It’s the hagwon, life, for us

So the link was clicked.

And after a few months of sorting through options, gathering documents, and dropping into the ROK consulate in Manhattan for an interview, I had a shiny E-21 visa affixed to my passport and I was on my way to Busan in late August 2008.

Bear in in mind that being 2008 (and me not being particularly read in on the internet culture that did exist at the time) the web was still not inundated with 1,000s of highly specific sites and videos to serve as a primer. So I really had very little idea what I was getting myself into. The limited info that I did gather indicated that I was entering world of the foreign teacher in what I came to dub the hagwon industrial complex (HIC)—and that experiences in the HIC ran the gamut from fun & chill to nightmarish & traumatizing.

As a brief aside, hagwon is a name for a wide-range of after school study centers specializing in subjects including math, science, and of course English; which, as a subject on the national college entrance exam, commanded the full attention of families with dreams of their children’s social advancement via admission to an elite university.2 The logic was pretty straightforward: a good exam score increases opportunity to enter a highly reputable university, and as such, a high score on the English section was seen as essential to gaining a competitive leg up. And into this set up walked the countless English hagwons dotting Busan’s neighborhoods.

Indeed, Korea is many things, but among these, it is a place of voracious entrepreneurial hustle. Koreans tend to be risk takers and willing to take big swings in the hope of launching a profitable enterprise. Combine this general (though certainly not universal) proclivity with the seemingly bottomless pool of middle-class households eager to spend what it takes to get even a marginal edge3 on the college entrance exam score and you have what I am calling the HIC.

So as I touched down at Busan’s Gimhae airport on a swampy August evening I was certainly excited for my new venture all the while possessing few details as to what exactly was in store for me. I was duly met at the airport by ‘Chad’ and after a brief dinner, dropped at a pretty dodgy motel in the central district of Seomyeon. It was a Wednesday and he told me that I would start on Monday, and with that he was off.

I will spare you the details, but it was a pretty wild few days trying to navigate my new life that I basically just parachuted into. The only person I knew within a roughly 5,000 mile radius was ‘Chad’4 who I spent about an hour with the night of my arrival. I certainly knew zero Korean and in those first few days, wandering around Busan alone and returning to my neon bathed, raunchy hotel I started to think I had made a terrible mistake.

Alas, after a fairly lonely and introspective five days muddling around the city and sitting in my dank hotel room, I was finally able to begin work and move into my nice one room apartment. I had fortunately ended up at a well run, above-board,5 hagwon with a nice director. Though I do remember when I nervously asked him for an advance on my first month’s salary (I mean I was properly broke), he chuckled, spun around in his chair and proceeded to open a safe and hand me the equivalent of about a $1,000 in cash.6 Worked for me!

A Beautiful Aroma

So in the interest of brevity, let’s just get right to the point. As I mentioned in the first part, we are generally only able to identify critical junctures in our lives retrospectively. That is certainly the case here, but that said, it is undoubtedly the case that one casual saunter down the stairs to a basement bar set my life on a wholly new vector that finds me sitting in my office in Akita, Japan today writing these very words.

During my first week on the job, my Canadian colleague filled me in on some of the lay of the land—groceries, using the subway, and most importantly local foreigner haunts. She told me that in our part of town you were basically looking at two options, 1) The Rock n’ Roll Bar & 2) O’Brien’s. Just going by name alone, I kind of thought O’Brien’s sounded a bit more my speed.7 My fellow foreign teachers were nice enough but we didn’t really click on a hang-out level so I was eager to make some friends. And with this I decided to indeed stop by O’Brien’s on the way home.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I was walking into a scene that produce multiple deep friendships that are well intact to this day. O’Brien’s was a true one-of-a-kind and I happened to arrive at a time when things were really clicking. The owners Chris and Andrew were so kind and welcoming from the jump and I found myself deep in the fold in fairly short order.

The place was so wild and featured such a rich cast of characters that I don’t think I could do it any sort of justice here. A collection of misfits from the English speaking world. Snarky Brits, bawdy Irish, cheeky Aussies & Kiwis, earnest Canadians, loud mouth Americans (such as yours truly), retired U.S. military vets, hustler Korean-Americans, neighborhood old dudes who liked to hang, young Korean couples out for an ‘exotic’ date night. Poker games, live music, raucous political debates, all lubricated by loads & loads of booze. Suffice to say it was a special, special place.

