Remaking the Myth of the ‘Trade Warrior’: Searching for South Korean Masculinity in the Philippines

Abstract

This study explores South Korean middle-aged businessmen, mainly in their 50s and 60s, who migrated to the Philippines to boost their socio-economic status and eventually recuperate their masculine identities. By examining how the Korean men’s assumption about where and how they can redeem their masculine identity was made, this research extends the notion of transnational business masculinity in three ways. First, it demonstrates the emergence of transnational business masculinity does not simply denote the demise of older form of business masculinity, and second, the ascendancy of certain form of business masculinity is not given but can be shaped by one of the primary actors, that is, the state. Lastly, the case of Korean middle-aged businessmen in the Philippines unravels the contemporary business masculinity prompts actual transnational migration as it relates to men’s self-positionality in geopolitical global order.

Keywords

transnational business masculinity South Korea the Philippines the state transnational mobility geopolitical inequality

Introduction

This study investigates South Korean¹ middle-aged businessmen, mainly in their 50s and 60s, who migrated to the Philippines to open businesses and boost their socio-economic status to recuperate their masculine identities. The Korean men participating in this research shared common life histories and migratory patterns. They were typically born in the 1950s and 1960s and worked in the international trading sector of commodities, such as textiles, at small-to-medium companies or at least had dreamed of having such a job. Facing financial difficulties in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 1997, they found crossing the Philippine border as businessmen as a last resort to recover their economic losses and ultimately redeem their masculine identity.

By examining the ways in which the Korean men’s assumption about where and how they can redeem their masculine identity was made, this research spotlights the historical, political, and ideological forces in formulating such gendered transnational mobility. In common, the research participants were proud of their career path as international businessmen during the youth when the military regime promoted an export-led growth strategy (Gill and Raiser 2013) that prioritized men’s frontier spirit as an essential ethos to advance the national economy. “Trade warriors” (muyŏk chŏnsa) was one of the rhetoric that the state mobilized to valorize those men bravely broke through enemy lines to pioneer new markets (Kang 2004; Yang 2011; Yu 2014). When the country was hit by the financial crisis in the late 1990s, such heroic discourse was revived by the state as one of the solutions for men to search for the second chance in another territory.

By exploring how migratory decision-making processes of the Korean middle-aged men intersect with their life path as “trade warrior” and the state policies, this article contributes to extend the concept of transnational business masculinity. Connell introduced the concept of transnational business masculinity by identifying the cultural traits associated with capitalists and business elites, mostly in multinational corporations (MNCs), with hegemonic masculinity in the current global order. Tinted with neoliberal ideals of subjectivity such as flexibility, rationality, self-management, and egocentricity, she claimed transnational business masculinity was the new hegemonic masculinity powerful in this transnational arena replacing the old, local-based bourgeois masculinity (Connell 1998; Connell 2005a, 2005b; Connell and Wood 2005).

The case of Korea is peculiar in that, first, it demonstrates the emergence of transnational business masculinity does not simply denote the demise of older form of business masculinity, and second, the ascendancy of certain form of business masculinity is not given but shaped by one of the primary actors, that is, the state. In Korea, as I will illustrate later in this article, the state and media proceeded two ways of remasculinization in the aftermath of Asian financial crisis of 1997. While the new business masculinity represented by individualistic and calculating young men in venture companies was celebrated, the old hero with a tint of militarism was also revived as a significant agent in restoring the country.

More importantly, the case of Korean middle-aged businessmen in the Philippines unravels how the contemporary business masculinity prompts actual transnational migration as it shapes men’s self-positionality in geopolitical global order. Connell noted that like the imperial conquest, “the current world systems of power, investment, trade, and communication have brought very diverse societies in contact with each other.” (Connell 2005c, 73). Nonetheless, it is lesser known in what context the contemporary business masculinity provokes different people to meet. By analyzing how the Korean men conceive the Philippines as a lucrative market to eventually redeem their masculinity, this article unfolds the ways in which the geopolitical inequalities and power differentials intersect with the contemporary business masculinity to shape transnational gendered mobility.

