Language choices and symbolic power in intercultural communication: A case study of a multilingual, immigrant Filipino woman in South Korea

2.1 Participants ^[3]

Natalie is a Filipino woman in her thirties who in the Philippines used Kapampangan (i. e., her home language), Tagalog (i. e., the national language of the Philippines), and English (i. e., the official language of the Philippines) routinely in everyday life. Once Natalie received her bachelor’s degree in nursing science in the Philippines, she decided to marry a Korean farmer and migrated to Korea at the age of 21. After three years of marriage, Natalie left her husband because of his “strong” personality and his parents’ ill treatment of her (e. g., the use of profanity). She then began to teach English at a local English institute and remarried a Filipino man who was working as a delivery person in Korea. Natalie’s daughter, Hayang, started her first year in middle school in 2014. She constantly expressed her frustration with languages spoken at home (e. g., Kapampangan, English) because she could not fully understand any of them. She wished that she could use the Korean language comfortably at home. Hayang’s homeroom teacher, Ms. Park, is in her fifties and teaches physical education. She has taught quite a few students whose parents come from other countries. Ms. Park is a monolingual Korean speaker and does not have any experience living abroad.

2.2 Research sites

At the time of the study, Natalie and Hayang lived in an urban setting; their home was a small semi-basement tenement apartment. Because the family had only two rooms, Natalie, her Filipino husband, and their 11-month-old son occupied a room and Hayang shared her room with her Filipino uncle. Hayang’s school was a girl’s middle school; her classroom had the typical shape of a classroom (e. g., teacher’s desk at the front, students sitting in rows). Ms. Park used a small, quiet office that she shared with three other colleagues.

2.3 Research design, data sources, and data analysis ^[4]

This paper employs ethnography of embedded case study that involves multiple units of analysis within a case (Yin 2003). By examining how Natalie uses her linguistic resources in multiple units (e. g., home, Hayang’s school, Hayang, Ms. Park), this paper aims “to understand the complexity and dynamic nature of the particular entity, and to discover systematic connections among experiences, behaviors, and relevant features of the context” (Johnson 1992: 84).

The primary data sources for this study include fieldnotes produced over eleven months of fieldwork at home and in school; ^[5] audio-recordings that captured interactions among the study participants; and four semi-structured audio-recorded interviews with Natalie, Hayang, and Ms. Park. ^[6] In order to analyze these data, I adopted inductive thematic analysis (Boyatzis 1998) and discourse analysis (Blommaert 2005). This is to identify repeating themes in the data and understand how my study participants challenged, reinforced, and/or reconstructed existing power relations.

2.4 My role as a researcher vis-à-vis Natalie, Hayang, and Ms. Park

I was a moderate participant observer who was both insider and outsider (Spradley 1980). I was an insider because I was mentoring Hayang in 2014 through a research project and established rapport with her and her mother. Both Natalie and Hayang told me their personal and familial stories and shared their concerns frankly (e. g., peer relations), and we sought some possible solutions together. Yet, I was also an outsider to my study participants because I was introduced as a researcher from the U.S. who would stay with them for a limited period of time. Moreover, because I was not Hayang’s parent, I was described to Ms. Park as a third person who helped them.

3.1 Natalie’s attitudes toward Korean and English: Arrogance and pride

Despite the fact that she had lived in Korea for 15 years, Natalie had minimal proficiency in Korean. When she first moved to Korea, she did not know a word of Korean. This led to a significant language barrier between her and her Korean husband. While Natalie blamed herself for marrying a Korean man without knowing the language, she also attributed such a communication failure to her ex-husband who could not understand her languages, particularly the English language. Describing her married life as a “prison,” Natalie said, “I don’t know how to speak Korean. I don’t understand them. Anything (from Interview on April 21, 2014).” Natalie’s lack of Korean proficiency did not prevent her from leaving her Korean husband. Although it was her husband who managed her day-to-day life (e. g., interacting with neighbors, submitting official documents written in Korean), Natalie claims she had no anxiety about being independent because she was a young college graduate and proficient in English.

