Recounting the day that spurred our decision to take our kids out of the city and to a rural farming village in the South Gyeongsang province of Korea.
It’s been seven months since my family moved from the city to a village in South Gyeongsang Province (Gyeongnam), also known as “What, where?” to my friends in Seoul.
After a few recent puzzled conversations with friends and acquaintances, I realized that I never really painted a comprehensive picture of our family’s move down south. I’ve referred to some of the motives and reasoning in passing, but inadvertently left a lot of holes that need patching and connecting. Did Ajeossi get fired from his job due to his growing ajeossity™? Did we finally buy the country house I’ve been talking about for the past decade? The truth is actually much simpler, and I’ll do my best to write it out coherently, in somewhat chronological order.
There’s actually a place and time that really solidified my decision and jumpstarted our journey to Gyeongnam.
Let me take you back to late-spring, 2022. My daughter has recently started elementary school in Gyeonggi, the sprawling suburb of Seoul. After school, I take her and her little brother to the playground. It’s mostly toddlers around two years of age. The rest of her classmates are in private academies from class dismissal to dinner.
One day, at the playground, I looked around and see that my kids are the only ones in their age group (kindergarten to middle childhood). There were a few toddlers and nursery-school age kids waiting in queue for the swings. On the swings were two girls, appearing to be around fourth or fifth grade. They were on their phones and sitting on the swings. After a while, one of the toddler’s moms approached the girls and asked in a clear, kind voice if they would be willing to let the young ones have a turn on the swings. They both looked up, with an emptiness that sent a chill down my spine, and stared hard at the mom for a moment. Then they looked back at their phones without saying a word.
I had heard about these mystical creatures of Korea, but this was my first time seeing them in the wild. The ones who refused to conform (attend hagwon, or extra-curricular academies). The ones broken—then hardened—by the system. As I observed the creatures from afar, there was a sudden uproar. Like some scene from Maury, the girls had each other in what I can only describe as a mutual hairlock. Like a headlock, but with their long straight hair clutched and tangled about. After a few halting cries, they stopped and sat back down on the swings. To this day, I don’t know if they had a sudden spat or if they decided to see whose hair was stronger or if that’s just how kids these days play.
I think I must have fallen into a deep trance after that, in which I saw fleeting visions of my kids in a few years, expertly squatting under a stairwell with a cigarette between their fingers, glaring at parents who approach them, while their peers nod off in after-school academies. I realized that if we were not planning to go with the flow that is the norm in our area (i.e., dedicate their young lives to studying), we should remove them and find a different stream that’s more aligned with our vision of childhood.
I went home and started searching all the words I could think of that was the opposite of the schooling situation of our city. 시골학교 (rural school). 농어촌유학 (study “abroad” in a farming area). 폐교위기학교 (schools at risk of closing). I searched specifically for small schools in the surrounding provinces that had made the news for their innovative after-school programs, efforts to attract new enrollment, or supportive local community or alumni association.
Then I discovered that the Gyeongnam Education Office had started the nation’s first program to attract new families to rural schools on the brink of closing due to low enrollment. One of the biggest draws is that the relocation program includes housing at a nominal fee, taking out the headache of navigating the rural rental market (there are tons of empty homes, but owners don’t want to lease them). I spent the week calling every small school that had made the shortlist for this program. I spoke to principals and administrators. This was the single most important thing I did to make this move a reality—actually calling and speaking to school administrators and government offices. There were open calls and notices on government portals and school websites, but nothing came close to pointing me in the right direction like speaking to actual people.
I found that some country schools started renovating empty, dilapidated country homes for prospective students and their families. One principal offered me a renovated house right then and there. When I inquired about the rent, she said it was free for seven years. Free! For seven years! The caveat is that not all these renovated homes are within walking distance to the school, or next to other families, which we really wanted for our kids.
In the end, as it is with all things in life, it came down to timing and a bit of luck. We were extremely lucky to snag a house in a new school housing complex near the southern coast of Gyeongnam. The family living there had moved suddenly, and there weren’t many applications to move schools in the middle of the school year.
It’s important to emphasize the luck/timing aspect of our family’s move because school housing it’s not something that you can instantly get if you decide to move to the countryside. Our family normally wouldn’t qualify for such programs because we only have two kids. Housing is competitive and granted based on a point system. Your application, statement, and in-person interview is vetted and scored, but the points you get per each child carries the biggest weight in the application process. (All of our other neighbors have three or four kids—a rarity in Korea)
Additionally, our school was one of the ones without strict stipulations, due to its independent management by the regional government. Other schools that have more stakeholders, like the government’s Ministry of Land and Housing, have caps and restrictions on income, assets, and real estate ownership for potential tenant families.
So it was luck, timing, and a lot of Navering and calling around that brought us here to our little rural farming community in Gyeongnam. And as with all big changes, it took a bit of courage to be at peace with the unknown. So maybe it wasn’t just those two girls with attitude that caused this move, but they definitely helped spur the movement.
We don’t want to raise our children in an environment centered around schooling when they are young. And though I don’t expect the apples to fall that far from the trees (hah), if they want to study and achieve academic excellence in the future, I hope they are capable enough to do it on their own terms. For now, they’re more than happy to climb the mountain and catch bugs every day after school.