Before I moved to Korea, I prepared for the experience in part with podcasts, both Korean shows to further familiarize myself with the language and English-language ones made by Westerners already in Korea. But that was half a decade ago now, and all the Korea expatriate podcasts I’d enjoyed — Seoul Syndrome, Chance and Dan Do Korea, and other titles that escape me — have vanished down the internet memory hole. But for every Korea expat podcast that fades away, at least one rises in its place, and now as then an iTunes search will turn up a handful of shows whose makers have managed to put out episodes in the past few months. Having logged a few expat years myself at this point, I thought I’d tune in to the offerings of the current crop of Korea-based Westerners with microphones to hear how their perspectives on life in the Land of the Morning Calm compare with my own.
Listening took me back to the period of my American life during which I wrote “Podthoughts,” a weekly podcast review column for the podcasting network Maximum Fun. These were the years 2008 to 2014, a time when podcasting itself had yet to become quite as powerful a cultural phenomenon as it is today. A decade ago, the mainstream still seemed to regard listening to podcasts, let alone producing them, as a niche hobby, if it regarded them at all. Now everyone even mildly famous is expected to host a podcast or two, and every subject, no matter how obscure, is expected to have at a show dedicated to it. In my columns I used the shorthand TTWGBAC to denote what then just felt like the most common genre of podcast, Two Twentysomething White Guys Bullshitting About Culture; these days, that demographic’s penchant for podcasting is taken as given, whether for the basis of jokes or calls to diversify what has rapidly become a medium more relevant, in some ways, than the mainstream.
Not much has changed in the world of Korea expat podcasting, whose standard form could be called Two Twentysomething White Guys Bullshitting About Korean Culture, except the guys now tend to be thirty- and fortysomethings. And while there are sometimes more than two of them or they’ve brought aboard a female co-host, they do, for the most part, remain white. But the lack of ethnic variety is less disappointing than the lack of occupational variety: like most podcasters, Korea expat podcasters have day jobs, and as far as I can tell, those day jobs all involve teaching English. “Let me guess,” a man I met in England as soon as he heard that I live in Korea. “You graduated college, couldn’t find a job, went to Korea to teach English, and decided to stay.” I’ve experienced countless variations on this interaction in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, and have everywhere given the same response: no, I’ve never taught English myself, but 99 times out of 100 you’d be right.
Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.