Natalie was 24 when she became a single mother and the primary caregiver for her daughter. She was no longer a homemaker but had to make a living. Reflecting back on her twenties, she, she constantly said that she was too young, too busy, and too tired and therefore, she could not take good care of her daughter and learn Korean. In addition, working as an English teacher in a private English academy, Natalie did not have to learn the Korean language since people in her workplace easily understood her if she used English. Her Korean colleagues helped her by interpreting/translating Korean for her when needed. These experiences allowed her to believe that she could live in Korea without mastering the Korean language.

Natalie’s attitude towards Korean manifested itself in her description of why she decided not to attend any parent-teacher conferences. Similar to her life with her ex-husband in a rural area, the conferences – that generally have the format of a homeroom teacher and parents sitting in a circle and talking – made her feel that she was in a “prison” because she could not understand the language. Her sense of isolation was exacerbated by the fact that none of the mothers could speak English and understand Natalie’s English fully. She characterized her parent-teacher conference experiences as “quite bothering” and expressed her disappointment in Koreans’ limited English proficiency. Natalie evidently did not expect the Korean language to be still the dominant language in Korea and that she needed to learn Korean to communicate with Koreans. Instead, she expected Koreans, regardless of their education and occupation, to be able to use English proficiently in any public setting.

Natalie’s reluctance to learn Korean might stem from her pride as an English speaker, her career as an English teacher, and her sense of being a legitimate user of English, but it might also be due to her feelings of inferiority at being a “foreign bride” and a divorced one at that. Natalie presented herself as a near-native English speaker who does not have a strong Filipino accent. ^[7] This led her to use English with me without any hesitation and without any attempts to speak Korean. In fact, her use of English continued when we went to Hayang’s school to attend open lessons for parents in May 2014. By frequently making comments in English to me during the lessons, she drew on my presence to legitimate her use of English and distance herself from other Korean mothers. This inevitably made other mothers and students stare at us although Natalie did not seem to notice or even care.

In addition, Natalie was proud of her profession as an English instructor. When we talked about her living, working, and child rearing experiences in Korea, Natalie usually recited phrases such as “because I am a teacher,” “because I teach English,” “because I am English teacher,” and “your mom [Natalie] is English teacher.” Moreover, she confidently reported that she did not have trouble getting teaching jobs due to her accent in English (i. e., Filipino English) or race/ethnicity (e. g., her Filipina appearance). This source of satisfaction led Natalie to often ask me to introduce her to any Koreans who wanted to learn English so that she or her brother could make extra money tutoring. As such, Natalie was fully aware of the symbolic and economic value of English and the authority that Koreans attach to being a teacher, and she was able to navigate how to advertise her English proficiency as well as her identity as a teacher.

Perhaps due to her attitudes toward the English language, Natalie boasted that she spoke exclusively English with Hayang when she was young. She wanted to teach Hayang English “naturally,” she said, so that she could be proficient in English. Natalie did not make any conscious or explicit attempt to teach her Tagalog or Kapampangan – the two languages that Natalie feels most comfortable using. This is further evidence that she understood herself to be a legitimate speaker of English, who could teach English to her own child with authority.

Interestingly, Natalie feels that as a person from the Philippines, her ownership of English is “funny.”

In interacting with her peers, Hayang spread the word that her mother was “American.” To Hayang, Americanness is constructed based on language and therefore, her mother was American because she spoke English. Furthermore, Hayang’s perception of the symbolic power of her mother’s English brings to the fore the social and racial prejudices in Korean society. As physical appearance tends to define who is American in Korea (see Amin 1997), Natalie had to clarify that “American” is not solely a product of appearance and that the English language is not exclusively used by Americans, but also by Australians, Singaporeans, Indians, and “even Filipinos.” Through her explanation that many people in different parts of the world use English, Natalie justified her use of English to her daughter and countered an implicit challenge to her symbolic power as an English speaker. But by doing this, she risked devaluing the symbolic status of her English as mere “Filipino English.” This was a fine line that Natalie had to constantly tread between speaking English like an American and speaking English like a Filipina. Which legitimacy was hers? The legitimacy of the global citizen or the legitimacy of the colonized? Her use of the word “funny” to characterize this paradox shows how precarious her position was as a foreign bride in Korea.

