They are called 'kirogi,' or wild geese -- South Korean families separated by an ocean. The parents want their children to be taught in the United States, but the cost of an American education can be the fracturing of the family, often for years. This is the story of one kirogi family.
The flag of South Korea hung high above Hannah Kim's head as she sat in her Howard County classroom, listening to the day's lesson on immigration.
Terry, left, and Hannah, far right, watch as their father prepares to catch a train to the airport.
(Tracy A. Woodward - The Washington Post)
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Monday , 2 p.m. ET: Post reporter Phuong Ly discusses her story on Korean children sent to the U.S. for education.
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Her social studies teacher described how 14 million people have immigrated to this country since 1990, the year before many of these seventh-graders were born.
"Fourteen million," repeated Cliff Bernstein, looking around. "Why do people want to come to the United States so badly?"
Jobs and homes and democracy, one girl offered hesitantly. A couple of students doodled in their notebooks; others stared into space.
Hannah's hand shot up. "They want to learn English and get a better education," she said.
Education has brought Hannah to this classroom and to a white frame townhouse in Ellicott City. But the price of her American education -- and her escape from the relentlessly competitive Korean school system -- is a fractured family. Hannah's mother, Jungwon Kim, and two younger siblings are here with her. Her father, Keeyeop Kim, an executive in South Korea, stayed behind to finance his family's life abroad.
They have lived this way -- children without a father, wife without a husband -- for a year. Their plan is to live this way for nine more years.
The Koreans call them kirogi, or wild geese. The birds, a traditional symbol at weddings, mate for life. And they travel great distances to bring back food for their young.
Korean officials can't say how many families are kirogi, but they know how many children are leaving the country: 10,000 school-age children left to study overseas in 2002, up from 4,400 in 2000.
Hannah's mother knows at least two other families like hers in their tree-lined subdivision. Several more attend her church. Their numbers swell the ranks of Korean children in Howard County schools: Each year, nearly 400 Korean-speaking students are enrolled in English for Speakers of Other Language classes, making them the largest ethnic group in the program.
The families also are turning up in other suburbs with well-regarded public schools. The Korean Embassy Web site links to the home pages of the Fairfax and Montgomery counties' school districts.
In South Korea, a First World country of broadband Internet and skyscraper shopping malls, society still runs on an education system that dates to the age of kings. Jobs, social status, even marriage prospects often are determined by how well someone performs on national school exams. There is little room for creativity or enterprise.
To live successfully in the family's homeland, Hannah, 13, would have to give up her drums and piano unless she expected to make music a career, the Kims said. Eugene, 11, would have to put away his inline skates to attend after-school tutoring sessions. Even Terry, 4, would be doing something practical, such as studying the IQ tests that the bookstores sell packaged in bright cartoon covers.
"I see the big picture in the U.S.," Jungwon Kim, 38, said. "They can go to a nice college and have time to have a good time with their friends."
The Kims are part of a middle-class subset of U.S. immigrants who arrive here not out of financial need but out of a desire to give their children other advantages. For the suburban school districts, the influx of Korean students requires additional resources to teach them English. But many move quickly into regular classes and help raise the school's performance.
Korean society always has placed a premium on an American education, with the English skills and global experience it brings. Keeyeop Kim, Hannah's father, remade his future at age 20 when he went to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, after failing to score high enough on a foreign service exam and being shut out of South Korea's marquee universities.
With the slots at those universities becoming more precious, many students are leaving well before college. Agencies in Seoul offer to help settle mothers and children in English-speaking countries, and Web sites provide tips on real estate, banking and handling stress. Typically, the mothers enroll in community colleges and apply for student visas, which allow them and their children to immigrate easily.
For the Kims, the details of immigrating were simple: Jungwon Kim, who lived in this country with her parents as a teenager, is a U.S. citizen. So are the three children.
But the details of dividing the family have been far more complex. Eugene struggles with English. Hannah feels guilty about her parents' separation. Jungwon Kim finds herself questioning the choices they made. And Keeyeop Kim senses an odd distance from his children: With just three visits in the past year, his chief connection is a nightly phone call.
