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Credit:
Patty Lan
On the hunt for mooncakes for the Mid Autumn Festival in Seoul’s Daelim
One day while taking the train in Seoul, two young Chinese girls were chatting in Cantonese, much to my excitement. It had been so long since I heard my native language, and I was enjoying being able to understand everything they were saying. But then a young Korean man sitting nearby turned and shouted at them in Korean to be considerate and to be quiet. The joy I felt in that moment evaporated. Even though they were not the only ones talking on the train, the Chinese girls bore the sole responsibility of being “noisy.” The immediate transformation of their attitudes from lighthearted to ashamed burned itself into my memory. During my year in South Korea from 2023 to 2024, I began to be more wary of speaking Mandarin or Cantonese in public, unsure if I would be similarly chastised or judged.
This reminded me of a previous experience. I was chatting with two Eastern European alumni of the Global Korea Scholarship program (GKS) over beer and rotisserie chicken at a restaurant in Seoul, when they looked me straight in the eye and gave me some advice for my interactions with Koreans. “You should only say you are American and keep the Chinese part a secret.” It was mainly said in jest, as the statement was accompanied with some laughter. But looking back at it now, it served as a warning that the South Korea I was in now, was very different from the South Korea I had visited 10 years prior.
In recent years, sinophobia in South Korea has increased dramatically, arguably surpassing age-old anti-Japanese sentiment. Partially due to growing economic and military tensions, Covid-19, and South Korean conservative talking points, in South Korean society, even among the younger generations, there is a growing perception that China is an authoritarian communist threat that needs to be contained. China’s continued economic and geopolitical aggression seems to existentially jeopardize South Korea’s democratic sovereignty, with conservatives united in their accusations of Chinese interference in South Korean elections. These perceptions are bolstered by popular media depictions of Chinese migrant communities in South Korea, who are often portrayed as gangsters or criminals that threaten the civility and peace of South Korean society. In addition to sinophobia, xenophobia more generally has escalated in the country in response to the large numbers of migrant workers and brides from Southeast Asian countries who were initially welcomed into the country as solutions to South Korea’s growing low-fertility and labor problems. Research is increasingly demonstrating that despite government efforts to help these communities integrate into South Korea society, entrenched racism and cultural paternalism persist. This may be partially due to the possibility that government policies relying on western frameworks of xenophobia and racism alone do not account for the discrimination Asian non-Koreans experience in South Korea. Research into the experiences of various migrant communities in South Korea reflect diverse historical, economic, gendered, and religious intersections which contextualize these disparate experiences.
A banner titled “Daelim Central Market” in Korean welcoming visitors to various shops with banners in Chinese and Korean characters
Credit:
Patty Lan
I participated in a walking tour of Daelim Chinatown which included a lecture on the history and development of the neighborhood and key functions of local businesses. It ended with a delicious meal at a local restaurant. It is run by a South Korean nonprofit organization meant to better educate the South Korean public about multicultural communities.
Two hundred years of engagement with the West through trade, colonialism, imperialism, militarization, and aid has combined with the region’s history of Confucian patriarchy and geopolitical positioning between China and Japan to produce a dynamic practice of racialization. Racialization in Korea is largely tied to how a particular “race” signals the corresponding country’s economic status and their proximity to being a “western developed” country. This focus on “development” as a hierarchy juggling GDP, education, technological advancement, and cosmopolitan values expands upon typical western conceptions of race focused on skin color. While colorism is present in South Korean society, it is often in combination with discrimination against “developing countries.” As labor and marriage migrants have increased, the government has taken to branding them as “multicultural families” or” 다문화 가족” in order to integrate them into South Korean society. However, government-sponsored reality TV programming about these families reinforces the stereotype of the submissive wife from the Global South performing care work while migrants from the Global North are shown to be men working in more high-skilled jobs. Even different parts of the Korean diaspora are treated unequally. Korean Americans are granted visa privileges which allow for long-term work and residency permits whereas their counterparts in Northern China are only offered single five-year work visas despite both diasporas being sizable multigenerational Korean ethnic communities. The feelings of contempt and paternalism directed at “poor developing” countries reinforces a racializing hierarchy of who and how one gets to be a legitimate person in South Korean society.
While on a walk in a busy university neighborhood in Seoul with a white French friend from Mauritania, we were stopped by an older Korean lady who walked straight out of a cafe to talk to my friend. As total strangers, the Korean woman tried to explain to my friend that she was writing an email and needed someone to help her edit her English. When we understood what was happening, my friend corrected the lady, telling her that she was French and her English was very poor, but that I, her Asian-looking friend, was from the US and would be much more helpful. The lady was a bit confused but was relieved to have some help as we walked back inside the cafe and I edited her email.
