A pathway to ‘constant becoming’: time, temporalities and the construction of self among South Korean educational migrants in Singapore

ABSTRACT

This study explores the significance and complexity of time practices and experiences in understanding the emerging identities and aspirations of South Korean pre-college students and their mothers who moved to Singapore for the children’s education. I adopt the notion of chronotope, a spatial-temporal frame for a specific type of personhood, to analyze (1) the discrepant experiences of time and temporalities between Korean students and their accompanying mothers, and (2) the intersections between the Korean migrants’ subjective experiences of time and their imaginings of social positioning in transnational contexts. The Korean students’ identities were often imagined and constituted through a chronotope of ‘constant becoming’ oriented toward the future and the global, while their mothers typically conceptualized and expressed their migration experiences as a confined time of ‘intensive mothering’, reflecting a chronotope of traditional mothering that often belongs to pre-modern time and space. Thus, revealing the chronotopes of the different generations promotes understanding of their shifting identities as articulated through multiple scales of time and space, mediating between the present and the future, and the local and the global.

KEYWORDS:

• Time
• chronotope
• identity
• educational migration
• South Korea
• Singapore

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Hong Jung-wook has a wiki page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Jung-wook, accessed on 5 August 2017.

2 A newspaper article reports on a Harvard graduate’s success story, ‘Jin Kwon-yong returns to Korea from Harvard, graduating with highest honors. He tells us his secret study methods.’ Dong-A Ilbo (Dong-A Daily News) Online: http://news.donga.com/3/all/20120529/46580088/1 (quoted in Lo & Choi, 2017).

3 Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Status of Overseas Korean’, http://www.mofa.go.kr/travel/overseascitizen/ Accessed on 8 July 2015.

4 The overall number of Korean ESA students abroad rose up to 29,511 in 2006, but decreased to 18,741 in 2010, and 10,907 in 2014 (Yonhap News, 2015. 11. 17). http://m.yna.co.kr/kr/contents/?cid=GYH20151117000300044 (accessed on 17 November 2015).

5 For example, international students have been required to pass tests for admission in English and Mathematics under the umbrella of AEIS (Admissions Exercise for International Students), the regulation of which has been strengthened since 2015. The school tuition for foreign students has also increased. For example, the monthly fees for a government primary school increased from SGD 156 (USD 111) to SGD 550 (USD 393) in 2015. See http://www.moe.gov.sg/admissions/international-students for more information.

6 For example, in 2014 the number of Korean students who went to the Philippines (including those who enrolled in short-term language training programs) almost doubled compared to that of the previous year, despite an overall drop in the number of students going abroad in the most recent nine years. See MK Business News. 3 February 2015. http://news.mk.co.kr/newsRead.php?year=2015&no=110391 (accessed on 4 February 2015).

7 All personal names are pseudonyms.

8 International students who want to go to government schools in Singapore need to take and pass placement exams. Since they are given a chance to take a placement exam only if there is a vacancy in a school, they need to wait to hear from the school where they want to enroll (Park & Bae, 2015).

9 Similarly, some returnees who completed their ESA in the United States also reported that they found themselves not quite successful, as they continued to ‘dream of a future elsewhere even after their return’ (Lo & Kim, 2015, p. 169).