When the phone rings in Ellicott City and the caller ID flashes "Out of Area," they become a family again.
"Appa," Eugene will say, grabbing the phone. Daddy.
Best Year Ever
When Hannah thinks about school in Korea, she remembers the afternoon her classmate approached her in tears.
The scores for the year-end exams in their school were announced days earlier, and Hannah had finished first in the class. A perfect 100. Her friend received the second-best score. His parents grounded him. Now he was terrified of the next round of testing.
This was fourth grade.
"I didn't want to live in a place where you get so much pressure," Hannah said, recalling that day.
By Korean standards, the Kims' home town of Taebaek is considered slow-paced. A town of 50,000 tucked in the mountains, it is four hours southeast of Seoul.
Still, Hannah soon would be facing the maxim of "four in, five out," a Korean proverb that means those who settle for four hours of sleep a night will get into the most prestigious universities and those who sleep five hours will not.
Her classmates already were filing out of school every afternoon onto buses taking them to "cram schools" for hours of tutoring. Her parents did not want that type of future for their children.
So in August 2002, before the start of sixth grade, Hannah was sent to live with her grandparents in Howard County. The next summer, her mother and siblings followed, and the Kims bought a townhouse, a Toyota minivan and new furniture.
Here, Hannah's afternoons are filled with band practice, private drum lessons and church youth group. Academically, she has thrived, cycling quickly out of ESOL classes and making the honor roll at Patapsco Middle School.
In many ways, she is a typical teenage girl -- she hates wearing her glasses, frets over her baby-fat cheeks and cuts out photos of Korean pop stars and Orlando Bloom. But she exudes a self-confidence uncommon for her age; along with the hearts doodled across her notebooks are her mantras: "I won't be marked as average" and "I will be remembered."
"Patapsco is so much fun. This is the best year of my life. Ever," Hannah declared one evening.
She and her mother -- matching images in their jeans, untucked T-shirt and auburn-tinted hair -- were lingering over their dinner of Korean barbecue beef.
"What about next year?" Jungwon Kim asked.
"Mom, are you going to kill me if my grades are underwater? You know, 'under C.' Get it?"
Her mother shot her a look of mock threat: "I'll have to think about going back to Korea."
"Then I'll get all F's," Hannah retorted. "I've forgotten most of my Korean."
Kim touched her daughter's hand lightly. "No, I don't care if you don't get straight A's. But I know you probably will. You work hard. You're special and you're smart," she said, and then smirked. "Because your mom's smart."
"I'll say my dad's smart, but you, I don't know," Hannah replied.
Her mother doesn't look offended. She began reminiscing about her husband, whom she met in college.
Hannah said nothing. That night, she was scouring the living room for her drumsticks when she stopped suddenly. The sticks were lying on the end table. So were the framed family snapshots, two pictures taken at Tokyo Disneyland, the family's last big vacation before Hannah left.
"I kind of feel sorry, mostly for my mom," Hannah said, looking at the photo of herself, Eugene and their father sitting on a park bench. "She can't have a husband because of us. If we weren't here, why would she leave her husband?"
She picked up her drumsticks and pounded the couch.
'Don't Need a Husband'
The light in the freezer refused to blink on. Jungwon Kim could still see the ice pops that the children wanted that summer evening, but the burned-out bulb bothered her. She screwed in a 60-watt and watched the freezer light up. "See," she said smiling. "I'm good at these things. Don't need a husband."
She has trouble believing it. In the mornings, she cannot attend the sunrise service at her church -- a ritual she observed faithfully in Korea -- because she doesn't want to leave the children alone in the house. The maintenance of the minivan, which she calls a "man's job," is her responsibility. When three of her sisters and their husbands took a vacation to Europe this summer, she didn't join them. "Couples only," she said.
She misses the companionship of the man she calls her lifetime friend. "When I get moody, I think about my husband and think, why am I doing this alone?" she said. "I'm sure God has a special purpose for my family. I don't know what it is."