In South Korean society, language is a key process through which race becomes materialized, negotiated, and transformed. Raciolinguistics, while initially developed with a US and white settler context in mind, recognizes the socio-political relationship between race and language. Building on this approach, the South Korean context offers a useful case for thinking about how English’s relation to whiteness can expand and complicate processes of racialization. English in South Korea is a prestigious language, with South Korean parents spending up to $2,000 USD per month to have their children start learning English as early as four years old. Simply appearing white allows some foreigners to have an easier time getting hired as English tutors, in contrast to their darker skin or Asian counterparts who come from English-speaking countries. Even with English, there are hierarchies which place American English, spoken by white Americans at the top, affordable only to the most wealthy of South Korean parents, and at the bottom, other forms of accented English available at alternative locations like the Philippines and Singapore for aspiring middle-class families.
The Korean language also serves as an avenue of racialization. In experimental bilingual elementary schools for migrant children where Mandarin is offered as a language course, researchers noticed how use of Chinese outside of the classroom and creative hybrid experimentations often get labeled as linguistic deficiencies. The result is a language hierarchy which positions Korean as the only legitimate language of the classroom, despite claims of bilingual learning. How Korean is spoken is also racially marked. For North Korean refugees in South Korea, they experience discrimination for their accent, with some even being confused for Chinese. Ethnic Koreans born in China (Joseonjok) returning to South Korea as labor migrants and ethnic Chinese born in South Korea (Hwagyo) experience similar linguistic bias over their accented Korean, with South Koreans viewing their accents as signals of their inherent “Chineseness” or “backwardness”. Here, Sinophobia materializes and is transformed through the overlapping of Chinese racialization and “Chinese linguistics,” marking all who speak Chinese or speak “Chinese-accented” Korean.
A white booth tent for an outdoor festival with banners titled, “Environmental Preservation with Foreigners” and “Korean Scholarship Alumni Association”
Credit:
Patty Lan
This is a photo of the GKS Alumni booth at the Environmental Sustainability Festival in Busan. Our booth was called “Environmental Preservation with Foreigners.” We played Indian board games and passed out South Asian snacks to Korean elementary school students and their parents.
Coming back to South Korea in 2023 as a researcher on Fulbright, I often introduced myself as an American first, to give legitimacy to my status as a doctoral student from the US. However, as I met more GKS students and alumni, most of them coming from what Koreans consider the “developing world” such as Uganda, Pakistan, Peru, and Thailand, I realized how much my Americanness, English-use, and perceived “Koreanness” created a wall between us. All of them at our initial meeting thought I was Korean. After being in South Korea for so long, “Koreanness” to them had come to mean a dominant status quo that marginalized and othered them. Once I corrected people and told them that I was Chinese American, the conversation shifted.
Then I became “the American,” a rootless cosmopolitan from the Global North who existed as a privileged class in South Korea. But when I shared that I also spoke fluent Cantonese and Mandarin, the mood shifted again. “Hey, you are a real Chinese!”, they would say. After verifying my Chineseness, GKS recipients I talked to would immediately tell me about their affectionately close relationships with Chinese friends from school or work and show off all the things they learned about China through their friends. Being able to speak “Chinese,” the GKS community felt solidarity with me in a way I had not expected. In our conversations, they spoke more openly with me about their struggles in South Korean society, and their honest thoughts about their fellow classmates, colleagues, and superiors. “Koreans are toxic” was not an uncommon phrase. They also asked me a lot of questions about being Chinese in the US and what it was like to maintain my Chinese language skills, observe cultural practices, and survive as a low-income family. I served as a kind of portal into the future of what their lives and their children’s lives might look like if they continued to stay abroad. Being “Chinese” in these spaces meant identifying with collective struggles of migration, discrimination, and class.
Outside of the GKS community, I felt racially ambiguous in a way I had never felt in the US. Being surrounded by the hums of Korean being spoken everywhere, I felt my Chinese identity retreat the more I did not speak Cantonese or Mandarin. In my frustration, during one of my participant observations sessions at a local festival where GKS alumni were running an “Interact with a Foreigner” booth, I introduced myself as Chinese in Korean to two grade-school aged Korean girls. Both stared at me in shock when I said I was Chinese and immediately denied my claim. So I switched to Mandarin to prove to them who I was, and one of the little girls, who had actually lived in China briefly because of her dad’s job, was able to verify who I was and excitedly started to talk to me in Mandarin. I felt seen. Language continued to be a tool for me to negotiate and navigate these fluctuating racial identities of belonging and otherness.
I felt like I was living in two different worlds. One where I was Chinese, and another where I was Korean. As long as I paid attention to the right signals, I would be reminded of my potential for unsettling the sonic landscape, like when the two Cantonese-speaking women were scolded on the train. I often wondered what would have happened if it were me instead. How would I have reacted? I also wondered if my Chinese racialization would have been further complicated if I had been from Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Singapore instead. My research in South Korea, examining the racial politics of development and education, ended up leading me back to reflect deeply on my own racialized identity in the context of Asia. In the same place where I had the privilege to disappear into the crowd, I could also signal myself as cosmopolitan, or signify as an insidious Chinese authoritarian takeover. My experiences negotiating and transforming racial signaling through language in South Korea highlight the significance of (East) Asia’s regional and global histories, development aspirations, and geopolitics in understanding racialization beyond a western framework.
Alex Wolff and Yanping Ni are the section contributing editors for the Society for East Asian Anthropology.
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