Korea in the World: New Zealand

Pictures courtesy of Hyo Jeong Lee.

To make Hyo Jeong Lee’s face light up, just mention New Zealand. She moved there in 2005 to attend the University of Wellington.

“Fresh air. Clean streets. A beautiful campus. So many activities, and good tastes and smells from the cafes!” she enthuses. “I loved Weillington so much.”

Hyo Jeong was far from the only Korean delighting in her host country, although she met relatively few of them in Wellington. Only several hundred “Kowis” –  New Zealanders, or “Kiwis”, who have Korean ancestry – live in the nation’s capital. Kowis number far more than that in total, over 31,000, but the majority live farther north in Auckland, where their Korean language schools and hundred-plus churches conspicuously dot the North Shore.

The churches are particularly important to New Zealand’s Korean population, since they double as community centers. In an August 9, 2010 article (“Religion gives salvation for immigrants”), the New Zealand Herald quotes one new Kowi as saying, “I am not a Christian, and I only started attending a Korean Catholic church because I didn’t have any friends. … But it is through people in the church that I have found a house to rent, school for my son and also how to sponsor my parents to come here.”

At least one church has gone so far as to make these services part of its sales pitch. Kiwi researchers at Massey University discovered a magazine ad for a church reading, “Which church you decide to go to determines your immigration success.”

While Hyo Jeong, the student, lived on the North Island, Yoon Sang Soo, the teacher, toured the South. An avid hiker, Yoon reveled in its famous volcanic landscapes, but what touched him the most was how the people treated him.

“Everyone is so busy in Korea, ‘balli-balli’,” he says. “Passing people in New Zealand would say hello to me.”

Hyo Jeong recalls that not all the Kowis she met were busy. Many were employed in restaurants and sales forces, but quite a few others had no job. “They were just spending money that they brought when they immigrated to NZ.”

Those unemployed Kowis that Hyo Jeong noticed are part of an unusual problem in Korea’s global diaspora: Kowis find it difficult to obtain work in New Zealand. Although their Korean language skills are generally better than those of Korean-Americans, Kowis’ English is generally worse. That discrepancy is considered to be one reason why they were the least-employed immigrants from Asia in 2006.

Although they have yet to fully integrate with the economy, young Kowis are certainly contributing to other spheres of New Zealand life. K-pop has reportedly hit New Zealand as hard as any western country.  Melissa Lee, a Korean-New Zealander, is a member of the nation’s parliament.

Some community leaders are in fact already turning their attention from worrying about their community’s insulation to worrying about its assimilation. A group named the Korea Society is raising funds to build facilities in which to teach Korean recipes and crafts it fears will be forgotten by the next generation.

Hyo Jeong did not stay long enough to forget her Korean heritage; she completed her one-year exchange program and returned to Gwangju. She says that was long enough to change her, however.

“I used to be kind of a stressed person,” she remembers, “[because] of the obedience to tradition and invisible rules in Korea. I can’t say I’m a better person now, but I became much freer. New Zealand is peace and freedom to me.”