r/Living_in_Korea

Hi, my name is Jay Sung and I'm the dad of Bryan Sung (Korean name "성준“). I have posted before on this forum a few times for my child's abduction by his biological mother. Bryan is a missing child from Washington and the Korean government fails to return him even when the Korean courts said they should. The mother who kidnapped him hired one of the most expensive and most powerful law firm in Korea but even the Korean supreme court decided that she should return the child. Due to numerous court order violations she was detained twice (15 days and 30 days, respectfully) but the family members do not cooperate with the court orders. I don't even know what Bryan is being told about me. As a dad, that cannot let go of my son, I just want this to be not forgotten. Until Bryan comes back home I will not give up.... I just want people to remember, and share this huge injustice.

Thank you very much. Jay Sung Bryan's dad and the director of "Do You Remember Dad?"

So, I looked up the population of the 30 years olds in Korea.. and it's approximately around 7 million [1,965,051+ 1,699,289 + 1,753,722 + 1,562,905 = 6,980,967]. (Same figures from this website).

This means around 9.22% of 30 year olds in Korea are unemployed [644,000/6,980,967 = .0922]. I've always thought the number was high, but it's actually considerably big when you actually punch in the numbers. That's roughly 1 in every 10 thirty year olds. This is really concerning in general. I don't mean to be political, but there needs to be more support for people in this subgroup, especially for an age group where they should be working as much as possible.

Just curious, is anyone confused by the manner of which traffic directions are given by traffic wardens here? Their hand signals are kinda erratic and different from person to person.

Hello, I’m m/15. I’m half Korean and grew up in Korea until I was 10. I then had to move to Kosovo with my dad after my parents divorced and since then I’ve been coming back to Korea every summer break (they’re 3 months long over there) to visit my mom, younger brother, and the rest of my family.

The problem is, my mom really doesn’t care about me and my younger brother isn’t much better. He doesn't really want to interact or hang out with me. Over the years I always gave my best to keep in touch with my friends from school but after I moved away thing seem to fade out. They started treating me more like an outsider and eventually most of them ghosted me.

So, every summer I kind of just live here without really having anyone. The only one I have is my grandparents who live in Jeollanam-do. I usually just stay with them and help them out but that gets super repetetive and boring, my grandpa also told me during my last visit that I should do things people my age do instead of staying with them the whole time.

I’ve been thinking maybe I should try to actually meet new people my age or find something else to do. I'm active on Korean sns, so I should techinically know what people my age are into but I still seem to hit a wall.

Do you have any suggestions on how to meet people my age in Korea (specifically in Seoul) , or just things I could do so I’m not doing the exact same thing this year again?

So I am a US citizen, and my wife is Korean. We met and got married in Korea, and then right away moved to the US. We are now planning to move to Korea after living in the US for 6 years. We started working on my F-6 visa and we have many questions.

1. So we have a Korean marriage certificate, and when we applied for my spouses green card, all 50 states recognize the Korean marriage certificate, so we never got an American marriage certificate. The forms ask for it, so what should we do?

2. I heard online that typically the proof of funds are something that couples moving to Korea are exempt from, especially the proof of work. What should we write there? Leave it blank? We have a pretty large amount of savings (a couple years living expenses, and we will be selling our house as we move.), so if they need a lump sum, that is doable for us.

3. We are planning to live at my spouses parents house when we first arrive and then get our own place. Do we just put her parents information in?

4. The medical exam, do we both need to get one, and what type of doctor do we need to see? Is there a specific name for the exam that I can look up?

I am currently on an E2 visa, soon transitioning to an F2-7. I've been applying to places outside of teaching and recently landed a gig at an educational consulting firm in Apgujeong. The gist of the job was extensively helping Korean high school students get into their dream universities abroad.

My plate was already stacked. I am still working at my academy (my contract ends in June), and I take KIIP classes for 8 hours on Saturdays. But I agreed to start part-time because it seemed like a great opportunity. We settled on 3 days a week, 2 hours a day. I’d finish at the academy and immediately bolt for the subway to get to the firm.

The boss was nice, spoke fluent English, and had a very macro-managing, chill style. However, I quickly realized this job was going to be a massive adjustment. I majored in business, but the sheer volume of niche information demanded was wild. You were expected to have every major US university memorized off the top of your head: what they are known for, their enrollment numbers, their city, and whether they use the Common App. You were also expected to instantly curate custom action plans for each client, involving local/overseas competitions and academies, and oversee the entire process.