The decision to split the family did not come easily, Kim recalled. She and her husband considered coming here together, as her parents did years ago. But her father had retired from his job as a police officer when he moved. Keeyeop Kim is at the height of his career, director of slot machine operations at South Korea's largest casino.
They talked about opening a business, as many Korean families do. But Jungwon Kim said the pressures of running a seven-day-a-week grocery or dry cleaners would mean the children might be, in a sense, losing both parents.
Ultimately, Keeyeop Kim decided the family should go on without him. Jungwon Kim said she hesitated but finally resolved that she could not ask him to give up his career and the status of his executive position. She experienced something like that herself when they moved back to Korea years ago and she was expected to stay home with the children, despite having a college degree.
She said she now believes her role as a full-time mother is a blessing. But she recognizes that the burden of cultural expectation falls squarely on Korean men. "Being Korean, in that way, I know I can't push my husband too much."
Her pastor in Columbia said he understands the dilemma.
"Biblically, the husband and wife should stay together, rain or shine. But this is not a black-and-white matter," said the Rev. Jonathan Song of the Korean American Church of the Philippi. "In Korea, only one in 10 children can bear the education system. What about the remaining nine?"
He said he knows several kirogi families in his congregation. One man missed his wife and children so much that he joined them, coming on a tourist visa and staying illegally. Now he works at a restaurant, busing tables. In Korea, he had an office. He asked his pastor whether he made the right choice.
Song closed his eyes. "It's almost unthinkable for a man of his stature to do this," he said.
In many ways, Kim said, her husband is making a bigger sacrifice than she is. Here, at least she has the children and her extended family. And increasingly, she has a circle of friends, including other kirogi mothers.
The separation is bearable, Kim said, when she thinks about the advantages they are giving their children. Still she worries about the children, especially Terry, who was just 3, and her father's pet, when the family moved here.
Sometimes, she gives the little girl a test.
"Where's Daddy?" she asks her. Terry always answers that he's in Korea -- working to buy her things, such as Barbies and Hello Kitty toys.
Kim said she worries that one day, her youngest child will ask why.
Missing Korea
It was time for dinner, but all Eugene could think about was math homework. He loves math, except for word problems. Numbers are a snap; they look the same in Korean. Words don't. Does "minus" mean the same as "subtract"?
Eugene handed his worksheet to his mother. Hannah jumped in: "When are we going to stop helping Eugene with his homework? We've helped him for nine months already."
Eugene glared at her. Try your best in school, Kim told her son in Korean. No more video games.
Eugene stomped downstairs to the playroom and slammed the door. Unlike Hannah, Eugene was not having the best year of his life.
Twice, Kim had been called up to Hollifield Station Elementary School by Eugene's fourth-grade teacher. Eugene had been involved in shoving arguments after he had trouble expressing himself in English. He would stand up in class and walk to the window, staring outside.
Eugene wasn't the perfect student back home, Kim acknowledged, but this year has been unusually tough. Of the three children, Eugene is most like his father, often shy about speaking to people he doesn't know well. And of the three, Eugene seems to feel his father's absence most acutely.
Eugene has told his mother that he would like to go back to Korea. Because that has not happened, he has made his life here as Korean as possible. All his friends are Korean. When it is "Drop Everything and Read" time in school, he pulls out a Korean book. He uses less English than Terry, who is in preschool but already knows the "SpongeBob SquarePants" theme song.
His teachers said Eugene is bright and are puzzled by his struggle with English. A Korean-speaking outreach liaison works at the school. In the afternoons, Eugene spends an hour with an ESOL teacher. On Tuesdays, he attends an after-school "homework club" for immigrant children.
One in eight students at Hollifield Station has limited English skills. Still, the school's standardized test scores top the state average. Even the scores for ESOL students are at the state average. Many teachers have noticed the influx of Koreans and are flattered that these families have traveled so far to reach their classrooms.
Eugene comes from a middle-class background and, in that sense, is like most of Hollifield Station's students. He also has a stay-at home mother who speaks English, an unusual asset for an immigrant child.
