I had known for a while that New Zealand is a place where Koreans have been travelling – and settling down – for a number of years. At the BFI London Film Festival in 2004 there was a short film entitled Eating Sausage (Zia Mandviwalla, 2004), about Korean immigrants in Auckland; while Bungee Jumping of Their Own (Kim Dae-seung, 2001) features New Zealand as a known tourism destination – at least for adventure sports.
Artist Lee Hye Rim lives in Aukland, while the Lonely Planet advises that the work of Oh Seung Yul can be found at the new art gallery there.
Since I was in Auckland recently on vacation I thought I’d check out evidence of Koreans in New Zealand’s most populous city. A Korean friend of mine in London grew up there, so before I went on holiday I emailed her for some tips, but unfortunately I didn’t get an answer before I got there (understandably – she was on honeymoon). But evidence was not hard to find:
Korean students in the streets and on the buses, a noraebang in Queen Street, a couple of restaurants near the New Gallery on Wellesley Street, a Korean supermarket near the city hospital in Grafton. And that was just on the basis of a random walk round the downtown area.
I was expecting more obvious evidence of Korean businesses in Karangahape Road, the main ethnic street, but couldn’t find any. I suspect, though, that a number of the Japanese restaurants, as in London, are in fact Korean-owned.
New Zealand is a popular place for Koreans to study, but despite the numbers it’s not always easy to adjust - at least that’s the explanation reportedly given by a community spokesman for a recent nasty incident picked up in the Chosun Ilbo.
A youth court in Auckland found six Korean girls aged between 15 and 17 guilty of detaining a 16-year-old girl, also Korean, for more than an hour and burning her with cigarettes outside a supermarket in Auckland in February.
Getting into the more touristy parts, one third of the passengers on my flight [1] down to the beautiful lakeside town of Queenstown were Korean. And back in the North Island, the volcanic Maori centre of Rotorua is also a popular destination for Koreans as for many others. It was there that I got chatting to a Kiwi in the travel business who had some interesting (and unprompted) observations about the behaviour of Korean tour groups compared with the Japanese or Chinese. Let’s call it a combination of risk-taking and entrepreneurism, but Koreans are
- More likely to injure themselves - and others - on the jet skis
- More likely to try to avoid paying for things
- More likely to be ripped off by their own (Korean) tour guides (Korean tour guides are notorious for charging their customers a fee to enter a (free) public park).
At least, on the evidence of this sign, they are no more likely than the Chinese to damage the silver ferns in Rotorua’s Redwood plantation:
Koreans have, apparently, been travelling to New Zealand since the early 90s, both as tourists and on business. Often business is mixed with pleasure, as when people in the fruit business are brought to New Zealand by the big kiwifruit marketing company, Zespri. Apart from fruit, I’m told that deer antlers (for traditional medicine) and honey are popular exports to Korea, but forestry is the biggest commodity export. In fact, Korea is New Zealand’s 6th biggest export market and FTA talks may soon start between the two countries. Prime Minister Helen Clark is currently in Seoul to promote the idea of such talks.
As I left Auckland, once again it was hard to avoid things Korean. In the Air New Zealand lounge, the only non-Kiwi newspapers and magazines on display were Korean: the Hanguk Ilbo, the weekly Economist magazine plus a Korean golf magazine, while the Taste of New Zealand duty free is blessed with four very pretty Korean shop assistants.
I’m looking for someone to provide some funding so that I can go back and do some more in-depth fieldwork. New Zealand’s a great country.
Links
- Helen Clark’s speech at New Zealand-Korea Business Breakfast, May 16. Silla Hotel, Seoul.
- New Zealand Herald website
- South Korea’s Wild Geese - photo essay in New York Times, and related article - For English Studies, Koreans say goodbye to Dad - about Koreans learning English in Auckland. 8 June 2008
- It’s hard to be a Kowi, but fun too (Kowi = Korean Kiwi) - New Zealand Herald, 24 June 2008
- Travel tip - always fly Air New Zealand rather than Qantas for internal flights. The former have all the navigation equipment for taking off and landing in the frequent low cloud, and hence flights get canceled much less frequently than Qantas[back]
Related posts
Further Reading
Click on any of these categories / tags for more articles in a similar subject area: Auckland, Business, Koreatowns, Travel
7 Comments
The aforementioned kiwi travel businessman propagates unfair negative generalizations about Korean tourists. As the Dear Editor knows, Koreans are culturally extremely generous, loyal and hospitable. It’s nice to know that he keeps a Korean headcount wherever he goes, though.
I was a little surprised at his comments, but when asking him about his perceptions of the differences between Japanese, Chinese and Korean tour groups I deliberately withheld my own particular interest to make sure that he was not playing to a particular audience. The comments he made were on the basis of his own specific experiences. So they may be unrepresentative, but I thought them worthwhile recording. And they tied in with what another guide told me.
The downtown area can give a very distorted view of the numbers of Koreans and East Asians living in Auckland. There are certainly a lot of students living there in dormitories and a great many Korean restaurants on upper Queen Street (which connects to K Road), but walk a few kilometers in any direction and you’d be half-pressed to find many East Asians at all! The bulk of Taiwanese immigrants, for instance, live way out East in the Howick/Pakuranga area where I went to school, and most Korean immigrants live in a couple of suburbs north of the Harbour Bridge. I can’t remember exactly where sorry because I’ve been living in Korea for the last 8 years, although I did go back just last December, and it was fun talking to Koreans and noticing all the businesses.
K-road is more of an “alternative” area rather than an “ethnic” area (used to live there too!), and was the centre of Auckland’s gay and lesbian community back when I was still there…not the normal kind of area most Korean immigrants want to set up shop!
Finally, not adjusting well has been overwhelmingly cited as the reason for the attack by those girls, but as Popular Gusts points out in the link below, bullying like this is unfortunately all too common in Korean schools also. Ultimately, not adjusting to NZ life may have had nothing whatsover to do with it.
http://populargusts.blogspot.com/2008/04/cigarette-burns.html
Thanks for the link James. As usual, Popular Gusts has certainly done the legwork. I couldn’t even find the original article in the Star Times!
Mr. Turnbull, from what I hear, the bullying in the top British public schools is much, much worse. Western perceptions of Koreans tend to be inaccurate and unfair. Why always focus on the sordid or seedy when it comes to foreign culture? It’s like having a Korean language website for English people that focuses on the recent teen internet suicide rings in Wales. Generally, Koreans students are not known for burning each other with cigarettes, just as Brits are not known for sodomy and “fagging.”
Grace Kim,
That bullying occurs in British schools and may be far worse than in Korean schools doesn’t negate the facts that bullying occurs in the latter too, and that knowing that aids in our understanding of the attacks in New Zealand.
You seem to imply that one must mention things like the fact that bullying occurs in British schools too when discussing the attacks. Why? Constantly prefacing any discussion of a negative aspect of Korean society with such qualifiers is tiresome and patronising to readers’ intelligence.
I also resent the implication that I have inaccurate and/or unfair perceptions of Korea simply because I’m a Westerner, or even that I focus on the negative. If you’d bothered to read my blog for instance, rather than making blanket assumptions about me because of my background, you’d see that nothing is farther from the truth.
Good morning. As there are very few English language resources about Korea, I think there is a responsibility by websites and publications such as LKL to present a fair and balanced view. If I want to read a tabloid, there are plenty of other options. I went to the Popular Gusts website and checked the cigarette burns story which seemed to consist of a sordid litany of alleged assaults. I know nothing of your background except through what I can glean from what you’ve written.
Post a Comment