After I left Korea for college, I sort of refused to think about my time there, so my language skills degraded and the memories rapidly became blurry. My children may want to know what Korea was like, so I’ll write some posts about it before it fades more.
Here are two experiences I’ve had that were personally informative and are likely culturally striking to a Western audience. They are pretty braggy. They have meant different things to me at different times.
sixteen
I find it natural to start with the chronologically latter event.
I had just started at a private high school, which was a feeder school for overseas colleges. It had its own entrance exams, and for some reason, there was another set of exams at the beginning of the school year. We were given the materials to study for it when we were admitted. I think there wasn’t a clear incentive to study for them, and I’m sure many students did so perfunctorily. But I spent much of the winter in between middle and high school studying for it. I did this because they told me to, and because I enjoyed studying. I had just developed a sex drive, so I read erotic Harry Potter fanfiction on my handheld digital dictionary (which could display txt files) in between studying math and memorizing SAT vocabulary words.
It was a wonderful time in my life. I’d gotten into my dream high school, and a stressful year of entrance exam preparation was over. My parents were pleased with me, and happy to leave me alone. I can remember spending that winter at the floor desk of a pleasantly chilly little room, alternating between lying down and sitting up, alternating between studying and reading porn.
High school started with that additional exam. At the first gathering of my high school bahn – thirty teens who would share a classroom for the next three years – a teacher entered and called my name. I raised my hand, not knowing what they wanted me for. They told me I was the highest scoring student in the year, out of about three hundred students (divided into ten bahns), and I’d be given an award in the imminent year-wide assembly.
Everyone in my bahn knew my face after that. Their first and public impression of me was that I was the best student in the year. The least academically driven student there was still moderately driven – entry was competitive, and the students didn’t want to let down their parents, who were paying for private school.
(“And thereafter, Sarabet had a deep mental association between academic excellence and social acceptance.“)
I have always been proud of this memory, but there was a long temporal moat where the embarrassment of discussing it as an unsuccessful adult overcame the pride. When the accolade was recent, it was glorious. When I was in college, it was pathetic to discuss. Even more so when I graduated and did poorly at my job. But now, almost 32, I have sunk deep into my mediocrity and found in it normalcy and happiness and ambition. At the time I was 16, the award catapulted me into acceptance and popularity, but many more defining events have happened to me since. It is possible now to write about this without feeling it interact in a heavy, draggy way with my ego.
I loved the culture of my high school. It wasn’t intellectual or nerdy, but we were all serious about working hard and getting into good colleges. Fights stronger than tiffs were unheard of. So was dating, almost. It was against school rules to date, but it was easy enough to circumvent if you wanted to – two of my friends dated each other – but I think most people genuinely didn’t want to. It was a chill-but-intense, asexual, friendly, orderly environment.
I studied hard for the rest of high school, and got perfect scores on the SAT, PSAT, SAT II Math, SAT II US History, SAT II Chemistry; AP Physics C, Chemistry, Bio, Calculus BC, English Literature, Macro and Microeconomics. I didn’t quite escape with a perfect GPA – I got a nick from a math final in my senior year. I did extracurriculars and won writing awards, but it never felt as clean or good as studying for exams.
The more I racked up these scores, the more eerily perfect I felt. I became afraid with each exam that this would be the one that broke my record. I heard with pleasure that the school talked about me for at least a few years after I graduated. Then my potential drained away, and it became awkward to think of meeting any of them again. The parts of my life I consider beautiful and hard-won are invisible to my Korean friends and teachers, whereas the inglorious parts are immediately legible.
What explanation could I possibly give them? From the inside, it feels like my native talents were never ones that translated into conventional success. I’m not a genius or a hard worker. I’m bright, I love structured competition, and I have an addictive personality. It so happened that I was able to become addicted to exams, and was socially rewarded for choosing this addiction. If you adversarially designed a human mind that would superperform in the Korean education system and underperform in the real world, I think you’d make something close to me.
fifteen
To prepare for the entrance exams for that feeder school, I entered a hagwon that specialized in those exams. The hagwon hours were something like 6:30pm to 9:30pm, more during weekends. Yes, I was in an (after-school) feeder school for a feeder school.
(Oh. Hagwon. Faded, blobby memories are surging up. I just looked at my knuckles almost frantically, searching for the scar I got tripping on the slick granite steps of the hagwon as I came in from the rain. Good, still there – it happened, it was real, my time in Korea isn’t some weird hallucination. In the gap between public school and hagwon, I bought ramen and plastic-wrapped cream sandwiches for dinner. I listened to Sonata Arctica and MIT OpenCourseWare psychology lectures on the hagwon bus. So it wasn’t just exams I liked – I really wanted to know about the world, too. Or was I just play-acting at intellectual curiosity, because I knew it was a virtue? I studied random things outside of school, but not very hard. I never had the persistence and obsession that characterize truly generative minds.)