Relevant Literature

Transnational Business Masculinity and Inter-Asian Migration

Given that the capitalists and business elites control hegemonic power dominant in the contemporary world economy, Connell called the masculine traits that these new business entrepreneurs embodied, such as flexibility, egocentrism, and conditional loyalty, transnational business masculinity (Connell 1998; Connell 2005a, 2005b, 2005c; Connell 2016; Connell and Wood 2005). Her claim identifying transnational business masculinity as hegemonic masculinity in the contemporary neoliberal world order invited both criticism and empirical research. Elsewhere, Beasley and Elias criticized the claim was monolithic in that it simply reduced a certain group of men (i.e., White capitalists and business elites) to sole holders of masculine power in the global economy and failed to explicate the process that transnational business masculinity was legitimized to earn hegemony (Beasley 2008; Elias and Beasley 2009). Partly drawing on such criticism, many empirical research were conducted in different parts of the world to figure out variations of transnational business masculinity (Song 2003; Griffin 2012; Madrid 2017; Nemoto 2018; Kwon 2019). For instance, Kwon (2019)’s study on Korean top corporate managers working in transnational fields suggested that in Korea, not only neoliberal managerialism but also loyalty toward the state were emerged by emphasizing the intimate historical relationship between Korean conglomerates and the developmental state. Likewise, the existing empirical research deepens the understanding on transnational business masculinity by showing local variations; however, they still tend to focus on highlighting characteristics of new business masculinity in relation to the local context of race, nationality, and class.

This article extends the notion of transnational business masculinity by demonstrating the process in which the certain form of business masculinity earns hegemony in the local context. When the neoliberal economic reform was intensified in the late 1990s, the Korean society, like other parts of the world, observed the emergence of a new ruling class, which included businessmen in MNCs and finance managers, and the increased popularity of the ego-centric and self-managing characters they represented (Song 2007). However, the new business masculinity - what Connell said, transnational business masculinity – did not simply replaced the old one that was glorified during the developmental era in Korea. Rather, both obtained its legitimacy, because while the Korean state celebrated young men’s rational and self-managing ethos, it also revived the heroic image of men in the past who pioneered emerging market with a reckless yet challenging spirit. Such marriage between old and new was justified by the state as the optimal way for individual Korean men in different generation to overcome socioeconomic difficulties driven by the financial crisis.

This study’s processual approach on transnational business masculinity also benefitted to understand its larger impact on society, such as men’s transnational mobility and its outcome in the level of individual, family, and the local society. In discussing globalization, Connell (2005c) suggested European imperialism was historical predecessor of current globalization by viewing both as masculine process to civilize and modernize the other. In that sense, although neoliberal market economy used the gender-neutral terms such as individual and choice, she argued masculine ideology of conquest was embedded in capitalists’ ideas and their ways of meeting people in the world. Yet, it was unanswered how the business masculinity that capitalists, traders, and investors embodied provoked actual migration and interacted with the local society in another territory.

By taking the Korean case, this study provides an example showing how the contemporary business masculinity in relation to transnational migration shapes men’s perception on where to go and what to do for recuperating their masculinity. Korean middle-aged men in the Philippines who intended to do business commonly understood that they can redeem their masculine identity by utilizing their relatively superior socioeconomic status and previous experiences in economic development in, what they believed, undeveloped, thus lucrative market – the Philippines. This paper does not suggest that Korean businessmen’s relocation to the Philippines is part of a colonization project. Rather, at least, it opens the window to discuss how the geopolitical inequalities intersected with business masculinity eventually shape men’s transnational migration, specifically in the form inter-Asian migration.

As most masculinity studies dealt with men’s migration from the global South to the North (Datta et al. 2009), a relatively smaller body of masculinity literature studied migrants who sought to revive their masculine potency in the global South, primarily as sex tourists, retirement migrants, and lifestyle migrants (Aoyama 2015; Cohen 1982 1986; Hamilton 1982; Koch-Schulte 2008; Ono 2015; Shakuto 2017). Based on power differential among nations, these migrants also took advantage of their relatively superior socioeconomic status, but only as consumers; thus, business as practice and ethos was not the subject of masculinity and migration agenda in migration from the global North to South. Thus, this study contributes to expanding such limited geographical understanding on men’s transnational migration in relation to masculinity. Furthermore, in migration studies, the Philippines has been understood as a top sending country because of its opportunities for neoliberal states to take advantage of its English-speaking, educated workforce (Rodriguez 2010). This study also disrupts such existing understanding of the Philippines in migration literature.