Kim, however, knows she is not enough. "Of course Eugene is missing something. . . ," she said. "He doesn't have his father."
Boys often have the hardest time adjusting to the separations, said Sue Song, a mental health consultant in Howard County who has worked with about 20 kirogi mothers and their teenage sons in the past two years. The boys have failed classes, flown into violent rages and experimented with drugs. One family gave up and went back to Korea.
"They make a decision based on an idealistic situation, not so much based on reality," Song said. "When the years go by, a lot of things can happen."
Kim recognizes that and said she wants to shield her children from additional pressure. "I'll never tell Hannah and Eugene, 'You have to make good grades because Mom and Dad are suffering,' " she said. "I'll never say that. They didn't ask us to do it this way."
By the end of the school year, Eugene began to make some progress. He raised his hand in class, especially during math, in which he excels. He shared with some non-Korean classmates the games on his handheld computer. Still, he didn't like to speak much English. "It not fun," he said.
Fourth grade ended with a project on poetry. Eugene managed to fill a blank book with short rhymes, and his teacher, Jennifer Wilkins, praised him for his cover artwork: an aqua-blue house, red flowers and a big tree with a little cicada on the trunk.
Wilkins told the class to give their books one final touch: a dedication. As usual, most of the students started working right away. As usual, Eugene looked around the room.
Wilkins bent down beside Eugene and tried to explain what a dedication is.
Eugene raised his eyebrows: "Mwoh?"
It is a Korean word that Wilkins understood because Eugene said it so often. "Mwoh?" What?
She called over Justin, a Korean American boy. "It's like who inspired these poems," she said. "If he was going to give this book to someone, who would he give it to?"
Justin translated. Eugene finally understood.
He took a pencil and, in unsure print, wrote: "This book is for my dad because my dad in Korea."
Hedging His Bets
Halfway around the world in Taebaek, Dad was walking outside his high-rise apartment building. Dozens of dragonflies were darting around the deserted parking lot.
It was a gray, drizzly Sunday, the only free time in the six-day Korean workweek. Keeyeop Kim spent the morning in church. Except he missed half the service when someone from the casino called his cell phone. He would spend the rest of the day home alone, with file folders of paperwork. He shrugged. He had nothing else to do.
Across the parking lot, a little girl giggled. She was running, her arms propelling her like wings, and she breezed past Kim. Her mother followed, a bright blue net in hand. They were chasing dragonflies.
"A couple of years ago," Kim said quietly, "Eugene caught hundreds of dragonflies."
In the family's three-bedroom flat, all the children's furniture is gone. Eugene's room, with its sailboat wallpaper, has been turned into his father's office. On the computer, the weather is set to Ellicott City. Hannah's room houses an exercise bike and a weight machine. Snapshots of the children hang on the refrigerator.
Out on the balcony sat two blue American Tourister suitcases. Nearby, there was a new purchase: a set of Ping golf clubs. "There was nothing to do after I sent my family to the States," Kim said of playing the sport.
Of course, the golf -- like everything else in his life -- is intertwined with work. He was recently elected chairman of the employees' golf club, and his casino is building a world-class golf course. Kangwon Land rises, all glittering glass and marble, amid the low-slung buildings of this coal-mining region.
When Kim strides through the resort's chandelier-lighted halls, employees bow. He is a slight man who commands attention in his Italian suit and Cartier watch.
Inside the cavernous casino, Kim outlined his challenges with the precision of a math professor: where to position the machines to draw the most customers; how to increase slots revenue compared with the table games; which coins people are more likely to use in their wager. Kangwon Land's $300 million annual profit puts it in the ranks of such casinos as the Bellagio in Las Vegas, he said.
Not that it would be possible, he said, to become a top executive at the Bellagio or any other U.S. casino. Every Asian person he knows in U.S. casinos has a job on the marketing side, which he said is not in line with his shy, by-the-numbers personality. He worried about his lack of any network in the United States. And he is 39. It is not an age for starting over, he said.