But all this said, there was indeed one member of the O’Brien’s collective that caught my eye amid our first encounter on a particularly sweltering late August night. That would be one of the bartenders, and Busan native, Cindy. She was beautiful, engaging, sweet, but also willing to trade barbs with the obnoxious gaggle of blokes that gathered their each evening. She had a gorgeous, exuberant smile and I was instantly smitten.

Now, I had worked in restaurants and bars for years and I knew from many observations that one of the biggest no-go’s was to be that rando new customer who roles into the pub and instantly starts trying to date the bartender. Female bartenders are so accustomed to stammering, half-drunken dudes hitting on them that you are almost certain to be expediently cast into the bucket of every other bro who has made their cliché bid.

So I bided my time, and after establishing myself a bit more as a regular (i.e., show up everyday and drink a lot of beer) started to strike up chats with Cindy until one time I just decided to ask her out. And the long and short of it is that we recently celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary.

‘Now hold on here a minute!,’ the dutiful reader may be saying to themselves, ‘this was supposed to be a tale of a journey to Gwangju in 2025, but here I am being regaled with a love story from 2008!?’

On the one hand, that is a more than fair point. On the other hand, I would hold that it was probably this exact chance encounter with Cindy (her true given name being Hyang A, meaning roughly beautiful aroma) that put me on course to be on that train to Gwangju in January 2025. As noted, we were married in June 2010 and continue on to this day, but this romance would also end up having a profound effect on shaping the intellectual byways I had yet realized I was set to traverse.

About that dissertation…

While I was busy cavorting with the O’Brien’s crew and falling in love with Cindy, I was ‘theoretically’ supposed to be making head way on my dissertation project. As it is probably not difficult to surmise, that ‘progress’ could, in the most optimistic sense, be described as exceedingly sluggish. My dissertation advisors seemed fine with giving me some time to get settled but I knew this would only last so long. It’s not that they were very strict or anything but more that many a grad student reaches the dissertation stage of a Ph.D. only to wallow and stagnate for some years before ultimately bailing altogether.

From their view, they were more than happy to help but they needed to see some proof of life before investing any of their scarce time into the project. The problem was, I didn’t much like the topic I had set in motion before up and moving to Korea on a whim. But during my first few years there I kept trying to force it forward. I mean given that I was busy partying and carrying my 20s well into my 30s in that fair, fair city of Busan, I found myself bereft of any ideas for an alternative path.

I began to feel myself drifting slowly into my own version of dissertation abyss, and it was the cause of a persistent low-humming anxiety. I mean I had worked for years to get myself in this position and I could feel it slowly dissolving away. Not in one grand sequence, but rather by daily drips of anxiety induced writing paralysis, which of course only hastened more of the same in the following days, that became weeks, that became months.

Alas, there was one moment, probably several, around 2011-2012 that I realized that the solution to my problems was standing there right in front of me. I should write my dissertation about development and political economy in Korea. I will spare you the horrifically boring details, but in short, my main research focus was on the varying ways that societies around the world politically confronted the global impulses for economic liberalization in the 1980s and 90s. As such, the Korean experience of ‘development’ and liberalization during this era could serve as a perfect point of focus to explore the localized, highly contested politics, that played out around these core issues and their many attendant offshoots

Additionally, though we were in the process of obtaining Cindy’s Green Card & moving to the states, after some discussion and consideration we decided to stay put in Busan. The Koreanization of my life was accelerating rapidly.

And with that, I was off to the races. I worked voraciously on the project, bringing all of the ardor so common to the recently converted. I had been transformed from the aimless dissertation pilgrim ambling on a path with no destination to the zealous prophet of my newly christened topic. It is important to note that by this time my very kind and supportive advisors had made it clear that there was no more wiggle room in terms of the timeline. From here on out, the progress must be substantial and consistent.