Korean Hegemonic Masculinities and Transnational Mobility

Studies on Korean masculinities have understood the country as a highly patriarchal society by analyzing how the state mobilized masculine pathways in its industrialization process after the Korean War (Kendall 2002; Kim and Choi 1998; Moon 2005). The strictly gendered division of labor made men financial providers by using war metaphors, such as the “industrial warriors” and “trade warriors” (Kim 1997; Kim and Park 2003; Kwon 2019). These discourses of militarized industrialization idealized not only hardworking and diligent men in the industrial sector (“industrial warrior”) but also those in business with courageous and tenacious spirits (“trade warrior”). While the former denoted both blue-collar and management workers in heavy and chemical industries, the latter involved salarymen in transnational businesses (Kwon 2019; see also Kim and Park 2003; Lee and Parpart 2018; Song 2003). In the case of “industrial warrior,” women as factory workers were sometimes called by the state, though their labor was considered secondary and temporary (Kim 1997). Yet, for the “trade warrior,” women were completely out of the subject as the Korean trading companies did not expect to recruit women as front runners working in international fields (Elfving-Hwang 2017). Although there are many studies on workers in industrial sector including women’s labor in factories because the labor relations and working-class formation became one of the major topics in the Korean studies (e.g., Koo 2001), the literature detailing the transnational aspects of Korean business masculinity is relatively small (Kwon 2019).

Korean men’s masculinity in a transnational context has also been examined in research on Korean diaspora, primarily in the United States. Studies focusing on how Korean men struggled to maintain their masculine identities in the U.S. racial hierarchy reveal how their marginalized masculinity in the United States impacted their lives and even their decisions to return to Korea (Abelmann and Lie 1997; Cho 2012; Suh 2016; Lee 2018; Song 2020). Although such narratives on the downward mobility of Korean men in the United States have received significant attention, the ascendancy of Korean masculinity in the contemporary era has been less highlighted.² A notable exception is Hoang’s (2015) ethnography on the Vietnamese sex industry and shifts in the global masculinity hierarchy in the rise of the Asian market. She illustrates how relatively young Asian businessmen, including Koreans, emerged as new actors in the sex industry and contested Western superiority in the Asia-Pacific region.

This study extends such focus on the emergence of new Asian businessmen in inter-Asian migration by highlighting the older generation cohort and the sector of transnational business. By studying relatively old Korean men’s perception on their migration and relocation process, this article details the process of forming men’s gendered understanding on another territory and eventually expectation of business success. In this way, this article contributes to revealing how the masculine ideas of conquest and settlement stimulated by the geopolitical inequalities were embedded in the current business masculinity and prompted inter-Asian migration.

Data and Methods

This analysis is based on twentieth months of ethnographic research conducted between 2013 and 2016 in several major cities in the Philippines, including Metro Manila, Angeles, Baguio, Davao, and Cebu—all popular destinations for Korean migrants. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the number of Koreans residing in the Philippines for more than 1 year drastically increased from 7,000 in 1995 to 46,000 in 2005 and 115,400 in 2009 (MOFAT 2009). Such dramatic growth was initially driven by the Korean government’s strong promotion of the globalization of education and emphasized the ability of spoken English as one of the major engines for achieving the goal of globalization in the late 1990s. As the Philippines was known to provide English education at a relatively cheap cost, students crossed the Philippine border to form a significant group, composing 25percent of the Korean population in the Philippines in 2009 (25,122 out of 115,400) (MOFAT 2009). The number of Koreans decreased slightly to 96,632 in 2011, where it remained until the COVID-19 outbreak (MOFAT 2019).³ Since 2006, the highest number of visitors to the Philippines has been from Korea, followed by America and China (Ruffino 2013).⁴

Such population growth also led to an increase in Korean businesses, particularly small-scale businesses. Korean businesses entered the archipelago in the 1980s as Korean garment factories sought for cheaper labor costs, but they were withdrawn when the financial crisis hit the Asian region in the late 1990s (Kim 2021b). The number of Korean businesses again increased in the 2000s, primarily small-scale service providers targeting either Korean visitors or middle-class Filipinos, including restaurants, guesthouses, cell phone sellers, English/Korean language institutions, and real estate agencies (Kim 2016). As shown in later sections, Korea’s financial crisis in 1997 and deteriorated economic conditions strongly contributed to the increase in small-scale business in the Philippines (see also Chang, Jackson, and Sam 2017).

