South Korea's Uneasy Relationship With Its Foreign English Teachers

In 1882, King Gojong of Korea issued a royal statement warning his people about Western foreigners — the American missionaries then arriving at his door — advising Koreans to learn from outsiders' technology while remaining wary of their corrupting influence.

More than a century later, that old suspicion had found a modern target: the foreign English teachers. Demand for English brought tens of thousands of foreigners to South Korea each year, most of them young, most of them teaching in public schools and private academies. They were, by most accounts, well received — until periodically they weren't.

The flashpoint in 2010 was a policy with an ugly logic: mandatory HIV/AIDS testing for foreign teachers, introduced after a 2007 wave of sensational — and never substantiated — press reports alleging that foreign English teachers were molesting students and spreading disease. Teachers who tested positive could lose their contracts and face deportation. Ethnic Koreans, regardless of where they were born or raised, were exempt.

The exemption was the tell. If the policy were genuinely about public health, nationality wouldn't matter. Andrea Vandom, a former teacher who petitioned the constitutional court over the tests, put it plainly, saying she was being singled out as a disease carrier simply because she was not of Korean blood.

Defenders of the policy argued the suspicion had roots — the U.S. military presence had indeed fed aspects of Korea's sex industry, and a few high-profile crimes by foreigners had poisoned the well. But collective punishment of an entire profession by bloodline is a hard thing to defend as public health, and the international coverage it drew did South Korea's reputation no favors.

The episode captured something real about a country in transition: a thriving, globally connected nation of 50 million still negotiating, in fits and starts, what it means to live alongside outsiders. Gojong's warning had been about keeping Korea Korean. A century later, the question was whether that instinct could survive contact with a world that wouldn't stay outside.