I knew it was a lot of information, and since each client was a unique case, I figured I’d get used to it with time. The problem is that the firm was tiny. It was just me, two other consultants, and the boss. The boss was constantly in and out of meetings with clientele, making it nearly impossible to get proper training. Two hours a shift goes by incredibly fast, especially when the boss is unavailable for half of it.

Before her meetings, she would assign me tasks like reviewing action plans and creating next-step lists for students. I tried my best, but I was shooting in the dark. The case notes were completely contextless, requiring 60% assumption and a 40% wild goose chase just to formulate an idea. Plainly, I didn't know what I was doing.

A month goes by, and I have clocked a grand total of 23 training hours. The other consultant usually working with me started out nice, but soon began randomly quizzing me. The day before my last day, while the boss was in a meeting, she turned to me and demanded I write a mock email to a professor to sign a client up for a course. Then, she made me roleplay a phone call for the same scenario. She proceeded to look over my shoulder at random client files and aggressively quiz me: "So? What would you do for them? What does the yellow-highlighted comments mean? Do you know what [insert competition name] is? Do you know how to apply for it?"

It was obvious she was trying to embarrass and belittle me. I lowkey shut down and I felt ashamed, but I also knew it wasn't entirely my fault. They expected me to be a seasoned pro after 23 hours of disjointed training, half of which was spent completely unsupervised.

Anyways, I just wanted to vent out this frustration here in case anyone has had a similar experience. Please don't make it weird in the comments.

The next day, the boss pulled me into a meeting and told me it wasn't a good fit. I agreed disappointedly. The timing and their expectations were severely misaligned. Overall, it was not a experience. I do appreciate that the boss was likable and treated me like a human being—a nice change of pace from the hagwon grind—but the expectations were entirely detached from reality.

TL;DR: New hagwon director arrived, built a paper trail to push me out, used another teacher's feedback to discipline me, praised my performance six weeks before issuing a second warning letter for the same conduct, called a classroom management decision "child abuse" in a recorded meeting, accidentally admitted in writing that my warning letter was issued because I disputed their characterization. Filed MOEL Article 76-2 complaint with 344 pages of documentation. Outcome pending.

So this has been the wildest few months of my life and I need to get it out somewhere. I'm a foreign English teacher in Seoul and I recently went through a full MOEL workplace harassment investigation against my hagwon director. Finding out the result tomorrow so tonight felt like the right time to write this.

Background

I work at a private English academy in Seoul. Been here for under a year. Things were genuinely fine for most of my time there until a new director came in mid-year. Within about six weeks of her arrival things started shifting in ways I couldn't quite put my finger on at first. Lesson plan requirements for me kept changing in contradictory and nitpicky ways. A co-teacher started asking me unusual questions and reporting back to management. I found out CCTV was being used to specifically monitor my preparation time. It started feeling like I was being watched in a way that other teachers weren't.

The First Warning Letter

About two months after the new director arrived I received a formal warning letter. One of the grounds was a parent complaint about a tutoring student, essentially that his English hadn't improved and that I had given negative feedback about his behavior.

Here's the thing: I was on approved vacation when the first class with that student happened. A substitute teacher covered it and wrote the feedback under his own name. That feedback was significantly more negative than anything I had ever written. The parent received it, was upset, and management included it in my warning letter as if I had written it.

I have the feedback logs. It has the substitute's name on it. It's dated during my vacation. My supervisor essentially acknowledged in a recorded conversation that the substitute's feedback was involved. They put it in a legal disciplinary document anyway.

That was the moment I started recording everything.

The January Plot Twist

Here's where it gets genuinely bizarre. About a month after the first warning letter my director called me in and told me my teaching had improved significantly, that multiple supervisors had noticed the change, and that she wanted to renew my contract for the following year. Ten days later she met with me again and discussed specific class assignments and the contract timeline in detail.

I have both of those meetings on recording.

Six weeks after the second meeting I received a second warning letter. The same categories she praised me for in January became the basis for formal discipline in March. She never addressed the January recordings in any official communication. Not once.

The Incident That Set Everything Off

In March I had a confrontation with my director over a classroom management decision involving a difficult student. Without going into too much detail, I briefly separated a disruptive student directly outside the classroom in a supervised common area with multiple adults present. My director called this "child abuse" in a recorded meeting, I argued that it doesn't constitute child abuse by law, and later their own official response to the MOEL case confirmed that the warning letter was justifiably issued because I refused to accept that characterization. Not because of what I did. Because I disputed their description of it.