I was initially interested in Korean retirees in the Philippines. However, during the beginning of my fieldwork in 2013, I recognized the increasing number of Korean small-scale businesses and the gendered migration pattern in the businesses. Whenever I interviewed Koreans engaged in any business, men (husbands) often strongly initiated migration. Their Korean wives were reluctant but agreed because they believed their children would at least be able to gain English proficiency in the Philippines. Although not all Korean small-scale business owners were middle-aged men, the narratives of men in their 50s and 60s shared common life histories and migratory trajectories. Thus, along with the study of retirees, I expanded my research to Korean businesses and middle-aged men’s masculinity by recruiting research participants by snowball method while residing in Korean guesthouses in major cities in the Philippines. Because Korean residents in major Philippine cities tended to reside in segregated areas, such as gated communities and Koreatown, for safety (Kim 2016), I booked a guesthouse inside a Korean gated community and informed the Korean owners who I was and what my research topic was.

In most cases, through the owners, I was introduced to other Korean businessmen, who introduced me to others in the town. I interviewed 20 middle-aged Korean men who engaged in business activities and five of their wives. The most important topic of my interview was about their relocation process including business intention; but considering my interviewees’ common career trajectories as businessmen, I included diverse topics to cover their life histories, ranging from their childhood dream, their experiences as businessmen during the youth, factors influencing their decision to migrate to the Philippines to the responses from the family and relatives to their decision. Typically, the interviews were conducted for around 2 to 3 hours but sometimes it spent more than 4 hours. During the interviews, I noticed they all crossed the Philippine border with strong business intentions, but not all remained successful in their business engagements. I included those business failure cases to understand the settlement process and its results.

The interviewees also shared several similar demographic characteristics beyond their age. They relocated to the Philippines in the 2000s after experiencing financial losses in the wake of the Asian financial crisis with strong intentions to launch small businesses in the country (with or without a concrete business plan). As noted, most had worked in transnational commodity trading sectors in Korean companies (although company sizes varied) or at least clearly remembered the popularity and success of the trading business in Korea’s past. Another commonality was family composition—most interviewees were accompanied by Korean wives and, in most cases, children in their twenties or late teens when they relocated to the Philippines.

The Asian Financial Crisis and Business Masculinity in Korea

In Korea, the financial collapse in 1997 resulted in fierce critiques of old-form state-business collusion, that is, crony capitalism, and the celebration of opening the market to rational global business (Han and Ling 1998; Kim and Im 2001). The Korean state launched favorable policies for venture capital by praising young businessmen, particularly in the I.T. industry, as new economic actors embodying rationality, flexibility, and self-management (Song 2007). Similar stories of the emergence of new business masculinity and the neoliberal economy can be found in other parts of the world (Dunn 2004; Shever 2012). However, the Korean case is peculiar in that new and old forms of business masculinity were simultaneously touted (Elfving-Hwang 2017). The Korean government’s policies and media discourses in the late 1990s demonstrate this duality.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the military regime of President Park Chung-hee advocated “export-driven policy” through the mobilization of military metaphors, and “trade warriors” was one of them to specifically herorize those businessmen working in commodity trading sector in the globe (Kang 2004; Yang 2011; Yu 2014). The slogan, “Sell heaters in Africa,” denoted that a trader with a will to sell could sell anything, no matter the circumstances. Each year beginning in 1965, the government set a trade surplus target and allotted a certain amount to each Korean embassy worldwide to fulfill. The President presided over a monthly high-official meeting to check embassies’ progress.

In March 1998, four months after the Korean government accepted a 55 billion USD bailout package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Pollack 1997), President Kim Dae-jung revived the presidential high-official meeting to promote exportation. After this meeting, diverse government agencies, including local governments, launched programs to assist companies in finding new foreign markets. For instance, Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency organized a “Special Forces Team for Exportation” (such’ul t’ŭk’gongdae) in 1999 to send its young employees around the world to investigate “unexplored markets” and obtain market information for Korean companies (Chang 1999). At the same time, the government strongly encouraged small and medium companies to open sales branches and new offices in foreign markets by financially supporting them through the Small and Medium Business Administration (An and Sin 2017). The media enhanced the government’s promotions by reporting success stories of small and medium companies finding new lucrative markets. Moreover, migration and travel agencies organized events to introduce foreign countries as markets for those seeking to profit through small-scale entrepreneurship (Sŏng 1998).

