In the past few decades, patterns of transnational migration have changed dramatically. No longer seen as a one-time move to a new country followed by permanent settlement, migration involves complex movements of people with varied durations, purposes and trajectories. As people move back and forth across different countries, return migration to one’s country of birth has increased, representing approximately 26-31 percent of overall transnational mobility.
Transnational educational migration is growing, especially in East Asia. Students leave to acquire linguistic capital, sociolinguistic capital, and transnational experience with the intention of returning home afterwards. Study abroad by primary and secondary school students, or Early Study Abroad (ESA), is particularly popular among South Korean students, with increasing numbers of younger Chinese students as well. Since the early 2000s, there has been a sharp increase in the number of South Korean students studying abroad before college. While ESA is based on a planned return to South Korea, ideally culminating in entrance into an elite high school or university, for those with ample resources it can also extend to an undergraduate degree abroad.
Over the past few decades, ESA has diversified. English-speaking countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom still host the highest number of students, but destinations such as China, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia are becoming more common. Stays of several years, sometimes with one parent in South Korea and one parent abroad, were a familiar pattern in the past, but parents today are orienting more towards repeated shorter visits over the span of a lifetime combined with special educational programs in South Korea. Although official counts of ESA report a marked decline since 2008, from our perspective the shifts in form, trajectory, and duration testify to a sustained belief in the value of time abroad and experience interacting with foreigners.
Early study abroad in South Korea
Like many English-as-a-foreign language countries, South Korea has emphasised the importance of English as a medium of global communication. English became a highly sought after resource in South Korea in tandem with neoliberal reforms that transformed the structure of the economy and education. In South Korea, English is seen as a characteristic of the diligent individual who constantly engages in self-development and self-actualisation. Having ‘good English’, as demonstrated through reading tests, grammar tests, and oral interviews, has become vital for securing a place at a top university, getting professional employment, and advancing in the workplace. As contemporary South Korea has experienced the proliferation of part-time work, escalating living costs, and an unemployment rate for college graduates that now exceeds 30 percent, many South Korean parents view the study of English and time spent abroad as a necessary investment to secure their children’s future.
The emphasis on early education in English is driven by the belief that exposure in early childhood enables a child to develop capacities that cannot be acquired later in life. These include ‘authentic’ and ‘native-like’ English, ‘comfort’ interacting with foreigners, and the cultivation of a ‘global mindset’. Parents believe that these competencies must be nurtured throughout the lifespan, and that different institutions are equipped to develop particular aspects of a child’s overall formation (grammar vs. oral proficiency; doing well on college entrance exams vs. ‘confidence’ talking to ‘native speakers’). Consequently, ESA forms part of a carefully calculated life trajectory of stints in and out of South Korea for children with parents of means. It is one component of an assemblage that can include English-medium preschools, English-medium kindergartens, after school tutoring for parents who can invest in South Korea’s large and stratified private market; as well as stints overseas for students at the primary and secondary school level.
ESA is based on the belief that children need to live and study abroad in order to develop fully. Experience abroad is considered essential for transforming students into multilingual adults who can fluently and smoothly communicate with foreigners. This narrative is built on a contrast with the figure of the insecure, awkward South Korean of an older generation who uses ‘inauthentic’, ‘overly-Koreanised’, and ‘accented’ English. The construct of the idealised global citizen, who possesses ‘authentic’ and ‘native-like’ fluency in both Korean and English and a cosmopolitan outlook, remains tied to migration. South Koreans describe their country as one that is becoming multicultural, as demonstrated by the widely circulated fact that foreign-born residents increased from 390,000 in 1997 to 2.5 million in 2023, or approximately five percent of the current population. A wide array of government policies has increased the numbers of transitory labourers, marriage migrants, international students, diasporic Koreans, and ‘native speaker’ English teachers in South Korea. Nevertheless, many parents still believe that one must leave the country in order to truly develop into a person who will be successful in the competitive domestic and global marketplace.
Views of early study abroad returnees
While those who participate in ESA may understand it as a valuable experience, the government both supports globalisation initiatives while attempting to curb the trend of spending long spells away from the country. Since the early 2000s the South Korean media has portrayed ESA as risky for children, warning parents not to hastily dispatch their children to unknown countries. The South Korean government has also framed ESA as a talent drain and a waste of national resources. At the same time, however, they have invested significantly in efforts that bring the experience of living elsewhere to South Korea. The hope is that if students can access English villages, international zones, and foreign language schooling in South Korea itself, then they will not feel the need to leave. These government efforts thus reinforce the belief that the experience of globalisation is valuable and important.
Anti-ESA rhetoric forms part of a broader suite of surging discourses of class polarisation, in which the wealthy are cast as morally bankrupt people who will stop at nothing to reinforce their privilege. For example, one longstanding discourse portrays ESA as an exit strategy for lazy rich kids, referred to disparagingly as ‘escapee returnees’, who lack the diligence to succeed in South Korea’s competitive schooling system. Another frames young people who return to South Korea from time abroad as fakes who pretend to have acquired valuable resources abroad while actually just indulging themselves. The Korean term jogi yuhak ‘early study abroad’ has become highly stigmatised, and parents these days tend to say that they are investing in sending children abroad for the ‘experience’ (rather than for English) and that whatever they are doing is thus not technically ESA. From our point of view, the current discourse points not to rupture but to continuity, illustrating how migration out of the country for education has formed part of a Korean strategy since the Japanese colonial period from 1910 to 1945.
