My oldest child W began elementary school in March (the school year begins in March in Korea). For months before this moms with older children had been telling me (with a maniacal gleam of the eye), “Oh you’re going to be really BUSY from now on.” As anyone even tangentially integrated into the Ajuma* network of Seoul knows, education is a big deal and a huge source of pressure here. We had always planned to send our kids to local school; we wanted them to have a strong base of Korean and be a part of the social and cultural networks here, not to live in a bubble.

Besides, in Korea, elementary school is where you make your friends for life, shaping not just who you know but also what you can do in a society built upon relationships. In a country where a fourth of the population lives in one city and adults regularly attend elementary school reunions, first grade is not just the beginning of one’s educational career but the budding of one’s life as a social being, integrated into the various kinds of strong networks that shape life and success in this society.

All this I sensed. But being more practical-minded (and knowing we will leave Korea) I was curious what my son would actually learn in school. First grade has a graduated start; the kids go for one hour a day at first, working up to 3.5 hours a day by April. My son brought home textbooks with basic hangul (the Korean writing system) and addition. The graduated start and these basic texts seemed inappropriate given that the kids who live in our area (a place famous for both its nouveau riche and the high number of after school private institutions, called “hakwon,” which boast of sending students to Seoul National University) have most likely already attended a full day of preschool and kindergarten for 3 years, can read and write in two languages, match flags to their countries, play one or more instruments, and do basic math (addition, subtraction, possibly multiplication). Hakwon is like a second school that many of these kids attend a few hours a day. In short they know more than I do and their handwriting is far better. What would the teacher actually teach them?

On the day of our half an hour class visitation I lined up against the back wall of the classroom with the other moms, decked out in my heels, nice pants, unwrinkled shirt, and lipstick. (I had already learned the dress code from my individual “greeting” visit to the teacher, in which I brought juice and snacks and listened to her advice and opinions about raising children.) The time was spent on protocol: how to address the teacher, how to sit correctly, how to stand up and sit down and push one’s chair around at the right speed. The teacher asked each child a simple question, such as, “What did you have for lunch?” or “What do you like the best?” The three kids who went before my son answered, “Studying,” to this last question, which made all of us in the back giggle. When it was W’s turn I thought with some amusement that he would answer “Legos,” or “Star Wars,” because after all, I don’t brainwash my kids about studying. So I was flummoxed when he answered (with a proud smile) “God.”

After fielding congratulations for having such a pious child, inquiries about which church we attend (we don’t), and assumptions that we must talk about God at home (we don’t), the moms and teacher sat down for a three hour meeting during which we divvied up the responsibilities of the class. Each class here is like its own ecosystem, responsible for providing the means for its own survival. We needed at least one mom to serve in the crossing guard corps, one to serve as volunteer teacher twice a month (that’s me), a class leader (we all avoided the teacher’s gaze at this point), and a schedule for cleaning the classroom and serving lunch.

These moms gathered again the next Saturday after school (yes, we have school on Saturday too) for our “big cleaning” of the classroom. I showed up without rubber gloves, rags and cleaning fluid, because no one thought to tell me what they assumed everyone would know. I had already eaten lunch too, I didn’t know we would spend the first hour eating kimpap, drinking coffee, and learning who belonged to whom (in Korean, we are usually not addressed by name, rather I am “W’s mom” — I haven’t even heard most of the moms’ actual names). Then we settled in for about two hours of intense cleaning: dismantling the fans to clean the blades, disassembling the curtains to have them dry-cleaned, perching on the window sill to engineer the cleaning of three panes of window glass, washing the walls, etc. I found the whole thing so fascinating that I wished aloud that I had brought my camera, which elicited a rather pissy glare from the woman vacuuming the dust trapped in the grooves of the window next to me.