Against this background, developing economies in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, were often mentioned as the most accessible, promising markets. These positive evaluations were not only drawn from the factual merits of these countries, such as geographical proximity to Korea but also from the perception that developing economies have more potential for growth. The latter point can be related to the deep-seated ideology of economic development in Korea that understood the direction of economic development was universal and linear. The Korea sociologist Chong-t’ae Kim (2014) argued that the Park Chung-hee regime indoctrinated the developmentalistic ideology of linear economic development from developing countries (hujin’guk) to developed countries (sŏnjin’guk) to cultivate its citizens to work diligently to catch up with developed countries. According to this idea of linear economic development, Korean men had unique and valuable knowledge in that they can accurately predict the development path of developing economies as they already experienced such process. Routinely combined with the idea that the Philippines was a developing economy, the Korean media reported numerous series about the Philippines and Korean migrants and strongly emphasized that Korean migrants in the country could eventually retire while making money through business (Pak 2006; Maekyŏng Ik’onomi 2006).

In sum, in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, two ways of remasculinization were found in the state policy and media discourses in Korea to encourage individual men to search for their own way out. For young men, through the individualistic and calculating subjectivities in venture economy, and for relatively old men, the state and media discourses revived the image of militant hero pioneering ‘unexplored’ developing economies. These promotions significantly impacted the decision of men in their 50s and 60s to relocate.

Crossing the Border to the Philippines is the Viable Solution

As noted, most of my interviewees experienced financial and emotional difficulties in Korea after losing their job or business. The loss of economic status in Korea severely weakened not only households’ financial stability but also Korean men’s sense of self—as one interviewee stated, “I lost my raison d’être” (chonjae iyu). According to Moon (2005, 84), men’s role “as the principal income earners of the family justify men’s domestic authority and dominance” in Korea. It is, therefore, not surprising that my interviewees frequently connected the loss of their jobs with the marginalized masculinity that eventually became their primary motivation to relocate. Han-min, a Korean man in his late sixties who was laid off in 1999, recounted how not being a traditional Korean breadwinner was the primary reason he decided to leave Korea:

After losing my job, I felt forlorn (ch’ŏryang). A man has to function as father, son, and husband. He should do this. But [because I lost these roles], I was compared to other fathers, sons, and husbands who were still functioning.

Narratives about older men leaving their home countries after losing their jobs are common. For instance, studies of Japanese retirees in Southeast Asia demonstrate how economically displaced men chose to leave Japan to save face (Toyota 2006). However, these Japanese men migrated as retirees with no intention of earning income in economically less-developed countries. In contrast, the Korean men in this study chose to migrate for business.

Whether or not they were involved in income-earning activities at the time of the interview, interviewees commonly said that they intended to do business in the Philippines before entering. This faith in transnational business was partly based on media promotion in the early 2000s and their common work history. Interviewees largely agreed that media and state promotion of transnational business contributed to their view of migration as a solution for their economic situations. For instance, one of my interviewees, Hyung-su, who relocated to the Philippines in 2005 when he was fifty-five, was one of the Korean men featured in the Korean media as a success story of relocation, business, and eventual retirement. He was proud of being featured as an example of rejuvenation and how the media coverage became popular to attract other Korean men: “After the news article, there were numerous people (men) contacting me to ask what they can do in the Philippines,” he said. Echoing his remark, some interviewees said they decided to move to the country after reading articles promoting migration, including Hyung-su’s.

Nonetheless, the popularity of migration is explained by the intersection of middle-aged men’s life and work histories. Hyung-su had worked in the trade department at a medium-sized company before he was laid off. Through numerous business trips in the 1970s and 1980s (when the government restricted the overseas travel of most ordinary citizens), he gained experience living in other countries in South Asia. Facing financial difficulties in the business he launched for himself after losing his job, he decided to reframe his circumstances as an opportunity:

At that time, I recollected a book title that I found very moving, The World Is Wide and There Are Many Things To Do, and thought about leaving Korea as a last resort by slightly changing the title to “The world is wide and there are many places to live.”

