Choosing to Stay: From ‘Chibang’ to Centre

My one-year experience of living in Seoul revealed to me that a geographical dichotomy is prevalent in the daily expression of people in contemporary Korean society: a discrepancy between Seoul (the capital, the centre) and elsewhere in Korea (chibang, the periphery). Living in Seoul between 2013 and 2014, I witnessed a linguistic hierarchy frequently present in daily conversations: people described a geographical movement from any place (a village, a city, or a province) in Korea to Seoul as ‘going up’ (ollagada) and, conversely, moving away from Seoul was described as ‘going down’ (naeryŏgada). Some people explained this disparity in terms of geographic location. Seoul is in the north of the country and hence heading from southern locations to Seoul is considered ‘going up’.

However, I believe that this use of language also implies a sense of social direction. In the education domain, Seoul has the most prestigious universities and secondary schools, whereas the educational institutes outside Seoul are regarded as relatively low in prestige (Seth 2002, 143–144). Support for this view is that Korean student informants in this book also declared that their goal in the university entrance exam had been admission to an ‘in-Seoul’ university. Admission to a university outside of Seoul was accordingly considered as having been downgraded (somewhat disgracefully) to a lower tier of university.