Koreans embrace lifestyle change

By SIMON COLLINS

On a sunny weekday morning, the streets around the Regional Botanic Gardens in Manurewa are deserted.

Paik Jae Sung and Chang Yu Jin, a Korean couple in their early 50s, are alone as they take their daily 45-minute walk to nearby Totara Park and back.

Sometimes the couple play golf at the Manukau golf course. Other times, perhaps with their son Paik Sang Yun (Max), 23, they go surfcasting for kahawai at Port Waikato.

"I like this area, it's a very nice place. Fresh air and chilly," Paik says.

Adds Chang: "It's very peaceful."

The contrast could not be greater with Seoul, South Korea, where they lived until two years ago and where their daughter, Paik Soo Yeon, and her husband, Lim Eu Chul, still live.

In Suraksan, an outer suburb named after the local Surak mountain, Lim's parents, Lim Young Jai, 66, and Jang Myong Ja, 62, live in a tiny flat that is not much bigger than the carport in the two-storey Paik/Chang home in Manurewa.

The Lim/Jang flat is in a block about 20 storeys high. It is part of an estate of blocks of the same height and the same design - a variation on similar designs that are replicated throughout Seoul.

While Paik and Chang go on their daily walks around Manurewa, Lim leaves home in Suraksan at 5.30am to travel for an hour on two subway lines to open their streetside store selling cigarettes and softdrinks in South Seoul at 7am, six days a week. Jang joins him around 10am.

They keep the stall open until 8pm, except on Saturdays when they knock off at 3pm. The journey home can take up to two hours, as 8pm is still part of Seoul's evening rush-hour.

Lim and Jang value nature just as highly as Paik and Chang. But they experience it only on Sundays when they climb the 638m Surak mountain - along with hundreds of their neighbours.

From the top, even on a good day, they can't see far. Smog blankets an urban area whose population is variously put at between 12 and 20 million, depending on where you draw an arbitrary line in the sprawl of jammed roads and high-rise estates that stretch out along every valley until they run imperceptibly into the next city down the line.

A younger mother reports that if she lets her 5-year-old son out in the rain, other mothers scold her because the rain in Seoul is toxic. Even the cars are smeared with the pollution, and have to be washed after a downpour.

Despite all this, Lim and Jang are happy. Their simple flat is comfortable and, like 60 per cent of South Koreans, they have a high-speed internet terminal through which they keep in touch with friends and family spread through South Korea, America and, now, New Zealand.

"I really don't understand why Soo Yeon's father went to New Zealand," Lim says.

Paik and Chang first saw New Zealand when they sent their son Max to Papakura High School in 1996 because they wanted him to learn English somewhere safer than America.

A couple of years later, when Paik's senior job in a bank evaporated in the Asian financial crisis, both he and Chang yearned for the peace and security that they had glimpsed in South Auckland.

"After retiring, I discussed our family's future with my wife, and we decided to emigrate to New Zealand for more improved quality of life," Paik says. "My main reason is that it's very clean and quiet."

They are not alone. In the 13 years since the South Korean Government removed restrictions on overseas travel in 1989, Korean residents in New Zealand have soared from fewer than 1000 to 30,000.

The net inflow in the latest year to September was 1977. In North Shore City, last year's census found that Korean is now the most common language after English.

"The latest hotspot for the Korean emigration is New Zealand," economist Inbom Choi told a conference in Seoul this month on the "Korean diaspora".

Previous emigrants, the conference heard, went to neighbouring China between about 1860 and 1940, seeking farmland which was scarce at home. It still is scarce: South Korea has 47 million people in less than the area of the North Island.

Also in the late 19th century, sugar and pineapple plantation owners took thousands of Koreans to Hawaii as indentured labourers, beginning a long-term migration that soon spread to the mainland United States.

When the Japanese occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945, many Koreans took low-paid jobs in Japan because Korean businesses were suppressed at home. Some 725,000 Koreans were drafted into forced labour and military service in Japan during World War II.

Today, Choi says there are 2.1 million Koreans in the US, 1.9 million in China, 640,000 in Japan, 520,000 in the former Soviet Union, 140,000 in Canada, 110,000 in Latin America and 7000, mainly construction workers, in the Middle East - a total, including other places, of 5.7 million, or about 8 per cent of the 70 million people still living in either North or South Korea.

But, he says, the latest surge to New Zealand differs from the previous outflows in being driven not by economic or military necessity but by lifestyle choice.

"The motivation of this new wave of Korean migration to New Zealand is to escape from the poor living environment of the Korean society, particularly for the sake of their children's education," he said.