This book was significant for understanding why Hyung-su believed that moving to another country was his last hope. Published in 1989, The World Is Wide was written by Kim Woo-Jung, Daewoo’s founder and former CEO. Though it became bankrupt in 1999 in the turmoil of the Asian financial crisis, in 1978, Daewoo was the number-one trading company, with thirty-nine overseas branches in thirty-one countries (Cho and Heo 1984). A best-seller, Kim’s book was full of advice and encouragement to embrace failure, go abroad, and face new challenges in the world. Emphasizing the importance of pioneering new markets, Kim specifically urged a “Move to the East”—and not to the West, where the market was too mature to succeed (1989, 76). This book and its author were symbols of the success of the Korean trade industry.

Hyung-su described how Kim’s book impacted his days at the company and offered him a way out of his financial struggles by searching for a new market: “I spent a year travelling countries in Southeast Asia to figure out where to go and what I can do.” Noticing the growing number of Korean visitors in the Philippines, he moved there and opened a guesthouse business and real-estate agency for Koreans. Although his wife did not support his plan, she had no choice but to follow him after he sold the family’s house in suburban Seoul without her consent.

Kim Woo-Jung’s name appeared again in an interview with another informant. Sang-woo, in his sixties at the time of the interview, relocated to the Philippines relatively early, in 1999, when he saw how the Korean economy had been devastated by the financial crisis. He was very proud of being one of the first Korean businessmen selling Korean textiles in Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam and Indonesia, in the early 1980s. Like Hyung-su, Sang-woo noted that he was among the few successful Korean businessmen allowed to travel overseas freely. He boasted that he had encountered Kim Woo-jung several times during his business travels:

I met Kim Woo-jung three times in my life. During the Gulf War, I was not paid by the counterpart in Dubai. Because Daewoo was in charge of shipping, it paid me instead of the Arabian company. I lost nothing. At that time, I met Kim Woo-jung to receive the check. Later, I encountered him again in one of the golf clubs. He remembered who I was—I was so thrilled.

Although Sang-woo had not been the CEO of a large company, he was proud to have been part of Korea’s trading industry and pioneering a new market like former CEO Kim Woo-Jung. Unlike other interviewees, he did not experience severe financial difficulty due to the 1997 financial crisis. However, for him, the crisis marked the end of Korea’s growth and the beginning of a new opportunity in the Philippines, which his experience made him capable of seizing: “I had been familiar with this country because of my business and had a belief that this market would be booming soon.” Purchasing land and constructing a condominium, Sang-woo established a land-development company and then expanded it to other businesses, such as selling coffee beans to Korea.

Many interviewees expressed pride in working in transnational trade during their youth. Thus, for some, their status as businessmen in the Philippines was an actualization of their idealized masculine figure. Jun-sik, who was in his late fifties at the time of the interview and relocated to the Philippines in 2005 to open a Korean-language institution for Filipino learners, described that his dream came true in the Philippines because he dreamt of becoming a CEO and presiding over business meetings in English:

You know, in the 1970s, no Koreans could go abroad—those men coming and going at airports with briefcases like James Bond looked so fabulous to me (laugh). That’s why I majored in trade and worked at the trade division in the company… Now, my dream came true, because even in the trade company, I wanted to work more in global [business], like directing something and having business meetings only in English. One day in the Philippines, I was surprised that my dream came true!

In cases like Jun-sik’s, the promotion of the “trade warrior” discourse in the 1970s influenced the idealized masculine figure of working in international business and motivated transnational relocation later in life.

Furthermore, interviewees often shared that the markets in economically less-developed countries offered more opportunities, echoing Kim Woo-Jung’s “Move to the East” and the media discourses. Some interviewees explained that their experiences of Korea’s economic development from one of the least developed economies to one of the top provided them a competitive edge. For instance, Jun-sik said about Korean men like him, “As we succeeded in developing the economy from the very bottom to the top in the world by our own hands, we knew what the Philippines economy would evolve into—we have competitiveness.” Resonating Kim’s (2014) argument that the Korean developmental ideology was rooted in the belief in linear and singular economic development, the Korean middle-aged men showed confidence in accurately predicting where to go and what to do based on their own experiences of economic development, specifically as international businessmen.

In sum, the Korean state and media’s collaborative effort to recall masculine heroes pioneering the new markets appealed to the interviewees, men in their 50s and 60s who shared common work histories as businessmen and aspirations to succeed in business. Following financial hardships in Korea, interviewees moved to the Philippines because they saw an opportunity to recuperate their masculine identity using their expertise of transnational business based on their assumption that they can predict the pathway of economic development of the country.

