“I HAVE THESE KOREAN CLOTHES,
BUT I DON’T KNOW HOW TO EXPLAIN THEM”:

THE PRECARIOUS BALANCE OF
THE NATIONAL AND THE INTERNATIONAL
AT THE KOREAN MINJOK LEADERSHIP ACADEMY

A SENIOR THESIS BY

ABRAHAM JOSEPHINE RIESMAN

AGE 22

***

Introduction

On November 30th, 2007, the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy had a coming-out party, of sorts, and it happened on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, in an article auspiciously titled “How to Get Into Harvard.” The paper had conducted a study of the freshman classes at eight “top colleges” in the United States and compiled a list of the students’ high school alma maters. From that data, they ranked the schools that were sending the highest percentages of their graduating classes to those “top colleges.”1 They listed 40 high schools, all of which were located in the US—except for two. Both of these exceptions were located halfway around the world from Harvard, in South Korea. About a month later, the Journal ran a correction, saying their data had been “incomplete,” and in their “re-calculated” list, only one Korean school remained, sticking out conspicuously amidst all the American prep schools—the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy.2

The article had almost no qualitative information about the institution: “School in South Korea’s Gangwon-do province requires students to speak only English for many classes” was all the writers had to say about it.3 There was no examination of the origins or policies of this anomalous school that had beaten out such eminent academies as Princeton High School and Regis High School. Nor was there any explanation as to what the Korean word, “Minjok,” meant. Or, for that matter, why South Korea—instead of, say, India—was sending so many students to America’s best colleges. But I knew how to fill in those informational gaps, and the moment was exciting for me—it was as if the American mass media had just validated a year of my academic life.

I first learned of the school—also known as “KMLA”—in 2006, while doing an interview-based research project on the so-called “Harvard Wave” in South Korea. Starting sometime around 2004, there had been a boom in the Korean pop-culture market for Harvard-related products: The top-rated TV show in late 2004 was a soap opera entitled Love Story at Harvard, and more importantly for my research, Korean students admitted into Harvard were becoming national celebrities.4 I interviewed students my age who had their life stories published in books marketed as how-to guides on getting into Harvard, with titles like Everyone Can Do It.5 What initially astonished me was the disparity between the fame these students had at home and their relative invisibility on campus. What astonished me even more were the unpublished statistics I uncovered: There were more Korean nationals studying abroad at Harvard College than Chinese nationals, Indian nationals, or any group other than Canadians and British. Among non-English-speaking countries, Korea was the #1 supplier of study-abroad students to the College. Perhaps more importantly, that statistical trend was a recent and dramatic one—as of 2000, there had been 4 Koreans at the College; in 2006, there were 27.6 After more digging, I found that the phenomenon was global: In the space of a decade, South Korea had gone from being a non-entity in study-abroad education to being the world’s single biggest per-capita exporter of study abroad students to the United States.7 As I gathered this quantitative data, I also learned from my interviewees—Korean nationals studying at the College—that there were whole schools in South Korea whose major goal was to send students abroad.

One such school, which three of them had attended, was the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy. It seemed like an ethnographic goldmine at a first glance. Virtually nothing was—or is, for that matter—written about KMLA in Korean or American scholarship. Nevertheless, I investigated the high school and its popularity through Korean periodicals, KMLA’s website, and the school’s Wikipedia page. KMLA was built largely on two pillars, it seemed—intense Korean pride and intense dedication to sending students abroad. The contradictions made my head spin: The students wore traditional Korean clothes (hanbok), but they were forced to speak only in English during their classes. They awoke at dawn to perform silent archery, but they spent class time studying for the American Advanced Placement Tests. The school’s name had “minjok” in it—a word, as we shall see, with deep historical, ethnic, and nationalistic connotations—but it was at the vanguard of sending students to the United States. My interest was thoroughly piqued, and I obtained a research grant to go to Korea and explore the following question: How does the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy balance nationalism with internationalism?

With that query in mind, I went to Korea in the summer of 2007 for three months of study and research. Through 43 interviews with students and faculty, gathering documents at the school, and living at KMLA for observation, I collected information to answer my question about nationalism and internationalism.8 I soon learned that those two terms were too politically charged to aptly describe the school, and the following question became my focus: In what ways have KMLA and its students balanced their aims for international standards of success with their sense of national identity?

The question has a great deal of theoretical and practical importance, on three levels. On a very basic level, any study about Korean nationals studying abroad is significant: They represent the third largest study-abroad population in the US, and as previously noted, Korea produces more study-abroad students, per capita, than any other country—a statistic that was far from true ten years ago, and that only shows signs of rising. At this basic level, a study of KMLA itself is also vital, since no one has examined it yet, despite its popularity and pole position in the Korean educational exodus.9 On a slightly larger level, notions of identity among Korean students is vital to the growing literature on Korean nationalism. As we shall see in the following chapter, Korean nationalism stands at an historical crossroads at the beginning of the 21st century, with increased engagement in the world at large coming at the same time as a resurgence of Korea-centric rhetoric. From that angle, a school that aims to promote Korean national pride and international success provides an ideal lens for examining the paradoxes of present-day Korean ideology. But at the largest level, this question allows for a specific case study in one of the most dynamic, vital, and vagary-prone scholarly questions in post-Cold War social science: How do the forces of globalization and national identity interact in the modern world? In order to shed light on that larger question, however, we must first focus on our case study.

This thesis suggests that KMLA’s institutional balance has been tipped in favor of international factors, but that a different personal balance among its students has emerged in spite—or even because—of that fact. Our argument is as follows: KMLA’s institutional push for international competitiveness has significantly watered down its institutional push for national pride and identity; but paradoxically, the school’s students are still developing that national pride and identity, often as a result of their international aspirations.

We will organize this paper into three chapters. In the first, “A Battlefield Without Borders,” we will examine the history and present state of KMLA, in the context of contemporary issues of international identity, as well as Korea-specific dilemmas of globalization and nationalism. Here, we claim that the history of KMLA is one of decreasing institutional focus on overt attempts at instilling national pride and identity in students, largely due to the rigors of the international educational economy into which the school placed itself. In the second, “‘Traditional Learning’ and Its Discontents,” we will examine student responses to the question of whether or not their time at KMLA influenced their sense of Korean pride or identity. Here, we claim that the vast majority of our student interviewees are unmoved by the school’s overt attempts to teach such national-oriented concepts—attempts collectively called “traditional learning”—although some non-“traditional learning” factors of KMLA life increase their sense of Korean pride and/or identity. In the third, “International Sources of National Feeling,” we build on the implications of the previous chapter, by analyzing the fact that an overwhelming majority of students say their sense of Korean pride and/or identity is at the forefront of their minds. Here, we claim that at least two of their recurring strains of thought about being Korean stem largely—and somewhat paradoxically—from their aspirations of living and succeeding abroad. In the conclusion, we will tie together our findings with the findings of other authors in various disciplines related to this study—authors we will also mention within the body of the essay.10 In doing so, we will also address the implications our research has for a greater understanding of globalization and national identity.

Chapter One:

“A Battlefield Without Borders”

There’s a building on the campus of the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy that looks, from a distance, like most of the buildings on campus. It has the same sloping, uniquely Korean style of roof. It has the same blue-and-white color scheme. The thick greenery of the school’s isolated location surrounds it. But there’s a difference between this building and the others—this one is abandoned. Tucked away on a hill, with vines creeping onto it and all useful school equipment emptied out of it, this building used to be the girls’ dormitory. In addition to housing students, it also seems to have been intended as an area of physical exercise—behind it is a rotting, drained-out swimming pool. Three years into KMLA’s existence, the female population of the school became too large for the dorm, and the girls were moved to the main dormitory building. But the building has existed in a state of limbo ever since then—not demolished, but not being used.

“Unfortunately, that pool may be an example for the school: To maintain it is too much of a cost.” says one teacher, who has been with the school almost since its beginning. “The founder had a vision, but how to implement it in an economic way was difficult.” The teacher is not without hope for the building, nor for what it represents to him. “That old girls’ dormitory, it will perhaps be used again,” he says.

That teacher uses an apt metaphor to describe the challenges that KMLA has faced since its founder, a milk entrepreneur named Ch’oe Myŏngchae, created it in the mid-1990’s. Like many buildings on campus, the girls’ dormitory demonstrates a balance between traditional Korean architecture and modern glass and plastic. So, too, has the school been a unique attempt to strike a balance—one between distinctly Korean notions of identity and pride on the one hand, and aspirations for international success and recognition on the other. But the girls’ dormitory was abandoned. So, too, have many aspects of KMLA’s ideological mission been abandoned since its doors first opened in 1996.

In this chapter, we will tell the story of KMLA through the analytical lens of its attempts to balance national and international concepts. Of course, that lens will obscure a great deal of the school’s history, but this paper is not an attempt to tell the authoritative story of KMLA. Instead, we will use this space to make a specific argument: Although Ch’oe created the school as an attempt to respond to the combating historical forces of nationalism and globalization, and although many of the school’s so-called “traditional learning” aspects remain, international aspirations have watered down almost all Korean-centric ideology and practices. Put simply: Throughout the history of KMLA, there has been decreasing institutional focus on overt attempts at instilling national pride and identity in students, largely due to the rigors of the international educational economy into which the school placed itself.

We will analyze the school’s history in three parts. First, we will briefly touch upon the larger dilemmas of global identity that Ch’oe faced in the mid-1990’s and that KMLA continues to face today. Second, we will examine the ideological balancing act upon which he founded KMLA. Finally, we will examine how various forces tipped that balance in favor of international goals over the course of the school’s history from 1996 to 2007, and what the balance is today.

Part 1: Crossroads

Ch’oe Myŏngchae is not an academic. He made his fortune through a milk company called “P’asŭt’oerŭ Uyu”—“Pasteur Milk” in English. Nevertheless, in his autobiography, he offers up a vision of the future shared by theoreticians and authors throughout the world. “In the future, there aren’t going to be any borders across countries, but the world is going to be a huge mass of land with no borders,” he writes. “It’s going to be a battlefield without borders.”11 From this standpoint, he makes the assertion that the best survival strategy in that “battlefield” is to resist assimilation into a composite, global identity, while accepting the need to participate in a global order. “First and foremost, our minjok has to be well-off and never again be oppressed by other countries or be at the mercy of other countries,” he writes. “That is the only way to be a responsible member of the world community.”12

That word, “minjok” (민족), is impossible to translate into English. But in order to understand Korea, and especially to understand the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, we must offer up some connotations, at least. It is often simply translated as “nation,” and indeed it bears connotational similarities to terms like the German “Volk,” but it has its own history—it was not merely a Korean translation of a Western European term. Its linguistic origins are murky, but it came into modern parlance in the context of Korean nationalism during the turn of the 20th century. Anti-Japanese activist Sin Ch’aeho was one of the first popularizers of the term in political discourse. For example, he published a Korea-centric (as opposed to Sino-centric or Japan-centric) history of Korea called Chosŏn Sanggosa under Japanese colonial rule, and the book was filled with references to the minjok. There, he defined it as “an organic body formed out of the spirit of a people” and said it was “descended through a single pure blood line,” which began with the mythical founder of Korea, Tangun.13 This focus on minjok as tied up with history, family, and direct lineage was also closely related to a belief that it was part of some kind of Social Darwinian order. He wrote that history was an “indispensable instrument… in instilling minjok ideas and implanting minjok awareness in our young people so that they can compete on equal terms with other nations in the struggle for survival, where only the winners are allowed to exist and the losers perish.”14 The term, as that passage suggests, has a public aspect—it is not confined to personal feelings or familial relations, but rather expands to mass mobilization and public awareness. Just as importantly, that emphasis on Tangun was linked to Mt. Paektu, the mountain in northern Korea from which the mythical king was said to have descended. Thus, land was a key element in Sin’s seminal work, and in the thought that stemmed from it through subsequent decades.

Of course, he was not the only one to use it. Anti-Japanese militants used the term during the colonial years. North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, wrote extensively about minjok tongnip (“independence of the minjok”).15 The student activists who worked to overthrow the South Korean military dictatorship used it in their writings.16 At Seoul’s Korean War Museum, a sign over a diorama of a battle declares the war to be “The Tragedy of the Minjok.” These examples are, of course, only a small sample of situations in which the term has been deployed historically. And, in a way, they only tell half the story: We need to know how the term is thought of today. In my interviews, I would ask students to play a game of word association—I would say “minjok,” and I asked them to say the first English words that came to mind when they heard me say it. “Nation,” “Korea,” “history,” “family,” and “blood” were the 5 most common words given by the interviewees, which should give some sense of what it means to the population under examination in this study. So, in sum, there is no way to conclusively define “minjok,” unfortunately. However, we can provisionally think of it as a word with connotations of ethnic unity, specific Korean-ness, geographically centered Korean-ness, Western notions of nationalism, Korean history, and familial bonds.

At the time when Ch’oe put the word into the title of his new school, notions of Korean identity and the place—or relevance—of the Korean minjok in the world were all coming into question. On the one hand, since the late 1990’s there has been a resurgence of nationalist sentiment and rhetoric in various aspects of Korean public life. Perhaps the best demonstration of that resurgence was a confluence of events in 2002. Korea (along with Japan) played host to that year’s World Cup, and hundreds of thousands of Koreans rallied in Seoul, chanting pro-Korean slogans in support of the national team. In that same year, Roh Moo-hyun, a liberal politician with a stance that was explicitly critical of Korea’s longtime ally, the United States, was elected president. Additionally, an incident in which American soldiers accidentally killed two Korean girls in an automobile accident led to a series of demonstrations and editorials expressing indignation on behalf of the Korean people. In quieter ways, the government has been sponsoring programs to promote uniquely Korean aspects of cultural identity. Kim Young-sam, Korean president from 1993 to 1998, spoke in 1996 of the “five major goals of globalization,” one of which dealt with what he called “Koreanization.” “Koreans cannot become global citizens without a good understanding of their own culture and tradition,” he said. “Koreans should march out into the world on the strength of their unique culture and traditional values. Only when the national identity is maintained and intrinsic national spirit upheld will Koreans be able to successfully globalize.”17 As Gi-Wook Shin has noted, Kim’s government and those of his successors have sponsored the creation of institutions like the Andong Folk Festival and a 2001 celebration of a famous Korean Confucianist.18 A recent East Asia Barometer Poll found that Koreans were more likely to express “pride” in their country than Japanese respondents.19 Perhaps most significantly, the South Korean state has entered into direct dialogue with North Korea for the first time since the Korean War, and an accompanying sense of pan-Korean feeling has entered political rhetoric and written opinion.20

But, on the other hand, globalization—with all of its cultural and economic connotations—has been on the rise in Korea. It is, of course, impossible to give a universally approved definition of “globalization.” But for the purposes of this paper, we define it as “the process by which communications, culture, and commerce have crossed international borders with greater ease since the second half of the 20th century.” In Korea, a term often used instead of “globalization” is segyehwa, another difficult-to-translate term, roughly meaning “globalizing the economy and internationalizing local society by adopting new ways of thinking.”21 For instance, one of the bases of Korean nationalism had long been anti-Japanese sentiment, but with the end of military rule in 1987 came a massive jump in Korea-Japan trade and investment.22 The two countries even held the aforementioned World Cup together. On a broader scale, the Korean state has aggressively pursued success in the globalizing economy. As noted, Kim Young-sam set out principles for globalization, saying that “all aspects of national life” needed to be directed towards it and establishing a Globalization Promotion Committee.23 His successor, Kim Dae-jung, followed suit.

Even after the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997/1998, which hit Korea particularly hard, the state remained committed to engagement in the global economy.24 The so-called “Korea Wave” has exported Korean soap operas and pop music throughout Asia. And then, of course, there is the under-researched phenomenon of the Korean educational exodus. Since 1994, the number of Korean students studying abroad in the United States has nearly doubled, reaching a total of 62,392 in school year 2006-2007—a number bested only by China and India, but which is catching up to those countries’ totals.25 And, if one takes the total populations of the three countries into account, Korea holds a firm lead in the percentage of the student population studying abroad. Simultaneously, Koreans have become a major study-abroad population in China, with even more students going there than to the US.26

These are only a handful of examples of the rise of Korean national pride and Korean participation in globalization, but hopefully they illustrate the power of the two forces—and suggest a potential contradiction between the two. There have been a number of theories as to how Koreans will manage the two socio-cultural phenomena. Alford has argued that Koreans are over-confident in their belief that “the Korean body can ingest foreign ideas without altering the basic structure of the Korean body”—he calls such notions of cultural compromise a “collective fantasy.”27 Samuel S. Kim agrees that the forces of segyehwa and minjok nationalism are relatively incompatible, and argues that Koreans have simply gone through the motions of economic globalization and not changed anything about their view of the world. “Despite the rising globalization and globalism chorus, deep down Korea remains mired in the cocoon of exclusive cultural nationalism,” he writes. There has been “no fundamental learning—no paradigm shift” in Korean thought—“only situation-specific tactical adaptation.”28 On the other side of the spectrum sit theorists like Shin, who has argued that what Alford calls a fantasy is, in fact, a reality. “Most Koreans appear to see no inherent contradiction between nationalism and globalization,” he writes. “Rather, they seek to appropriate globalization for nationalist goals.”29 Similarly, Park and Abelmann, in their study of how Korean mothers push their children to study English, have argued that “nationalism and cosmopolitanism are not contradictory.” In their view, “the idea of what it means to be South Korean is transforming: increasingly, to be South Korean means to be South Korean ‘in the world.’”30 There is no consensus as to how nationalism can exist alongside internationalism (or, depending on the term used, globalism, cosmopolitanism, or globalization) in Korea.

The terms of this debate are by no means restricted to the Korean peninsula. Since the fall of the Eastern Bloc, a whole social-anthropological literature has blossomed, focusing on variations of a single question: What does it mean to be part of a “nation” in a “globalized” world? With increased communications and cultural exchange, one must start questioning the fate of the “nation”—which Anderson famously defined as an “imagined community” among a group of people who believe they have similar traits that separate them from other such communities at a primordial level.31 How will modern subjects—especially ones who live outside of the geographic bounds of their “imagined community”—conceive of what that community is, and whether they are a part of it? As Appadurai has put it, there are now “diasporic public spheres” which “confound theories that depend on the contained salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important social changes.”32 From this basis, he has concluded “that the nation state, as a complex modern political form, is on its last legs.”33 In its place, he sees a world of people who “extend” Anderson’s “imagined communities” to include peoples across the world.34 Ong, on the other end of the spectrum, has argued that what she calls “transnationality”—“the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space”—has in fact bolstered the concept of the nation and the nation-state.35 “Contrary to the popular view that sees the state in retreat everywhere before globalization, I consider state power as a positive generative force that has responded eagerly and even creatively to the challenges of global capital,” she says, looking at economics.36 When it comes to identity politics, she holds a similar view: “Over the past few decades, the multiple and shifting status of ‘Chineseness’ has been formed and embedded within the processes of global capitalism.”37 In between those two influential writers and their studies of India and China, respectively, are a wide range of theoreticians. All of them look at what Juergensmeyer has succinctly called the “Paradox of Nationalism in a Global World.”38 The debate is, by no means, limited to social anthropology, either—Fukuyama argues that nationalism is in its death throes thanks to liberal democracy; Huntington counters that the world is in a “clash of civilizations”; and so on.39

It was this discourse that Ch’oe, knowingly or unknowingly, entered into when he decided to establish his school. We will cite some of these authors as warranted during our analysis of our own data, and conclude the paper by revisiting the existing literature and seeing how our findings fit in with it. But what is most important is not the existing literature—it is the as-yet-untold story of KMLA. Indeed, the only scholar to ever publish anything about the school is Shin, who offers a grand total of a page and a half about it in a book on the history of ethnic nationalism in Korea. Apparently, he met a KMLA graduate and decided to visit the school in 2002. “Although instruction takes place in English, KMLA emphasizes a curriculum aimed at enhancing Korean national identity,” he writes.