"[Korea's] highly competitive educational system is driving these people from their homeland. They would rather raise their children in an easygoing, environmentally cleaner, less expensive and English-speaking educational system."

Recently a reverse flow of New Zealanders going to Korea has also begun, as another result of the same Korean craving for English.

"Parents will do anything for their children to learn English," says Professor Bak Sangmee of Hankuk University. "It's almost like a religion."

The NZ Embassy in Seoul says that two years ago there were fewer than 60 New Zealanders teaching English in South Korea. Today there are more than 1000.

Kylie Ngaropo, a policy analyst from Wellington, went because she was "sick of the stress involved in working a 60-hour week and not being paid and recognised for the worth of my work".

"I didn't want to get stuck in the rat race that so many young graduates are finding themselves in now - work hard, pay loads of tax and struggle to save," she says.

"Secondly, I really wanted to travel, learn another language and experience another challenging culture that wasn't European."

She is paid the equivalent of $4000 a month after tax, plus free rent, power, gas and water and return air flights to New Zealand. All this for working four hours a day as a private tutor for students after school.

She expects to pay off her $30,000 student loan in a year or two. "It would have taken me about 10 years, if not more, in New Zealand."

Former Winz call centre operator Melanie Cottingham reckons it would have taken her 30 years to pay off her $50,000 student loan at home. She earns $3500 a month to teach a full day in a school, 9am-6pm with a two-hour lunch break, and expects to pay off her loan in two to five years.

"It is nice to get away from the stress at home and hang out with the children for a while."

Marilyn Innes of World English Services, a Dunedin-based agency specialising in Korea, says there is also a great demand for English tuition for Korean toddlers at kindergarten.

"An extremely large proportion of four- to six-year-olds have two years' full immersion English," she says.

But she says some agencies do not check people out before sending them to Korea.

"It's led to some severely dysfunctional psychiatric New Zealanders let loose in Korea."

New Zealanders are more likely than Koreans to be living outside their homeland. Last December, Statistics NZ said there were 800,000 Kiwi expatriates, including children, or 20.5 per cent of the 3.9 million people still living in New Zealand.

Conversely, as a nation of immigrants, New Zealand has always welcomed new migrants officially, even if the public has had doubts.

Korea, in contrast, has been much less open. For centuries, Westerners called it "the hermit kingdom". Traumatised by repeated invasions from Japan and China, it did not want to be overrun by Western traders.

That attitude has changed somewhat since the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, when the incoming President Kim Dae Jung opened the economy to foreigners to help break the power of the big chaebol, or conglomerates, which were blamed for the crisis.

Since then, US-based Newbridge Capital has bought the Korea First Bank, General Motors has bought Daewoo, and multiple foreign shareholders now own more than half the shares in Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor and Posco Steel.

The country has welcomed Russian scientists fleeing economic collapse at home.

But Koreans are still wary of them. One scientist, encountered cycling in the science city of Daejon, says the politicians debated whether to let them stay permanently a couple of years ago, and decided against it. They must go home when their contracts end.

Choi notes that migration stimulates trade. Statistically, in any country, "a 100 per cent increase in the number of overseas Koreans appears to increase Korea's exports [to that country] by 16 per cent and Korea's imports by 14 per cent".

But patterns are changing. Samuel Lim, of Seoul's Korea Emigration Company, believes the Korean craze for learning English abroad will wane as better English teaching develops at home.

"People will still emigrate. Korea is crowded," he says. "But the numbers might not be as great as now or in the past."

Also, migration is no longer a one-way ticket. Immigration agent Aeryun Lee lived in New Zealand for 10 years. Now her husband is still in Rotorua, while she is back in Seoul, and their son is studying business in New York.

In Manurewa, Max Paik is studying computer science at Auckland University and his options beyond that are open.

"I don't really have a plan right now," he says.

"I was going to go to Australia and find some job and make some experience and come back here because my parents are going to stay here.

"It would be really hard to get a job here. There are a lot of people who want a job. Some of my friends went into information technology and are still looking for a place to work here."

So he may still go, or come back, or do something completely different.

Some Koreans may not get jobs here, and some New Zealanders may crack psychologically in Korea. In both societies, some locals may see immigrants as a threat to the host country's national identity.

But for Max Paik and his family, and for Kiwis like Kylie Ngaropo and Melanie Cottingham, migration has opened up a whole new array of choices. Despite all the social problems that migration brings, that widening of personal freedom must count for something.

* Simon Collins travelled to South Korea with support from Asia 2000