Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (20 page)

We spent quite a bit of time talking about the university’s recently established English requirements for graduation, namely an 800 or above on the TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication).
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The student government was busily campaigning against this change in graduation requirements and other features of Koryŏ University’s aggressive globalization efforts. Heejin was quite matter-of-fact about the requirement, which she argued should be even steeper. She posited that the social circles of future Koryŏ University graduates were ones that would demand English mastery. In passing, she remarked, “Last semester I saw more English than Korean [in course readings].” Heejin was unabashed that the university should confer these
and many more
credentials on its graduates. She described that she supports “anything that asserts that I have achieved to
this
level” [motioning with her hand]. She added later that Koryŏ University is her brand (
mak’ŭ
), and hence she wanted the bar to be set high.

Heejin
is a great defender of Koryŏ University’s efforts to remake itself from “national Koryŏ University” into “global Koryŏ University.” She described the university’s newspaper campaign, “Now we have turned our back on our homeland and are marching toward the world.” She praised the university’s efforts to be included in the list of the world’s top 100 universities,
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in which currently there are no South Korean universities. She was also well aware of the dean’s motto, “Let’s make good on our [university] pride!” For Heejin the march to the world, high levels of English acquisition, endless credentials, and ever-rising standards are the registers of self-development, not an “end” as her friend prodded her, but a way of life. Heejin’s career goals encompassed this sense of self-development. She detailed her ever-escalating desire for foreign languages: “My major is English [literature]. But it is unsatisfying to work only on English. After all, everybody does English. . . . Now I am learning Japanese, and I am continuing with Spanish too. And I also want to learn Chinese.” She described crafting a career through which she can use her English to “contact foreigners.” Heejin thus imagined herself in broad circulation, moving freely in the world, facilitated by her mastery of many tongues, and acting as an agent who can help bring South Korea to the world. Heejin wanted to become an “events director”; more specifically she hoped to orchestrate public events that would “circulate foreign culture.” Heejin’s description of her ideal career synthesized her aesthetics of vital self-development, as well as her sense of the global:

I like to make plans and to act on them, to bring them to life. . . . I’m the type who initiates getting together with my friends. I want to develop this side of me. I also like to deal with people. At one point I thought about becoming a producer, but I sensed that I would be constrained and that bothered me. . . . A producer is confined to this country. Instead, I want to have a hand in circulating foreign culture.

Throughout Heejin’s narrative, she was queried both by her friend as well as ourselves about those who might be left outside of her notion of vital personhood. Heejin insisted that, in today’s world of nations, South Korea cannot afford to be concerned about socioeconomic inequality: “It’s too early, we are still at the point where we have to make students study more and more; all we do now is play.” Lest the reader imagine that this affirmation of individual striving for success might preclude national identification,
comments
championing “competition” in such nationalistic terms were not uncommon. Heejin was not alone in asserting that South Korea could ill afford more egalitarian policies in the face of its race for global standing. As many have argued, nationalism and cosmopolitanism often go hand in hand (Park and Abelmann 2004; Schein 1998; Cho 2008).

As for people who can’t afford the private after-school education indispensable to upper-tier college entrance, Heejin merely offered, “They should work hard and make themselves rich, too.” This remark perhaps betrays Heejin’s squarely middle-class background, which had allowed her to receive private after-school education. In the highly personalized project of self-realization, the individual must fashion her own mobility. Heejin identified state policies for “equalization of educational opportunity” with “dumbing down” the country in a way that it can ill afford in the global race.
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Toward the end of our meeting, her friend interjected a comment that Heejin found simply beyond comprehension. In the torrent of talk about English, her friend confessed to preferring the study of Korean literature, to which Heejin simply replied, “I don’t get it.” In her view, a preference for Korean literature would limit oneself to a smaller universe, a domestic scene with lower standards and a limited global circulation. Heejin’s focus on market value made it clear that she felt that citizens bear a responsibility to be competitive in the global contest. Her friend’s commitment to Korean literature was too localized and would be a drag on the nation’s movement toward the global.

