Clever Turtles

A translation of an interview with the guy in charge of Anti-English Spectrum Cafe, the leading anti-foreign-teacher group in Korea.

The group originally started as a reaction to the discovery of a web board for expat teachers that had had a party in Itaewon with lots of Korean girls and stupid shit like a wet T-shirt contest. Some English-proficient Korean stumbled across the board, translated a few posts, and put them on a Naver board. Immediately the Korean net communities were outraged at seeing expatriates being disrespectful to women and launched an anti-teacher movement.

Now, the group says that they are opposed to foreign teachers for activities such as drug use, fraud, and unqualified teachers entering on forged degrees, but these issues are actually pretty minor in the expat teacher community. They spend a good deal of time talking about sex, which really makes you question their motives.

But it has not been easy for him to work his office job and this one, as he has for over four years. To track down the locations of foreign teachers using drugs he spent 150 days in bitterly cold weather, outworking the police, not going home. Many times he has asked schools to fire foreign teachers who make a hobby out of having sex at knifepoint, tracked down foreign lecturers who bring venereal disease, and warned security guards and hagwon authorities about kidnappers.

Seriously, this guy is obsessed and kind of scary. He's basically stalking and harassing foreigners whom he suspects of drug use.

As to VD, that's a disease and not a moral failing. The patient's SICK and not necessarily a PERVERT. Not to mention, it seems the most obvious means of catching VD in Korea would be the sex industry, which is fairly socially acceptable. Why hold foreign teachers to expectation beyond Korean teachers?

[On a vaguely related note, pretty much every man in Korea who has a lot of Korean friends has been invited to come along with the group to visit a brothel, after a night of drinking and partying. One of my classmates, who was in Korea as a missionary, no less, brought this one up.]

As for "sex at knifepoint", that's a job for the police and not vigilante justice. And rape is so much more of a GI thing. And kidnapping? I scan the headlines for stuff relating to expat teachers, and I haven't heard of any such thing happening. Really, I think this guy is desperately looking for something that will satisfy his assumptions.

Or justify his creepy harassment and stalking of foreigners.

The group was founded in January of 2005 amidst great anger at an online community site for foreign lecturers staying in Korea. The site had been receiving societal criticism for having posted photographs of half-naked Korean women in a nightclub and members had written boastingly of having sexual relationships with middle school students and married women.

The "married woman" thing has been going on since the Peace Corps started sending English teachers. A lot of the early English teacher programs put the teachers in home-stays, usually in families with fairly young middle-class couples. Teachers placed this way soon discovered that Korea has its little DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES-style dramas going on. Don't blame the teachers, here.

As for middle school students, well, I'll believe it when I see it. I can't recall seeing it in the papers. I do recall seeing many Korean teachers implicated in having sexual relations with their students. Nonetheless, pedophilia is often trotted out when people talk about English teachers.

Of course, Korea has its own problems with teenage prostitution, like Japan. Only, I don't think expat teachers are involved with it.

Mr. Lee said, “on one foreign website that encourages UK citizens to come teach English Japan is described as ‘dating heaven’. It’s so awful that foreign lecturers think Korea and Japan are the same.” Mr. Lee gave this interview while showing pictures and videos given to the police.

What? Is Japan the real dating heaven? Brain hurting . . .

There are a lot of boards full of assholes bragging about getting tail in Korea. It's true that as a foreigner you can leverage your exotic-ness to get dates, and Seoul has a big night club culture where anyone can hook up pretty easily.

But this keeps coming up, and apparently it's pretty much the driving force behind their group. Anti-miscegenation and a throwback to certain bourgeois social norms that try to dictate and control what women do with their bodies.

It's true that some people call Korea a more affordable Japan. This is just a poorly articulated way of saying it's a very accessible and enjoyable part of Asia. No one seriously thinks they are really the same, or if they do, well, they deserve the harsh disillusionment they will doubtlessly experience.

▶It’s demanding of you to work these two jobs but you’ve been doing it for four years. What results have you seen from it?

-We are determined to do this as a sacrifice. Through our sacrifice we can prevent our children being taught English by unqualified lecturers and achieve the deportation of foreigners who commit crimes, and our willing sacrifice is our principled stand. We work harder than anyone knows and feel a keen sense of duty. People who join our movement are bound together by our willingness to sacrifice to change the English education environment for their children.

See how he avoided actually answering the question there? Cute.

▶Don’t you worry that this movement could lead to nationalism or intolerance of foreigners?

-This is our most important boundary. Our first obligation is to avoid a one-sided view of all foreign lecturers as bad. We recognize the role of foreign lecturers in English education in our country. So on our website we introduce good foreign lecturers and avoid one-sidedness.

There are times when foreign lecturers come to use to ask for help. They tell us how they have been harmed by their hagwons. If we were so one-sided they wouldn’t come to us like that.

What is a "good foreign lecturer"? One who has taken an abstinence pledge? Perhaps he means highly qualified teachers with M.Ed. or teaching certifications from the US, who come to Korea to earn half of what they would make in their home countries with those qualifications.

I've never heard of them helping foreigners before. If they do, good for them. When a teacher gets the shaft, here, they really don't have anywhere to turn, but have to cut their losses and go home for a while.

▶What must be kept in mind in order to prevent the damage done by unqualified foreign lecturers?

-These days in the Gangbuk area of Seoul there are foreign lecturers who get paid in advance for private lessons and then never show up, and when parents report them to the Immigration Office or the Office of Education the authorities will immediately investigate. In the end those lecturers apologize and return the money. The truth is that no policy can prevent this kind of thing.

To prevent this kind of harm, parents must spread the word on internet sites that private tutoring is illegal. All private lessons are illegal for foreigners staying on an E-2 visa, and those with F-2 visas must report their lessons to the Office of Education.

Ah, yes, the grey market in English tutoring. I should point out that the tutors get shafted just as often as the students.

Another funny story I heard from my classmate: one of the bureaucrats in the local government office, who my classmate was friends with, asked for private classes for government employees. My classmate pointed out that it was outside of his visa status, but the guy didn't care. And offered a fee at the market rate, which was pretty high. This is the guy who's office is tasked with registering foreigners and all that stuff, but they don't care very much about this particular regulation. Irony much?

I know there are foreign teachers in Korea who suck. But if you want this issue to be taken seriously, Mr. Anti-English Spectrum man, focus on the facts. Give me newspaper clippings substantiating that this is a problem, and I mean stories of ACTUAL SPECIFIC INCIDENTS. Cut out the unfounded allegations, and stop worrying about the behavior of consenting adults.