Indeed, it was these efforts to revive any hopes of a career as a working academic that served as the critical point of entry into being any sort of ‘expert’ on Korea. So the die was cast. I was now the oddball foreign member of a (wonderful & welcoming) Korean family8 who had settled semi-permanently in Busan and decided to stake out any hope of fulfilling a nearly decade long aspiration to be a professor on cultivating some original insight on the the South Korean political economy and its developmental history.

Quite the transformation, given that I originally came to Korea to work as a part-time as an English teacher for a year and then most likely head back to Temple to teach classes and continue on my dissertation journey. But in truth, above and beyond my new martial bonds, I had fallen in love with Korea as a place to live and be. I especially loved Busan, which I still consider my adoptive second hometown. I had also acquired an abiding curiosity to explore the deepest sinews and dimmest corners of how Koreans from a wide array of standpoints experienced ‘development’.

Happy to say I did end up writing and successfully defending a pretty okay dissertation with the very sexy title: The Internationalization of the Korean Political Economy: Variations in the Liberalization of Trade, Foreign Direct Investment, and Finance (go on and click the hyperlink if you want to step into this world, haha). What’s more, I did really hit the jackpot (it is truthfully mostly a matter of luck) and was offered a tenure track position at Akita International University in the spring of 2015 where I sit in my office writing this now as a tenured associate professor in the Global Studies program.

Alas, looking back now over a decade later, with thousands of more hours spent researching and multiple papers published on Korean history, politics, and society, I realize that even the act writing my dissertation—i.e., spending several years studying Korean politics & history and basically writing a book on it—was at best mere table stakes in terms of building out a thorough and sophisticated understanding of the complex dynamics at play.

Indeed, the intellectual transformations that would emerge during my efforts over the last decade to burrow ever further into this story are central to understanding how I ended up on that train to Gwangju in early 2025.

And I do indeed promise that the next installment will cover that specific trip and much of the rich history, both traumatic and triumphant, the city has to offer…

But before we leave Busan in the rearview mirror of our tale, here are a few photos from the front stoop at our house. I used to host a big BBQ every summer to bring together our rag tag but deeply bonded collective. I smile every time I see these.

And I will give the last word to this photo from one of said BBQ’s featuring O’Brien’s legend ‘Sir’ David Scraggs & Happy Won. To me, it just captures the essence of these seven wild, but very special years in Busan.

Fin

4

Chad’s name is actually Kyemoon and we ended getting on pretty well and had some great times together. He always looked out for me and took me on some pretty cool trips to places off the beaten path. I haven’t seen him in a while, but I try to catch up with him if possible whenever I visit Korea.

So as is usually the case for an essay project, I am never wholly certain how my ‘vision’ will unfurl once the actual process of writing commences. And indeed that is the case here as it became clear to me that while I did want to write about my journey to Gwangju, South Korea in January 2025, I also wanted to write about how that journey truly began with a banner ad in 2008. Alas, it dawned on me that perhaps this a story best told in several parts. Here part one with the others to follow hopefully over the next few weeks. Writing about one’s life is inarguably a self-indulgent exercise, but my hope is that I will indulge myself in a way that speaks to things beyond the purview of my tiny little corner of existence. Thanks as always for your support…

To me there are few better places to engage in wistful contemplation than a solo train ride. Alas, as I glided on the high-speed train from Seoul to Gwangju in January 2025 I found myself steeping in a brew of curiosity and a somewhat strange bemusement as to how I came to be on this train, with these objectives, in the first place.

I truly believe that every person’s story is of profound interest when given the opportunity to appreciate the minutia of its fitful twists and turns. As such, if you allow me a moment to set the scene I hope to convey some of the odd turns that led to me being on that train to Gwangju. However, this is not say that the paths I have trundled (or not trundled) down are of any special import or significance, but hopefully of interest only in that way that anyone’s story is, when relayed in some detail.

Importantly, I hope to convey how my journey to Gwangju in a way that brings some color and insight to the (I would imagine) large portion of readers who have, at best, a passing familiarity with the stories its has to tell, and the ones it is still telling.1 To be sure, the romantic in me cannot help but note the poignancy in the fact that this journey transpired just a week or so before the inauguration of Donald Trump.

