘how they reside, how they interact with others, or how they experience life’ (p.14). This approach, Shin argues, allows us to understand how difference variously challenges, competes or collaborates with the ideologies of ‘mono’ in Korea, which serve as scaffolding for the dominant discriminatory structures. These are discussed in greater depth in Chapter 1, where Shin also introduces several pervasive discourses about ‘multicultural’ children growing up in Korea, including their dual role as both a ‘threat’ to national homogeneity and an ‘economic opportunity’ as part of continued globalisation efforts in the country.
Chapter 2 describes the research participants and methods. The primary data is based on interviews and ethnographic work conducted with six ‘multicultural’ families living in Korea in 2014. Following the first part of intensive data collection, Shin remained in close contact with the families, and the data obtained from continued interaction over the next few years is used to build a longitudinal profile of the six key (pseudonymised) participants: Heedong, Tayo, Sungho, Hayang, Jinsoo, and Artanis.
The stories of these six young people with diverse ethno-racial, linguistic, cultural, political, and economic backgrounds, make up part two of the book, with Chapters 3, 4, and 5 presenting different findings on the participants’ processes of identity (re)construction. The reader gets to know each teenager, and understand how their status as a ‘damunhwa’ (multicultural) Korean intersects and interacts with their personal development and identity-formation. Along the way, it becomes difficult not to get emotionally attached to the narrators and be affected by their struggles navigating a complex environment in which they are forced to assert themselves, or otherwise consistently (re)negotiate their authenticity and autonomy as valid Korean subjects. Thus, it is heartbreaking listening to Jinsoo rationalise his ‘misfortune’ of being born a multicultural child in this life as matter of unmyeong (destiny) (p. 99), much as it is uplifting to read Sungho’s critical and incisive poetry which exposes the absurdities of the social categories he is forced into (p. 111, to read my personal favorite, ‘Ttong/Shit’). Shin’s participants are presented as complex, three-dimensional characters, making their stories all the more impactful and memorable.
While they do not experience multiculturalism in a singular way, through their presence alone, all six teenagers challenge the local ideologies of ‘purity’ and introduce new subjectivities into the Korean national framework. This is by no means an easy task, and it becomes clear throughout the book that socioeconomic status is a major part of the quality of life of the six families. Shin makes as much apparent in her descriptions of the teenagers’ household environments, and the challenges they face in and across market and capital marked battlegrounds. Thus Hayang, in addition to navigating the daily difficulties of understanding class content delivered in academic Korean, and enduring severe school bullying, lives in a two-room semi-basement house, sharing her space with her close and extended family, and subsisting on minimal income. Such compounding of structural obstacles places the teenagers at the center of the tension between structure and agency, which ultimately gives rise to their identities as subjects who occupy the ‘unclear and disconcerted bifurcation zone in the imagined community of Korea’ (p. 138). In order to better understand this tension, in Chapter 6 Shin calls for the historicisation of structures underpinning Koreanness, with the aim of showcasing the implicit fluidity of the notion, and opening the space for diverse individuals to better assert their agency.
The interaction between processes of globalisation and migration and the hybrid, intersectional identities they produce, constitute the core theme of Chapter 7 – perhaps my personal favorite. It further unpacks the meaning of ‘multiculturalism’ in Korea, and returns to the notion of multilingual subjects with a section looking at how they situate and use their linguistic resources and language abilities within the context of a highly stratified society focused on economic growth.
Finally, in the conclusion, Shin sets out what she argues native Koreans should learn from the lives of multicultural youth in Korea, including the rewriting of national narratives in such a way to incorporate the history of diversity in the country, while still maintaining the coherence of unified nationhood.
Although at times the book struggles to keep track of all the elements introduced, and occasionally veers off into extended, decontextualised theoretical debates, it remains an impressively insightful and cohesive narrative of multiculturalism in Korea. Some may question the representativeness of findings sourced from such a small pool of participants, but the longitudinal nature of the research largely makes up for the restricted study population. At the same time, I would like to see qualitative studies move away from the Seoul Capital Area, particularly when exploring a phenomenon such as multiculturalism, which is likely to be even more complex in smaller urban and rural areas.
That being said, Expanding Ecological Approaches to Language, Culture, and Identity is a highly significant contribution to the study of identity policies and practices in Korea, and its findings are relevant to a range of disciplines, including applied and socio-linguistics, as well as Korean Studies in general. The book offers a strong argument for revisiting the notion of multiculturalism in the country, and exploring the struggles and challenges which hide behind this seemingly inclusive label of identity. Moreover, it provides a useful theoretical and methodological framework for studying the experiences of communities which exist at the margins of dominant societies in countries other than Korea. Most importantly, however, the book reminds us that politics and power are ultimately best understood on the ground, and in the personal, lived experiences of individuals who tend to benefit least from them.
The author of this book review is employed through the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2022-OLU-2250005).
