Dear Faculty,

I hope you had a good final week before Thanksgiving break and that you can find some time to relax this week after the final classes and games.  I just returned from a trip to Seoul, Korea and Yokohama, Japan.  In this entry I want to talk about Seoul, the home city of almost all of our Korean students.

First off, it is very big.  Riding in from the airport gave me a “Toto, I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore” feeling.  The population is about 15 million people.  It is a very modern city: big buildings, lots of lights, a massive and effective subway system.  I stayed in the Gangnam District, where many of our families live, and it was full of young and old people in business style clothes, living active lives.  During rush hour, the stations were full of people moving about and in the evening the many restaurants and stores were full.  Major international companies such as Samsung, LG, Fila, Kia, Hyundai were very visible.  Also, airport signs promote that South Korean companies builds more ships than the rest of the world combined.   It made me see, in person, the transition that our kids talk about; it’s like they are moving from Manhattan to Holderness, NH.  Here’s a picture of So Hee’s neighborhood, Gangnam:

The day that I flew in was the day of the huge national examination for high school students.  Millions of students travel into Seoul for the exam and the country stops airplane flights and traffic in the area to keep the the exam centers quiet.  The exams, mostly multiple choice, determine the university track and often the employment track of the students.  Obviously, it’s a high pressure moment that everyone in the country experiences.   Reportedly, there are only a few top universities and this limit is one of the reasons that so many Korean students travel abroad to study.   I heard one estimate that Korean citizens spend $5 billion on tuition and school expenses in the United States every year.  Part of the reason for that export of education is that most Korean students are not allowed to attend the international schools in the country.  Therefore, they need to travel abroad to gain a western-style education.  Many go to the US, and I have met some teachers who comment that Korean students are big part of international education schools in Singapore, China, Japan, etc.   Most Chinese students also cannot attend international schools in China, hence the demand Holderness feels from those two countries.

I saw three alumni while in Seoul.  Kris Langetieg ’95 married a Korean woman and lives in Seoul with their son.  He teaches English at a university, to high school students, and for some businesses.  He explained many of the cultural traditions to me as we travelled around.  Han Min Lee ’05 is a Lieutenant/Interpreting Officer as part of the Maritime Aircraft Program Team in the Defense Acquisition Program Administration of the Korean military.   He translated for me at the Holderness gathering and is very interested in promoting a Holderness alumni group in Seoul.  Woo Sung Lee ’06 has finished college and his military requirement, and he is now looking for a job.  They were great.

I spoke to the parents (through Han Min) at the gathering with some slides.  After the show, the alumni talked about one of the appeals of Holderness to Korean families: Korea sees itself as a country that pulled itself up from destruction of the Korean War, with US help, via education and hard work.  As they put it, “everyone works hard and chips in.”  Holderness aspects such as the job progam, special programs, etc. are appealing to our families.  On the flip side, the parents  gasped at the pictures of the deep snow in winter, and the only sport their kids (mostly boys) play is soccer.

The Holderness Korean families do not meet each other often, so it was nice to see a group of mothers socialize in the hotel bar area after the gathering.

Interestingly, there were not many positive facial expressions at first as I talked about the growth of our international population.  As we know, they are looking for their kids to experience an American education; to have a limited number of Korean students is a positive feature of Holderness.  In addition, they are long standing rivalries among Asian countries which I saw and read about while I travelled in Korea and Japan.   I needed to take some time to explain the benefits of increasing international students at Holderness.

In terms of regional rivalries, on a stereotypical level people from Korea look down on people from Southeast Asia (Vietnam, etc) as immigrant workers who perform low-paying jobs.  There is an underlying tension with Japan from on the street level from the pre-war occupation.  For example, the Japanese papers made a big story of how the North Koreans kept the Japanese national soccer team in Customs for four hours before a World Cup qualifier.  The Chinese are seen as big brothers that can be intimidating.   Korea shares a long cultural tie to China via Confucian values, etc. and their economic growth is interrelated.  Korean Construction companies work in China on a large scale, and thousands of Chinese travel to Seoul to shop for consumer goods.    But there is a fear of how powerful China can become.  The Japanese Times, one day, had a picture of the Korean Coast Guard chasing away ten Chinese fishing boats from the coast of Buan, South Korea.  (Picture Below) On a political level, these regional tensions are playing out as the national government jostle over access to resources in the local seas and over trade agreements.  President Obama’s visit to Asia which involved trade talks, a commitment to a military base in Australia, and ruffling China’s feathers over the South China Sea made daily headlines in Seoul and Tokyo.  Editorials in both Seoul and Tokyo welcomed the ties with the US.  However, there were editorials that argued against the free trade agreement with the US.

I had heard about many of these topics from our students at Holderness, but they came much more alive with a visit to the area.

Dong-A Ilbo / AFP – Getty ImagesA picture taken from a South Korean helicopter shows Chinese fishing boats banded together with ropes being chased by a South Korean coastguard ship. The incident followed alleged illegal fishing by the Chinese boats in South Korean waters in the Yellow Sea off Buan, South Korea, on November 16, 2011.

I hope you have a great Thanksgiving holiday.  Turkey is not a popular product over here, but there are plenty of apple tarts.

-Jory