While a particularly destructive actor himself, he also manifests the rekindling of authoritarian flames around the world.2 As such, I found it poetic and affirming to visit a place so deeply entwined with both authoritarian violence and the valiant, deeply human, resistance to it. So again, if you will indulge a middle-aged man’s introductory reminiscence,3 I wish to build out a bit of the backstory for this journey.

So how did I end up on that train?

The simple answer is that I happened to be living Seoul during my sabbatical for the Fall 2024 semester. But of course that merely presages the question of how I ended up in that particular place and time. To get at this, I will try to conjure up a relatively compressed account that all begins with a banner ad.

It was early spring 2008 and I was approaching the end of my four year fellowship as a PhD student/grad assistant in the political science department at Temple University in Philadelphia. I ‘kind of’ had a dissertation project in motion and theoretically I could have stayed on at Temple as an instructor, a role commonly referred to as a grad-junct.

I really loved living in Philadelphia and had grown very connected the Fairmount neighborhood I had called home for those four years. I worked part-time at a great family owned restaurant called the London Grill and had become fairly enmeshed in the ‘lively’ galivanting of the restaurant-workers-scene. I also quite enjoyed teaching courses at Temple. However, I remember being overtaken by a strong sense that I needed to move somewhere else. Indeed, I could theoretically write my dissertation anywhere and I thought it might be cool to move to DC, but I didn’t really know what to do.

So one afternoon in that 2008 spring I fired up my laptop with zero foreknowledge that I was about to be set on a life course that would put me on that train Gwangju in January 2025. Though undoubtedly these things are only revealed to us through the retrospective gaze and the paths we end up taking rest upon an almost infinite set of contingencies (most we never fully recognize), at times we are able to boil things down to a decisive moment.

So I logged onto to Craig’s List (hard GenX, I know) and set about looking for jobs in DC as some vague start to my generally directionless desire to move somewhere new. Now remember this was 2008, so maybe the more tech savvy had sussed it out by then, but I was still getting all the pop-up ads and clutter (and using my neighbor’s wifi!).

As I scrolled through the job listings a blinking ad popped up:

HAVE A BACHELORS DEGREE? LIVE AND TEACH IN SOUTH KOREA!!

Now it’s worth mentioning here that though I possessed some extremely basic knowledge about South Korea, I pretty much knew zilch beyond the most surface details. But on the positive side, it was an opportunity for a worse than broke person like myself to live and travel overseas.

Indeed I had long harbored dreams of international adventure, but as I entered my thirtieth year I had only traversed the US border once and that was just to spend a wild (and indeed very memorable night) with my dad in Tijuana when I was 16. So here I was being sold a no-money-down opportunity to go live in a far off land and my imagination was already spinning. Recollections are always a bit hazy, if not downright inaccurate, but to the best I can remember, I decided then and there, so long as this banner ad checks out, I’m going to do this.

And with that I clicked the link…

Part II is now available here.

Note: You can find the essay I reference in the essay, here.

Here is a link to the video I mention in the show.

We discuss her recent important contribution to our understanding of these complex and deeply historical aspects of the conflict, Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom. This is a can’t miss conversation that opens a window into the history and experiences of the indigenous Tatar people of Crimea and how their story helps us better understand the present ongoing war.

Thanks as always for listening and supporting the show.

Who was the ‘worst’ person of the quarter century? The best? What movies and music moved us? What books stood out? You can find all this out in our free flowing review of these last 25 years.

https://theinterestingtimes.substack.com/p/ea-sports-utilitarian-sorts

Every writer knows that any published piece is an incomplete representation of their aspirations, but this essay is probably the one that came the closet to meeting the hopes I brought to the project. I also think the discussions are highly germane to contemporary affairs so I am sending the link here.

n.b. After multiple attempts to republish via substack failed I am left to use this more rote method. Please take a look if you have a chance. Thanks as always for your support.

Here is a link to The Guardian piece I mention in the show. And the (open access) book I mentioned at the end of the show can be found here.

There is so much to take away and consider by listening to Prof. Ishimaru insights and experiences across a range of important aspects tied to the continuing struggle for justice in education.