Although discourses on the merits and disadvantages of ESA are quite common in the national media, there has not been much attention paid to how students who studied abroad fare upon return. In order to fully understand the phenomenon, it is important to examine what opportunities and challenges students face upon re-entering South Korea. Are ESA returnee students truly enjoying the academic achievement and social success that is hoped for? How are they experiencing academic and social re-integration?
Data on ESA returnee students is not easy to obtain. While Statistics Korea publishes annual reports on gwigughagsaeng ‘returning students’ who are under the age of 19, this category does not track whether children went abroad specifically for educational purposes or to accompany their parents who were posted overseas. It excludes students who leave when they are in middle school or high school but return for university. It is thus very difficult to determine the exact number of returnee students or to obtain data on their ages, destinations, amount of time spent abroad, or placement in schools upon return. The absence of official data on these students points to the lack of recognition of returnees as a group that would be interesting or worthwhile of study.
Their sense of ‘otherness’
Returnees leave with the expectation that their transnational experiences will lead to academic success and privileged opportunities on return. As a small number of recent studies has shown, however, many returnee students find their reintegration experiences difficult.
We found that ESA returnees face a complicated process of readjustment and reintegration that can take a substantial amount of time. They are often regarded by their peers as ‘different’, ‘too Westernised’ and ‘less Korean’. Interviews with 40 ESA returnees conducted by the first author of this article, Lee Jin Choi, demonstrated many examples of this uneasiness. This is an example from a girl we call Jieun, who left Seoul for Chicago when she was 11 and returned at age 13:
’I still remember my first day back at a Korean school. As I introduced myself in front of the whole class, I realised that I was the only one with my hair in a ponytail without bangs and the only one wearing glasses. My classmates looked at me as if I was an alien. To me, the most challenging part of readjusting to a Korean school was changing how to dress, speak and behave properly according to their standards. For a while, I had to endure other kids constantly saying things like “Oh, that’s because she lived abroad” to point out differences between me and them’. (Jieun [a pseudonym], a 22-year-old former ESA student.)
Like Jieun, many ESA returnee students report that they experience marginalisation on return, from being called ‘too foreign’ to being verbally or physically harassed by other students because they act ‘too different’. Although bullying is seen as an important social problem these days, ESA returnees are not usually framed as victims in either the scholarly literature or in the Korean media.
Some ESA returnee students also told us that their ESA experience was read as a sign of being deceitful, and that their multilingualism was framed as inauthentic. Here, we can see how students are subjected to discourses of class polarisation that frame time abroad as crass efforts to secure one’s privilege:
‘Koreans tend to treat my advanced English skills as something that I bought using my father’s money, rather than recognising the effort I put into acquiring them. In high school, I often heard classmates make sneering remarks like, “If I went abroad and spent a lot of money, I’d be a better English speaker than him. Haha”’. (Wonjun [a pseudonym], a 21-year-old former ESA student who left Seoul for Houston, Texas when he was 10 and returned at age 13.)
In such narratives, students’ hard-won skills in English are not a marker of individual diligence or global acumen, but simply a commodity that can be purchased if one has the resources.
In today’s globalising South Korea, the government recognises some categories of children as vulnerable. For example, the bullying of children from so-called ‘multicultural’ families is understood as a serious social problem that requires intervention. However, the ostracisation that ESA returnees report is not attended to, either institutionally or in media reports. ESA returnees are not framed in the public discourse or by their schools as children who are vulnerable to others; indeed, they are likely to be typecast as entitled perpetrators rather than victims in contemporary Korean dramas that fictionalise the world of the uber wealthy. This typecasting, we argue, carries over into the treatment of actual returnees, who are adultified on the basis of their class privilege, and thus not seen as deserving of protection and compassion as typical children would be. While the stereotype is that such experiences only add to such children’s already considerable privilege and that they result in, at worst, a minor and temporary spell of readjustment, our research shows that the sense of dislocation can persist well into adulthood. In another study Jenna Kim and Adrienne Lo found that ESA returnees interviewed in 2008 reported feeling ostracised at work, with friends, and by their families. All of them said they experienced stress and anxiety on a regular basis from being made to feel like they did not fit in. They considered leaving South Korea, even as they acknowledged that the time they had spent abroad was not easy. Some returnees who are older now tell us that they have never felt like they truly belong in South Korea, even decades after return.
In this sense, we can see how stereotypes of essentialised ‘Koreanness’—as a quality that is inherent in one’s blood which does not need to be nurtured—impact migrants across class divides. The same ideologies that frame children from ‘multicultural families’ as never being able to be truly Korean despite being born and raised in South Korea also affect those from privileged families, who are scrutinised for any sign that they are not ‘really’ Korean. In this way, the othering that returnees from ESA report parallels the experiences of adults of Korean heritage from various diasporic backgrounds, who also report that they are made to feel unwelcome and ashamed of not being ‘truly Korean’. As South Korean society has become increasingly diverse, it is crucial to consider whether the essentialist construct of ‘Koreanness,’ deeply ingrained in the society, tends to not only reproduce the rigid boundary between ‘pure’ and ‘pseudo’ Koreans but also to leave all Korean students behind. Could efforts to accept cultural and sociolinguistic difference help to diminish these exclusionary dynamics? Is there room for an understanding of Korean identity that encompasses multiple experiences and backgrounds?
Authors: Dr Lee Jin Choi & A/Prof Adrienne Lo.
The research for this chapter was supported by grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (#37510) and the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2018-OLU-2250001) awarded to the second author.
Image: Korean students in the USA. Credit: SunyKorea/Flickr.