The curriculum includes Confucian ethics and traditional rituals, music, and sports. For instance, every morning at 6 a.m., students gather in the courtyard of a traditional building to bow deeply to their teachers, a demonstration of filial piety that is performed by sons toward their parents. After the ritual, the students are required to practice at least one of three traditional forms of music or sports. KMLA’s experimental methods seem to be working: every year the school sends its best students to top American colleges.40

By his estimation, KMLA was just another bit of proof that there was no contradiction between nationalism and globalization—that the latter could be used as a tool to further the former. That analysis, as we shall see, is based on flawed data, and is a gross oversimplification of the realities of KMLA. But in a way, he described exactly what Ch’oe wanted to create. In order to understand what he created, we must first examine who Ch’oe is and what his ideological goals were, in establishing KMLA.41 By doing this, we can move out of the realm of theory, and into the realm of facts, evidence, and case study.

Part 2: The Founder’s Life and the Initial Balance

In a way, Ch’oe’s life reflects the experiences of an entire generation of Koreans—those who were born under Japanese colonial rule, lived through the Korean War, worked during the modernization drives of the 1960’s and 70’s, became prosperous in the 1980’s and 90’s, had to make severe cutbacks during the Financial Crisis, and now see their country deciding how it will respond to the internal and external economic and cultural forces of the 21st century. That lived experience, according to him, deeply affected the way he viewed his life’s mission—to create KMLA. Unfortunately, the only widely available account of his life is his autobiography, published in 2004. Entitled 20 Nyŏn Hu Nŏhŭidŭli Malhara (roughly, “Students, Let Your Voices Be Heard in 20 Years”), it is largely a self-aggrandizing book, so it must be taken with a grain of salt, when it comes to facts.42 Nevertheless, the book offers a window into his thoughts on the ideology of KMLA and his beliefs about the balance of the national with the international.

The book is heavy on nationalist rhetoric. Born in southwestern Korea in 1927, Ch’oe paraphrases Plato to describe how his early life affected his view of the world. “Plato said that he was happy for three reasons: For being born a man, for being born a citizen of Athens, and having Socrates as a teacher,” he writes. “Similarly, if someone asks me what my three biggest reasons for being happy are, I’ll say, ‘I was born with a healthy body, I went through the colonial period and the Korean War, which gave me the strength and endurance to continually challenge myself, and third, I received a stable goal in life from my parents.”43 He says that goal was to run a school. According to the book—as well as speeches and interviews given at other occasions—his father used all his money to establish an elementary school in 1936.44 Ch’oe says his father—a farmer—did it because the schools in that era were centered on Japanese-mandated education, and he wanted to offer a more Korea-friendly alternative.45 The Japanese government eventually squashed it, as it did with many independent schools of that type.46 So, Ch’oe went to a conventional school, and he recalls the birth of his minjoksŏng—“sense of minjok”—in high school, in the early 1940’s. There was a “name you weren’t supposed to say, but everyone knew,” and that was Yi Sunsin—the 16th century Korean admiral who defeated invading Japanese forces and has since become a symbol of Korean pride. Ch’oe says he found a sort of samizdat book about Yi, and stayed up all night reading it, thus wholly changing his view of the world and of Japan.47 “Yi is still alive in our world today,” he writes, and he is not far off from reality—the admiral was a hero of Korean president Park Chung-hee, a statue of him stands in Seoul, and Ch’oe put a similar statue of him at the gates of KMLA.48

It was this admiration of Yi, he says, as well as the inspiration of his father’s school, that later crystallized in an inspirational moment—one that led to the creation of KMLA. After living through—though not fighting in—the Korean War, Ch’oe says he became a banker, and then a transporter, driving throughout Eurasia for shipping companies. He describes a day when he was making a shipment in England and passed through Eton College, the famous preparatory secondary school. Apparently, there was a ceremony being held for another famous admiral who had become a nationalist symbol—Lord Nelson, the hero of the Napoleonic Wars. The ceremony, he writes, stirred his minjok chuch’esŏng—rougly translated as “minjok identity.” What follows is a quotation that is absolutely essential for understanding what Ch’oe intended for KMLA: “That day, I made two promises to myself,” he writes.

Number one was that I would build a school that would educate more world leaders than Eton College, and number two was that I would also educate youngsters who, like Yi Sunsin, will preserve the minjok chuch’esŏng. If you combine number one and number two, you have the training of world leaders who have a sense of national identity.49

It is important to remind the reader that minjok chuch’esŏng —a word Ch’oe uses repeatedly throughout his book—is not exactly the same as “nationalism.” It has fewer connotations of chauvinism, and is more of a thought-process than a plan of action. As one of my interviewees put it, the term is “less a political tool or movement and more a strong sense of knowing who you are and staying true to your roots.” It is precisely because of nuanced definitions and translations such as this one that we will use the term “the national” to describe what is being balanced in KMLA’s ideology, rather than “nationalism.” We are talking about notions of geographically and ethnically specific identity, not necessarily missions of political upheaval. We will get to specific definitions of such terms soon. Nevertheless, the equation Ch’oe laid out in that passage is clear: He wanted to create an institution that could produce a certain type of student, one that held both “national identity” and successful engagement with the global marketplace in high esteem.

That pursuit of creating global leaders with Korean identities also had roots in Ch’oe’s frustration with the Korean educational system, itself. It is worth dwelling on this point for a moment because his frustrations are shared by nearly all of the students I interviewed. In his book, Ch’oe writes of how he was astonished that so many Koreans were pursuing degrees at Seoul National University, given that “around that time, some research abroad reported that Seoul National University was only around the 800th best university.” “Are our youth really investing so much time to get into a college that only ranks 800th?” he writes.50 “Instead of aiming for a college that only ranks 800th, we should aim for schools in the top 10, such as Harvard, MIT, or Oxford.” He declared early on that his school “will only accept students who aim for the top schools in the world, not Seoul National.”51 He never cites where that number, “800th”, came from, but students I interviewed repeatedly echoed his tendency to throw around numbers about the low “ranking” of Seoul National, as an indicator that Korean tertiary schools are of low quality. Indeed, that notion of an international hierarchy of schools, and of Korean schools being low-quality (“all drinking, no learning” as one student put it), was one of the primary factors in motivating these students to attend KMLA and look to leave Korea. Coincidentally, around the time that Ch’oe was coming up with these ideas about Korean universities, the Korean government was waking up to problems with its tertiary education system.52 But the reforms clearly did not come in time for Ch’oe to be deterred from his viewpoint.

In 1992, flush with money from the milk fortune he had amassed in the intervening decades, he tried to accomplish that goal by taking over the reins from an existing high school. But his ideas were too radical for the institution or the Ministry of Education, and in the face of such resistance, he abandoned the project.53 Not deterred from his goal, he decided to build his own school in his own backyard—right behind the Pasteur Milk factory, in Korea’s rural, northeastern Kangwŏn Province. Principal construction began in 1994, he received a permit to start the school in 1995, and opening ceremonies were held in 1996. The Korean Minjok Leadership Academy was up and running, with Ch’oe and his ideology holding the reins.

Before we go any further in discussing the ideological balance at KMLA, we should define some key terms. One is “balance,” itself—a complex word, but one that serves our analytical purposes. When it comes to national and international factors at the school and in the minds of its students, no other term really suits the situation. It is not quite a “mixture” or a “blend,” because a key idea behind the school is to explicitly define certain things as “Korean” or “traditional”—as separate from everything else in the world, as part of the minjok, as what we will call “the national.” We will give examples soon, but “the national” contains everything from material objects to ritual practices to spoken words. The “everything else” that is not “the national” is hard to define, but some of it is what we will call “the international.” That term entails key things involved in the pursuit of education and life abroad, especially in the United States. For example, these specific things include Advanced Placement examinations, learning in English-only environments, or aspiring to run international firms. The problematic aspect of this demarcation, of course, is that there are things that are not one or the other. For example, studying for long hours and wearing school uniforms are both prominent aspects of Korean schooling, but are not unique to Korea—indeed, they are practices shared by schools around the world. So, in order to bring some semblance of sense to this muddy set of definitions, we emphasize that what we call “national” is what our subjects see as unique to Korea. Likewise, we will call “international” those things that they see as explicitly oriented towards life and education abroad. It is not a perfect distinction—not nearly as simple as Ch’oe’s “number one” and “number two,” or Shin’s “nationalism” and “globalization”—but having a less nuanced definition would do a disservice to the realities of identity formation at KMLA.

As for “balance,” the word is somewhat deceptive. It implies that there are equal amounts of each factor, but that is not necessarily the case. Think of it this way: A lever can require a disproportionate amount of one material on one side if the fulcrum is closer to that side, if it is to balance out with the other side. Our point is that Ch’oe’s vision was not to have an institution that would educate students to have identities that are 50% Korean and 50% international, but instead to have identities that prevent the scale from tipping in such a way as to eliminate unique Korean-ness or eliminate aspirations to global achievement. It is not the purpose of this paper to evaluate whether or not he “succeeded” or “failed” in “maintaining” that balance—we are analyzing the ways that he, his school, and his students all have their own balances between the national and the international, and the causes and effects of those balances. But we have digressed back into the realm of theory again. We must return to practice, if we are to effectively demonstrate what we mean by “the national,” “the international,” and the “balance” that Ch’oe initially created.

A good jumping-off point is a glance at the two most crucial school mottos created by Ch’oe: The School Motto and the English Motto. The former reads as follows:

Through education based on the deep awareness of the heritage of our people;

Towards tomorrow’s bright Fatherland;

Let us study, not for the sake of personal gain, but for the sake of learning.

Let us not choose a career in thoughts of personal gain,

But choose a career based on our talents and aptitude.

Such is my true fortune and tomorrow’s bright Fatherland.

There, we have a strong sense of the national, but not anything necessarily oriented towards the international. However, the latter creed is recited and printed nearly as much as the former, and completes the picture:

English is a tool for us to make use of an advanced civilization and culture, and Koreanize it in order to advance.

That slogan was not only to be recited at school gatherings—it was inscribed all over the school, including on the elevators at the dorms. In looking at it, we see the beginnings of the ideological balance. From here, we will look at the national aspects of his initial set-up, then look at the international aspects.

The notion of English being “a tool” necessary for the “advance” of a nation is not a unique ideological construct. It evokes Meiji Japan’s drives for industrialization along Western lines, or Li Hongzhang’s push for Qing China to upgrade its military to Western standards—both in the name of defending against the West and competing with it. Indeed, the militaristic connotations go deeper than a possible association with East Asian leaders of the past—the very name of the school connotes militarism. In the school’s early years, Ch’oe faced friction from the Ministry of Education about the Korean name of his nascent school: Minjok Sagwan Kodŭng Hakkyo. In order to understand why, we have to break down the meaning of the words. The name certainly does not translate to “Korean Minjok Leadership Academy,” which was an English title Ch’oe created separately. Kodŭng Hakkyo merely means “high school,” and as we have seen, minjok has many meanings. The problem that the Ministry had was not with “Minjok”, but with “Sagwan”—a word used in the past to describe military academies. It seems unlikely that Ch’oe would have been unaware of the connotations that the word held, but nevertheless, he successfully argued that it meant something else. He claimed that his word sounded the same as the word for “military academy,” but had different hanja—Chinese characters—behind it, ones with the same sounds. “Sa,” in this case, meant “history” or “tradition,” and “kwan” meant “view” or “perspective.”54 Therefore, the meaning, for him, was something along the lines of “Minjok Traditional Perspective High School”—a title full of national connotations, with virtually nothing of the international in it.

But just as important as the school’s name are the places where it is written—the built environment of the school was another aspect of the school that weighs heavily on the national. Maps of the school from as early as 1997 show an intent to foster something of a pre-modern, Korea-centric sensibility in the look and feel of the area. “Kangwŏn Province is mountainous, clean and quiet—the ideal place to engage in concentrated academic study without the distractions and disturbances of urban life,” reads an advertising pamphlet from 1997.55 The pamphlet is right, to an extent—it’s a half-hour drive by cab to get from the nearest town. It also shows plans for the campus to be filled with massive buildings in classical Korean style—the sloping, tiled roofs and so on—more than were ever actually built.56 The gate to the school was built with two statues: One of Yi Sunsin, and the other of Chŏng Yakyong—a late Chosŏn-era philosopher and social critic better known by his pen-name of “Tasan.” The two main classroom buildings, according to a map printed around the same time, were given names charged with Korean national connotations: Ch’ungmu Hall and Tasan Hall, “Ch’ungmu” being a posthumous title given to Yi Sunsin.57 Ch’oe also commissioned even more thoroughly classical Korean buildings on a hill above everything else, in the so-called “Minjok Kyoyukkwan”—roughly translated as “Minjok Education Area,” but often referred to in English as the “Cultural Center.” The space was planned to be a large complex of single-floor structures made without plastics or glass.58 “The Cultural Center is an extra-curricular facility constructed according to traditional Korean aesthetics,” reads that early pamphlet.59 Even within the main teaching buildings, which were relatively unremarkable in their modern-style interior construction, there were to be strong elements of the national. Each classroom had a Korean flag and large hanja reading “My Country.” And, of course, the English Motto was inscribed into the elevator walls.

The other most visible—and perhaps most famous—element of the national planned for KMLA was the use of hanbok. A style of clothing dating back to the Chosŏn era, hanbok is not entirely absent from Korean life, but is usually only worn ceremonially, at cultural events or weddings. But Ch’oe wanted that situation to change—not just at his school, but in the world at large. “Back during the colonial era, whenever Japanese people passed by Korean kimchi [pickled cabbage], they would pinch their noses and curse and say ‘Chōsenjin’” he writes in his book, referring to a common slur used against Koreans during the colonial era. “But now those Japanese stand in line just to buy our kimchi because they love it so much. Similarly, I think there will be a day when the Korean traditional attire will be appreciated by the world’s leaders. Minsago graduates will probably lead that change,” he says, using a colloquial abbreviation of KMLA’s Korean name.60 Accordingly, from the very outset, KMLA students and teachers were to wear slightly modified forms of hanbok at almost all times—complete with a large and somewhat cumbersome head-piece for teachers.61 At special occasions, everyone was to wear even more formal types of hanbok. At the outset of the school, Ch’oe believed all of this hanbok would contribute “to the establishment of the school identity and reinforce the idea of developing and preserving the national culture.”62

Continuing on that matter of culture, Ch’oe envisioned the arts as a huge part of his program for national education. The 1997 pamphlet features a list of artistic endeavors students would be able to learn at the Cultural Center: Calligraphy, Korean opera (p’ansori), Korean three-verse poetry (sijo), Korean folk singing (chang) and a musical style based on a quartet of classical Korean instruments (samulnori).63 These were all to be taught in the Minjok Kyoyukkwan. Ch’oe hired, as the music teacher, one of Korea’s most famous players of traditional instruments, a man who still teaches what he taught in 1996, and reflects Ch’oe’s ideals from the early days. “I want you to have a clear definition of the word, minjok,” he says in an interview. “In my point of view, the meaning of ‘global,’ of ‘international’—it means that it’s not about having a homogenous culture. It’s about recognizing the differences in cultures and uniqueness of those cultures.” I ask him how he can teach minjok. Without a word, he plucks a leaf from a plant on his desk, places it to his lips, and whistles out a mournful melody for a minute and a half. As per his and Ch’oe’s ideas, all students were to learn how to play such classical Korean instruments as the changgu drum and the kayagŭm zither. Indeed, teachers who have been at KMLA since the early days say that, in the early days, Ch’oe would not allow any non-Korean instruments on campus. Meanwhile, students were also to learn Korean styles of traditional art and painting.

The last of the national elements of this initial vision were a set of Korea-centric activities. The most crucial of these was the daily bow to the “dorm parents.” At the student dormitories, there were to be people hired to act as supervisors of dorm life, but who would also be referred to as “parents,” and to whom students would bow every day in a brief but mandatory ceremony. The idea was that these individuals were to stand in for the students’ actual parents, thus allowing them to perform a traditional form of Confucian filial piety while separated from their real families. Bowing was to extend beyond the dorm parents, too—students were supposed to bow to each other, especially to those older than they. One teacher who was present at the beginning of the school says the bows were crucial, and relatively simple to institute. “We taught Korean traditional manners, like the bow,” he says. “It was easy to implement that.” The pamphlet contains a litany of other activities for students to learn about in the Minjok Kyoyukkwan: “classes in traditional Korean Customs and Manners, traditional ceremonial practices including those of Coming of Age, Marriage, Funeral and Ancestral Remembrance, the Histories of the Korean Dynasties, Filial Piety,” as well as “meditation” and “Tea Ceremony.”64 In addition, all students were required to perform some form of Korea-oriented physical activity every day, such as silent archery, kŏmdo, or other martial arts. But on top of all that, there were to be daily “Morning Meetings” just after dawn, at which all students and teachers would gather and recite the mottos of the school and sing all the verses of the Korean national anthem.

Taken together, these six elements—the mottos, the school name, the physical environment, hanbok, Korean arts, and Korean activities—form what is commonly called “traditional learning” at KMLA. There is no official name for the national aspects of the school, other than one mention of “National Identity Education” in an email that an administrator sent to me, but “traditional learning” was the phrase most often used by students when talking about the elements we have just described. It is important to note that none of this traditional learning included chauvinistic indoctrination about the superiority of the Korean minjok, or the re-writing of history textbooks to favor Korean interpretations of history. While acknowledging the depth, breadth, and unprecedented nature of the traditional learning program, we should not give the impression that it was aimed to brainwash its students, or (besides the décor and the clothing) enter into the rest of the curriculum of academic subjects. For the most part, the rest of the curriculum was, in fact, oriented towards the other side of Ch’oe’s ideology: Vigorous emphasis on the international.

It is more difficult to describe Ch’oe’s focus on the international, in that there was never anything as cohesive as the traditional learning aspects, and in that many of his internationally-oriented ideas were not unique to his school or to Korea. Nevertheless, we can point out some specific aspects of the school’s initial balance that are clearly international. For one, the School Motto, to be recited every morning, clearly emphasizes that idea of being a “global leader” that Ch’oe says he thought of while visiting Eton. But even more than the Motto, one particular institution represented Ch’oe’s vision of international education more visibly than anything else: the English-Only Policy, or “EOP.” The EOP was instituted a year after the creation of the school, in 1997. It stated that all classes, except for those in Korean music and Korean language, were to be conducted entirely in English, and that students were to speak in English on school grounds at nearly all times (there would be some exceptions for Sundays and after-hours on weekdays). Ch’oe says he received criticism for the decision to institute the EOP—that it formed a “contradiction” to his ideas of preserving national identity. But he recalls in his book that, when facing that critique, he came up with the English Motto.65 The wording of that motto, stating that the English-speaking world is an “advanced civilization” and that Korea needs to use it “in order to advance,” strongly evokes the idea that students need to formulate their identities with international aspirations in mind. Signs were placed on teachers’ doors, reading, “This teacher has his teaching, discussion, and comment [sic] only in English.”66 We will explore the degree to which this policy was and is implemented later, but suffice it to say that the EOP, on paper, represents one of the clearest examples of balancing the international with the national at KMLA.

