The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea

4 Class Work: Education Stories

100 4 4 4 CLASS WORK Education Stories There is little that is more vulnerable or more volatile in the South Korean social imagination than education. That is, as education has so long captured the aspirations and dreams of South Koreans, even slight changes in its meanings are felt in seismic proportions—ripe for a melodramatic sensibility , as discussed in chapter 1. Perhaps the most sensitive of social registers in South Korea, education is shorthand, a Rorschach for, dare I say, almost everything else. The education stories that follow take us into the early through middle years of the 1990s, in which this project is anchored, and extend to the century’s closing parentheses, conversations in 2000 and 2001. These stories reveal the considerable social confusion over class work, namely the work people do to ensure class reproduction or mobility (see also Janelli 1993, 37, and Kendall 1996, 229, on the competing claims of status; see Nelson 2000, 149–160, on mothers, education, and class work; on education and the middle class, see chapter 5 in Lett 1998). In this chapter, I turn to the education stories of two of the women, the Education Mother and the Janitor, and to the story of Mi-yôn’s youngest brother. These education tales demonstrate the story of class work in South Korea today. The education musings of Mi-yôn’s brother are recent, postmillennial reflections. Importantly, they are thoughts expressed in the aftermath of South Korea’s IMF Crisis. I argue that with the IMF Crisis, the rules of the game have changed. That social calculations are precarious and so forth is in one sense old hat: namely, South Koreans have long reflected upon, and negotiated their way through, changing rules, as we saw in the last chapter. Indeed, the thoughts of Mi-yôn’s brother that I heard in 2001, the o~cial end of the IMF Crisis, echo elements in the accounts of the Janitor and her children in the early 1990s, prior to the IMF Crisis. But there have been important structural changes in the dynamics of the social game: the taste of twenty-first-century venture capitalism in South Korea, although waning at this moment in 2002, is very new; the shocking pace at which South Korea and South Koreans have become “wired” is also noteworthy , as are the neoliberal politics promulgated by President Kim Dae Jung. What has remained familiar amidst these changes is the feeling of the personal and social contests—about a just world, and about personal circumstances , calculations, and chances. The Education Mother and Her Son Who Made It into College I turn now to the Education Mother, whom we met through the pocketbook story in chapter 1, again in chapter 2, and briefly in chapter 3 for her discussions of ki (spirit, energy) and how her mother’s child rearing and ambition had led to her eldest brother’s never amounting to anything. The story that follows, about her only son, is not unrelated, for it too concerns a boy’s ki, education course, and life horizons. In the pocketbook story, we saw how the Education Mother came to think of her sister’s story: a story of personality and, at the same time, a transgenerational story about her mother, the times, and social transformation. Before turning to the education story of the Education Mother’s only son, I return to the story of her brother and to some more details of her own family history. I begin by discussing conversations on a television soap opera (tûrama) that was popular in 1993, particularly among the women of the generation featured here, because it ran through my first three meetings with the Education Mother. In fact, to wrest the Education Mother’s story from its intersection with that of the soap opera would, I think, do it an injustice. By Way of a Soap Opera: Adûl kwa ttal (A son and a daughter) Adûl kwa ttal, the story of boy-and-girl twins, Kui-nam and Hu-nam, was foremost a dramatization of Korean gender prejudice. Interestingly, the soap opera revealed the costs of such discrimination for both the son and the daughter, who were each its victim. About the hardships experienced by these twins, one article noted: “People who have felt su¬ocated in life, people who haven’t quite known what to say or how to voice their silence, find the words with...