3.2 Natalie’s use of English in the school setting: Destabilizing power differences

Natalie’s attitudes toward Korean and English enabled her to imagine that she might be able to negotiate power relations and become a legitimate interlocutor as a “proficient” English speaker. For example, Natalie created an annual ritual at the beginning of Hayang’s academic year. She visited or called her daughter’s homeroom teachers in order to inform them that her Korean proficiency was limited and that her daughter was a slow learner.

With a statement that apologizes for her limited Korean, Natalie seemed to give Hayang’s homeroom teachers two options: Natalie can just use English to communicate with them or Natalie can mix English with some keywords in Korean. Her utterances, including “Or else I couldn’t write any Korean,” limited other options that the teachers could choose (e. g., resisting Natalie’s use of English or asking Natalie to use only Korean). Natalie’s negotiation was possible because of the symbolic status of English at the global and local levels: as the lingua franca of the world that the Korean educational system strives to teach, it might be “embarrassing” for Koreans not to understand English. The power of English, regardless of Natalie’s English proficiency, did not make her feel embarrassed not to know Korean. In fact, she claimed that Hayang’s teachers “really loved” her use of English. In particular, Natalie likely placed the teachers in a situation in which they confessed that they understood English but could not speak the language, making them look less competent. To be sure, this would not call into question the teachers’ pedagogical or administrative abilities; furthermore, the teachers did not always buy Natalie’s attempts at legitimation, as we can see with Ms. Park below. Yet, by positioning the teachers as more local and herself as more global, Natalie ultimately reduced their authority as teachers in an effort to enhance her own.

As Natalie had done for years with other teachers, she attempted to communicate in English with Ms. Park, Hayang’s homeroom teacher in middle school. After attending the open lessons for parents, Natalie and I had a meeting with Ms. Park in the teacher’s office. We exchanged greetings, and a silence reigned in the office. Then Ms. Park asked us how we could have a conversation. This question referred back to Ms. Park’s phone conversation with Natalie at the beginning of the semester. When Natalie wanted to discuss Hayang’s possible absence from school due to the family’s plan to visit the Philippines, there was a breakdown of communication and they barely understood each other’s words. In responding to Ms. Park’s question of how we could talk in the meeting, without any hesitation, Natalie answered the teacher in English, “Just I can understand but I can’t tell.” This forestalling statement implies that (a) Natalie would understand what the teacher says in Korean, but (b) she would not be able to give responses in Korean and therefore, (c) she wanted to use English to respond to the teacher. Natalie’s comment surprised both Ms. Park and me because she was aware that Ms. Park did not understand English. Ms. Park did not say anything but looked at me with a face full of curiosity and despair. As a speaker of both Korean and English and who can guess each party’s positions and expectations, I began to intervene and resolve the tension by interpreting each other’s words. But in this particular moment, by challenging the existing power relationship (e. g., teacher in authority, Korean as the norm of communication in Korea), Natalie threatened Ms. Park’s authority as a teacher in a public school (i. e., a public officer). Moreover, by insistently using English, she put Ms. Park, so to speak, in quarantine and positioned her as a local, Korean citizen who was proud of Korea’s national language and institutions but who was not successful in becoming a global citizen. Simultaneously, Natalie positioned herself as a citizen in a globalized world who was able to use English and have a conversation in English even though she was a Filipina.

The excerpt below shows how Natalie continued to try to negotiate her use of English with Ms. Park. Natalie expressed her desire to send text messages to Ms. Park in English even though Ms. Park was not proficient in English.