Just as important is the idea of training students to study abroad. Ch’oe, in his book, claims that he was the first to implement a program specifically aimed at sending students abroad. And, indeed, when he created the so-called “Ivy Program”—a track within the school that focused on the US application process—in 1997, the educational exodus had not yet begun. But around the same time, a handful of other elite high schools—most notably Seoul’s Taewŏn Foreign Language High School—established similar programs. Whoever was the first is somewhat irrelevant—they all happened around the same time, in the late 1990’s, and the Ivy Program is the flagship of KMLA. The idea of teaching students based on aptitude for Advanced Placement tests and the SATs is firmly international—those are tests designed for and by Americans, tests that are valid almost exclusively for American schools, and certainly irrelevant for any Korean universities. For those students who wanted to enter into Korean universities, the “Minjok Program” was established as an alternative to the Ivy, but was never the marketed aspect of the school. From the very beginning, Ch’oe’s closest advisers and subordinates agreed that the Ivy Program was absolutely crucial to the school. “Going abroad gives opportunities for students to get better knowledge,” one teacher who was there at the beginning says. “They can also have better opportunities as a Korean.” Ch’oe put it more bluntly. In his book, he recalls students initially leaving the school because it could not get them into Seoul National University. “So I pronounced to insiders and outsiders that, if you want to go to Seoul National, don’t come to Minsago.”67

Alongside the tests and examinations required for attending American colleges came tests and examinations for international academic competitions. Ch’oe envisioned a school that would train students to compete in science Olympiads, math Olympiads, and other contests held outside Korea with an explicitly international bent. Again, by looking beyond Korea, this aspect of Ch’oe’s initial program acted as a counterweight to traditional learning. Indeed, knowledge of math and natural science is, by its very nature, non-national, but we must be careful in calling the teaching of such subjects “international”—there is very little ideology in the idea of rigorously teaching a given academic subject. Nevertheless, the idea of competing on an international stage with those subjects does fall under the rubric of the international. And, as we shall see, it played a strong part in bringing the school its fame and prestige.

One final aspect represents an ideological element of the international: the so-called “Nobel Pillars.” Ch’oe ordered that roughly a dozen granite pillars be built on the campus, with plaques saying “Here sits the winner of a Nobel Prize.” But the pillars did not have busts of Einstein or Martin Luther King, Jr. on them. In fact, there were to be no busts or images on them. They were to be blank. The idea was to inspire students to become so successful that they would be the ones whose faces would be carved in bronze and put on top.68 They were first placed on a hill, and later moved to the side of the main road into the school, but no matter their location, they were to send a clear message—this school was looking to achieve the highest levels of international prestige, even while maintaining a balance with deeply national ideas that are exclusive to Korea.

Before we move on to the ways in which these ideas were implemented and how they have changed, we must emphasize that the balance of the national and the international was by no means Ch’oe’s only concern. As made clear in the School Motto, the other base upon which KMLA was built was the idea of creating leaders—independent in their thought, aiming towards the value of thought for its own sake, and taking the helm of their country. Indeed, in that pamphlet we have cited so often, there is more space devoted to things like the school’s high-tech computer centers and claims that the school has “one overriding purpose—the development and nurturing of the potential in Korea’s most gifted high school students.”69 That idea is somewhat separate from our discussion of the national and the international. Our aim in this paper is not to encompass all the aspects and goals of KMLA, but rather to focus on this one balancing act, as a test case in the larger debate about the creation of identity in a national and international context.

Part 3: Changes and the Present Balance

In 2006, the administration of KMLA published a large, yellow book chronicling the history and current state of the school. On page 20, it lists the school’s three greatest strengths: “Students, teachers, and facilities.”70 No mention of a uniquely Korean experience. No mention of traditional learning. Only seven pages later, in a passage looking at the origins of the school, is there any mention of such national ideals. The school’s “main goal,” it reads was “to foster world leaders who are armed with minjok chŏngsin” [a minjok spirit].71 Similarly, later in the book, there is a list of “Six Skills” that the administration hopes to teach to its students: English fluency, hanja, “control of one’s mind,” volunteering, reading books, and playing “traditional musical instruments.”72 While the book does not discount the importance of national elements, it certainly downplays them. What happened during the decade that the book chronicles that might have led to such statements? Did the balance change?

In many ways, the answer is “yes.” The school was in constant flux from the very beginning, when Ch’oe was still in charge. “Usually at the initiative of the founder, who was a creative man, changes were implemented virtually every month,” recalls one teacher who arrived in 1997. One of the first changes was the implementation of the EOP, which was much easier in theory than in practice. “At one time, he decided that all teachers except for Korean language teachers should teach in English,” a teacher of the time recalls. “There was a panic. Foreign teachers were told to teach English to the Korean teachers, who didn’t know English.” That particular teacher—a non-Korean—recalls chaotic attempts to do so. “Once a week, I would meet with [the Korean teachers], I would simply tell them jokes, do activities the teachers can relate to.” Eventually, the panic subsided, but he says the changes never really stuck. “The physical education teachers will say ‘today morning.’”

But the EOP was in no way the only policy change that led to confusion and consternation. Nor was it the only way in which Ch’oe alienated those around him with his ideals of change and educational reform. “When I got here, there were three other foreign teachers, and they all left,” one non-Korean teacher recalls. “The founder was in your face all the time.” Teachers tell of how Ch’oe would make pronouncements—like that all students needed to have independent research seminars—and everyone would immediately have to adjust. He also had a very hands-on approach to monitoring his students and teachers—students and teachers recall him bursting into classrooms and chastising people for not obeying the EOP. Although he is no longer in charge, all interviewees refer to him as “the founder”—never as “Mr. Ch’oe” or “Ch’oe Myŏngchae.” “If you met the founder in his prime, just staring into his face is scary,” an early student recalls. “He’s a scary person. He’s tall, has a huge head, has these huge eyes. He just screams at you. He’s just a very scary figure.” A teacher put it this way: “He’s a typical Korean patriarch—he wanted everything under control, and everyone joining in with him to give 100 percent, if not more,” he says. “He wanted the world’s best school.”

Ch’oe achieved one goal indisputably—KMLA became a smash success in terms of national prestige. No one is exactly sure how it happened, but a number of theories abound. “When we got the first few students into Ivy League schools, his prophecy fulfilled itself,” one teacher recalls. What he means is that the national publicity given to the first few students getting into top-ranked American colleges made KMLA seem like a place where students could go to get into such schools, and thus fulfilled the founder’s prophecy that KMLA could make international leaders. The authors of the yellow book concur: “It had been rare for Korean high school students to think about going to prestigious US colleges,” the book reads. “But as people got into Duke, Columbia, and Yale, KMLA became popular.”73 Ch’oe himself puts the start-date for the school’s fame a bit earlier, with the success of students at various international academic Olympiads.74 There was some advertising, early on: One early student says she heard about the school through an ad in a newspaper, and I heard through a fellow American researching Korean hagwŏn (cram-schools) that a hagwŏn owner she knew found out about KMLA through a session it held with educators.75 But the school quickly abandoned advertising efforts, according to teachers and administrators—the phenomenon caught on, and the success of the school was self-perpetuating. Despite a rocky start—in the first year, only about 30 students enrolled, and more than half of them dropped out at the semester—the school eventually saw its application and enrollment numbers skyrocket. These days, over a thousand students apply each year, and about 150 are admitted.76 A 2006 newspaper poll showed that 27.7% of elementary school students explicitly say they want to go to KMLA, and 31.9% of their parents concur.77 Whole programs exist at hagwŏn throughout Seoul with names like “Minsago Track.”78 By 1999, Korean students who had lived abroad started to flood the school, as well. “From the third year onward, I practically taught international students exclusively,” one teacher recalls. “We had students coming in who spoke better English than most of their teachers.” Ch’oe, in his book, theorizes that the rush of Koreans from abroad came as a result of the Financial Crisis—Koreans living abroad had to bring their families back home, and wanted their children to attend a school that held international standards.79

But despite that success, a chaotic atmosphere persisted—one in which the balance began to tip towards the international. “Good things survive and impractical things don’t,” Ch’oe writes in his book, and that dictum applied to a number of aspects of his initial vision.80 Initially, Ch’oe had taken in students free of charge—there was no tuition. But that policy was not to last, as Pasteur and the Korean economy in general were swept up in the Crisis of 1997/1998.81 Pasteur went bankrupt, leaving the school to focus on streamlining its approach to education for the rest of its existence. Teachers, administrators, and students are all quick to point out that, despite the school’s success, it still has a very small alumni base, and thus very little in the way of donorship. Buildings have gone unfinished. Ideals had to be sacrificed for practicality—the school initially had only a one-way road that forced drivers to see all of KMLA, but the road has since been torn up, moved, and made into a two-lane. Teachers say they were pressured to take pay cuts. A system of closed-circuit TV cameras was installed to monitor students in their dorms, but it was later shut down. “They ran out of money and had to run everything in a more economic way,” one teacher recalls of the transitional years around the turn of the millennium. Another teacher described the atmosphere, when he arrived in 2000, as being one of “controlled chaos.”

Amidst this chaos, the greatest change to the school arrived in 2003: An aging and ill Ch’oe stepped down as headmaster, giving the reins to a former Minister of Education, Yi Tonhŭi. Nearly every adult interviewed agreed that Ch’oe’s departure was either a cause of a drastic shift away from the national, or at least representative of a shift that was already underway. Even a top administrator says he regrets the change. “Under the founder, every day, the students would gather in the auditorium and sing the Korean national anthem and the school song. People followed traditional rules,” he says. “The new headmaster emphasizes sentimental attachment to Korean values, but not actually implementing them.” He goes on: “That is a change in the mission of the school, of the founder’s vision of psychological and emotional attachment to tradition.” A college counselor agrees: “There’s less patriotism now. Especially now that the president of our school, or, rather, the headmaster, does not emphasize so much traditionalism,” she says. “The founder had more emphasis on that.” One American teacher, who is no longer at the school, describes Yi’s shift away from Ch’oe’s unique mission in blander terms: “I believe he thinks KMLA should be like Daewon—its greatest rival, and a conventional Korean magnet school.”82

The Yi era also brought a shift in the school’s implementation of policies. One might think of it as a shift from education by force to education by allowance. “The founder was very stern and firm in his beliefs. He pressured and forced students to stay after school and have shorter breaks, et cetera,” one teacher says. “But after they changed the school headmaster, teachers have more freedom to teach their students… They used to gather students in a room and beat their legs with a stick. But now they have a point system.” Gone are the corporal punishments. Morning Meetings are only held once a week.83 No one bursts through classroom doors to verify compliance with rules. As we have already said, the closed-circuit TV cameras are gone now. Students are allowed to run an independent student court for punishments and an executive branch for carrying out policies. More independent studying time is in every student’s schedule.

An administrator echoes a sentiment I heard in interviews and informal conversations with many teachers—that one of KMLA’s strengths is the choices and freedoms offered to students today are what make KMLA special. “The new headmaster gives more self-governing to the students. The pressure and control over students is relieved,” he says. “And that’s a good thing. For students, it’s good for them to have time on their own. Our school is excellent because it incorporates things like extracurriculars inside other academics.” One teacher, born and raised in Korea, draws a contrast between KMLA and other elite schools because it gives students literal space to think. “They have more opportunity for independent thought than I got, as a student. They have some free time,” she says. “They’re away from nagging parents and don’t have to go to hagwŏn at night.”

The college counselor even goes so far as to say that traditional learning is more optional. “Students should have a chance to learn traditional Korean values if they want. It’s not forced,” she says. “They can compare the values and choose one of them if they want. I want them to have the chance to compare to other cultures’ values.” An art teacher agrees: “[KMLA students] have the chance to learn and the chance to experience Korea, not just nationality but Korean identity,” he says. “But then, maybe after this, they can make a choice. We have to give them a chance.” We will return to the unexpected implications of this freedom and the effects it has on students’ construction of identity in the next chapter. But now, we will take a look at how the balance of the national and the international stands, after all of these years of change.84

Many of the national forms and practices of traditional learning set out by Ch’oe still exist, but nearly all of them have been watered down, in some way. Take, for example, the Morning Meeting. As we already said, it is held only once a week now. No longer do the students sing all the verses of the national anthem—they only sing an abbreviated version. An ensemble of Korean instruments plays, but so does a small orchestra of Western instruments—gone is the ban on non-Korean instruments. I attended two Morning Meetings, and there was little effort to keep jostling, chatty students in line. After one meeting, an administrator kept all the students in the auditorium for a stern talking-to about bowing. Apparently, in his view, students were not doing it correctly. They were to bow at a 15º angle when greeting a peer or someone below them in age, and they were to bow at a 30º angle when greeting an elder. One student refused, and bowed to the administrator at a 15º angle. When the man yelled at the boy and asked him why he had bowed at that angle, the boy replied that he had given the administrator the respect he deserved. There was giggling, but the administrator went on. What struck me was not so much the disrespect (for all I know, he was punished later in the day), but rather the lack of any ideology behind the administrator’s words. He was talking about forms, not the ideas behind the forms. As Richard Jenkins once said, “Meaning is not as easily imposed as method.”85

Teachers and administrators consistently confirmed that impression—that the forms had been hollowed out of their meaning, to a large degree. “They have the school motto, but they think about it for one second,” a teacher tells me. A high-ranking administrator has a similar view. “The students wear hanbok just because it’s the tradition of the school, because they’re required to,” he says. “They’re not accepting it as Korean culture, or their culture.” Even the hanbok itself has been reduced—teachers are no longer required to wear the headpieces that they once wore, and openly make fun of them (one calls them “Mickey Mouse hats”). The school’s director of public relations made no attempt to defend traditional learning as a crucial part of the school’s approach to education. “I think we’re very modern. The only difference is on the outside—the school looks Korean,” he says. “But inside, I don’t think it’s much different. Not that different from American trends.” He speaks about samulnori with a certain degree of respect (“I can feel the past, I can feel the ancestors’ spirits”), but immediately says traditional learning is not a major selling point of the school. “The bigger points are facilities, education, and faculty,” he says. “Why are we so popular? That’s very easy. This school sends the most number of students to the most prestigious universities.”

Even in advertising, the school no longer portrays itself as doctrinaire in teaching national ideas. A current pamphlet given out to American colleges prominently displays this statement about the school’s goals:

While maintaining a liberal view on education, the school expects students to hold fast to their identity as Koreans. However, instead of blindly preserving old customs, KMLA aspires to educate national identity by pursuing harmony between old and new practices. By observing Korean tradition, students experience Korea’s cultural heritage in their daily lives.86

That language stands in stark contrast to Ch’oe’s words about holding close to the minjok. Indeed, that phrase, “blindly preserving old customs,” almost sounds like a reaction against Ch’oe’s ideas. Nevertheless, there is potentially some credence in the idea that the school now emphasizes “harmony”—potentially, harmony between the national and the international. There are certainly authority figures who express that feeling—but only conditionally. “The school has become more cosmopolitan,” one teacher says. But he does not use the term positively, not as a way of describing a new ideology of harmony between national and international elements. “It has become less special than it once was. It’s just about a regular Korean school, to an extent.” A longtime administrator and teacher is quick to dispel the idea of any “contradiction” between traditional learning and efforts to send students abroad—but also doubles back. “There is no less emphasis today on Korean values than there was,” he says. “However, there is a difficulty, due to an increase in student numbers. There’s a difficulty in teaching kids about Korean values these days. It used to be easy to implement that, but now it’s not easy.”

Within the classrooms, there is virtually no trace of the national. A teacher of Korean history says that he has never been under any administrative pressure to modify his curriculum—which uses the same textbooks as most Korean high schools—to fit any ideological ends. “Not really is there any pressure to teach Korean values,” he says. “The administration actually does not focus on the content of the class. They focus on the exams.” He does feel that there is some “biased opinion” in the textbooks, often “Japanese influenced bias,” but he is insulted when I suggest that he would mention that in class. “It’s not important for me to correct that history—it’s for individuals, themselves, to think in their opinions through the course readings.” He tries to give them as many supplemental readings as possible, so that they can form their own views. “As things go by, it’s coming more and more towards the international side of the education,” he says, when asked about the institutional direction of KMLA. A Korean language teacher, teaching in the Minjok Kyoyukkwan, says he feels no responsibility to emphasize Korean values—“The minjok is implemented through the history classes,” he says with unintended irony. For him, the pressure is on the opposite end. “The school is not pressuring students to develop their ideas on nationalism too much,” he says. “Actually, downplaying nationalism and patriotism is critical.” Of course, Ch’oe never explicitly called for the history or literature classes to be ideological. But he did call for the art classes to instill pride and awareness of the minjok. And the current art teacher, who has been there since 2001, is decidedly against any and all forms of Korea-oriented education. “There are no more traditional Korean art classes here,” he says. Instead, he teaches how to use computer graphics. And he, himself, was originally taught in traditional Korean styles, but has since abandoned them. “I wanted to find more than nationality. That’s why I stayed away from Oriental painting,” he says. He says the school is, in theory, balanced between the national and the international. “I think the school is supposed to be in between,” he says. “But realistically? It’s internationally oriented in its objectives and curriculum.”

The national is not gone from KMLA, at all. For instance, Ch’oe’s goals are still being expressed through the teachings of the music class. I sat in on one session of the class, and the teacher spoke at length about the uniqueness of Korean music and how it relates to the Korean minjok.87 But, as we shall see in the next chapter, students have a low regard for the class. An Earth Sciences teacher says that he tells his students to refer to the body of water between Japan and Korea as the “East Sea” rather than the “Sea of Japan.” And, of course, the school looks wildly different from any other high school in the country, and everyone still wears hanbok. Everyone still recites the mottos and performs the daily bow to the dorm parents, too. Yet, one cannot escape the rhetoric and indications that the ideology has been somewhat drained from these forms, and we shall see more examples of this change in the next chapter.

On the other side of the coin, the ideology of training students to be global leaders is largely intact—at least rhetorically. For instance, that new pamphlet we cited earlier features a message from Headmaster Yi about how “we” (it is unclear if he means humanity or Koreans) live in a “knowledge-based society.” “However, only a small, gifted segment of society will be able to lead this nation to greatness and elevate the general standard of living,” the statement reads.88 The college counselor echoes that sentiment. “Traditional learning is very important, but for me, the more important thing is that they must get prepared or competitive,” she says. “I don’t mean test scores. They must be prepared for education standards in America if they want to survive.” One teacher speaks proudly of how knowledgeable his students are about the world, and how outspoken they can be. He tells a story of some US state-level congressmen visiting the school on a tour. “Our students asked critical questions to a degree that astonished them,” he says with a smile. “In Seoul, other students just said, ‘We are allies.’ But my students didn’t fall for propaganda or uni-source positions. They asked questions.” And, of course, the Nobel Pillars still prominently stand alongside the road.

And yet, there has been a bit of a draining of ideology here, too. Ch’oe’s School Motto explicitly says that learning should be done “for the sake of learning” and not “in thoughts of personal gain.” But when I spoke with students about their average days, they spoke constantly of preparing for AP tests and SATs, of memorizing words and sweating over their college applications. The idea of “learning for the sake of learning” is a difficult one to maintain when the school’s fame, as acknowledged by its students, teachers, and even its public relations representative, is its ability to get kids into the Ivy League. Perhaps the most representative manifestation of the international aspects’ loss of ideology is the status of the EOP. To put it bluntly, the EOP barely exists. Yes, there are large banners up in the cafeteria that read “ENGLISH ONLY POLICY,” and students are spottily punished for using Korean on campus. But the teacher who is nominally in charge of enforcing it cannot speak English, and had to conduct his interview with me through an interpreter. When asked about the EOP, the public relations representative shakes his head in exhaustion and says, “When people visit, I don’t say that we have an English-Only Policy.” Another teacher, Korean-born and Korean-bred, firmly says, “I don’t enforce the EOP. Nope!” No student who had attended the school in recent years told me that the EOP was enforced—nearly all teachers who speak Korean teach in Korean.

