I’ve seen these posts on Instagram and the comments section are filled with people, especially from India, wanting to study and eventually work in S. Korea because of the false reality that K-pop and K-dramas present to the world.

However, there are sobering comments as well that warn people that’s not what it’s cracked up to be. First off, their degrees obtained in S. Korea will not land them jobs in S. Korea because there are more qualified graduates from among the local population who have gone through the hypercompetitive educational system of the country. Top Korean universities have already filtered their students, whereas foreign students don’t go through the wringer. They accept all foreign students regardless of their GPAs or whatever scoring system they have, since they pay more than locals.

Local corporations, of course, choose the best locals from the top schools so why would they even hire foreigners? The reason why a lot of Koreans study English here in the Philippines is because of the hypercompetitive jobs market back home. Those from more modest background can’t afford to study in Australia, US, and UK so they choose the “English-lite” version–the Philippines–to learn the language for cheap. They need the extra edge of having functional English as a second language (ESL) when applying for jobs back home even though they may not even use it in their jobs and everyday life there. It’s the local employers’ way of filtering candidates, which is quite unfair as that already culls out those who could not afford to go abroad for ESL education. Hiring ESL tutors in Korea is more expensive. Several Koreans have already told me about this. My nephew’s best friend is Korean whose family settled in our hometown. The kid had to leave for a while to serve in the military and is now back to study in UP Diliman.

But I digress.

What I’m saying here is that the social construction of reality these K-dramas and the K-pop culture is like a bait-and-switch for the impressionable younger generation who are now so enamored of the country that when they land in Korea, they end up struggling or disappointed. This is what the Instagram post was about. She probably couldn’t express it well since it seems like English is not even her first language. What others are pointing out in the comments is that she is struggling because her expectation vs reality was very wide. She came unprepared.

Even though I love coming to Japan for the sights and food and I am fan of anime and their movies, I never considered moving there. I know about the realities of living there from friends who have moved there (they have Japanese blood so it was easy for them to migrate). Isolation is my number one fear and even the locals suffer from that. Language skills can easily be overcome but the barrier is still there. Xenophobia is another issue, which is very high among the locals, especially the older generation. I cannot subject my kids to those difficulties just because of naïveté. I’d rather they plant roots here first and let them explore on their own once their prefrontal cortexes are more developed. When they have roots, they will always have somewhere to come back to when things don’t work out versus having none and in the end they feel like they don’t belong anywhere.

I’ve written about social construction of reality when I was in graduate school pursuing media studies. I wanted my thesis to head in that direction but I figured I would graduate sooner if I do something closer to home, which is business journalism and systems theory. I have already seen this romanticization of S. Korea 20 years ago when I was still watching K-movies and K-dramas. I already thought that this was already unhealthy and I may become a victim of bait and switch. For somebody with a master’s degree on media studies, I should know better, right?

Anyway, I feel bad about those who fall for this false reality because they would have a rude awakening that it’s all not romantic being there, that not all Korean men are like the ones they have been watching in those dramas, and that working there is not as easy as they paint it to be.