I spent most of last week in long meetings with three other moms to plan a joint birthday party to which the whole class was invited. We took tedious trips to Costco; we engaged in a long discussion about the size of plates. There was a great deal of mutual fawning of the “Oh, you’re so skinny!” and “No, you’re too busy, I’ll wash the grapes!” variety. During the party, the kids amused themselves while the moms convened. The conversation broke down something like this:

40% “Which hakwon does your child attend? Is it good? How many hours a week? Oh, our child’s English is so bad, I don’t know what to do!”
20% Mutual fawning
20% The kids in our class are the best! So well-behaved.
10% Chicken pox
10% Dieting/personal appearance

I linger on the details here both because I find them fascinating and because they provide a series of snapshots of the way in which it is not just W, but also I, who is being educated and socialized. As an outsider to this system — and one not heavily invested, as I know that I am leaving — I see all this emphasis on protocol and participation as a way of training and expressing particular relationships between social bodies — between individuals in the system and between us and authority figures. What W learns in class is not so much reading and writing (most kids learn that at hakwon) but rather how to express and confirm his relationship to the authority of the teacher, and how to move his body in accordance with social hierarchies and standards. [Perhaps one of these weeks I will write about his textbook “Correct Living.” It is riveting.] He is also learning to value (in word if not in thought and action) what he is told to value — studying, God, and country. He has begun to tell me to be quiet when other people are around, since I speak English to him and he wants to avoid questions about what he is. He is learning how to fit in.

We moms are being disciplined as well, learning to display our love and commitment to our children through particular prescribed and public means: formal greetings to the teacher, helping in the classroom, attending meetings. (I should also say that bribery and preferential treatment enter into this — some teachers favor students whose moms give them a lot of money or frequently help out at the school.) School-mom meetings are like political events, important not just to get things done but because the moms are creating alliances and making sure their children are not ostracized. (Ostracization being a big problem and linked to many suicides.) At the birthday party I watched a friend of mine work the crowd in her nice dress, making sure to talk to most, if not all the other moms, mentally categorizing them into “good connection” or not, knowing that these are the women she will have to deal with for the next decade, knowing the importance of these people in shaping her son’s future. I also see the social pressures take shape as these women compare how much after school English their children are attending (some are taking another 6 hours a week of English in addition to art, music, etc.).

I am particularly sensitive to all this (or reading too much into it), perhaps, because I have begun to think about leaving Korea in a year and am in the process of choosing a school for W in our next country of residence. I again consider the ramifications of choosing a local school over an international school — not just the economic and linguistic ramifications but in the ways in which both my kids and I become integrated into the social universe of that new place. I can stand back and laugh at myself as I stumble through the whole process (the teacher asked for books, I thought I would get them back; I didn’t know they were donations), knowing that we will move yet again. And I can snicker behind my hand at the currency of alliance and solidarity exchanged by the moms — the compliments, the insistence on being the one to wash the grapes, the furtive appraisal of each other’s shoes — because I can opt out of that system. For my son, who cringes as I speak English to his classmates as I serve them lunch, the notion of alternative social universes is as comprehensible as Anakin going to the dark side. This is his whole world, and I want him to be invested in these friendships, because one of the reasons we have lived here for so long is that we want him to be tied, not just linguistically and paternally, but socially as well, to this place. We hope that his friendships will give him both opportunity and incentive to build his own relationship to Korea above and beyond that which we have imposed on him. I don’t send my kids to hakwon, but I’m not so different from the other moms after all. I lost the fight to wash the grapes but I made the invitations, I made nice with the mom of W’s desk partner, I washed the teacher’s spoon and chopsticks even though she told me not to.

Ever since S L Kim’s article on naturalization last year I have been idly wondering about the performance of citizenship and the ways in which the relationship between various kinds of authority are expressed and shaped in daily life. The way “correct living” and other forms of advice are distributed in the context of classroom and school here invoke, not just the authority of the teacher, but also the authority of the state and notions of responsible citizenry. But that will have to be a topic for another day. I’m late to serve lunch in the classroom.

* Ajuma.[ah-ju-mah] noun. 1. A middle-aged woman 2. A married woman, a mother 3. Anyone of that age group. Known colloquially as “the third sex.” Sometimes used derogatorily.

For a follow-up to this piece see Keeping up with the Kims 1