Classes taught by non-Korean-speakers, of course, are in English. One such teacher offered his thoughts on why the EOP had lapsed so much. He was the one who had to teach those Korean teachers in the early days, telling them jokes in English, so he thinks it is simply not feasible for most Korean teachers to become fluent. But he thinks it is also a matter of efficiency on another end. “We now have so many students who have lived abroad, and they don’t need it,” he says. “In the early period, it helped, when the level of English for the students wasn’t that good. By now, it’s not really necessary anymore.” He also remarks that the EOP is only important for students insofar as it gets them into top-tier colleges—and when they realize that they are good enough, they use English even less. “Students who come back from American field trips to American colleges totally forget about EOP,” he says. In general, the international goals have remained more durable than the national ones, but have still changed—everything is more streamlined towards what is more efficient. As we saw in the words of teachers talking about independent thought, even the idea of free thinking and open research is invoked as something that gives KMLA something of a competitive edge, something that makes it more effective at what it does internationally.

Conclusions

We must note immediately that this chapter is not intended to be the story of how a school has failed. Indeed, if anything, KMLA is a success story by any number of measures. Koreans see it as one of the most desirable schools to attend in the whole country. As the Wall Street Journal has noted, it sends more students to top American colleges than most American high schools, and more than any other Korean school. The quality of the education is much lauded by students, faculty, and administrators, as well. As the official history says, the best parts of the school are its students, teachers, and facilities. Teachers constantly echo that sentiment, saying that KMLA’s students and faculty are its greatest assets. However, we must remember that those words lack the rhetoric about the minjok that Ch’oe initially used and tried to implement. The institution, in a way, might be seen as an individual, constructing its identity over time. For various reasons—financial problems, demands of outsiders, dilemmas of efficiency, recognition of its own strengths—that individual has gradually watered down the national parts of its identity. While still maintaining some forms and ideas that are specifically national, it has become much more international in its outlook and in its notion of itself. But the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. To get the deepest possible sense of KMLA’s ideological balancing act—and its implications for understanding the larger balancing in Korea and the world—we must look to the students. Now that we have the background and the story of the institution, we can look at the words of the students, and the ways in which they themselves think about the dilemmas Ch’oe once faced.

***

Chapter Two:

“Traditional Learning” and Its Discontents

Students at the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy spend most of their daylight hours in two buildings at the bottom of a hill: C’hungmu Hall and Tasan Hall, which we introduced in the previous chapter. And as we said, these buildings are intended to seem specifically Korean. They are named after two iconic, pre-20th century Korean figures. They have classical Korean roofs, with blue-painted tiles and gentle concave slopes. A six-foot-tall statue of Ch’oe, dressed in hanbok, sits nearby. In stark contrast, at the top of the hill stands the massive student dormitory, to which the students return each night. More than a dozen floors high and made of gray cinderblock, it looks thoroughly modern. It could fit in with the apartment complexes of Seoul, or New York City, or even the newer dorms of Harvard University. Inside, the dorm rooms could also have been plucked from any American college, with bunkbeds and spaces for computers.

The contrast between the two buildings is something of a gateway to understanding one of the central questions in this paper. KMLA students study in an environment that was designed to evoke a pre-modern, uniquely Korean past, but they ultimately leave that environment. The question is whether or not that environment has enough of an effect on them for them to take it back up the hill and into their lives. To put it more bluntly: How do KMLA’s students interpret and incorporate the national aspects of the school into their own identities as transnational subjects? In this section, we will look at the words of KMLA students—both current ones and graduates—and analyze their responses to questions about this issue.

This chapter and the one that follows it comprise, in a way, their own balance between the national and the international—this one focuses on the former, and the next focuses on the latter. But, as we shall see, when it comes to the ways KMLA students think and speak about their identities and aspirations, the relationship between “national” and “international” is far more complex than a simple division into two concepts. In this chapter, we will focus on what students said about the “national” aspects of their time at KMLA. Those aspects largely consist of—but, as we shall see, are not limited to—the school’s traditional learning initiatives. We will also introduce a new term: “Korean-ness.” 89 That term, in this context, encompasses a handful of concepts, all related to what we have previously called “the national”—a sense of duty to work for the benefit of the Korean community, a sense of being a member of a larger community of Koreans, and/or pride in having a Korean background.

Our argument here is as follows: Although a minority of the interviewees said the school’s institutional emphasis on traditional learning had a direct impact on making them feel a greater sense of Korean-ness, most of them did not. However, that latter group is not monolithic. To be sure, there are those who said, outright, that their time at KMLA has not made them feel more Korean-ness. But there were also many who said that they developed a greater sense of Korean-ness while at KMLA, but not because of any traditional learning policies. This third group raises questions about how and where national identity is produced, but the other two also offer insights into the theory and practice of identity formation in an educational context. We will analyze each of these three groupings, beginning with those who said the traditional learning made them feel more Korean-ness, whom we will call the “Yes Group”; moving on to those from that middle category, whom we will call the “Conditional Yes Group”; and finally looking at those who said they felt no greater Korean-ness from their KMLA experience, whom we will call the “No Group.” What this chapter will suggest is that aspects of the school that have nothing to do with traditional learning have made students more aware of Korean identity, pride, and even tradition. We do not have the space to quote every student, so we will do our best to offer illustrative quotations from a select few.

Part 1: The Yes Group

The Yes Group is hardly uniform. 9 of the 28 respondents fit into the category, which represents respondents with a wide range of views. There were those who expressed unequivocal praise for the traditional learning programs to people who were very reluctant to admit that such programs changed them at all. We shall begin with the most vehement proponents of traditional learning, and move towards those who had a more mixed opinion of it, so as to present a segue into our next section.

Haeil90 is a senior at KMLA, and has lived his entire life in Pusan, in the southeastern corner of South Korea. Nevertheless, despite having lived only in Korea, he says there was something lacking in his life before he came to KMLA—a sense of being Korean. “My identity as a Korean was quite a little bit not that strong,” Haeil says with a laugh. He was not looking for a revamped identity in his scholastic experience, he says: “I’m sure that the traditional learning was not the reason that made me decide to go to KMLA.” But when he speaks of his experiences at KMLA, he uses an almost religious vocabulary, as though he had gone through a conversion experience.

Haeil cites the first time he heard one of the student music groups play samulnori as a key moment in his personal development. “Something strange that I didn’t feel before was rising in my heart,” he says. “I got to know that this was something that I, as a Korean, got to feel when hearing it.” Now he, too, plays in the student samulnori ensemble, and he says it has changed him. “Whenever I play samulnori, I feel something I’ve never felt before, and it’s as a Korean—I feel pride as a Korean,” he says. “There is something that makes me feel so…” And he trails off for a moment. “I cannot express it in words. I feel Korean, really.” He also cites a visual dimension to his transformative experience at KMLA—the classroom buildings. “The architecture is really similar to the Blue House,” he says, referencing the Korean presidential building in Seoul. “I was really interested to see that, because I’ve almost never seen such architecture before. I didn’t expect that to be a school building. But when I saw that, I also got to be proud that I am a Korean, because there is something that makes me feel so…” He trails off, before saying, once again, “I cannot express it in words.” When asked if he means he cannot express it in English words, Haeil says that he cannot express it in any language. “I don’t know if I was, something like, brainwashed or not, but I think KMLA gave me something like a Korean identity and a strong feeling and power as a Korean.”

Tongwŏn’s life story stands in stark contrast to that of Haeil, at least in terms of residency. He lived most of his life in the United States, moving from there to matriculate at KMLA. Indeed, he almost canceled the Korean half of his dual citizenship, leading to a national media scandal surrounding him and his father, a government employee.91 Also, unlike Haeil, he says he definitely came to KMLA with an agenda to strengthen his Korean identity. He feared that if he “stayed more and more in America,” that he would “become more and more Americanized,” and wanted a school that would prevent that process from occurring. “I noticed that this Minjok, KMLA school had a lot going on—hanbok, kŏmdo, doing archery, learning a lot of special Korean cultures, all of those combined,” he recalls. In his estimation, those elements—all central to the school’s traditional learning initiatives—changed him. “The heritage aspects have definitely been met,” he says. “Instead of being just a good school, KMLA tries to make us more Korean. Going to a good school is huge, but it’s a secondary thing.” He goes on: “Our goals are to go to America and spread the Korean spirit to all the people in the world.” When asked to define the “Korean spirit” and what it means to “spread” it, Tongwŏn, even more explicitly than Haeil, uses language associated with religion. “It means to make people understand that Korea is a great country, make people understand what Korea is,” he says. “To have a Korean spirit, all you need is to be proud of Korea. It doesn’t matter whether you know a lot about Korea or whatever—it’s about being proud of becoming Korean.”

If Haeil seems to be describing a conversion experience and Tongwŏn alludes to a goal of proselytizing, we might see Kŭnsŏk as someone who felt that KMLA offered salvation, lifting the burden of Korean history from his shoulders. Kŭnsŏk grew up in Los Angeles, around Korean-Americans who often asked him—a native-born Korean—to tell them about Korea. When he ran out of facts that he already knew, he turned to the books he could find. “I tried to study Korean history, but the more I did, the more sad I became,” he recalls. “I become sad when I study Korean history because it’s always been invaded by China or Japan or Russia.” He was not without pride, though. “I was not ashamed of Korea,” he says. “For example, if my mother or my father were collaborators [with the Japanese colonizers], I would be ashamed. But I felt remorsed. That’s where KMLA stepped in. “I was just frustrated about the whole thing of Korean history. But KMLA helped me feel more proud and happy.” He says he chose KMLA, instead of comparable foreign-language high schools, because he was “a little interested in its special mission.” He is now a graduate, and looks back on the rules of traditional learning with admiration. “Hanbok and bowing—some of those things were very superficial, but I had to know what they meant,” he says. Such rules constituted a separate set of “ethics” that non-KMLA students do not experience. “In public school, ethics would be, like, ‘don’t steal.’ But at KMLA, you had to be Korean with your ethics.”

But unadulterated enthusiasm is not the norm here. The other students in the Yes Group all said that they had felt an increase in Korean-ness as a result of KMLA’s traditional learning aspects, but they all tended to downplay that change, in relation to the other experiences they had at the school. Sangmin, a 10th-grader, offers an example of such an attitude. When asked about his sense of Korean identity, he says, “I have that now. Before I came to KMLA, I had it a little. After I came to KMLA, KMLA’s education confirmed it.” But he does not wax poetic, like Tongwŏn or Haeil: “I’m a bit more of a patriot now,” he says. “I think that wearing hanbok makes students feel that they are Korean.” He also speaks of the Korean flags and the hanja in the classrooms as objects that “always emphasize this patriotic mind.” He is enthusiastic about the school’s emphasis on traditional learning. “I think it’s important to think about patriotism,” he says. “Education in KMLA tends to prevent students from losing their national identity.” But that effect, he says, is not always overt. “Wearing hanbok and following Korean traditions unconsciously gives a sense of nationality for me, I think,” he says. “I think KMLA’s education—some part of it, not all—gives me a sense of ‘I’m Korean.’”

For Sŏna, improving Korea’s image abroad is a deeply-held goal, one that she actively works for in her extracurricular activities. But, as with Sangmin, it is unclear whether KMLA did much in the way of actively strengthening that aspect of her Korean-ness. A life-long resident of Seoul and senior at KMLA, she is even more blunt than Sangmin when it comes to downplaying the traditional learning. “I would not say that the focus on tradition is important,” she says. “But it is the only school in Korea that teaches so much about the Korean tradition.” She describes the ceremonies and symbols almost as a kind of wallpaper, constantly shaping students’ vision of the world around them. “Just by having hanbok and teaching music, it gives students an idea, and reminds them what Korea is like,” she says. “In a normal high school, you wear Western-style uniforms, and the buildings are just Western there… It doesn’t give students an idea, or an inspiration at those schools.” She is already working on her own idea of how to “publicize Korea”—she works for an NGO that she was involved with in middle school, and that she brought to KMLA. “We write some essays about Korea that might help foreigners better understand about Korea,” she says, “Especially websites and textbooks… so we send emails to those webmasters and publishers that such and such information is wrong, and we want to change it to this or that.” The group, she says, also sets up “e-penpals” with “some high schools in the US or other countries, to keep in touch with them and exchange our cultures.” But we must note that this effort, so central to her Korean-ness, began before she arrived at KMLA, making it unclear if the traditional learning did much to actually change her.

Chihun and Chinhŭi, the last two members of the Yes Group we will profile, are reluctant to say that traditional learning had no effect on them, but come very close to doing so. “The traditional things, they changed me a little bit,” Chihun, a graduate of the school, says. “You have to do the Korean traditional instruments, and while doing that, I felt some patriotism. And wearing hanbok made me feel some of it.” She is quick to point out that she takes her Korean identity very seriously, though. “Our country is very precious for me, and I want to make our place much better,” she says. But did her education give her that idea? “KMLA made me feel that preciousness a little bit. But not so much,” she says. “I don’t think they failed.” Chinhŭi, a current senior, sees the situation in lowest-common-denominator terms. “At least, thanks to the education at KMLA, we know how to wear hanbok and play at least one Korean instrument,” he says. “It’s better than nothing, and other schools have almost nothing.”

Those words are a fitting transition to the other two groupings. Even among those in the Yes Group, many were emphatic in saying that traditional learning was not the most important part of their experience at KMLA, and more importantly, that it did not necessarily have a huge impact on their Korean-ness. Such statements put them near to our next group, who bear strong similarities to the Yes Group in their rhetoric about the transformative power of KMLA, with one important difference—they have an even lower opinion of traditional learning than even Chinhŭi or Chihun.

Part 2: The Conditional Yes Group

This group, comprising 10 of the 28 interviewees, problematizes the notion that an educational institution can directly influence a student’s sense of national identity. In fact, the paradigm of “directly” and “indirectly” does not even do justice to the nuances of this group, because such a paradigm implies that the school is seeking indirect means to implement a national agenda. What most of these students express, instead, is that they gained a sense of Korean-ness at the school through institutional aspects that no administrator or official document identified as being aimed towards Korean identity-building. It would be easy to lump these students in with the Yes Group, but we must take a nuanced look at their words to see that they are of a different mind.

Sangmi and Sŏngsu provide two very clear examples of how one can gain a greater sense of Korean-ness without being primarily influenced by the mottos, ceremonies, or objects of traditional learning. Both have lived parts of their lives in North America, both speak in clear English, and both have a forceful enthusiasm about their school. “Just being at KMLA made me feel that I am important to the world and I am important to my country,” Sangmi, an 11th-grader, says. Sŏngsu, a senior, is even more direct: “I’m in love with the school.” But the greatest similarity between the two is their involvement in extracurricular activities.

Sangmi is the head of the judicial branch of the KMLA student government—a position she speaks about with considerable gusto.92 “There are no teachers in this,” she says. “Teachers have nothing to do with it.” She is especially proud of the moral standard the student government sets. “Korean politicians are rotten,” she says. “But KMLA is a beacon. In our school at least, we are proud that we are transparent; no bribery, no nothing. If I become involved in law, since I learned those attitudes, I know how I should act as a leader.” She also says her patriotism has increased since she came to KMLA. “KMLA has made me feel more love for my country, but I cannot really say how,” she says. However, she later concludes that it was her work with a school music group. She lights up when she talks about the independence the group has. “We don’t have a proper Western music supervisor in our school, but we don’t really need one!” she says. And finally, we have hit upon what has given her this greater sense of patriotism: freedom and responsibility. “That’s how I learned that Korea is important and valuable and beautiful—through club activities,” she says. “Just being in KMLA, just being here makes me feel that I am important to Korea.” She goes on, talking about being a judge at the school:

It’s like my job. Our school is a school, but it is also a place where you have a job to do, work to do, a position. It’s your duty. I felt like serving for students or making judgments for people is something I want to do. You see, it’s the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy. You’re making future leaders.

Sŏngsu tells a similar story, also about an orchestra, albeit the larger of the school’s two ensembles. But first, he talks about how he feels a duty to “fix” Korean institutions. “Korea has still only had 50 years of democracy, and it still has lots of problems in the political processes,” he says. “It’s not so much that I want power, but that I want to be in a position to observe the problem and make a solution, where I can fix the situation. Corruption, the whole thing. Education, too—I want to improve it. International relations, I want to greatly improve that stuff, too.” When asked how and when he started to feel such a mission to fix his nation-state, he remembers a specific incident—one at KMLA. “I think it was after I was president of my orchestra,” he says.

The orchestra is over 80 people, and there’s no teacher or executive. All the stuff, the student president has to do—all the administrative things. When I got into the orchestra, it had tons of problems. People wouldn’t show up for an hour. There was chaos. Then I came in and I became the president and conductor. I tried many new policies. When I see my policies working and improving the whole group, I feel a certain self-achievement, that I’d fixed something—not only helped myself, but all the others. I want to do the same kind of thing, now, likewise things in the bigger world. That happened at KMLA. Before, I was only interested in science, purer academics. But now, I’m more interested in handling people.

Right after that monologue is when he says he’s “in love” with KMLA. Later, he says the traditional learning elements—like the “traditional clothes and the minjok characters up on every classroom”—are important, but he never speaks of a transformative experience coming from them. “You can’t teach patriotism,” he says. Again, the freedom and space afforded in extracurriculars seem to be the key for him, rather than the traditional learning.

There is another aspect of KMLA life and the free space it allows to its students that seems to have an effect on interviewees’ senses of Korean-ness: dorm life. Boarding schools are not the norm for elite academies in Korea. All research on Korean education notes the cramped, urban nature of the high-end high schools, and the fact that such schools tend to be in Seoul. Students there are shuttled from school to cram-school, returning to their homes late at night, and never having much time to speak with one another.93 Our interviewees tended to be aware of the fact that they were in unique circumstances when it came to living conditions. But for three students in particular, that uniqueness seemed to play a special role in their development of a Korean identity.

Sori is a senior who, like Sŏngsu, says you cannot teach patriotism. “The school hasn’t forced us or taught us about Korean pride,” she says. Nevertheless, she says she has felt more of that kind of pride since she came to KMLA. But the reasons have little to do with ceremonies or mottos. “My personal opinion is that the reason I felt national pride is dorm life,” she says.

We sit together and spend every day, most of our lives, like a family. We get to talk about studying abroad. Funny as it sounds, we do talk about national pride and coming back to Korea after we graduate. I don’t think the school taught us to be proud of ourselves—it’s just, when you’re going abroad, nationality comes into mind. The school hasn’t forced us or taught us. We just think about it.

Note that particular phrasing—“We get to talk about studying abroad.” Again, the emphasis here is on space, on freedom, on a lack of total supervision. The students are allowed to form a community, in Sori’s description, and from that basis, they are able to talk about what it means to be proud of Korea.

Usŏng is a recent graduate of the school, and he gives an almost identical account of how his time at KMLA affected his sense of identity. He was disappointed with KMLA’s traditional learning programs. “I was surprised that they didn’t emphasize traditions and patriotism enough. They were just about studying and just about success,” he recalls. “At morning meetings, they say things about patriotism, but they don’t emphasize that during their academic programs. They don’t have extracurricular activities about patriotism.” He does not fault the school, though: “Eventually, I understood that you couldn’t do much about it—it would be like propaganda, and they didn’t do propaganda.” But after saying all of that, Usŏng makes a curious statement. “I expected to learn how to be a patriot, how to work for your country,” he says. “It wasn’t actually like that, but I still think that they somehow reached their goal.” That “somehow,” again, has to do with space afforded to the students in dorm life. “Me and my friends would talk a lot, just spend all night talking,” he says. “You’re not supposed to hang out in your friends’ rooms after 12, but I did it anyway. We didn’t always talk about being a patriot, but we would talk a lot about patriotism.” He emphasizes one point, though: “The school wasn’t the main influence on that patriotism.”

