‘Language Obsession’: a Sino-centric Cosmopolitanism?

This chapter explores how language acquisition is perceived by Korean parents as an important outcome of their child’s education. As a result, language acquisition plays an important role in school choices. ‘Koreans have an obsession with language (ŏnŏjipch’ak),’ asserts Hyemin, explaining that she was willing to stay in China so that her daughter could complete her high school education at the British school and become fully proficient in English, even if her husband needed to return to Korea for his work. Hyemin is not alone in this regard. Numerous other parents also highlighted a desire for their children to become fluent in English, Mandarin and Korean, by immersing them in various educational tracks. They articulated this ‘obsession’ as a passionate manifestation of educational desires formulated in the homeland and reinforced by migration to China. Foreign (Korean) nationals in China enjoy access to international or bilingual schools, local Chinese schools and overseas Korean schools, meaning that Korean children in China are presented with more school choices than in their homeland, and more than indigenous Chinese children. This wide range of options further motivates the parents’ ambition to cultivate multilingual and multicultural offspring.

The obsession with English has been described as a ‘social malady’ in Korean society in that it sustains the hierarchy of power relations between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, masked by the rhetoric of meritocracy (Song 2011).