Negotiating Masculinity in the Philippines

Many older Korean men migrated to the Philippines to redeem their marginalized masculinities by recovering their status as family providers. However, few I spoke with experienced financial success in their businesses, primarily because of their lack of language ability and cultural knowledge of local business and law.⁵ Due to such difficulties, some spent years identifying the “right” business venture. Jin-chul came to the Philippines in 2006. When interviewed in 2013, he was still looking for a business opportunity.

Before relocation, I had always thought that I should do something [business] in the Philippines. And, I thought it would be easy to find something once I got here. But, apparently, I could not find anything that I can do.

Research on migration and masculinities has explored how migration affected men’s identities and how migrant men negotiated their masculinities in both family and work (Batnitzky, McDowell, and Dyer 2008; Hansen 2008; Suh 2016; Water, Bourgois, and Loinaz 2004). For example, Markussen’s (2018) study on elderly Somalian refugee men in Norway detailed their strategies to recuperate respectable masculinities through voluntary work in ethnic local communities or frequently returning home to Somalia. Interviewees in this study also renegotiated their masculine identities through active local engagement and professionalization of “women’s” work after encountering difficulties finding viable business opportunities or facing financial deadlock. Here, it is noteworthy that by negotiating their new positions at home, the men continue to rely on the idea of business and business masculinity that are distinctively different from women’s realm.

I stayed in Ki-hyun’s guesthouse, which his wife ran for Korean visitors in 2015, for about a month. Like other interviewees, he proudly discussed how he freely traveled overseas in the 1980s and 1990s as a salesman in a medium-sized textile company. He quit this job at thirty-nine and opened his own business exporting textiles. However, the financial crisis and rising prices of Korean products devastated his business and led him to declare bankruptcy. He later came to the Philippines with his wife and a child seeking another business opportunity, such as importing agricultural equipment from Korea. While migrating, however, Ki-hyun lost around 60,000 USD because the land he purchased through a Korean friend already in the Philippines was determined to be unavailable for foreign ownership.

In 2015, when I interviewed Ki-Hyun, I found that his primary household income came from the guesthouse his wife ran, and he spent most of his time trading stocks online and meeting with other Korean men in the city. Ki-hyun launched several Korean NGOs helping poverty-ridden Philippine communities and children of mixed Korean and Filipina descent (kopino⁶) and enhancing Korean national prestige by advertising Korean culture. He connected his activities in NGOs with his efforts to make his life more “meaningful”:

Given that I might live here for about twenty years, I need some plans to find my life worth living. Establishing NGOs and helping people is one of the plans. It’s more like a plan for my later life.

Ki-hyun was also involved in some of the Korean government’s activities in the city, such as establishing the Korean monument commemorating friendly relations between the two countries. His activities, at the moment of the interview, were in the form of non-profit; however, his vision was clearly related to finding business opportunities. Ki-hyun described the long-term plans of his organization to connect Korean construction companies with the city planning bureau of the local government to facilitate local economic development. In that sense, his efforts would not only make his work recognizable by both the Philippine and Korean governments but also make his dream of transnational business success come true. By dedicating his time to public work, he attempted to continue navigating the business possibilities and eventually recuperated his masculine identity on the verge of being challenged by his financial situation in the Philippines.

Other interviewees took different strategies, such as professionalizing “feminine” work. Like Ki-hyun, many interviewees financially depended on a guesthouse business that their wives primarily ran, particularly those who had failed to create a lucrative business or experienced financial loss during migration. Suzuki (2019) notes that the number of Korean English learners dramatically increased in the Philippines after the early 2000s, when the Philippines offered affordable opportunities to attain the English proficiency necessary for entering excellent universities and competing in the Korean job market. To capitalize on this, Korean migrants to the Philippines established English-language institutions; others turned their homes into guesthouses to accommodate mostly English learners, including placing teenagers in extra bedrooms. Due to the relatively cheaper labor cost in the Philippines, the Korean guesthouses generally hired Filipina house workers for cleaning, cooking, and laundering. However, the business inevitably required diverse work ranging from picking up students, arranging Filipino English tutors, and checking in on the students’ daily lives to helping them experience local cultural events.