When I entered this hagwon, I’d been trying to be a good student for maybe a year. My parents were chill for Korean parents – my older sister had a mental health crisis at an American boarding school and they reacted by being quite gentle with me in childhood. But the pressure ramped up in middle school, and I reacted with vague, annoyed obedience. My grades rose, but not dramatically. I knew what my ranking was because, after exams, my teachers at school handed us our scores on strips of paper that also contained our ranking – I didn’t reliably break into the top 20 out of the ~330 students in my year. It wasn’t until English and math accounted for the majority of the scoring that I started performing really well.
A few months after I started at this hagwon, they gave us a triple exam – English language, Korean language and literature, and math – and posted the students’ grades on the wall, sorted by average score. This was standard practice.
I remember having studied hard for this test. When I entered the building, I asked the secretary-receptionist person about the posted grades. She said, “They’re up on that wall. What’s your name?”
“Chang Yuye.”
“You’re Chang Yuye?” I remember this distinctly – she was surprised that this name belonged to me, the weird girl. Looking back at me now, I’m struck that even she knew I was weird.
(How was I weird? A random example is that I had trouble stopping laughing. I would keep on long after everyone had stopped laughing at a joke. Sometimes I would do this after my own jokes. It was physically hard to stop. I couldn’t regulate it until I really, really cared about not annoying others, and I didn’t yet.)
When I went to the wall, I saw with a hot flush that my name was at the top. But the thing is, it wasn’t just at the top. The average scores went something like this:
90.4
81.3
80.8
80.1
…
and so on, halfway into the second page. I had the top English score. I had a top or near-top math score. I had a high but not top Korean score. The combination had launched my average score far ahead. I stared. I felt like the universe had abruptly jabbed me with a syringe and filled me with worth.
So did everyone else. My time at the hagwon abruptly became socially pleasant. My peers started greeting me and tolerating my obliviousness and attempted clowning. Given this slack, my social skills improved, as they would again under similar circumstances in high school. When I took an English fluency test administered by Seoul National University (the TEPS) and scored well enough to be mentioned in a national newspaper, the hagwon cut out the column and posted it on their announcement board. I was someone they were proud to have.
tangents
Trying to figure out what to say here and what to say in a longer, more meandering catch-all post about growing up in Korea. Here are some tangents I think belong here.
Should Korean schools, er, do that? My short and obviously biased answer is yes. It helps the culture focus their time and energy on what they want to see more of. I think Westerners are against posting exam scores publicly due to status quo bias / lack of experience with how non-toxic it can be in real life. Students pay much more attention to who’s doing well than who’s doing poorly. The list of low performers is less stable, anyway, because it’s more driven by randomness.
Some of my sudden academic excellence was just an artifact of testing in my true native language. Throughout my childhood, I read and wrote in English maybe a hundred times more than in Korean. But the ratio was reversed for spoken language. My parents and I had the information to piece together that I’d test much better in English, but it surprised all of us when it happened. I thought my Korean was fine. Korean was my native language, wasn’t it? How could it be the bottleneck in my academic performance? But it turned out I was much smarter in English, and no one noticed until I was fifteen.
An odd feature of the Korean education system and culture is that English fluency is so prized. Being used to being valued for your English is awkward when you move to the States. It means nothing among English speakers. What do Koreans value it for? I don’t have a great answer to this. English let you talk to white people, who are exotic and cool. It’s an extremely dissimilar and difficult language for Koreans to learn, and so is rare. Maybe it’s mostly a proxy signal – emigrating is probably associated with bravery and wealth.
Being valued for my English fluency was odd in conjunction with how much English exposure took me out of step with Korean values. It made me more ideologically Western than my parents could simulate, since they had spent most of their time in America in Korean enclaves. I read an English textbook on ethics, read the section on utilitarianism, and went, “Ah, obviously that’s the correct one”, and didn’t realize how disagreeable utilitarianism was to a Confucian culture. I never talked to anyone about what I was reading.
After reading Freakonomics in middle school, I chose abortion as the controversial topic to take a stand on for a civics class. I regurgitated the book’s points and said I was pro, because of the positive knock-on effects on society, and was immediately chastised by my teacher for taking the wrong stance. It wasn’t controversial in Korea. But I had no idea what Koreans thought of abortion. I didn’t talk much to people. I hadn’t realized I would make them mad.
My short story Second Generation Immigrant is about this phenomenon qua tragedy for the parent – giving your child the tools to enter a wealthier and more technologically advanced culture, without realizing how hideously alien they will become to you. My parents opened the way for me to become intellectually and emotionally free when they taught me to read English books, and so I slipped out of their grasp. I have no regrets. But I’m sorry for them, beyond what they will ever know.