I consulted a lawyer the same day who confirmed the situation didn't meet the legal threshold for child abuse. The company's own internal investigation later reached the same conclusion.

The director also sent a school-wide notice to all teachers that same afternoon announcing this policy in writing for the very first time, and then issued me a warning letter three days later citing that conduct as a pre-existing policy violation.

Filing the MOEL Complaint

After the second warning letter I filed an Article 76-2 workplace harassment complaint with the MOEL and submitted a formal written rebuttal refusing to sign either warning letter.

By this point I had been documenting everything for months. Timestamped messages, recorded meetings, the feedback sheet with the substitute's name, a supervisory message sent the morning after my warning letter meeting, a school-wide policy notice issued three days before I was disciplined under that same policy, and recordings of my director praising my performance six weeks before disciplining me for the same conduct.

After I filed, HQ conducted an internal investigation. During the interview their HR rep apologized on behalf of the company, acknowledged the media policy had been applied inconsistently, confirmed the child abuse characterization didn't meet the legal standard, and told me I didn't need to sign the warning letters.

Eleven days later their official internal finding came back. They found that all claims I made did not constitute workplace harassment.

But here's what they accidentally wrote in their official response to the MOEL. They stated that the warning letter was issued because I refused to accept the child abuse characterization, not because of the underlying conduct. Because I disputed their description of it. They also described policy changes made after my complaint as "follow-up measures for organizational culture improvement as a result of the internal investigation," which is basically admitting those policies weren't clearly established before. And they contradicted themselves on CCTV across two separate official responses in a way that cannot be reconciled.

I submitted annotated counter-arguments to all of this directly to the MOEL investigator.

The Investigation

My interview with the MOEL investigator went well. I brought my Korean friend with me for communication. The MOEL investigator asked questions about intent rather than questioning whether events happened, which I took as a signal that the factual record had already cleared the credibility threshold in her mind.

The deadline is tomorrow.

A Few Things I Learned

Document everything in real time, not after the fact. Respond to suspicious messages in writing. Ask clarifying questions that force the other side to confirm or deny things on record.

Korean labor law has real protections for workers including foreign workers. Article 76-2 is a genuine legal tool but you have to build the case yourself.

The most important thing I did was keep showing up professionally every single day regardless of how I felt. Every time management expected me to react emotionally I didn't. That discipline is what made the documentation credible.

Being on an employer-tied visa while filing against your employer is genuinely terrifying. Plan for that emotionally if you're ever in this situation.

Where Things Stand

My contract completes in a few months. My long term visa path is on track. The result is pending.

Has anyone else gone through the MOEL complaint process? Foreign or domestic workers both welcome. Curious what other peoples' experience was like.

On the 20th, a senior official from the Cargo Truckers Solidarity under the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions was killed after being struck by a vehicle during a riot in front of the CU Jinju Logistics Center in Jinju, South Gyeongsang Province.

According to the union, at around 10 a.m. that day, a 2.5-ton truck collided with three union members. One official was transported to the hospital in cardiac arrest but later died, while the other two are receiving treatment. The vehicle involved is believed to have been a replacement truck deployed to carry out logistics operations.

Police stated that “some claims that the vehicle ran over union members are not true,” adding that “the accident appears to have occurred as individuals approached the driver’s side to protest.”

In contrast, the union argued that excessive police response and poor on-site management were the causes of the accident. The Cargo Truckers Solidarity has been demanding direct negotiations with BGF Logistics and has been blocking the entry and exit of vehicles at the logistics center since the 5th.

Meanwhile, following the incident, a vehicle believed to be from the union side rammed into a police barricade and drove toward the main gate, injuring a riot police officer in the head. The clash between police and union members further escalated. Police have arrested two individuals in the vehicle on charges of obstruction of official duties and are investigating the circumstances of the incident.

Hi everyone it’s my first time moving into a new house with my own lease and the landlord is forcing me to keep their very old and dirty washing machine, fridge and microwave even though I have said I don’t need them and they are claiming it’s “full option”. Is this normal? Legally can I refuse or not ?

Hi, I am a student planning to go Yonsei or Snu on a fee paying basis In Korean track electrical engineering. I’m from north central Asia and planning to stay in Korea after or do Masters in US or Korea. The question is, since living and tuition won‘t be cheap (but I can afford it), is the degree worth its money? Also, I would like to know job opportunities for foreigners who graduated from top 200 unis In Korea. (I searched in the internet and responses were quite negative) so I wanted to know different people’s opinion.