Because of Ms. Park’s position of authority, she refused to receive any inquires in English from Natalie. This way, Ms. Park seemed to regain her authority as a teacher who had worked in public education for decades and who was a native speaker of Korean. However, her words, “Yes a little. I don’t yet [feel comfortable using English]” signals that Ms. Park accepted the status of English and participated in the social reality that Natalie created through her imposition of English in Korea, namely, a multilingual or multicultural country. Responding to Ms. Park’s resistance, Natalie softened her insistence on English and yielded an inch by saying “Nye [I see].” But she also resisted using solely Korean and did not give up using English by saying “Okay.”

Indeed, Natalie believed that such communication in English should be possible in the school settings. As a non-native Korean speaker parent who identified herself as a “proficient” English speaker, Natalie argued that English should be an option for intercultural communication. The fact that Natalie did not ask her daughter’s teachers to know her first languages such as Tagalog or Kapampangan shows her pride as an English speaker and her perception of English, i. e., occupying the very zenith in the linguistic hierarchy in Korea and the world (e. g., Park 2009; Seidlhofer 2004). This means that English, the language that is not her first language, both empowered Natalie to play the global against the local and impose her view of how intercultural interaction should occur in Korean public institutional settings, and at the same time made her vulnerable to the criticism that she was after all only a Filipino immigrant who should learn the language of her host country.

3.3 Natalie’s encounters of institutional/ideological walls: Reinforcing power differences

Later in the interaction, Ms. Park attempted again to reframe the power relationship. Ms. Park gave Natalie (via me) an imperative that she needs to learn the Korean language. More specifically, Ms. Park said, “The mother too needs to learn the Korean language assiduously. To be proficient in Korean.” Similarly, after illustrating Hayang’s potential to become a multilingual individual, Ms. Park returned to the issue of Natalie’s limited Korean proficiency:

This interaction could be understood at two different levels. At the surface level, as Ms. Park emphasized the need for Natalie to study Korean, Natalie responded to her in English, “No, I’m studying.” Although she was taking Korean language classes twice a week, Natalie did not respond in Korean but in English. Even after understanding Natalie’s comment, Ms. Park dismissively responded to what Natalie said and continued to explain the importance of Natalie mastering Korean. At the underlying level, Ms. Park suggested that it is Natalie who needs to learn Korean so that she can talk to others in Korean instead of others – including Ms. Park herself – learning Natalie’s language, i. e., English. Ms. Park insisted that outsiders living in Korea should learn the dominant language of the land and that the Korean language was the norm for intercultural communication on the Korean territory.

When I had an interview with Ms. Park in August 2014, she immediately confessed that it was the first time she had a parent who spoke as little Korean as Natalie. Ms. Park frequently mentioned Natalie’s deficiencies, in particular, that it was Natalie’s limited Korean proficiency that prevented her from taking good care of her daughter. Some of the comments from Ms. Park are presented below:

In addition to Ms. Park, Natalie was constantly pushed by her own daughter to speak Korean. For Hayang, her mother’s use of English, rather than enhancing her mother’s status as a global citizen, indexed her as a foreigner and un-Korean. Moreover, as Hayang experienced more language barriers at home, her sense of exclusion deepened. She frequently reiterated the prevailing discourse that being unable to speak Korean in Korea is not “normal.” Normal mothers, she thought, speak and understand Korean without any difficulty. And to be identified as “normal,” Hayang herself resisted learning either English or any Filipino languages. In fact, she admitted hating these languages.

Natalie ultimately described Hayang as a “loyalist”: “Only the Korean language. She was really loyalist [patriotic] at these times. So she said she always say that Korean is better, honored, unlike the Philippines. She was so proud of being Korean (from Interview on April 21, 2014).” Overall, Hayang and Ms. Park’s demands that Natalie use Korean reflect the value attached to the Korean language as well as to perpetuating power differences between Koreans and foreigners, between native and non-native speakers of Korean, and ultimately between people from different social classes (Bolton 2008).

3.4 Hayang’s strategies of using her mother’s English speaker status: An ingenious punch

Although Natalie attempted to destabilize power differences by using her linguistic capital in intercultural interactions, this seems to have had only a partial impact. However, the daughter’s manipulation of the mother’s status as an English speaker adds another layer of complexity to the situation. Contrary to Hayang’s attitudes toward English in her interactions with her mother, the daughter ironically used her mother’s ability to speak English to make friends.