Hŭisŏn’s story is, in a way, a darker, more violent version of the previous two accounts. Born and raised in the United States until the age of 9, Hŭisŏn says she was, “identity wise, a very confused child” during her pre-adolescence. “Then I relocated to Korea and a lot of things got shaken up. I didn’t know what it meant to be a Korean anymore.” However, she was given a firm tutorial when she arrived at KMLA. Her class was admitted earlier than usual, so their hanbok did not arrive until well into the school year. Older students did not approve. “When we came in with our ordinary clothes, they thought it was inappropriate, too loud, too revealing,” she recalls. “They already thought of themselves as Korean leaders, you know, saying ‘We have to set an example, we have to be put together, and responsible.’” She says the most disciplining she received was from her seniors, not the administration, and that it was even more severe among the boys—her male classmates often got “beaten up” by upperclassmen for not fitting their standards, she says. “I got yelled at if I was seen as an ‘Americanized’ girl. It made me conscious of what I was doing.” One of the primary aspects, other than dress, of not being “Americanized” was one’s motivation for going abroad. She says it was considered more “Korean” to talk about going to the US with an aim towards helping Korea in some way, not just for personal gain. But once Hŭisŏn left this pressure cooker, she says she stopped worrying about the American/Korean duality. “There was no deep ideological change in myself,” she says. “I do have a more acute awareness, at least, of what Korean-ness is, which does not necessarily mean blind patriotism.” What she chooses to do with that awareness has yet to be determined.

There are others in this Conditional Yes group whose stories have less to do with nuance than ambivalence. “It would be an exaggeration if I say that I feel my pride or anything like that has been strengthened while here,” one says. Another says traditional learning is there, “but it’s not the main thing—we have to study.” Yet another thinks that the traditional learning aspects have not changed her, but might do so in the future. “We are not sure if we are more nationalistic than before,” she says of herself and her fellow seniors. “But if we go abroad and study and are separated from our families, then we may think at that time if we are more nationalistic or not.” Finally, one says she is simply not that interested in Korean identity. “I don’t think I will directly use my power to help Korea be a ‘stronger nation,’” she says. “But KMLA gives me the opportunity of thinking.” As we saw in the first chapter, that notion about the “opportunity of thinking”—the idea that students are given a choice to develop their Korean-ness or not—is central to present-day KMLA institutions and ideology.

We will now move on to our final group—a group the founder would likely find to be an example of the school’s failure to execute its mission. But before we do, we must make one point clear: The members of the Conditional Yes Group are not anti-KMLA. Indeed, almost all of them express deep fondness for their school. The mechanisms and institutions that explicitly exist to promote the development of Korean-ness simply did not affect them. Nevertheless, they did develop some sense of Korean-ness. We will address the implications of this seeming paradox throughout the rest of this paper.

Part 3: The No Group

The members of the No Group make up the final 9 of our 28 interviewees. As with the previous group, we should note that many of these students felt enthusiastic towards their time at KMLA or grateful for the education they received—but that is not the point of our analysis. The point is that, according to all of them, the experience of going to KMLA in no way strengthened their sense of Korean-ness. Indeed, some of them said they went in as patriots and came out feeling less Korean pride than before.

Chŏnghyŏk and Insŏng fit firmly into that latter category—they say their time at KMLA has dampened their sense of Korean pride. Chŏnghyŏk is a freshman at the school, raised mostly in the United States, and says he came to KMLA with big dreams. “I want to be a global CEO,” he says early on in his interview. “But I want to get educated in America and still have a Korean heritage.” From that perspective, KMLA seemed like an obvious choice. His words sound strikingly similar to those of the founder: “My mission is to raise Korea to be one of the highest-earning countries, the most economically strong country, even.”94 But he has only found disappointment at KMLA. “There’s traditional music and morning ceremonies, but that is just superficial,” he says. “KMLA just uses the same textbooks as other schools,” he adds, concluding with disdain that “KMLA isn’t any different from other foreign-language high schools.” He does not blame the school for the gaps he sees. “The school has no endowment, so you can’t emphasize Korean heritage and identity and also be teaching students at a high level,” he says. Ultimately, he feels that he may have wasted his time by coming to KMLA. “KMLA or Philips Andover—it doesn’t matter to me now,” he says.

Insŏng, a recent graduate, is undoubtedly the most extreme in his critique of KMLA and its traditional learning policies, dwarfing Chŏnghyŏk in that respect. “When I was 15, I was nationalistic,” he recalls. “Kim Young-sam was energetically pushing the plans to get rid of all the Japanese facets of our society, and I deeply agreed with that. I was young and immature. That’s how I got nationalistic. I was anti-Japanese.” But KMLA, he says, exposed him to the dangers of nationalism. “While I was at KMLA, I became less nationalistic, and that’s definitely because of the internationalism,” he says. “I learned more about the outside world. I saw how nationalistic behaviors do not help us, do not nourish our concepts of the world, of your life, of your attitudes towards life and other countries.”95

Traditional learning was key in this change: “Part of the eye-opener came because I was forced to salute the flag and sing the national anthem every Monday, which I thought was very much a sign of this nationalistic behavior,” he says. “That was why I felt that nationalism didn’t help—it seemed meaningless.” And unlike some of those in the Conditional Yes Group, Insŏng points to dorm life as a factor that drained his nationalism. “Dorm life was totally non-nationalistic—they all listened to J-Pop and Western music,” he says. “I’m sure this is solid evidence that students and faculty members are not as nationalistic as we may appear to outsiders who only watch us wearing hanbok, shooting archeries, bowing politely to teachers, all of which add up to the biased viewpoint toward the school.” When asked if he could change anything about the school, he says he would change the name. “I would take ‘Leadership’ out of the school name, and ‘Minjok,’ too,” he says. “So, I guess you would lose the ‘L’ and the ‘M.’ It would just be ‘Korean Academy.’ Korean Academy isn’t bad—it’s close to the truth. There’s not so much of a leadership or minjok ingredient in school life or what the school teaches us.”

Tongwan, Chaewŏn, and Yongjun are of a markedly less depressed disposition than Insŏng or Chŏnghyŏk in discussing their time at KMLA. For them, the school did not drain their Korean-ness—they just say that they have felt no effects on it, one way or the other, while at the school. Tongwan, raised largely in the United States, wishes that even the tiny traces of those aspects would be erased. “It’s a fraud!” he says of traditional learning at the school, throwing his hands in the air. “There’s not much to it. Even if I went to a regular high school, it wouldn’t be much different. I’m just wearing hanbok.” He points to the Korean music class as a particularly blatant example of the “fraud” he sees. “Korean music class is a joke,” he says. “The teacher is one of the most famous traditional Korean musicians in the country, but he comes in and he just talks and no one listens.” Ultimately, he is pessimistic about the school’s capacity to construct national identity. “It’s gonna be a fallen dream,” he says. “I might end up telling my kids that the school I went to has fallen.”

Chaewŏn, on the other hand, wishes that there were more effective traditional learning programs at the school. He came to the school in no small part because he believed in its national ideals. “Compared to other schools in Korea, where they follow Western traditions; going to a school that values our culture is a school that thinks one step above, one level higher,” he says. But he cites the bow to the dorm parents as an example of unmet expectations: “Today when we do it, it has become a very, a very not-significant experience, neither for the dorm-parents nor the students.” He wants change. “I think there should be something more—I think we should learn something that allows all the students to preserve the values that our ancestors valued,” he says. “Loyalty, courage, things like that.” Instead, he just sees routine. But he also blames himself. “I am self-contradictory, because I do value what the school teaches, but I don’t intend to follow that final goal of being a great leader,” he says. “It’s me sort of sneaking out of the way. I’m providing another brain drain.” In a way, Chaewŏn is describing a corollary of what many of the Conditional Yes respondents say—he has been given a choice to embrace some sense of Korean-ness, but he has opted not to. He seems to be saying that the school has failed, in a way, by allowing him to opt out.

Yongjun makes that point about choice even more explicit. “The school kind of influenced you, but if you chose to ignore it, you can.” He is simply neutral on the issue of the lack of strong traditional forms at the school. He came because he “always wanted to go to the best universities,” and also because of pressure from his parents. He does say that he wants to be a CEO and that he “plans to come back to Korea,” but his current aim is on succeeding abroad—and the traditional forms are just a sideshow to that goal. “Basically the only traditional class around here is music class, and that’s only once a week,” he says.96 “It’s all about getting abroad—better APs and whatever.” Bows are “more of a school tradition than anything else” in his mind. “KMLA has not helped me get that Korean identity.”

Hyechŏng and Chiyun offer helpful bookends to our analysis of the No Group. Hyechŏng graduated from Cornell years ago, and was in the first class of “Ivy Students” at KMLA—the track of students specifically aiming for study at American colleges. Chiyun, on the other hand, is a current member of the Ivy track. But both of them have the same assessment of why the school has had little to no effect on their Korean-ness: the founder’s balance does not make sense. “The school is in a very confused position, when it comes to traditional learning,” Chiyun says. “They want to emphasize it, but the reality is that we have to do a lot of time preparing to go abroad. It’s only one or two periods a week. It exists, but students get the feeling that the school isn’t emphasizing it anymore. I get the feeling that the priorities are changing.” But Hyechŏng says that very little has changed since her time there—that problem existed a decade ago. “Stressing all those nationalistic values and at the same time gearing towards globalism or whatever, it doesn’t really make sense,” she says. “I still get lots of questions from other people who don’t know the school very well, asking, ‘Well, if the school is so minjok-oriented, why are you speaking in English? Shouldn’t you be learning Korean in more detail?”

Chiyun has a particularly eloquent summary of the national and the international at KMLA: “If there’s a KMLA sundae, the ice cream part is that we have to do well in our academics. The sprinkles are the nationalism.” Hyechŏng remembers the days when the school was more propagandistic about its national pride, but says there was not much to write home about. “When I hear the word, ‘propaganda,’ that assumes that it’s working—that you’re forcing people to believe something,” she says. “But if no one is believing it, it doesn’t count as propaganda!”

In a way, Hyechŏng’s weak sense of Korean patriotism or nationalism—she says the two are “dangerous words”—is a vision of things to come that people in the Yes and Conditional Yes Groups must contend with. When students like Sangmin or Sŏngsu say that KMLA provides “subconscious” elements of Korean pride, which will be awakened when its students go abroad, they must temper their optimism with the example of Hyechŏng, who went to the school at a time when the founder was still in charge and ideology was still a prominent part of daily life. What has been the result of her travels in the world? “I think the traditional learning was sort of appealing, but I don’t remember clearly,” she says. “I don’t think that, during the time I was at the school, I became more patriotic—that’s not what happened.”

Conclusions

At this point, we must reiterate that this section is not intended to be a denigration of KMLA or its mission. What we are looking at is how students—especially those in the No Group and the Conditional Yes Group—have interpreted that mission. An important question in teasing out that interpretation is whether the Conditional Yes Group fits in more with the Yes Group or the No Group—a question that can sway one’s view of how much agency the school has in constructing its students’ identities as Koreans. I argue that they belong more with the No Group, especially given the aforementioned agreement from teachers and administrators about the school’s goals of freedom, as well as the fact that, even among the Yes Group, most of the interviewees said that traditional learning was not the most prominent aspect of their experience at KMLA. And yet, the Conditional Yes group offers salient points about how attending a school like KMLA can increase one’s sense of national identity through non-overt means. Most importantly, we should note that many of the Conditional Yes students say their increased Korean-ness came from activities oriented towards making them successful leaders on an international stage—not from explicitly national-oriented activities.

In general, the words of the students in this chapter should demonstrate relatively conclusively that the school’s direct attempts to instill a sense of the national in its students are nowhere near as powerful as the founder intended. But if there is one idea to take away from this chapter and use as a segue into the next, it is this idea that national pride and identity can come from unexpected places, places that are explicitly non-national or even—as we shall see in the next chapter—explicitly international. In many ways, the founder seems to have succeeded in spite of himself.

***

Chapter Three:

International Sources of National Feeling

While sorting through the interview responses of my student interviewees, I came across something of a paradox. As we saw in the previous chapter, only a minority of students said KMLA gave them a greater sense of Korean-ness. And yet, I also found an overwhelming amount of interview data about how strongly these students identified as Koreans. At first, I wrote it off as a consequence of the simple fact that they had been born Korean, spoke Korean, and were living in Korea. But I could not get over the fact that these students spoke of their attachment to Korea in urgent tones—Korean-ness was at the forefront of their thoughts, even among the ones who said traditional learning did nothing for them. What was troubling these students, and why was their feeling of Korean-ness so urgent? Eventually, an answer made itself apparent.

As promised, this chapter forms something of a companion piece to the previous one. Here, we will focus on the international. KMLA, as we learned in the first chapter, has tilted its balance towards the international, institutionally, in the past few years. More focus is given to AP preparation than samulnori, and so on. That preparation is explicitly international—students are preparing to study outside Korea and meet standards of success that are not uniquely Korean. But there are international sources of national feeling—the international can feed the national.

In this chapter, we will focus on two sources of national feeling among students—what we will call the “assimilation anxiety” and the “improvement capability.” What makes these factors distinct from the traditional learning program is that they stem mostly from students’ notions of studying or living abroad, not from notions of Korean tradition. In a way, both are a response to—indeed, in some cases, a reaction against—the prospect of living up to international standards. What makes these factors salient to this particular paper is not just that our particular interviewees express them. Rather, they are salient because they are closely related, in these students’ minds, to KMLA’s attempts to help them construct identities as international leaders. Indeed, in some cases, students said that they came to KMLA, in the first place, because of international factors that frightened them—factors that we will examine here. Our argument is as follows: The factors we will call “assimilation anxiety” and “improvement capability” stemmed from the international side of the national-international balance, and yet, they increased students’ national feeling of national identity and pride.

We must reiterate that we are not arguing that these two phenomena are the “most important” or “first” factors in students’ formation of Korean identity. Speaking Korean and being born to Korean parents, of course, would arguably be far more important. We are making a comparative argument, to contrast against the explicitly national factors explored in the previous chapter. The two factors in this chapter are merely two examples of international factors that can contribute to constructing a national identity. We chose them because they were ideas that students brought up voluntarily and about which they felt strongly. They are crucial in the way these students construct their personal balance of the national and the international.

Part One: The Assimilation Anxiety

All of the current students at KMLA whom we interviewed express some degree of anxiety about their journeys abroad. Often, those anxieties are about academics and the college admissions process—whether their application essays will be good enough, whether they will get good recommendation letters, whether their Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) scores will be high enough, and so on. Students usually talk about such fears before or after their interviews. But there is another anxiety that comes up even more often, and always on the record—what we might call the “assimilation anxiety.”

We step into murky terminological waters by using that word, “assimilation,” so we must offer up a provisional definition. For the purposes of this paper, “assimilation” means “adopting the customs and attitudes of a community with which one does not feel an a priori membership.” In this section, we will present and analyze the words of 18 of the 28 student interviewees, all of whom expressed a fear that, by studying or living outside of Korea, they could lose some essential part of their Korean identity through such assimilation. These 18 students vary widely in the amount of time they have spent outside of Korea (some had never left the country, some had lived most of their lives there), as well as in their opinions about a whole range of other issues relating to Korea, KMLA, Korean pride, and even whether or not they planned to return to Korea. But what makes the point even more salient than its widespread occurrence is its attachment to international thoughts, concerns, and aspirations. Thoughts of life abroad—not traditional learning or national customs—were almost always the trigger for speaking about these national anxieties.97

Sŏngsu phrases his anxiety about assimilation by bifurcating himself into two forms: Present-day Sŏngsu and future Sŏngsu. In his words, the two seem to be at war with one another. He grew up all over Korea, from Chŏlla to Inch’ŏn, and also studied in the US for a year and a half in his middle-school years. His reasons for going abroad are academic: “I want to go abroad probably partially because I wanted to double-major, and you have to choose one major in Korea,” he says. “I just liked that American colleges provide more variety of studying environments. In Korean ones, you just… you drink all night.” Sŏngsu listed various motivations for coming to KMLA, but one had to do with this conflict between his present and future selves over assimilation. As we have seen in the previous chapter, he expresses admiration for the general “atmosphere” of KMLA, but he specifically praises the institution as something of a safeguard. “Right now, I might not feel a sense that I’m improved in terms of patriotism,” he says, “but I think 12 years, 20, 30 years from now, I’ll think about how we all wore traditional clothes and had the [hanja] characters up on every class.” He imagines his journey to the US to be an arduous one, identity-wise. “I’m saying that, because we’re going abroad, it’s more important for us to preserve that sense of patriotism before we actually leave.” Then, he voices his concern about his lack of total control over his future self. “There is a chance that I’ll go to the US and feel like, ‘I love this country better,’ and change my mind to live there forever,” he says.

Yongjun is also a senior, and speaks of his anxiety almost in terms of preparing for an exam—one in which non-Koreans would be quizzing him about Korea, and a low grade would mean he had failed to live up to his potential as a Korean. A high grade would mean sticking out like a sore thumb in America—a goal he wants to achieve. He lived in the US much longer than Sŏngsu—a full 5 years. Unlike Sŏngsu, he is a firm example of someone in the No Group, feeling that KMLA’s traditional learning elements were easy to “ignore,” and that he has largely ignored them. He even has harsh words for Korea, as a whole: “I’m satisfied that I’m a Korean, but I’m not proud of Korea.”

Nonetheless, he narrates his predicted journey to the US as one of identity crisis, not liberation from Korean restrictions or traditions. Indeed, he fears that he will not be able to express the Korean traditions that he “ignored” in high school. “I have this feeling that, when I’m going abroad and saying, ‘I’m from Korea,’ and people ask what’s special about it, I don’t think I can reply well,” he says. He especially fears the idea of blending into the US too much: “I’m afraid that I would just be an American—just another foreigner who speaks good English.” He says he “doesn’t know why” the idea of losing his Korean identity scares him so much, but that he knows he “doesn’t want to just become another organ of America.” Therein lies the essence of Yongjun’s fear and a deep source of his developing Korean-ness—he does not want to fit in when he goes to the US. “If I am a foreigner, I want to really be a foreigner, not just a foreigner on the outside,” he says. “I don’t know why, but I really don’t want to be like those Asians who go to other countries and don’t seem to retain their identity.” He sums up his feared future scenario in poetic terms. “When I finally started thinking about going abroad for university, when I meet new friends, when I study there, it’s like I’ll have a Korean instrument but no ability to play it,” he said. “I have these Korean clothes, but I don’t know how to explain them.”

Time and again, another factor causing anxiety comes up in interviews: living around Korean-Americans. Unlike most of the interviewees, Tongwŏn has lived the majority of his life in the US. He was born in New Jersey and lived there for 7 years, attended part of middle school in Korea, returned to the US for the rest of his middle school education, and did not return to Korea until the day he had to take the entrance examination for KMLA. When talking about his life in the US, he tells a variation of a narrative that many other students echo: learning to love being Korean by witnessing the “Americanization” of Korean-Americans in the US. “Growing up, I saw kids who were Korean but didn’t speak any Korean,” he says. “And I thought they were pretty cool at the beginning—he or she gets along well with American students. But then, I saw that I was a Korean with citizenship, but didn’t know anything about Korean culture!” He says he had an epiphany: “I thought, ‘Wow, if I stay here longer, I’ll be like one of them! I won’t speak [Korean] naturally!”

But Tongwŏn’s assimilation anxiety remained after coming to KMLA. For one thing, he was the subject of a national media circus when his father, a famous professor, pressured him to revoke his Korean citizenship—a decision that brought the family and KMLA under scrutiny, and that was resolved when the KMLA administration pressured him to maintain dual citizenship.98 Still, he says he was bullied for the incident, as well as for being “Americanized.” “But then, an older student came to me, and he had been Americanized somewhat, too, and he said, ‘Keep on going,’ and that he had even been hit by people before,” he recalls. Nevertheless, all those experiences—intimately tied up in a fear of becoming a Korean-American, as opposed to being a Korean—have stuck with him, and he is still anxious about the future. “I’m actually still worried,” he said. “Three years of high school in Korea might not do that much good towards not being Americanized.”