"I want to be at the top," said Kim, who supervises 101 people. He will retire at 49, he has decided, 10 years without his family.
"It's a sacrifice," he acknowledged. "I don't live with the family. That's what parents do for the kids."
It is also a gamble.
A steady stream of stories in Korean newspapers depicts a shadow society of lonely fathers spiraling into depression. Many move from their empty homes into "officetels," or single rooms with maid service. Some are gaining weight on fast food and frozen dinners. Others are succumbing to what one newspaper delicately called "temptations," or sexual affairs. Several have committed suicide.
Han Jun Sang, a professor of education at Yonsei University in Seoul, said the kirogi phenomenon undermines the strong Korean belief that fathers are the head of the household. Without regular contact, the children will rebel against the father's authority, Han said, and his wife will become more independent. The fathers, Han said, "shrink psychologically."
Keeyeop Kim knows something about gambling. The only card game he plays is blackjack. And only for a half-hour at a time. Because if you play too long, he said, you can lose everything .
A Whirlwind Reunion
Jungwon Kim had a deadline and could not believe what the sales clerk at Sears was telling her: All the store's photographers were booked for the week. Kim insisted; she begged. Her husband was here in Ellicott City, for only a week.
She didn't know when he might be back. Finally, the Kims were squeezed into a Friday slot.
Their family life in Howard County, compressed into a visit of eight days, seven nights, was a whirlwind. They saw friends and relatives in Howard; they watched sports on television; they ate out every night.
There was a day trip to Hagerstown to shop for school clothes at the outlet mall and an open house at Hollifield Station to meet Eugene's teachers. For a wedding anniversary that was months away, Kim ordered his wife a Gucci purse and had it shipped express mail so he could give it to her in person.
One evening, Keeyeop Kim measured the children, as he did during his visit last January, and marked their heights on a piece of tape against the refrigerator. Hannah and Terry had grown about an inch; Eugene had shot up more than two inches.
But Keeyeop Kim's work intruded every day. Phone calls from his colleagues in Korea interrupted dinner. What bothered his wife, though, was that some of his time online -- and away from the family -- wasn't about work. Once, he was simply checking the CNN Web site.
By the final day of his visit, Jungwon Kim expressed some of the frustration she had been feeling for months. "He doesn't need a wife," she scoffed.
Keeyeop Kim was anxious, too. He felt like a visitor, more like an uncle than a father or husband. Terry has called the Ellicott City townhouse "our house" and told her father the apartment back in South Korea is "your house."
Kim, suddenly unsure of his decision to live this way for a full 10 years, began considering other options: retiring earlier or finding another job.
As he waited for a relative to pick him up, the children were scattered about the house. Eugene was in the living room, watching television with a neighborhood friend. Hannah was updating her Web diary to note that her dad was leaving: "sniff* i'll miss him . . . church was awesome today . . . the message was really . . . meaningful . . . what i just needed." Terry played games on the Barbie Web site.
At 3 p.m., it was time for Daddy to go, and Terry erupted into tears.
But not for her father. Her mother had shut off the computer. Terry wailed for Barbie. Finally, Keeyeop Kim scooped the little girl into his arms and walked to the front door. He gave her a kiss.
He hugged Eugene and Hannah and told them to be good. Listen to your mother, he said in Korean. Study hard.
He patted his wife on the cheek. Her eyes were red; so were his.
Hannah leaned against the door, weeping. Eugene immersed himself in his GameBoy. Terry forgot about Barbie and began crying for her father.
Outside, a car door slammed.
Two weeks later, Jungwon Kim picked up the family portrait. The large, silver-framed picture of her husband -- hand on her shoulder, surrounded by their three beaming children -- hangs in the living room.
In Korea, Keeyeop Kim has a smaller copy, tucked in his wallet.
Staff writer Phuong Ly and staff photographer Tracy A. Woodward reported this story in Ellicott City and Taebaek, South Korea. Besides photographs of the Kim family and Korean schools, other stories exploring the separation and sacrifices that immigrant families endure can be found at www.washingtonpost.com/metro.