Throughout the year of this study, Hayang revealed that on a couple of weekends, some of her peers visited or planned to visit her house not to hang out but mostly to learn English. Being informed that her mother is an English teacher, some of her peers wanted to go to Hayang’s house to learn English. It was March 2014 when Hayang first told me about her friend visiting her house to learn English from her mother:

When I mentioned to Natalie her daughter’s strategies for using English to bring friends to her house, she was not surprised. Rather, she proudly said that Hayang always told people that her mother is an English teacher. I later found that it was Natalie who gave Hayang the idea that she could use English to make friends. Natalie wanted to change Hayang’s perception of her Filipino mother, and said that she would be willing to teach Hayang’s peers English.

Natalie’s idea worked. Hayang’s peers envied Hayang because her mother was an English speaker. They visited her house and had opportunities to meet foreigners and converse in English with Natalie. What is interesting, however, is why Hayang was persuaded by her mother’s plan. This is inseparable from her lived experience as a person who had a Filipino mother in Korea. Throughout her life, Hayang received a number of English related questions, including “Can you speak good English?”, “Is your mother teaching you English?”, and “Can you too read books written in English?” As Natalie was from the Philippines where the presence of the U.S. remains and where English is one of the official languages, Hayang became the target of these intense questions. The fact that they were focused on English and not on Tagalog or Kapampangan would inform Hayang of the linguistic hierarchy, the hierarchy of foreigners (e. g., people from Vietnam or Mainland China would occupy lower positions in the hierarchy because their countries were less close to the U.S.), and the value of English in Korea. Not surprisingly, she believed that English is essential for all:

In sum, while Hayang disempowered her Filipino mother by stigmatizing her use of English (or other Filipino languages), she also took advantage of the same language to be empowered and gain symbolic power as her mother did. The English language enabled Hayang to impress her peers and have more opportunities to converse with others. This shows that Hayang’s attitude to English is much contextualized.

4.1 The symbolic power of English at the global/local levels: The origin of Natalie’s power

The global/local interaction in the Philippines and in Korea confirmed for Natalie that English is a symbolically valued language. Natalie positioned herself as a legitimate speaker of English and as a legitimate interlocutor in Korea. She identified herself as a near-native speaker of English who can use English in her everyday social life, teach her own child English, and apply English to her own advantage. She indeed claimed, as Widdowson (1994) suggested, “ownership” of English. At the same time, due to her English proficiency, she obtained a job as an English teacher, enabling her to make a living; she also enjoyed her privileged social status as a teacher. These experiences of reinforcing her linguistic authority as an English speaker led Natalie to believe that with minimal Korean proficiency, she could survive in Korea, where the Korean language is the norm of communication, and interact with people there – regardless of whether they were monolingual Korean speakers or not.

In addition, the symbolic power of English allowed Natalie to utilize her linguistic capital to negotiate power relations with Hayang’s schoolteachers. Through the use of the discourse of the school that publicly acknowledges English as a compulsory subject in the educational system and claims that children can become global citizens only if they learn English, Natalie pressured teachers to accept the social reality that she was constructing, namely, English as a daily means of communication in Korea. Some of her symbolic attempts to use English with Hayang’s teachers worked possibly because (a) she was a visible minority, (b) she was a parent of one of their students, and (c) they were aware of the global/local status of English. The very fact that Natalie did not try to use her Filipino linguistic repertoires (i. e., Tagalog or Kapampangan) – the languages that are not recognized as global languages – to navigate the power relations demonstrates her understanding of the linguistic hierarchies in Korea and in the world. According to her, English as the lingua franca should be used in any intercultural communication.