Chŏnghyŏk is even more vehement on this issue. He is a freshman at KMLA who spent 3 years of middle school in Oregon. He is quick to say he “made all ‘A’s’” in middle school, “had a lot of activities going on” there, and that he could have gone to the Philips Andover Academy or the Stanford College Preparatory High School. Given all of that information, I had to ask him why he had bothered to apply to KMLA. His answer was swift: “I didn’t want to be a Korean-American.” He goes on to say that he wants to be a “global CEO,” but that one of the most attractive features of KMLA was the fact that it “was a pretty prestigious school, like Andover,” while “they could also teach the Korean-style teaching.” Again and again, he emphasizes that the fear of being a Korean-American had pushed him towards a deeper degree of Korean “patriotism.” “I saw many students, many Koreans at my middle school in Oregon, and also at Oregon State University,” he says.

Many of them, their parents came to Oregon way before their sons and daughters were born. This one friend that I knew grew up there for his whole lifetime. But they couldn’t speak Korean, even though they had Korean blood. They were more comfortable speaking English and talking with their American friends. Living in America for three years, I felt that, even for me, English was becoming more comfortable than Korean. I felt that it was right for me, as a Korean, to keep the Korean culture. That’s why I wanted to go to high school in Korea.

Usŏng, on the other hand, had very little experience in the US before coming to KMLA. He was born in the US, but left for Korea when he was 3. He graduated from KMLA a few years ago, and is currently attending college in New York City. It was there, in New York, that he saw Korean-Americans and started to fear the loss of his identity, as he tells it. “At college, I didn’t exactly become more patriotic, but I started to see why I had to be a patriot,” he says. He speaks of the polyglot world of New York City. “There’s a lot of Koreans in New York,” he said. “You can wake up and go back to bed, and in between those times, never have to speak a word of English—just Korean all day. I talk with my Korean friends [at college] like I used to when I was in high school.” But he tells this story not to speak of how pleasant it was to speak Korean, but to illustrate how seeing Korean-Americans has caused him to reflexively chastise himself for not being enough of a “patriot.” “I feel that none of them really care, my Korean-American friends and the other international students,” he says. “I don’t think they really think that Korea is their country, especially if they’re born in the United States.”

Chaewŏn demonstrates just how powerful this anxiety about Korean-Americans can be—he does not even want to live in Korea, but the sight of Koreans abroad has made him feel an urgency to preserve Korean identity. He grew up in Los Angeles. “I have seen many other Korean-American students in L.A. who have an identity crisis,” he recounts. This desire to hold on to his Korean heritage and prevent an “identity crisis” of his own is what made KMLA so appealing, according to him. “I first learned about the school from a church friend, who said, ‘There’s this great school where everybody wears hanbok and follows tradition,” Chaewŏn recalls. “The appeal was that… I had a right to be proud of our national heritage and culture.” Nevertheless, as he looks towards the future, Chaewŏn does not see Korea as a good place for him to live. “I worry about my future children,” he says. He thinks that “growing up in Korea’s current environment would be bad” for his children, especially educationally. Nevertheless, those early experiences with Korean-Americans have stuck with him, and make him anxious to prevent his children from losing their Korean identities. “What matters is that anywhere you go in the world, you’re still a Korean,” he said. “No matter where I am, I would make sure to teach my kids Korean.”

Haeil never grew up with Korean-Americans, and rarely left Korea as a child. Nevertheless, his one, brief experience abroad made him acutely aware of his identity as a Korean. In grade school, he visited various parts of Oceania. “I had been to other countries, and my identity as a Korean was quite a little bit not that strong,” he says of his travels. “I started to think, ‘I am just one of the international citizens.’ I had not such a strong identity as a Korean.” As a result, he says he has always planned to return to Korea, no matter where he goes—a feeling that predates his time at KMLA. “My whole life, I thought I’d come back to Korea after studying abroad,” he says. “That feeling became stronger when I went to KMLA.” Here, again, we see a form of assimilation anxiety. But unlike Chaewŏn, Haeil is staunch in his view that Korea is, and always will be, his main place of residence. Such a contrast is illustrative of how pervasive the assimilation anxiety is, even among students with different views of how to act on that anxiety.

Tonghun and Insŏng speak about a variation on the assimilation anxiety, one that emphasizes the feeling of being a fish out of water and also, in a way, emphasizes the potentially positive effects that can come from being in an alien environment. They show a corollary of the assimilation anxiety, by embracing the idea of not assimilating. Tonghun has never lived outside of Korea, other than a 2-month jaunt to Canada in grade school. As we shall see in the next section, he is very enthusiastic about helping Korea. But in addition to assisting his country, he predicts that his experiences abroad will give him the opportunity to strengthen his own Korean identity—by being a non-assimilated individual. “If you’re in Korea, and Korea is everywhere, then it’s not special for me,” he says. “But if I go to foreign countries and interact with other students from other countries, that means that the name, ‘Korea,’ makes me special.” Later in the interview, he re-emphasizes that point: “If I’m in Korea, the feeling that I’m Korean won’t be that special. But if I go abroad, I’m one of the few students from Korea, that makes me special.” Insŏng, as we have seen, is arguably the most vehement opponent of KMLA’s traditional learning program, and of nationalism in general. Nevertheless, he holds a sentiment similar to Tonghun’s. He says that “when you’re away from home,” you feel more in touch with your national identity. “That’s how everybody feels, whether you’re Korean or American or Japanese.”

Chiyun’s assimilation anxiety startled me—not only because the scenario she offered was unique, but because, in describing it, she directly confronted me and my own ethnic identity. She lived in New Jersey for 4 years of her life, and went to middle school in the hagwŏn Mecca of Kangnam, a neighborhood in Seoul. She expresses ambivalence about Korean nationalism. “I don’t hate my country, but I don’t really have a strong attachment, either,” she says. “It’s not that I have no attachment, but only a little. I’m proud to be a Korean, but it’s not that I want to dedicate my life to my country.” And yet, she sees the preservation of Korea as a nation-state to be vital, for a specific reason. “If you don’t have a nation that protects you, that could make your life hard if you go or live abroad,” she tells me. I ask her what she means. “You’re Jewish,” she tells me. “Don’t you understand? It’s like Israel. It’s a matter of your ethnicity. It can be a protection. I’d want Korea to be strong.” In this way, she manifests her assimilation anxiety through the fear that there might come a day when she could be threatened because of her identity, and that, in such a situation, rather than assimilate for protection, she would rather have a nation-state that could offer her protection. “It’s more pragmatic than patriotic,” she says. It is also intimately tied up in international life.

Tongwan is probably the least patriotic or nationalistic of the interviewees, and he wears that badge proudly. As we have seen, he calls traditional learning a “farce.” When asked if he considers himself a patriot, he says he is not. “What I’m saying by saying that I’m not a patriot is that, if a war occurred, then I would run away,” he elaborates. But he says that, despite his lack of patriotism, he thinks his heightened English abilities might actually lead to problems while he lives abroad—problems with assimilation. “I’m afraid of studying abroad, because it’s such a big place,” he says. “It seems like a problem, because my English is better than my Korean.” I ask him to elaborate, and he says he is not sure exactly what he means by that statement. But his use of the language of fear and the comparison of English with the Korean language suggests that he felt the same sort of anxieties that others had expressed.

Sŏna wants to be a diplomat, and she, more than anyone else, speaks of her assimilation anxiety while still wanting to remain as cosmopolitan as possible. Most of the interviewees say their motivations to go abroad had more to do with job and education opportunities, but she wants to be part of the mixed salad of nations and ethnicities. Nevertheless, she presents a scenario not unlike Yongjun’s—a situation in which she would be tested on her knowledge of Korea and her Korean identity. But the stakes were much higher in her scenario. She is involved in the Model United Nations (MUN), having done the activity in middle school as well as high school, and she says that MUN trips “made me decide to study abroad.” But they also taught her an important lesson about the importance of maintaining a Korean identity. “It’s important for students to be concerned about Korea and keep it in their minds even after they get into college, because, you know, they, many of the students might have to work for Korea, even if they just think they’re studying abroad,” she says. Upon being asked to elaborate, she presents what she calls a “case scenario.” “I might be working for the UN, and if there’s an issue dealing with Korea, if I don’t know Korea, then it’s a problem. Koreans should know more than anyone else about Korea.”

Some of these latter examples may seem weaker than the earlier cases, in the evidence they provide for showing pervasive assimilation anxiety. Indeed, one of the reasons we included the less clear ones as specific case studies was in an effort to parse out details and implications that the interviewees did not make obvious. However, in order to reinforce our point that the assimilation anxiety really was a widespread phenomenon, we will conclude with something of a “laundry list” of brief quotations from interviewees. Each of these statements was blunt in their expression of fear about assimilating and losing Korean identity while abroad.

“I’m worried about going abroad,” Tonggŏn, a senior, says, “because I have seen friends who have gone abroad, and I feel a difference between them and me—I worry that I would lose my identity.” I ask him why it is important to maintain his identity, and he says he is “not sure why it’s important, but just because I am Korean and I love my country.” Another senior, Minsik, puts it simply: “I don’t think that going abroad would be a good thing if I lost my identity as a Korean.” Taesu, also a senior, emphasizes that he greatly admired KMLA’s founder, Ch’oe Myŏngchae, and that he believes in Ch’oe’s vision for KMLA students. “If you go abroad and lose all our traditional values and our identity that we are Korean, then all his purpose is lost,” Taesu says. “Our school is trying its best to provide us with programs that are necessary to nurture our Korean thinking—thinking like a Korean, I just mean thinking about Korea.” Hanŭl has an interesting spin on anxiety about maintaining her Korean identity—one that she extends to the identity of projects she might create while abroad. “I want to come back to Korea because if I keep living and working in foreign countries, abroad, maybe the technology I develop will not be seen as Korean,” she says. “If I develop the technology or find something very unique, I want to tell people that it was developed by a Korean person.” Sangmin, a freshman who has never left Korea, perhaps sums up the assimilation anxiety most succinctly. “I want to study abroad, but I’m afraid, because I don’t want to lose my nationality.”

Sangmin’s statement acts as a jumping-off point for our larger analysis of KMLA. Ch’oe Myŏngchae would certainly be proud to hear Sangmin’s words—they describe his vision of the world. We are not saying the assimilation anxiety is wholly separate from the KMLA experience. Indeed, it is often deeply wrapped up in it. What we are arguing is that it is wrapped up in thoughts about international factors. KMLA students may have those thoughts at home or at school, but the fact remains that they are not triggered in interviews by talk of national symbols or traditions. And the same fact is true of another phenomenon that we must examine, one of a largely different character.

Part Two: The Improvement Capability

Hŭisŏn has a story that she says is revealing, when it comes to the mindset of her fellow KMLA graduates. “I had a conversation with a KMLA graduate at MIT,” she says.

He’s a very good-looking guy, but he’s never been able to hold down a girlfriend for a long time. He was slightly drunk and he told me that a lot of KMLA guys have difficulty holding down long-term relationships because they feel that they don’t deserve that until they achieve something, and also because they always feel that the girl has to understand their ambitions to save humanity.

She admits that the story was a bit of an exaggeration, but that there is a little bit of truth to it. As we shall see, there is more than just a little bit of truth in those words. Lofty ambitions and a feeling of responsibility are immensely important for the students in this study, even if they do not necessarily include “saving humanity.” The anecdote illuminates the second of our two featured factors in developing Korean-ness while thinking internationally. That factor is a sense of power that students have to improve Korea through their own actions. We will call this factor the “improvement capability.”

“Improvement” and “capability,” in this study, have many meanings, which we will parse out in each individual case. But the umbrella definition of our phrase is as follows: a perception that Korea is sub-optimal in certain aspects, combined with a feeling that the student can ameliorate those shortcomings, even if they do not necessarily want to do so.

In cases where students explicitly say that they feel a duty to improve Korea because it is the nation with which they identify, then the improvement capability is clearly linked to development of Korean-ness. But there are students who fit this rubric less clearly—those who say that Korea might benefit from their work, even if such national improvement is not their goal. In a way, this latter feeling is even more strongly connected to a sense of Korean-ness: Such respondents are saying that the gains of their success will automatically funnel specifically into Korea, implying that they are inextricably linked to a wider imagined community of Korea, whether they like it or not.

The improvement capability was roughly as widespread as the assimilation anxiety—20 out of 28 respondents expressed it in one form or another. Again, we must emphasize that these respondents did not necessarily develop this factor outside KMLA. Indeed, all the focus on leadership and “advancing” the “Fatherland” is strongly tied to an improvement capability. But those ideas, even at KMLA, are aimed internationally, not nationally. The improvement capability about which these students speak is only possible if they look abroad. It is an international source of national feeling.

We will divide the respondents who spoke of the improvement capability into two groups: those who said they planned to return to Korea to do the work that they thought could improve Korea, and those who were agnostic about the prospect of returning to Korea. We will call them the “Return Group” and the “Agnostic Group,” respectively. It is a bit of an arbitrary division, in that both groups tended to express the same sets of ideas. However, it will do, given that it will peripherally shed light on the possibility of brain drain resulting from the Korean educational exodus.

The Return Group

Of the 20 students who spoke of the improvement capability, 10 of them said that they definitely planned to return to Korea for the bulk of their lives. Not all of them said that they felt a duty to return to Korea—although some did. Rather, this grouping came solely from personal plans.

Sori, Sangmi, and Sangmin all came from different backgrounds, but held one belief in common: Korea is running out of unique advantages in the world, and the best way they could help their country is by contributing to the one natural resource it has left—intelligent minds. Sori is blunt in stating that idea. “Personally, I think Korea is losing its special identity. We used to make ships, cars or phones—but Japan has all that. We have nothing to do unique,” she says. “We have no materials, and high labor fees. We only have brainpower. I think that’s what Korea will be best at, after 20 years.” But that belief is not her only reason for wanting to turn a career in international relations into something that aids her home country. She says she feels an “innate” desire to improve Korea, a desire that, indeed, makes her uniquely Korean. “I feel like I have to do something for the nation. I have to come back and make Korea proud,” she says. “I don’t think a lot of people around the world feel that. We have one ancestor, we have the story of how we are all related to each other—that kind of concept is what minjok is all about.” Sori also wants to return. “No matter how well I would do, how good a job I would get in the US or Europe, no matter how handsome a boyfriend I might get, I would bring him home to Korea,” she says. Sangmi may turn her passion for the school’s judicial branch into a career in law, or she might go to medical school, but she knows where she will end up. “I have to come back to Korea,” she says, as if it is an a priori statement. When asked why she “has to,” she has trouble expressing the English term for her reasoning. “Well, because Korea is having a big trouble of…” she pauses, “Running out of brain? Brain drain! Yes, brain drain.” Her notions of Korea’s international standing, therefore, fuel her sense of national duty.

Sangmin is a member of the Yes Group, but only barely. He says that KMLA’s traditional learning had only influenced his ideas about patriotism “a bit.” By comparison, his desire to improve Korea is far more intense. “After I study abroad, I want to come back to Korea and work for Korea, because Korea needs some educated youth,” he says, echoing Sori and Sangmi. “Because Korea doesn’t have natural resources. I think Korea only has its personal resources.” In that vein, he plans to bring much-needed knowledge about environmental science to Korea. “When I become, like, an expert in that field, I want to come back to Korea and make some big facilities and institutions that research about environmental engineering,” he says. Korea needs such engineering institutions, he says, “because there are no good educational facilities in Korea that teach it.” He thinks he can change that state of affairs, and improve Korea in the process—but only by going abroad. International aspirations have fueled his belief in his ability to improve Korea. Chihun was also a borderline Yes Group member, having said that KMLA only influenced her patriotism “a little bit.” More important to her is a desire to help Korea. She sees deficiencies in Korea’s brainpower, but unlike Sangmi, Sangmin, or Sori, wants to attack the problem head-on, by reforming the Korean education system. “I want to have my education in the USA, more advanced education. I want to learn how to advance information and knowledge for students,” she says. “I want our country to have better Korean education.”

Tongwŏn and Hanŭl see Korea as lacking in scientific prowess, and feel that they can bring tools back from their studies in the West. “I want to be a pediatrician,” Tongwŏn says. “I’ll study in America and learn a lot, and then come back with more medical treatments than Korea has today. Hanŭl, as we saw in the section on assimilation anxiety, wants her work in biology to be identified as specifically “Korean,” and fears that the world might not see it as such. But she also thinks that she can ameliorate the social “problem” of needing “connections” for getting jobs in Korea. She thinks her potential fame could change that: “If I come back from Korea as a famous researcher, then I can become an example of someone who doesn’t need to have those connections; who can contribute to change society.” Again, going abroad is a key for her national pride and identity—it can improve Korea’s standing internally and externally.

Sŏngsu and Kŭnsŏk see politics as their area for reform. Sŏngsu says that his desire to improve Korea came even before he went to KMLA. “I always wanted to come back some day and contribute to my country’s development,” he says. He is the one who says he wants to “clean up” Korean politics, and thinks he can only pursue his national dreams by going abroad for a double major at a US college. Kŭnsŏk fits into the Yes Group, saying that KMLA helped him get over his feelings of “remorse” at Korea’s historical weaknesses. He says Korea’s biggest problem is reunification between North and South. “There’s China, Japan, and Russia, and overseas there’s the USA—we’re in the middle of a lot of strong countries,” he says. “I don’t think Japan or China want us to reunify—because they want us divided.” He calls that division a limitation on Korean power, and says it is a “real problem.” And, like our first few students in the Return Group, Kŭnsŏk believes that Korea’s last, best hope is human capital. “We don’t have many natural resources, so our main resource is smart people,” he says.

Chŏngan’s sense of improvement capability applies to national power in a broader sense than just politics, and she says she became aware of it when she was in an international situation. “After I went to the States, as I was studying among the Americans, the Indians, the Chinese, I kind of realized that my identity as a Korean…” she says, and pauses. “It’s my duty to come back and contribute to my country.” Although she is specifically working in finance, she thinks she can potentially help Korea’s standing in both global economics and global geopolitics. She can see herself “bringing financial knowledge from abroad into Korea,” so that she “can improve the institutions, the regulations and all that.” She cites the 2006 “Lone Star scandal,” in which two Americans were accused of manipulating the Korean stock market, as an example of Korean weakness.99 “I feel like we could have responded better to that event if we had more knowledge about hedge funds and leveraged investments and all that,” she says. “Money and power are linked.”

Of the students in the Return Group, none was more grandiose in his or her sense of improvement capability than Haeil. “Many Koreans are really egoistic. It’s the thing that can be called minjoksŏng,” he says. “Of course, it is impossible for me to fix such a minjoksŏng, but I think I can appeal to other Koreans at least, after I become a famous scientist or something like that,” he says. “I can appeal to other Koreans that we have to change. Many Koreans already know that they are egoistic.” He says he wants to “make Koreans feel more of a community,” and although “it’s too big a dream for one Korean,” he can nevertheless aspire to it. “I think if I make many contributions and make a higher position to appeal to others, I’ll have more opportunities for that,” he says. “I think if Koreans just get out of that egoism, we have really such a great potential to be a really well-living people.” Interestingly, he says that such changes would make Korea “a developed country.” After being told that many would consider Korea already “developed” in a conventional sense, he says, “We lack some things right now. We’re not yet developed,” and refers back to what he has said about egoism. In this way, Haeil’s perceived duty is to fix duty itself as a concept in Korean mindsets by serving his minjok abroad.

The Agnostic Group

The other 10 of the 20 students who speak of the improvement capability are what we might call “agnostic” about the prospect of returning to Korea. That word encompasses a wide range of opinions—from people who felt that there was a relatively good chance that they would return to people who felt they could best improve Korea by living outside of it. But they are all united by the belief that doing their life’s work in Korea is not a prerequisite for improving Korea.

