Koreans Have Difficulty Adapting to U.S., Research Shows

In the popular imagination, Koreans who have come to the United States are among this nation’s newest whiz kids: successful, upwardly mobile, and high in academic achievement. But a series of new studies on the Korean immigrants indicates that this image, while partly true, is incomplete and misleading.

The research, carried out in Los Angeles and Orange counties and in the Koreatowns of Chicago and New York, shows that many Koreans are having serious difficulty adapting to life in this country.

For example, one survey shows that while Koreans in the United States have the highest rate of self-employment among Asian-Americans or any other recent immigrant group, many Korean entrepreneurs suffer extraordinary problems of overwork, physical danger and depression.

Psychological Problems

Other researchers have found that some Korean children attending American schools suffer from unrecognized psychological problems, retardation or learning disabilities. And many elderly Koreans who come to the United States to join their adult children suffer mental health problems after discovering that they are supposed to serve as live-in baby-sitters and housekeepers or “shikmo” for their families.

The general picture, said sociologist Won Moo Hurh, is that Koreans have often been successful in the United States, but “at what cost, what social and psychological cost?”

The number of Koreans living in the United States is believed to have grown from 350,000 at the time of the 1980 census to nearly 1 million today. The largest single community, estimated at about 250,000, lives in Southern California.

The series of new studies on Koreans in the United States were presented recently at a meeting in San Francisco of the Assn. for Asian Studies, the principle organization for scholars doing research about Asia.

Survey of Entrepreneurs

Some of the most extensive research was carried out by Pyong Gap Min, a sociologist at Queens College in New York who studied the problems of Korean entrepreneurs by surveying more than 500 Koreans in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Min found that 43% of all Korean entrepreneurs had incomes of $50,000 or more in 1986. By contrast, among Koreans who did not own their own businesses, only 20% had incomes of $50,000 or more.

“The American mass media have depicted Korean immigrant businesses as very successful,” concluded Min. “If we mean by business success becoming a millionaire, few Korean immigrants can be considered to be successful businessmen. However, the vast majority of Korean entrepreneurs are successful . . . if we define business success as survival and modest growth to the point where many people can make a decent living by American standards.”

Still, Min found that one reason for the entrepreneurs’ success is that Koreans are working extremely long hours. In his Los Angeles study, 40% of all male Korean entrepreneurs worked more than 60 hours a week, and 72% of them worked six or seven days a week.

‘Lack of Sleep’

“Many Koreans complain about the lack of sleep,” Min found. “ . . . Most Korean business owners have to stay in a little store almost all day and repeat this every day.” The lack of recreation and leisure time “makes Korean business owners vulnerable to depression and other psychological symptoms.”

Min’s research showed that nearly one-third of all Korean businesses cater mainly to Korean customers. Another 35% of the Korean businesses in Los Angeles have blacks or Latinos as the majority of their customers.

“Korean entrepreneurs operating businesses in minority areas take the middleman-minority role, distributing corporate products to lower-income minority members,” Min said. He concluded that this role makes Korean merchants vulnerable, on the one hand, to the crime and vandalism associated with low-income areas, and, on the other hand, to exploitation by landlords and the corporations that provide them with supplies.

Finally, Min found that although the Korean community has an extraordinarily high proportion of self-employed entrepreneurs, this fact serves indirectly to discourage the Koreans’ assimilation into American society.

Limited Social Activities

In the Los Angeles study, 75% of all employed Koreans were in the “ethnic subeconomy.” As a measure of their isolation, less than half of these Koreans had dinner or other social activities with (non-Korean) Americans as often as once a year.

“Korean immigrants as a group have more disadvantages for assimilation than other Asian immigrant groups with a low level of self-employment,” Min said.

A separate research study on the performance of Korean-American children in Chicago showed that teachers and other professionals in the public schools were failing to identify those Korean children who had emotional or psychological problems.

“The schools don’t have ethnic professionals who know the language and culture,” said Dr. Tong-he Koh of the Chicago Board of Education. Furthermore, she said, Korean children are sometimes reluctant to discuss their problems because “in an Asian family, mental illness is attached to stigma and shame for the family.”

In a parallel finding, a survey of elderly Korean-Americans in Los Angeles and New York City concluded that they are a “high-risk group” for psychological difficulties and mental disorders.

Dependence of Elderly

“The Korean-American elderly are new immigrants with drastic social and economic loss, complete dependence on their children and near total ignorance of the culture and language of the host society,” said the authors, Tai S. Kang of the State University of New York at Buffalo and Gay E. Kang of Columbia University.

According to the Kangs’ study, about 87% of all elderly Koreans avoid non-Korean friends and neighbors, largely because of language difficulties. “Even in senior housing projects, they merely nod their heads or exchange smiles when they encounter non-Korean neighbors,” the researchers said.

‘Sex Differences’

Research in Chicago’s Koreatown, carried out by Kwang Chung Kim and Won Moo Hurh of Western Illinois University, showed that there are “pronounced sex differences” among Korean immigrants in factors affecting mental health.

For example, the researchers found Korean men who earn more money tend to have better mental health. But among Korean women who work, they discovered, the reverse is true: The more money the Korean women earn, the lower is their state of mental well-being.

Maintain Sex Roles

Kim and Hurh concluded that the explanation for this difference was that Koreans maintain “strong adherence to their Korean sex-role ideology even in their immigrant life.” Women are still required to run the household in the fashion they did in Korea, and “wives’ employment outside home means additional work, which in most cases brings no intrinsic reward.”

Eui-Young Yu of California State University, Los Angeles, presented research on juvenile delinquency in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. “The problem begins in school and then becomes deviant behavior and gang activity,” he said.

His research found that Korean youths “confront difficulties of language, cultural naivete, marginality and racial minority status.” However, Yu said, so far, Korean gangs do not seem to be engaging in extortions or shakedowns of businessmen, as have occurred in other Asian communities, such as Chinatown.

Difficult to Locate

In carrying out their research, the scholars confronted the problem of how to locate a random sample of Korean immigrants in the United States.

Min, for example, did his survey of Korean entrepreneurs by using what was termed the “Kim sample technique.” He noted that people with the surname of Kim make up 22% of the entire Korean population, and that no other nationalities have any significant numbers of people named Kim.

In beginning the research, Min said: “We randomly selected 1,020 Kims from 11 Los Angeles and Orange County public telephone directories.”