On the other hand, Natalie could never deny the fact that she was not a native speaker of English, that she spoke English with a Filipino accent, that she was a Filipino foreign bride immigrant, and that her daughter was ashamed of her mother’s Filipino origins. A self-assured Filipino woman, whose country had been colonized by the U.S., and who now touted her mastery of the colonizers’ language to put down Koreans who did not know English, seemed to disrupt and complicate the meanings of English in Korea. Through her nuanced interpretation of the global spread of English and its symbolic power, Natalie did not conform to the norm. Instead of learning the dominant language of the host country (i. e., Korean), she endeavored to use her less than proficient English to be recognized as a legitimate interlocutor. In this process, she was inclined to place even less proficient English speakers than her in a more provincial and marginal position, thus potentially threatening their authority. Although English was not her first language, Natalie adopted various symbolic strategies, manipulated her self-image, and empowered herself in the context of intercultural communication, but she always remained in a precarious social position in Korea, potentially hostage to her origins and to her own race and social class.

4.2 Ideologies of monolingual Korea: Natalie’s struggles

Despite the consequences of American geopolitics and the prodigious symbolic power of English, Natalie confronted counterattacks from ideologies and norms that have sustained Korea and that still hold true today. In fact, her own daughter and her daughter’s homeroom teacher in middle school were two individuals who reproduced the dominant ideologies of Korea and neutralized Natalie’s linguistic capital. More specifically, Hayang rejected Natalie’s use of English because it automatically highlighted Natalie’s foreignness. The mark of being “not Korean enough” as a half-Korean/half-Filipina was a burden that Hayang experienced in varying Korean contexts. Her ardent wish to have a “normal” mother exemplifies her own internalization of the monolingual and monocultural ideologies that have been rooted in Korea for decades.

Similarly, some institutional authorities did not fully welcome Natalie’s use of English in public settings. Although English is a powerful form of symbolic capital in Korea, the Korean language remains the norm of communication. For example, rejecting Natalie’s attempts to use English in making inquiries, Ms. Park asked Natalie to learn and speak the Korean language. Ms. Park, as the institutional authority, reproduced the traditional values and practices and perpetuated power structures between teachers and parents, between Koreans and foreigners, and between native and non-native speakers of Korean. Such resistance to Natalie’s use of English corresponds to the way the Korean government assimilates and integrates immigrants into the society (Cho 2010). This implies that in the era of globalization where the national boundaries are weakened, Korea is striving to (re)build a linguistically and culturally homogeneous nation-state that could be still identified as “Korea” in the next ensuing decades. Indeed, much of this nationalism seems to be a reaction against the overwhelming, hegemonic spread of English.

Of course, in the same manner as Natalie’s interlocutor identity is in flux and contextually influenced, the attitude and behavior of Hayang and Ms. Park are complex, fluid, ambivalent, and even paradoxical. The paradox that Natalie went through was passed on to Hayang. She both hated her mother for being “American” and drew symbolic profit vis-à-vis her peers from being familiar with English. Hayang’s contradictory strategies of using her mother’s status as an English speaker to gain a profit of distinction for herself illustrate the inherent, constant struggles across languages and ideologies. Likewise, although Ms. Park asked Natalie to learn and use the language of the land, she accepted the status of English in Korea and in the world because the Korean educational system expects to make their children into global citizens. This again is linked to Natalie’s reluctance to master the Korean language.

In sum, this paper presents a case of an immigrant person who was drawn by circumstances into playing the symbolic game by utilizing her linguistic repertoires. Natalie managed to draw symbolic power locally (i. e., in Korea) from the fact that globally her country had been colonized by an English-speaking power (i. e., the U.S.) and that she therefore spoke the language of the colonizer, albeit not very well. She was able to play the local and the global off one another in subtle and interesting ways due to the (post)colonial relationships between the U.S., the Philippines, and Korea. The attitude and behavior of Hayang and Ms. Park are in part a reaction to this historical reality. This is indeed a conflict between various symbolic orders (Bourdieu 1989) – local vs. global English, Filipino immigrants vs. Vietnamese immigrants, foreign immigrants vs. Korean autochtones, regular spouses vs. “foreign brides,” local Korean vs. global English, local English vs. English as a lingua franca. These conflicts highlight what the field of intercultural communication has tended to ignore, namely, the eminently paradoxical struggle for symbolic power and, ultimately, symbolic survival.