Chŏnghyŏk, Yongjun, and Usŏng offer emphatic arguments for why a life abroad could improve Korean deficiencies, and put those arguments in terms of success in the business world. Chŏnghyŏk, as we saw in the previous sections, feels a deep sense of Korean pride—more than he thinks KMLA can match. He channels that pride directly into an economic goal: “My mission is to raise Korea to being one of the highest-earning countries, the most economically-strong country,” he says. He even directly links his sense of Korean-ness to his sense of mission. “When I say I want to keep a Korean heritage and Korean identity, it’s that I want to, later on, benefit Korea and raise Korean power in the world, to be as strong as America or powerful countries like China.” He wants to be a CEO, but one who retains a sense of Korean identity. However, he does not see Korea as a necessary base of operations for his potential firm—indeed, the whole point of his goal is that he can best help Korea by thinking internationally. “I do not think that the only way to keep the Korean identity is to live in Korea or start the business in Korea,” he says. “I can live in America or other countries and have big companies there to influence the whole economy, and later to benefit the Korean economy.”

Yongjun wants to be a CEO, but more generally wants to help the Korean economy in the global marketplace. “I could help Korea in increasing its exports and profits,” he says. “I could be a lawyer, too, working on international trade talks or agreements. I just want to help my country.” That kind of rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the way he talks about the preservation of traditions at KMLA, which he describes as something one can “choose to ignore.” He says he plans to come back to Korea, but is not wedded to that idea as much as he is to the idea of helping Korea. “If I can’t come back, I would still try to promote Korea’s image,” he says. Usŏng also wants to help Korea’s economy flourish through what he learns abroad: “I’ll definitely use my skill for my country,” he says. And he, like Chŏnghyŏk and Yongjun, says he plans to come back to Korea, but does not feel a need to do so: “I don’t have to, if I can contribute to my country from abroad.” These are all very strong words in comparison to the way he describes official KMLA programs as being “just about studying and just about success,” and lacking in “patriotism.” The difference is striking, and indicative of how much the improvement capability, and the international aspects of his aspirations, have influenced his degree of Korean-ness.

Chiyun, as we have seen, is a pragmatist when it comes to her Korean-ness. “I don’t hate my country, but I don’t really have a strong attachment, either,” she says. “I don’t really have that feeling that I have to give back to my country.” As we have seen, she also has an acute sense of the fact that national strength is important to her survival. She is the one who draws the allusion to Israel, in talking about how “If you don’t have a nation that protects you, that could make your life hard if you go or live abroad. It’s the last protection you have.” For her, fears of the international climate prompt a feeling of national urgency. But she also works to strengthen Korea at a smaller level, in terms of what she calls “financial literacy.” “There’s not an emphasis on that in Korea, because college entrance is so important for Koreans,” she says. She sees this lack of financial education as the reason behind any number of Korean economic crises in the past half-century.

Tonghun, like Chiyun, is concerned with financial literacy in Korea. He has translated an American book called What Color is Your Piggybank? into Korean in order to educate children about economics. “It was very meaningful because although the economy and economics are quite emphasized more and more in Korean society, there aren’t that much materials for students, especially young kids,” he says. But what makes Tonghun unique is his belief that he can do the best for Korea by remaining outside of it. “I will give back to my society just if I do my best in my field, which will be economics,” he says. “It will make my country high if I do very good things, and set some milestones. It’s a prestige not only for myself but also for my country.” Then he goes one step further in his reasoning. “If I go somewhere else, then I’m doing well for Koreans,” he says. “My achievement in my field, everything will directly or indirectly affect thoughts about Korea in other students’ minds.”

Sŏna, Hŭisŏn, and Insŏng are of a different mindset from all the previous respondents: They think their successes will automatically benefit Korea—whether they like it or not. Sŏna does like that prospect. As we have seen in the previous section, she is part of an NGO that promotes Korea’s image abroad in various ways, and as we have seen, that involvement came before she arrived at KMLA. But even beyond her work with that organization, she thinks her personal success will help the country she seeks to promote. She wants to work for some kind of international company: “As long as I’m concerned about Korea, at least, if I work in the US and do good in my career, that is kind of like spreading out the Koreans’ reputation to the world.” Hŭisŏn is far less committed to the idea of helping Korea, yet still has a similar interpretation of what her life’s work might lead to. She says she knows many people who want to “help Korea.” “For me, it’s not that,” she says, and speaks about how she is more into the idea of aiding a “community,” but not necessarily a Korean community. Then she pauses and adds a caveat. “But I guess, if I become successful, as a result there would be a good image for Korea,” she says. “But that’s not the goal.” Insŏng is somewhere in between the two female students in his assessment of how important it is to help Korea, but he agrees with their interpretation of what will happen if he succeeds. “Doing your best wherever you are can be seen as doing good for your country.”

Ajung offers an example of the improvement capability at a bare-bones level. “I don’t think I will directly use my power to help Korea be a ‘stronger nation,’ but I want to help,” she says. She wants to go into business, probably outside Korea. But “I want to help Korea, people living in Korea,” she says. “I’m interested in orphans and I will help orphans in Korea as much as I can.” In Ajung’s case, the improvement capability is far from the most important factor in the development of her Korean-ness, but she speaks more concretely and emphatically about it than about anything she has experienced at KMLA.

Finally, we have Chaewǒn. He feels guilty. He does not plan to return to Korea after his studies, but understands the potential implications of that plan. “I’m thinking about staying in the US or moving to somewhere like Dubai or Morocco, or France,” he says. When asked if he feels any sense of duty to help Korea while abroad, he starts to speak in tones of personal shame. “There are other places in the world that are better than Korea. Even though Korea is my nation and I’m proud to be a Korean, I don’t have a responsibility to be tied to Korea,” he says. “I haven’t thought about my commitment to stay here and make Korea a better place, because I don’t know how much I can do as one person.” Then he adds, “Maybe that’s a little individualistic.” His feeling of guilt deepens. “I would never tell my teachers” about not returning to Korea, he says. “I have a guilty conscience about that.” He sees his decision as a potential detriment to Korea. “It’s me sort of sneaking out of the way, providing another brain drain,” he says. “I’m disappointed in myself. Maybe if I think about it more and weigh the costs and benefits, I think I would be able to change my mind, but for now…” and he trails off. These comments offer an interesting perspective on the notion of transnational identity. Chaewŏn recognizes his capability to potentially improve Korea, and that recognition is so deep that it makes him feel guilty when he chooses not to act on it. It is attachment by negation, and journeying internationally brings it out in him.

We began this sub-section with a story from Hŭisŏn, and we can close it with a comment she made about the phenomenon we have analyzed here. “I think a lot of my friends feel obliged to return to the Korean community,” she says. “I know a lot of friends who plan on going back to Korea immediately, without question. They say that it’s almost wrong to not help Korea.” Although that statement is purely anecdotal, it reinforces the idea that this notion of duty to help Korea is even more widespread than this paper can illustrate.

One question we have not been able to answer, and will not be able to answer, is one that the grouping of sub-sections here has raised: that of the potential return of Korean study-abroad students to Korea. Just as the Korean educational exodus is under-researched, so is its potential for brain drain. But as the grouping here shows, our sample group is relatively split down the middle, and more importantly, all its students are too young to speak concretely about their long-term plans. Even Hyechŏng, who was in the first wave of students to follow the Ivy Track for studying abroad, and who is currently living in Korea, is unsure of whether she wants to remain there. It is simply too early to tell whether the Korean educational exodus will be one of brain drain or growth in Korean human capital. Nevertheless, this idea that one is imbued with a unique power, as an individual, to help a given imagined community is crucial to understanding the ways in which transnational individuals like our students conceive of nationhood and identity. We will examine the implications of that idea, as well as many others from this thesis, in our final section.

Thoughts on “Cosmopolitanism”

These anecdotes take us back to that concept of “freedom” that the teachers and students spoke of so fondly in the previous two chapters. National feeling, we have seen, can come from sources that have more to do with varying degrees of freedom, for better or worse. Better, in that students say they have the world at their fingertips—they can lead orchestras and courts, they can speak freely about what it means to be a patriot, and they have unprecedented opportunities to learn and succeed outside of Korea, be it in business, law, or science. The other side of that coin, of course, is the terror that comes from the freedom to enter that “battlefield without borders” that Mr. Ch’oe predicted. That kind of freedom can instill a desire to cling fiercely to a sense of national identity that is localized and uniquely Korean, for any number of reasons, or even without any conscious logic.

But more importantly, we should note one concept that is absent from this chapter, because it is absent from the words of the students: cosmopolitanism. At the beginning of our first chapter, we said “balance” was the best word to describe the process of identity construction at KMLA, as opposed to “blending” or “mixing.” The statements in this chapter, by and large, justify that decision. Who, other than the girl with aspirations to join the UN, says anything about being a “global citizen” or experiencing “world culture”? Where, other than in the words of the girl who wants to be a part of “a community, but not necessarily the Korean community,” is the idea that these students passionately want to become both Korean and international? Virtually nowhere. We might expect that these students, being given the opportunity and training to be part of a global imagined community of elite intellectuals, would speak about the wonderful idea of joining a “global village.” But that is not what we see. Instead, the prospect of going abroad—although implicitly one that involves creating a new identity, simply by the fact that they will speak English and live out non-Korean mores—reinforces their sense of Korean-ness.

A summation of Chapters Two and Three is in order before we move on to the conclusion. Taken together, this chapter and the previous one reveal a particular balance that these interviewees have struck: They are almost single-mindedly oriented towards the international when it comes to their immediate and long-term plans, but they are just as committed to the idea that they themselves are fundamentally and inexorably Korean. And on the whole, they formulate the national part of that balance not through learning about Korean traditions at KMLA, but by learning how to succeed abroad at KMLA and having the freedom to think independently at KMLA. The concepts that these students express have a problematizing effect on conventional wisdom about the erosion of the nation-state and the decline of nationalism in the wake of the Cold War. It is with these thoughts in mind that we move to our conclusion, in which we will return to the theoretical literature and see how these ideas contribute to the larger, world-wide dialogue about globalization and national identity.

***

Conclusions:

Globalization and National Identity on Trial

In the introduction to this thesis, we laid out two questions. The primary one was as follows: “In what ways have KMLA and its students balanced their aims for international standards of success with their sense of national identity?” We have dedicated the bulk of the thesis to pursuing an answer to that question. Yet there was a larger query, one that we cannot come close to conclusively answering, but that our study addresses nonetheless: “How do the larger forces of globalization and national identity interact in the modern world?” It is a dilemma that concerns social scientists of numerous disciplines, but more importantly, one that affects populations and political systems around the world. Now that we have addressed our first question in depth, we have the opportunity to explore briefly the implications of our research for that second, more universally relevant question. Here our study suggests the following point: Globalization and national identity are not incompatible, but they interact in dynamic, unexpected ways that are difficult to control. As we conclude, we will offer up some thoughts about how this implication connects our study to the world at large.

In a sense, the story of KMLA is the story of one man trying to control the interaction between national identity and globalization, the story of an attempt at systematic, institutional control. His equation was simple: Globalization has come to Korea, but unique Korean identity needs to be preserved; therefore we should prepare students for the SATs on the one hand and teach them samulnori on the other. The end product was supposed to be students who could succeed abroad, but who also had pride and attachment to Korea. But this view turned out to be an over-simplification of a complex dynamic. There was no simple binary of “national” and “international.” What we see are students going abroad with strong views about their national identity, but for reasons that, on the whole, do not fit into the founder’s equation. For clarity’s sake, let us briefly review our argument, and then see how it challenges this belief in the efficacy of controlled systems.

Ch’oe Myŏngchae founded a school in 1996. It was to have a dual purpose of creating international leaders and graduates with a deep sense of national identity and pride—that was the initial ideological balance. The school became famous throughout the country. It was at the forefront of a revolution in Korean education—the rise of Korea to the status of number-one per-capita exporter of study-abroad students. Then the school’s ideological balance tipped in favor of the international. Why? New leadership was one factor, as were dire financial straits. But the deeper reason, playing into both of those two previous factors, seems to have been the pressures of maintaining what had made the school so successful—achievement of international standards of success. Today, some of the national elements remain in the form of traditional learning, but they are largely hollowed-out.

On what basis can we make an evaluative statement like that? We see it somewhat through observation of rituals and practices at the school, but more through the words of the very people who are supposed to be transformed by traditional learning—the students. On the whole, the students we interviewed felt that traditional learning was unimportant or at least not transformative in any meaningful way. Nevertheless, most of them expressed a pressing concern about their Korean-ness. What makes this study interesting is the fact that, despite the lack of care the students showed for explicit displays of national pride, they still embraced that Korean-ness, and that embrace was often triggered by international factors. For some, the increased concern about Korean-ness came during their time at KMLA, as a result of the space given to them for extracurricular activities or discussion and interaction with other students. That space and freedom was given to them, according to the school, so as to allow them to be more competitive in the international education market. For even more of the students, that concern came from more obviously international factors, such as anxiety about assimilating into a foreign culture, or a sense that their travels abroad can or will inevitably improve Korea.

And so we are left with a story about students who form their identities in a counterintuitive fashion: When faced with explicitly, uniquely Korean objects and traditions, they are unmoved; when faced with the rest of the world, they think deeply about Korea. This situation might be labeled simply as a case of “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” except for the fact that many of these students feel this increased Korean-ness before they even leave Korea. They feel it while they are confronted with traditional learning every day. They are not longing for something they do not have, because it is often right in front of them. This phenomenon is not simple enough to reduce to such an aphorism.

The phenomenon is also, in a way, bigger than KMLA, and bigger than Korea. We can examine its implications by parsing the statement we made earlier: first, that globalization and national identity are not incompatible; second, that they interact in dynamic, unexpected ways that are difficult to control.

Puzzling Pieces: The Compatibility Issue

There are those who claim that the forces of globalization are wholly antithetical to nations and the concept of the nation-state. One need look only a few hundred miles north of KMLA to find a hermit kingdom that actively resists nearly all penetration from outside culture. But beyond that fringe, there are those who think globalization and national identity at least erode one another, or that one will win out over the other. In the realm of theory, there are political scientists like Fukuyama, who sees the proliferation of liberal democracy wiping out vigorous nationalism over time, or Huntington, Barber, and Webb, who see radical nationalism as a militant response to and opponent of the onset of globalization.100 In social anthropology, we have Juergensmeyer, who also sees recent rises in nationalism as a nemesis to globalizing forces, and Appadurai, who predicts the death of the nation-state in a world of global communication.101 Even in Korean studies, there are those who see a certain degree of incompatibility between the forces. Alford and Kim, as we saw in the introduction, think Korea cannot maintain a unique national identity and fully enter the global community—the current situation of high nationalism and high globalization is untenable, in their view.102

Hopefully, this study has suggested that international aspirations and national feeling are not mutually exclusive within one person or one institution, although the balance might shift over time. Indeed, as we have seen, the forces of globalization can strengthen national identity. Of course, this small study cannot address the entire spectrum of issues about compatibility, but we have at least begun to engage the debate.103

Dynamic Dynamics: Systems of Control

The number of theorists and regimes who actually hold national identity and globalization to be incompatible is small, compared to those who see some sort of compatibility. However, although this study fits into that latter school of thought, we can still suggest that more work needs to be done in understanding how the forces interact. Put simply, theorists cannot predict, nor institutions control, the choices of individuals in constructing a balance between national and international identity.

Politically, we need look no further than Korea to see an example of people more powerful than Ch’oe trying to control the interaction of globalization and national identity—Presidents Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung. Kim Young-sam, like other leaders trying to maintain a 19th and 20th century notion of nationalism alive in a globalizing economy, spoke of “Koreanizing” globalization.104 He built up symbols of primordialist nationalism—folk villages, traditional festivals, and so on—while pushed for international trade. After him, Kim Dae-jung similarly tried to maintain control: He kept Korea active in the post-Asian Financial Crisis world economy, while also proposing legislation to give effective citizenship to all Koreans living abroad.105 Those were their attempts to control the balance of the national and the international, not unlike Ch’oe’s. They are not alone: Look no further than China or post-communist Eastern Europe for examples of states with leaders who have tried to reap the benefits of the global economy while sponsoring nationalist projects, all in the name of maintaining a simple balance between the two forces.

What our study suggests, on a microcosmic level, is that such attempts to control the balance are unstable and potentially doomed to failure—but not because the two forces are incompatible. Rather, what we suggest is that individuals will interpret their personal relationship to the rest of the world and their own imagined national community on an individual level. And that personal interpretation may be complex—for example, like our students, individuals can feel highly anxious about world culture, but still actively engage in it. Individuals might ignore explicit political attempts to dictate and promote identity politics, just as our students often ignore traditional learning. Like Certeau’s urban pedestrians, people facing programs that manage national identity can engage in “multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised.”106

Even among theorists, there is a tendency to over-simplify when writing about the complex interaction between globalization and national identity. There are those who speak of “cosmopolitanism,” such as Hannerz, Smith, Appiah, and Beck. Hannerz gives a succinct definition of “the cosmopolitan as a type in the current period of global interconnectedness, when an increasing number of people are geographically mobile under fairly comfortable circumstances and can enjoy taking in cultural diversity along the way.”107 But as we said at the end of our last chapter, our students are not cosmopolitans. Their aim is not “cultural diversity,” and the idea of assimilating into an identity that is not fundamentally Korean tends to give them deep anxiety. Then there are those theorists who speak of another equation—that populations use globalization as a tool for national advancement. Shin, Ong, and the joint work of Park and Abelmann all fit into this category.108 But our students show that such causality (nationalism leads to use of globalization as a tool) is theoretically problematic. It might be true in some cases, but many of our students showed that the prospect and opportunity of going abroad came before their deep national feeling. Perhaps the theorists who come closest to our conclusions are Fong and Nelson—both write about their subjects’ ambivalence and confusion as they think about national priorities and international opportunities.109

We do not mean to say that any of these theorists are necessarily “wrong,” or much less that our study is the only one that “gets it right” when it comes to understanding globalization and national identity. We merely want to add to an existing conversation, emphasizing the unpredictable, complex relationship between globalization and the national identities it faces. Indeed, our study has a number of deficiencies that further research should hopefully mitigate. We did not have access to a large enough sample size in order to examine correlations based on gender, age, or class, for example.110 More importantly, due to time and cost constraints, we were not able to do a comparative analysis with other schools in Korea—both those that send students abroad, such as Taewŏn, and more conventional schools. Additionally, interviews in Korean might have shed a different—though not necessarily more valid—light on these students’ thoughts and feelings. Nevertheless, we have recorded at least some of these students’ thoughts and feelings, and brought them into a dialogue that affects all of us living in a globalizing world.

The late Ernest Gellner, one of the world’s authorities on nationalism, understood the importance of education in any national identity-building. “Time was, when the minimal political unit was determined by the preconditions of defense or economy,” he wrote. “It is now determined by the preconditions of education.”111 But is it, really? More importantly, what constitutes “education,” in this context? Is it not possible that a national identity can arise from dorm life more than from classes on national identity? Is it not possible that an education explicitly aimed at international success can just as easily inspire national feeling? Hopefully, if nothing else, we have raised these questions, and pointed out their importance, not only to theorists but also to the greater public. Because students like Chŏngan and Sangmi are coming, en masse, to the United States and into the world at large, attention must be paid to how they think and act. If we are to promote and expand global understanding, we must be more ready for KMLA than the Wall Street Journal was.

Appendix I:

Notes on Methodology

The primary-source research for this study is based on 43 formal interviews, three weeks of on-site observation at the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy (KMLA), documents collected at KMLA, and dozens of fact-finding emails. The bulk of this data collection occurred during the summer of 2007, although one of the interviews and several of the email exchanges were held during the winter of 2007-08.