Thank you!

Unification Minister Chung Dong-young is reported to have newly identified Kusong City in North Pyongan Province as the location of a North Korean uranium enrichment facility, after which the United States is said to have partially restricted the sharing of satellite intelligence on North Korea.

According to a compilation of reports including those by Hankyoreh on the 19th, the U.S. has halted intelligence sharing—previously amounting to around 50 to 100 items per day—starting about a week ago. The move followed remarks made by Chung on the 6th of last month during a session of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee, where he referenced Kusong City as a site of uranium enrichment activity in North Korea.

At the time, Chung stated, “There was a very serious report delivered by Rafael Grossi at the IAEA Board of Governors meeting on March 2,” adding, “There are currently uranium enrichment facilities in Yongbyon, Kusong, and Kangson. While Iran’s enriched uranium reaches 60%, North Korea is reported to be producing weapons-grade uranium enriched to 90%.” He further noted that President Lee Jae-myung had said, “Halting this should be the top priority.”

This marked the first time a senior South Korean government official publicly mentioned Kusong—alongside the previously known sites of Yongbyon in North Pyongan Province and Kangson in Nampo—as a location of North Korea’s uranium enrichment facilities.

Following Chung’s remarks, the U.S. reportedly conveyed its objections to multiple South Korean ministries and agencies involved in foreign affairs, national security, and intelligence.

In addition, the U.S. is said to have restricted part of the satellite intelligence it had been sharing with South Korea. Washington collects intelligence on North Korea through a range of assets—including satellites, signal interception, and reconnaissance—and shares portions of it with Seoul. However, Chung’s comments are believed to have raised concerns that the disclosure could compromise intelligence networks and undermine trust between the allies.

A government official told Yonhap News Agency on the 19th, “If intelligence matters are made public, the assets or methods used to obtain that information could be traced back. If North Korea takes countermeasures based on that, it could make further surveillance and reconnaissance more difficult.”

D4 visas are connected to enrollment at language schools but has anyone ever been in this situation. Where they drop mid term comeback next term but also already had their extension approved or will it cancel and then I would have to reapply again?

Hi!

Im currently staying in seoul and will until August. Ive heard the summer here is really hot and really humid. I have wayvy hair with not that much curl definition cause i do not take care of it 😭 (im starting to use a treatment but that is about it). You can see the curls clearly when is wet and while is drying or dryied if I scruch it. It is thin but gains volume preatty fast (frizz) if I brush it.

I also sweat a lot)? So i wash it everyother day to keep it clean (also use dry shampoo cause the next day is kinda oily.

My question is, should I buy a straightener or get a striaght perm for the summer ? I dont want to deal with all the mess 😭 since honestly i do not know how to..

I want my curls to be safe tho for the winter or after I leave, but dont mind waiting a bit. It is virgin hair exept dor the ends which i do need to cut, so I am not sure which one is less invasive.

What do you guys recommend?

Hey all, this is a genuine question lol.

For foreign guys living in Korea, how do you actually meet Korean girlfriends?

I’m not coming from any weird fetish angle or anything like that. I live here, so naturally I feel like the chances of dating a Korean girl should be higher, right?

I’m a grad student and spend a lot of time in the lab, so it’s honestly pretty hard to meet new people. But whenever I go out — parks, concerts, cafes — I often see Korean female / foreign male couples, which makes me curious how those connections happen.

I guess I’m also just feeling a bit stuck and tired of being lonely, so I’d appreciate any honest insight or advice.

Where do you meet people? Apps? Social circles (how do you get involved in such circles) ? Language exchanges? Just random encounters (if so how those encounters even happen haha)?

I kinda dont like the idea of dating apps, i've heard from my friends that they can involve a lot of ghosting, blocking, and just require a ton of patience, and it seems like many people are mainly looking for hookups.

Thanks in advance lol

I’m from the US and plan on going to Korea and becoming a nurse. I don’t speak any Korean right now, so I would have to do language school until I’m fluent enough to apply for nursing programs. I was wondering how long it would realistically take for me to get to a high enough Korean level and if nursing schools accept foreigners.

For reference, both of my parents are Korean American and said if I go to Korea they will move with me, and my parents can’t afford to pay for my school, so I am paying for it all. Even with aid and scholarships it still costs me around 20k a year. I don’t think I would want to work in Korea as a nurse because I know they make less money and also are treated worse so after school I would most likely move back. Any advice is appreciated!