Heejin thus positioned herself as a neoliberal paragon, and all the more so as the graduate of a special-purpose high school, one that ran against the policy current of school equalization. As an elite college student, she enunciated the neoliberal turn, relishing in the project of her own creative capital formation.

A “Third-Tier” College Student

I can’t get anything from this school.

We met Sori for the first time in 2004, shortly before she was to resume her senior year at Myŏngji University after a year’s leave. Myŏngji University had been a disappointment to Sori in every way. Having been a hard-working
high
school student in a peer group headed for greener pastures, Sori had a hard time coming to terms with herself at what she dubbed a “third-tier college.”
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What is so fascinating, if semitragic, about Sori’s case is that she articulated a narrative of personal development not unlike Heejin’s, even as her personal circumstances had shut her out of the elite college brand capital that confers ideal human development. The profound personal costs and even trauma of Sori’s college story aside, she was nonetheless willing to take on the entire burden of her own human or capital development, holding herself “responsible for [her] own regulation” (Walkerdine 2003: 239). Although she intermittently generated systematic structural and gendered critiques, she then quickly returned to the theme of personal responsibility.

It is impossible to wrest Sori’s own college story from her father’s college story; indeed, college is always an intergenerational conversation of one kind or another. When Sori ended up at Myŏngji University, her father, an import-export small entrepreneur and a self-made man, let her know that she had “yielded no return” on his expenditures and that there was no point to his “investing” in her any further! Sori had made her way to Myŏngji University after a year of
chaesu
. Her scores had been so low on the first round of testing that she did not even apply to college because she had no interest in those schools that her scores would have enabled her to attend. Unlike most students from middle-class families, she did not attend a private institute in her
chaesu
year but instead burrowed in a public library because her father had pronounced her, his only child, a “hopeless case.”

At this turn, Sori’s family’s education investment became clearly gendered. She described the hapless library crew of other students, adrift in their private pursuits, many of them already years into the project of college entrance or study for one or another state exam. The irony of Sori’s settling for Myŏngji University was that her father, the first in his poor family to have attended college, had himself gone to Myŏngji University; it was thus unthinkable that the daughter, who had been raised with so many more advantages, had not managed to do any better. A year later it turned out that Sori’s college entrance exam scores actually went down; she explained that it seems that hers is a personal code (
k’odŭ
) or personality ill-suited to the entrance exams. Further, she admitted to the arbitrariness of it all: Her best scores, for example, were on the third go-around when she had not even studied for it. But even when we pushed, and even with her admission that she is not an “exam person,” Sori refused any critique of this engine of selection in a
highly
competitive South Korea; instead, echoing Heejin, she accepted that exams and competitive credentialization were necessary for South Korea’s competitiveness.

When Sori explained that the score that it took to enter her major at Myŏngji University’s Department of Business Management was no different from that required by less desirable departments at higher-ranked schools, it seemed that she was about to criticize the stratification of higher education in South Korea with its brand capital. Instead, however, Sori was very critical of the college. She detailed the various ways in which it did not live up to her image of what a college should be, an image made all the more palpable because the vast majority of her high school and after-school institute friends ended up attending higher-ranking schools. Indeed, on the day we met, she was accompanied by a friend who was about to begin graduate school at prestigious Yŏnse University located just minutes from the Myŏngji campus. Sori mentioned the empty Myŏngji library, completely vacant except during exam season; here we can recall how moved Heejin was by the students who lined up to enter the Koryŏ University library at dawn. Also lacking for Sori were meaningful social relationships: She described that, although students at Yŏnse or Koryŏ Universities build relations with their seniors (
sŏ
nbae
) and join clubs or study groups, “there is nothing that I can learn from them” [other Myŏngji students].
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She went on to enlarge her claim, “I can’t get anything from this school.” When we asked her why she cannot even “have a conversation” with classmates at Myŏngji she continued:

To give an example: I am interested in English, but if I try to talk to them about learning English, they are clueless. They know nothing about what teacher is good at what institute or how to prepare for the TOEFL [Test of English as a Foreign Language], and so forth. If they have studied English even a little, they would know that much, and I would at least be able to talk to them about how hard the TOEFL is. But all they can say is, “I don’t know anything about the TOEFL,” or, “I have never taken the TOEIC.”