All interviews were conducted in a similar format, and with similar stipulations. Each interviewee had to present me with a signed Consent Form before I could interview him or her. There were two Consent Forms, each written by me with approval from the Harvard Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research. One was for students younger than 19—legal minors in Korea. It was written in Korean and was to be read and signed by each student’s parents. The other was for non-minors, written in English, and to be read and signed by the interviewee. Each Consent Form emphasized that all interviews would be anonymous, that the interviewee could stop the interview or go off the record at any time, and that his or her words would be used in a senior thesis about nationalism at KMLA. All interviews were roughly an hour in length, and recorded. With the exception of two small-group interviews (both held in that manner at the request of the interviewees), all interviews were one-on-one. All interviews were held in locations chosen by the interviewees.

I was not fluent enough in Korean to conduct meaningful interviews in the language, but I offered all interviewees the opportunity to have an interpreter present. No student took me up on that offer, and all were fluent in English. However, a handful of the faculty/administrator interviews were conducted through a hired translator, as the interviewees did not feel comfortable speaking in English. In addition, once I returned to Harvard, I paid two Korean students to translate two primary-source books for me: the autobiography of KMLA’s founder, and the school’s official tenth anniversary history.

28 of the interviews were with current and former KMLA students, and most of those were conducted in and around Seoul during the summer break month of August. These usually occurred in coffee shops or fast-food restaurants.112 The remaining student interviews, as well as all of the 15 faculty/administrator interviews, were conducted at KMLA. I made three trips to the school—two brief visits in July, while I was also a student at the Harvard Summer School in Korea program, and an extended visit at the beginning of September, when classes were beginning at KMLA. While at the school, I was under virtually no administrative supervision. Thanks to the help of a teacher, I secured a room at a building reserved for teachers and visiting parents. During the day, I would conduct interviews, visit classes, coordinate further interviews, and gather data.

I assembled my interview group in a way that was more haphazard than I would have liked. The teacher who obtained a room for me also introduced me to some current students in my first July visit, and I got their contact information. I secured some interviews in this manner. Many students came to me: I asked one early interviewee to post a solicitation for my interviews on a KMLA student online message-board, and after he did that, I received a number of emails from interested students. Similarly, word got out to a KMLA graduate message-board, and some graduates contacted me as a result. I was able to surpass my goal of 25 student interviewees, but was unable to obtain a sample with equal numbers of students of varying age, gender, regional background, or economic class. Nevertheless, the numbers broke relatively even on gender—13 female students and 15 male students. I looked at my data and could find no appreciable differences between responses from males and females.113 Also by chance, the group came from a wide range of backgrounds—some had lived in the United States nearly all their lives while some had never left small towns in Korea; some were there on scholarships, some had familial wealth to supply their education; some were from Seoul, some were from Pusan or elsewhere. However, the sample size was not large enough to justify any generalizations about those factors and their effect on students, and with the sample we did have, there was no appreciable difference based on those factors.

Interviews were conversational in style, with no set structure. However, I did ask certain questions in every interview, such as, “What do you think of the ‘traditional learning’ program at KMLA?” “What does the word minjok mean to you?” and, in the case of students, “Why did you decide to study abroad?” I have chosen not to list all of these questions here, as they would give the impression that these interviews were like surveys, when they were not. Sometimes a question would yield a one-sentence answer; sometimes a tangential follow-up question would be the heart of the interview.

Appendix II:

Relevant Photographs

In the following pages, I have included some photographs I took of the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy and certain objects I observed in it. Some of these photos are referenced in the body of this thesis; others are included to give a more general sense of what the institution and its residents look like.

• #1: Overview of the main campus

• #2: Nobel Pillars

• #3: Entrance to the Minjok Kyoyukkwan (“Cultural Center”)

• #4: EOP sign on teacher’s door

• #5: A session of music class

• #6: Students on their way to lunch

• #7: A “Morning Meeting”

• #8: Typical classroom

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

#8

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Word Count: 30,953

1 Ellen Gamerman, et. al. “How to Get Into Harvard,” Wall Street Journal 30 November 2007, Weekend Section, p. W1.

2 Ellen Gamerman, et. al. “How the Schools Stack Up: Revised,” Wall Street Journal Online 28 December, 2007. http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html (accessed 11 January 2008).

3 “How to Get Into Harvard”. For the sake of honest quoting, we have opted to replicate the spelling from the article, which is in the Revised Romanization form of transliteration from Korean to the Latin alphabet. However, in all future transliterations that are not quotations from existing printed work, we will be using the McCune-Reischauer form. For example, if we had written this Journal article, we would have written “Kangwŏn,” not “Gangwon.”

4 Nina M Catalano, "Harvard TV Show Popular in Korea." The Harvard Crimson 13 December 2004. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505050 (accessed 15 October 2006).

5 Park Chung-ah, "Harvard Gets High Marks in Pop Culture." The Korea Times 7 December 2004. http://times.hankooki.com. (accessed 16 October 2006). Unfortunately, the webpage for this comprehensive article has since been taken down.

6 “Multi-Annual Statistics by School, 1992-2006,” Harvard University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard International Office, 2007. Obtained by special permission from the Harvard International Office, these statistics are available only by request and for academic purposes.

7 “Country Background: Korea.” Institute of International Education. Open Doors Project, 2006. http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=89245 (accessed 30 November 2006). The 2007 edition of this report has shown the number of Korean students studying abroad to have grown.

8 For a more detailed account of the methodology that went into this project, see Appendix I.

9 Curiously, although there has been recent research on Korean education, there has been no examination of the recent, rapid, and globally relevant rise of Korean study-abroad students. Seth is the leading English-language authority on Korean education, but he only briefly mentions studying abroad in the conclusion to 2002’s Education Fever, saying the “search for a competitive edge and the inadequacies of the educational system resulted in a huge exodus of students” by 1998. He attributes it to “the search for educational opportunity—and at a lower cost,” but offers no qualitative data to back up that assertion. Similarly, Korean education expert Ka Ho Mok has vaguely noted the existence of “international student exchange programs” in government plans of recent years, but does not examine the matter further. Michael J. Seth, Education Fever (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 256; Ka Ho Mok, Education Reform and Education Policy in East Asia (New York City: Routledge, 2006), 179.

10 We have opted to forego a traditional “literature review” chapter at the beginning of this thesis for two reasons: (1) There is no easily-defined body of literature into which this thesis fits, thus making such a chapter unwieldy, and (2) because it would be so unwieldy, it would disrupt the narrative flow of our argument. Nevertheless, we will firmly address certain fields of study and authors in the first chapter and in the conclusion.

11 Ch’oe Myŏngchae, 20 Nyŏn Hu Nŏhŭidŭli Malhara (Seoul: Ach’im Nara, 2004), 171.

12 Ibid.

13 Sin Ch’aeho, Tanjae Sin Ch’aeho chŏnjip (Collected Works of Sin Ch’aeho) (Seoul: Tanjae Sin Ch’aeho sŏnsaeng kinyŏm saŏphoe, 1982), 160-61; quoted in Shin Gi-wook, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006), 38.

14 Op. cit. Sin; quoted in Shin, 36.

15 Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, 2nd ed. (New York City: W. W. Norton, 2005), 413. Another note about Romanization of Korean names: We will leave modern politicians’ names in Revised Romanization form, as is the custom in Korean studies.

16 Shin, 171.

17 Kim Young-sam, Korea’s Reform and Globalization (Seoul: Korean Overseas Information Service), 273; quoted in Shin, 214.

18 Shin, 215.

19 “Korea Questionnaire 2003,” “Japan Questionnaire 2003,” National Taiwan University, Taipei: East Asian Barometer Survey, 2003. http://www.jdsurvey.net/bdasepjds/easiabarometer/eab.jsp (accessed 11 November 2007).

20 For an introduction to this so-called “Sunshine Policy,” re-engagement, and talks of reunification, the best sources are Oberdorfer or Cumings. Shin offers examples of the cultural implications of such reunification in the tenth chapter of Ethnic Nationalism in Korea. Op. cit. Cumings; Op. cit. Shin; Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History, 2nd ed. (New York City: Basic Books, 2001).

21 Kevin Murphy, “Seoul Arrives at a Difficult Crossroads,” International Herald Tribune, 16 September 1996. http://www.iht.com/articles/1996/09/16/overkor.t.php (accessed 15 December 2007). This definition is, of course, only one interpretation.

22 Victor D. Cha, Alignment Despite Antagonism: The United States-Korea-Japan Security Triangle (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999): data collected from various points in the book. Bilateral trade in 1983 was USD $9,723,000,000; by 1993 it was USD $31,579,000,000.

23 Shin, 212.

24 Shin, 213.

25 Open Doors Project.

26 “Destination Countries for Study, 2007” Korean National Statistical Office, Seoul, 2007. http://www.nso.go.kr/ (accessed 25 November 2007).

27 C. Fred Alford, Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age of Globalization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 12, 151.

28 Samuel S. Kim, “Korea’s Segyehwa Drive: Promise versus Performance,” in Korea’s Globalization, ed. Samuel S. Kim (New York City: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 263, 275.

29 Shin, 208.

30 So Jin Park and Nancy Abelmann, “Class and Cosmopolitan Striving: Mothers’ Management of English Education in South Korea.” Anthropological Quarterly 77 (2004), 650.

31 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 3rd ed. (New York City: Verso Press, 2006), passim.

32 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4.

33 Appadurai, 19.

34 Appadurai, 33.

35 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) 4.

36 Ong, 21.

37 Ong, 24.

38 Mark Juergensmeyer, “The Paradox of Nationalism in a Global World,” in The Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity, ed. Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjört (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

39 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 2nd ed. (New York City: Free Press, 2006); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

40 Shin, 204-05.

41 As of this writing, Ch’oe is alive, but lives in seclusion.

42 Ch’oe, passim. For example, one of the chapters about his brief career in banking is entitled “I Created the Very First Rule-Book of Banks,” and he devotes a whole section to the “Milk Wars” between his company and his competitors, which he claims to have won through “Ch’oe Myŏngchae Style Advertising” and not having the “Viagra effect” of his competitors (i.e. they were able to succeed for a brief period of time, but returned to impotency soon afterwards).

43 Ch’oe, 27.

44 He also mentions this memory in his address to the first graduating class of KMLA, for example. That address is published in the school’s 1999 yearbook.

45 Ch’oe, 26.

46 cf. Seth.

47 Ch’oe, 28-9.

48 Ch’oe, 29.

49 Ch’oe, 176.

50 Ch’oe, 233.

51 Ch’oe, 234.

52 cf. Mok.

53 Ch’oe, 181.

54 Ch’oe, 238.

55 “Korean Minjok Leadership Academy,” pamphlet self-published by the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, 1999. Hereafter cited as “Pamphlet #1.”

56 Pamphlet #1.

57 1997 map shown to me by a teacher who was hired in 1997.

58 For a view of the Minjok Kyoyukkwan, see photo #3 in Appendix II.

59 Pamphlet #1.

60 Ch’oe, 221. “Minsago” is an abbreviation of “Minjok Sagwan Kodŭng Hakkyo.”

61 For an example of typical student hanbok, see Photo #6 in Appendix II.

62 Ch’oe, 217, 221.

63 Pamphlet #1.

64 Pamphlet #1.

65 Ch’oe, 238.

66 See Photo #4 in Appendix II.

67 Ch’oe, 233.

68 Photo #2 in Appendix II.

69 Pamphlet #1.

70 Kyoyugŭl Pakkugo, Soesangŭl Pakkunda (Seoul: Hyungseul, 2006) 20. Hereafter cited as “KPSP”.

71 KPSP, 27.

72 KPSP, 187.

73 KPSP, 19.

74 Ch’oe.

75 Hagwǒn are private, after-school “cram-schools” that are de rigueur for competitive Korean students in urban environments.

76 There are no two sources that give the same exact set of numbers, but the KPSP, the school’s official Web site, and private correspondences with administrators yield the rough estimate of more than one thousand applicants and 150 admitted students.

77 Yi Chaeyong, “Ch'odŭnghagsaeng 10Myŏngchung 9Myŏng 'Haeoeyuhak Kago Ship'ŏyo,” Hanguk Ilbo, 26 November 2006, Economy Section. http://economy.hankooki.com/lpage/news/200611/e2006112617100570300.htm (accessed 11 January 2008). For further evidence of the school’s fame, a search of any Korean newspaper database will show dozens of articles explicitly about the school.

78 Ch’oe writes about this phenomenon, but more importantly, I saw it firsthand while visiting a few hagwŏn in Seoul—the institutions were explicitly advertising “Minsago Tracks.” A colleague who is researching hagwŏn tells me it is widespread.

79 Ch’oe, 237-242.

80 Ch’oe, 217-221.

81 KPSP, 401-4. The school still offers dozens of scholarships, thus not wholly excluding low-income families from sending their children to KMLA.

82 This quotation came in an email, and as with the Wall Street Journal article, we have opted to stay true to the original text here. The McCune-Reischauer style transliteration of the name of the rival school is the Taewŏn Foreign Language High School.

83 For a look at a current-day morning meeting, see Photo #7 in Appendix II.

84 We will focus on the identity of the institution, not on how students think about it—that latter set of observations is the entirety of our next chapter.

85 Richard Jenkins, “Transnational Corporations? Perhaps. Global Identities? Probably Not!” in The Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity, Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort, eds. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 70.

86 Ch’oe Onha et. al. “KMLA: Korean Minjok Leadership Academy,” pamphlet self-published by the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, 2006. Hereafter cited as “Pamphlet #2”.

87 For a look at that music class, see Photo #5 in Appendix II.

88 Pamphlet #2.

89 The term may sound odd, but has its roots in Ong’s work on transnational identity among ethnic Chinese. She uses the term “Chineseness” to describe the same feelings I describe here, albeit in the context of China and Chinese. One can also point to Appadurai’s use of the term “Englishness” in his studies of post-colonial identity in India. Ong, passim; Appadurai, passim.

90 Not his real name. As per my anonymity agreement with all interviewees, all of them will be written about pseudonymously.

91 We will analyze that story in the next chapter.

92 We conducted our interview immediately after she had presided over that week’s session of “student court”—an institution much loathed by all of my other interviewees, but one that she held in the highest regard. In a very stylized and strict procedure, students are brought forth to Sangmi and other, lower-ranked members of the legislative branch. They are told the crime of which they are accused (violation of the EOP, tardiness, use of computer games during study time, and so on) given an opportunity to plead not guilty (most chose not to, and afterwards told me it was because they just wanted to get the process over with), and after deliberation between Sangmi and her other magistrates, a sentence is declared. The sentences are “points”—rack up too many points, and you can face various forms of non-corporal punishment, such as having to write hundreds of hanja on a blackboard. What stands out about student court, and what Sangmi is so proud of, is the fact that there are no adults in the room when court is in session.

93 cf. Seth; Park & Abelmann.

94 In his ideal world, the Korean educational exodus would be reversed—“Students would want to study abroad in Korea.”

95 Indeed, Insŏng makes a comparison that would have shocked Korean nationalists of previous generations: “I started to draw a parallel between the administrators and Communists, in their way of thinking, in the way they behaved,” he says.

96 Many others echoed this blasé attitude about music class. “The musical instruments—I played them, but it was just playing music. I didn’t think of it as patriotism,” one said. Another said he liked the class, but because the teacher “let us order pizza and chicken wings and relax during class.”

97 What also makes the point salient—and somewhat problematic—was the fact that I never asked anyone about his or her fears of assimilation, in those exact words. Therefore, because I never asked directly about the fear of assimilation, some of the quotations are shorter and less elaborated-upon than we would like. On the other hand, that means this pattern is unprovoked—I asked no leading questions about it, and thus got expressions of anxiety that the students actively wanted to make sure were part of my research.

98 There is media documentation of this event, but I have opted to omit it, so as to preserve the interviewee’s anonymity.

99 For more information on the Lone Star scandal, a good starting point is this article from the International Herald Tribune: “Seoul court issues warrants for 2 Loan Star executives,” http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/16/business/lone.php

100 Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy, 2nd ed. (New York City: Ballantine Books, 2001), passim; Adam K. Webb, Beyond the Global Culture War (New York City: Routledge, 2006), passim; Fukuyama, passim; Huntington, passim. Obviously, this sentence is an oversimplification of their arguments. Indeed, Huntington’s book was written as a backlash against Fukuyama, and Webb proposes an alternative to their arguments, for example. However, we have grouped them together because they all posit that there are forces that rise up against the forces of globalization—although each author’s terms for the latter differ (“liberal democracy” for Fukuyama, “McWorld” for Barber, “liberal modernity” for Webb). Huntington is more complex, in that he sees globalization itself as a force proving the incompatibility of various nations. His different “civilizations,” all based on some degree of common, primordial, internal connection, cannot be combined. So, on that basis, he falls into the “incompatible” camp. What unites all of these writers is an assertion that the post-Cold War order is one in which primordialist, often nationalist groups stand in opposition to a harmonious, globalized order of some kind.

101 Juergensmeyer, passim; Appadurai, passim.

102 Alford, passim; Samuel S. Kim; passim.

103 The most important issue we have not—and cannot—address is that of mass migration, which is an oft-discussed issue among theorists and politicians in Europe, the Americas, and even Korea. For issues of migration and migrant workers in general, good starting points are Benhabib, Koopmans et. al., and Soysal. In Korean issues, Samuel S. Kim, Katharine H.S. Moon, and Hyun Ok Park have all written about how the influx of foreign workers to Korea threaten to erode the notion of minjok-oriented, ethnic-based nationalism. We just cannot address this issue because our students have not yet become part of the workforce in significant numbers, and we have no data on public responses to their movement to the US. That data will hopefully come soon, but it is not here now. Seyla Benhabib, “Citizens, Residents, and Aliens in a Changing World,” in The Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity, Hedetoft & Hjort, eds. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Ruud Koopmans, et. al., Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Samuel S. Kim; Katharine H.S. Moon, “Strangers in the Midst of Globalization: Migrant Workers and Korean Nationalism,” in Korea’s Globalization, Samuel S. Kim, ed. (New York City: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Hyun Ok Park, “Segyehwa: Globalization and Nationalism in Korea,” Journal of the International Institute 4, http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/journal/vol4no1/segyeh.html (accessed 22 January 2008).

104 Kim Young-sam, 273; quoted in Shin, 214.

105 Samuel S. Kim, 262.

106 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven Rendall, trans. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 96.

107 Ulf Hannerz, “Where We Are and Where We Want to Be,” in The Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 228; Anthony D. Smith, “The Crisis of Dual Legitimation,” in Nationalism (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1994); Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York City: W.W. Norton, 2006); Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision (New York City: Polity Press, 2006).

108 Shin; Ong; Park and Abelmann.

109 Vanessa Fong, “Filial nationalism among Chinese teenagers with global identities,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 4 (2004): 631-648; Laura C. Nelson, Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2000). In Fong’s case, the subjects are Chinese adolescents, deciding how to weigh pride in their country with the notion that it might be “backwards” by international standards. In Nelson’s case, the subjects are Korean consumers debating how their purchasing habits will affect their country.

110 On the issue of class, we must also note that these students tend to be relatively affluent, with access to high-quality education before they enter the school. This analysis should not be taken as exemplary of all Korean students, by any means.

111 Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism and Modernization,” in Nationalism (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1994), 56.

112 Most often, students asked to hold their interviews in Starbucks coffee shops.

113 This is not to say that gender does not play a crucial role in understanding Korean nationalism in general—merely that it did not play a major role in understanding our subjects and their responses. For those interested, there is a wealth of literature on gender and nationalism in Korea. These are some key works: Laurel Kendall, ed., Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002); Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Elaine H. Kim & Choi Chungmoo, eds., Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism (New York City: Routledge, 1998); Sheila M. Jager, Narratives of Nation Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003).