"Beat your child with a flower!" Asian advantage and educational connectivity between South Korea and Singapore

Abstract

As a new dimension of transnational connections between East and Southeast Asia, this paper explores educational migration of South Korean "early study abroad" (jogi yuhak) students and accompanying mothers to Singapore. In examining Asian educational migrants to the "West", many previous studies tend to focus on the accumulation of cultural and linguistic capital not available within Asia. However, I argue that the study of educational migration within Asia needs to go beyond the Bourdieuan framework of capital accumulation. Instead, the case of South Korean educational migrants in Singapore illustrates that these migrants emphasise more on the enactment rather than accumulation of cultural capital, the process wherein many emotional resources and embodied techniques are required in order to activate what the migrant students have accumulated through their overseas education. This study identifies the "Asian advantage", specific types of emotional and educational benefits that are believed to facilitate the migrant students' capital enactment in their imaginings of future trajectories of "going global".