Jonghee Lee-Caldararo

Using Foucault’s conceptualization of neoliberal governmentality, the present book chapter aims to demonstrate that neoliberalism is bodily experienced and entangled with South Korean young adults’ practices who spend their nighttime at 24hr cafes in Seoul. For that, I draw upon semi-structured interviews with twenty South Koreans in their early 20s, who currently attend or have taken a leave of absence from their universities to prepare for exams for future employment, and whose main nighttime
practice is gongbu in Korean, or simply put, ‘study.’ I first review South Korea’s economic change and youth’s precarious lives. I then discuss the relationship between such unfavorable socio-economic and political situation and youth’s night-time practice of study at cafés through the three related questions: (1) Why do these young adults engage in study at night in lieu of normal sleep schedule? (2) How do their fatigue become endurable and rationalized? and (3) Why do they work late at cafés instead of their home, or in any other space? I conclude by demonstrating that my research participants’ nocturnal practices are an embodied form of neoliberalism in which young adults take care of themselves. The case study will affirm that
neoliberalism is not just implemented in youth’s lives but bodily experienced and differently and ongoingly adjusted.

In this chapter, Jonghee Lee-Caldararo explores shows how transformational impacts of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises are felt at intimate, bodily scales. Through research with young people at a selection of Seoul’s ‘24hr cafés’, the chapter argues that a highly competitive neoliberalised education system in South Korea, coupled with anxieties about post-recessionary unemployment and job insecurity, have led to ‘laziness’ being stigmatised. In this context, the chapter shows how sleeplessness, chronic fatigue, anxiety and stress have come to be normalised bodily conditions for many young people. This is evidenced by the preponderance of ‘24hr cafés’ in Seoul, where many young people regularly study, work and doze through the night, in lieu of going to bed. This haunting chapter, vividly evokes the way in which neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises are lived and deeply -felt as personal, corporeal conditions, every day and every-night.

This paper has been written for the ultimate end to clarify the usefulness of 'place lens' on the study of transnational migration and network, so as to get over the limitation of methodological nationalism. The Seoul Mongol Town started to be formed as a sojourning place by Mongolian package peddlers since the diplomatic relations between Mongol and South Korea established in 1993. Just neighboring the Dongdaemun Market, this place was a 'food alley' catering to the Korean laborers, and then infiltrated by Russian migrants. Shortly thereafter in 2000 Mongolian migrants began to tremendously increase, the Mongolian migrants got together to the former Russian place, which was facilitated by the easy accessibility to the Dongdaemun Market, low land value, the possibility of employment at the manufacturing companies densely accumulated near here, and the sense of fellowship with Russian culture. The building New Kumho Tower newly erected in 2002 especially has played important roles to enable Mongolian migrants' experiences to be territorialized. For the last 10 years, the trans-network of Mongolian migrants has consolidated the identity and functions of the Mongol Town, and reconstructed the new locality by connecting the existing locality of Dongdaemun to the locality of origin back in Mongol.

In the present study, I investigate the locality of an ethnic place known as Mongolian town nearby Dongdaemun station in Seoul. Although the number of Mongolian migrants in South Korea has increased and played a significant role in the Mongol economy, geographical understanding has not yet been provided. Moreover, existing literature on migrants’ spaces or enclaves in a destination country tends to oversimplify characteristics of the ethic space as though there is a cultural essence of a nation. Drawing upon the perspective in the concept of ‘inter-culturalism,’ the study argues that such space is in fact configured in a way that different localities are entangled. Indeed, not nationality but the place of Mongol Town plays a role as a hub point to sustain the practices of trans-migration between home space and destination and to generate a new identity of those migrants.
As theoretical apparatuses, the study first discuss concepts including transnationalism, translocality, progress sense of space, and interculturalism. Then, it outlines the trajectory of Mongolian migration based on official statistics of Ministry of immigration in Korea and Mongolia; and analyzes ways in which the Mongolian town is represented in the newspaper and other publications. I finally parallel the analysis with the empirical case of Mongolian town, which illustrates Mongolians’ actual experiences in relation to their migration and place. As preliminary research, I first conduct surveys with 63 Mongolian and casual conversations. Then, I conducted participants observations at Mongolian Town from February to November, 2011. The ethnographic data was supplemented by the second survey with 95 Mongolian and semi-structured interview with 6 Korean and 15 Mongolian. Drawing on the ethnographic study, I argue that Mongolian town does not necessarily play a role in maintaining national identity, but it has been relationally configured and connect between two specific local spaces that pertains to individual Mongolian’s migrant practices. This study affirms that many local places in this global era are constituted by interactions between different scalar places such as global, national, local places and various social networks. Moreover, this paper calls attention to the marginalized and underrepresented experience of an ethnic group and highlights that ethic spaces in the destination country is not a segregated cultural product but intertwined with the pre-existing local space and ongoing differentiated.