With these comments, Sori felt she was describing students with no future or little ambition. She was also remarking on the lack of network or social capital at a place like Myŏngji University; there were neither strategic ties nor helpful information to be garnered there. These same students, who knew so little about the English exam for which Koryŏ University was requiring
a
score of 800 for graduation (the very score that earned Sori a sizable merit fellowship at Myŏngji University), nonetheless went for study abroad, but, Sori stressed, “with no mind of their own”: “They just head for China or the United States because their parents send them. I don’t understand them. They say, ‘Isn’t it a good thing to study abroad? Doesn’t it expand one’s horizons?’ But they have absolutely no plan to make good on their study abroad experience.” For her part, she could never imagine using her parents’ money without “strong determination” to really study hard. Here Sori distinguished the spirit from the letter; her classmates, she asserted, lacked the spirit—the subjecthood—that would assure meaningful returns.

Aspiring to follow in her father’s footsteps, Sori had taken on the burden of self-development on her own. Sori admired her father, a well-traveled successful businessman, “a self-made man who speaks English well, considering his age.” She went on to note that his English is, in fact, better than hers. In spite of admitting to being “hurt” by him and to the trials of “never being able to live up to his expectations,” Sori was busily crafting her own parallel track. Foremost, she knew that she would need to identify her own import/export “item” (transliterated into Korean as
ait’em
) if she were to succeed. Over the course of our conversation, we began to listen to this phonetic loan-word for “item” more metaphorically, to stand for the stress that many students put on discovering their own talent or nurturing their own passion. We were struck that Sori’s “item”—something that she would market or bring from abroad—paralleled Heejin’s “events”; both styled themselves as decidedly cosmopolitan by extending their ambition beyond South Korea and by working to acquire English capabilities that could enable such mobility. Sori did not want to be merely “a part of the machine” but aspired instead to becoming a “figure in her own right.”

Like her
chaesu
year, Sori’s item was a particularly gendered burden. As she described: “My dad says that his trade item is too good to let it die with his generation and that if he had had a son he could have had him take it over.” To wit, her entrepreneurship was indeed a self-entrepreneurship; the matter of fashioning herself as a woman was tied up in the project of somehow identifying that perfect trade item. Denied her patrimony on the basis of her gender, Sori’s dream to circulate on a larger stage became harder to realize. Interestingly, Sori related that as a young girl she had been indulged by her father, who at that time still had big dreams for her. Like Heejin, she thus never even entertained the possibility of attending a woman’s college
that
would somehow hem in her horizons. It was as if, in the face of her failure, Sori’s father relegated her to the feminine, as if to say, “Pull yourself up, if you can, with your own bootstraps.”

Sori’s gendered perceptions of her parents’ domains are revealing. While her father moved on the world stage, she characterized her mother as the kinder and more empathetic parent, who was confined to the domestic sphere. It is telling, if ironic, that the “masculine” attributes of the healthy subjectivity that Sori admired are coldness or even cruelty, while she portrayed “feminine” kindness as hemmed in or domestic in both senses of that word. Sori’s gendered worlds and evaluations collided as she mapped her own future. She described a dilemma. On the one hand, she wanted to marry and have children: “I want to have three kids and a harmonious home filled with the sounds of children. I want my kids to have siblings, and I want to hear the sounds of people making noise when I come home.” On the other hand, however, Sori was aware that to become the “savvy entrepreneurial woman” who could please her father, she needed to postpone her vision of a happy home to the distant future: “Honestly, I don’t think I can get married before my thirties. . . . I need to work in a company and start my own business too, but if I get married and take care of my home and my husband, I won’t be able to do anything.” She dismissed out of hand the possibility of help from her mother who has already, she offered, “sacrificed too much to patriarchal demands.”