In most guesthouses I visited, the Korean wives were usually in charge of running them. However, in a few case, men actively ran the guesthouse, emphasizing that it was an “educational business,” not care work. When I visited Jin-chul, he noted that his guesthouse accommodated several Korean teenagers who came to the country to study English. He proudly described how his approach to running the guesthouse was different from other Korean guesthouses that had sprouted up in the city:

Those guesthouses run by housewives [ajumma] are unprofessional [chumŏg’gugusik], so that what they do is only to forcefully control the students’ lives. They even confiscate students’ cell phones to make them concentrate on studying! But, this way of education cannot produce a good result.

Ajumma is a pejorative word denoting married middle-aged women as the word portrayed women who were less educated thus ignorant (Cho 2002). Identifying the Korean women running the guesthouse as ajumma, Jin-chul understood women’s guesthouse not as business entity. His understanding directly echoed the Korean state discourse and corporate policy to completely exclude women from the notion of “trade warrior.” Distancing himself from women’s business, Jin-chul emphasized that his guesthouse was democratic and open but still educational. He highlighted that he never infringed upon the students’ privacy. Instead, he maintained the uniqueness of his guesthouse by adopting “fun” and “educationally effective” programs—such as English-only parties and theatre performances in English. He further explained that the unprofessional operation of other boarding houses was rooted in Korean housewives’ lack of educational credentials and English ability. In this way, Jin-chul clarified his guesthouse was part of his proper ‘business’ that was distinctively different from guesthouse by Korean women who were lack of business mind.

Sarti’s (2010) study on migrant men in Italy who engaged in domestic work illustrated that when the nature of work potentially challenged their masculinity, they asserted that their work was not for women but “‘upgraded’ to a job for ‘real’ men” (33). Although interviewees were not engaged in domestic work like cooking and cleaning, they distinguished their work in the guesthouses from care work by re-masculinizing their duties and further related their work to business that they dreamt of.

Conclusion

This study explored South Korean middle-aged businessmen, mainly in their 50s and 60s, who migrated to the Philippines to start a business to boost their socio-economic status and eventually recuperate their masculine identities. By examining how the Korean men’s assumption about where and how they can redeem their masculine identity was made, this research revealed the historical, political, and ideological forces in shaping such gendered transnational mobility. Specifically, in post-1997 era, the Korean state and media discourse celebrated emerging ideas of flexibility and self-management as new form of business masculinity, but at the same time it also revived the tenacious spirit to pioneer markets in developing economies. This finding demonstrated that as globalization and neoliberal economic reform cannot be a singular process, the business masculinity earning hegemonic status in the local context cannot be singular. By emphasizing the role of state to boost business masculinity, this article also revealed how certain form of business masculinity was legitimized. Such finding contributed to extending the notion of transnational business masculinity in three ways. First, the Korean case showed transnational business masculinity did not simply replace the old form of business masculinity. Second, it detailed the legitimization process of it. Furthermore, this study clarified that transnational businessmen’s sense of masculinity was strongly related to men’s self-positionality in the gendered world order. Thus, their relatively socioeconomic power and belief in economic development could shape transnational migration, specifically from the global North to the South. The men entered the Philippines with a strong faith in achieving financial success and redeeming their masculinity; however, not all of them attained the success they sought. Many interviewees renegotiated their masculinities through local engagement and distinguished their work at guesthouses from feminized care work.

An increasing number of East Asian businessmen including investors are migrating to developing economies in Southeast Asia (Jung 2020). Recent studies have focused on relatively young men (Hoang 2015; Ono 2015), only partially reflecting Korean business migration to the Philippines. This study, therefore, contributes to the literature on men and business masculinity in the transnational context by spotlighting relatively older generations and the gendered qualities of their migratory flow. By revealing how the businessmen’s belief in lucrative market is formed, this article further contributes to reconsidering intersection between contemporary business masculinity and geopolitical inequalities among nations to understand such gendered mobility.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation: [Dissertation Fieldwork Grant] and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign: [Graduate College Dissertation Travel Fund].

ORCID iD

Dohye Kim

Notes

Author Biography

Dohye Kim’s research interest lies in inter-Asian migration between South Korea and countries in Southeast Asia through the lens of class, gender, race and age. Specifically, she earned her PhD with her dissertation about South Korean middle-aged male migrants and their business activities in the Philippines. Dr. Kim is currently working as an Assistant Professor at Duksung Women’s University in Seoul and expands her research into inter-Asian student mobility, again between South Korea and Southeast Asian countries. She is recently conducting two research – South Korean return migrants who were graduated from the Philippine universities and Asian female international students studying in South Korea.

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