In the Spring of 1997, a Korean friend and I sat in a coffee shop in Kyongju. Over our half-filled mugs of instant hazelnut, we talked about my most recent photographic project. Over the past eight months I'd been photographing in town at a special school for the "mentally and physically handicapped." Earlier in that conversation, I had been telling my friend about some undergraduate public policy work I'd done on a Native American Reservation and now he echoed one of the new English words I'd taught him: "this special school where you are photographing—it is like a hidden reservation."
While these mentally and physically challenged students were schooled in their own "hidden reservation" separate from mainstream Korean society, I had recently sent myself to a reservation of my own. And there I was. A couple months after my graduation from college, I had left the United States for Kyongju, Korea. I'd gone to teach English for a year, however, teaching was really the least of my concerns./font>
While most of my college friends were entering professional schools or the consulting and investment banking fields, I'd allowed myself this one year period to figure out where to start my life—to go to law school, to go to art school, to go to rabbinical school, or perhaps to continue teaching in the States. I also wanted to know what it was like to be a minority in a society, and South Korea—the single most ethnically homogeneous country in the world—seemed like a good place for this upper-middle class white male to go.
As one of only a handful of Caucasian people living in the town of Kyongju, I was often stared at or jeered with cries of We-gook saram! (Foreigner!) or a Me-gook saram! (American!) Only once in eight months of photographing did any of the students at this special school refer to me by any of these terms. I attribute this to one simple fact: they knew, appreciated, and respected what it was like to be different. In this part of Korean society I represented the only group of people who was perhaps even more strange and ostracized than they were. I was a foreigner. I went to their school regularly to photograph the students, and they were invariably excited to see me; they looked forward to my visits. On most visits, I played basketball, soccer, or ping-pong with them before, after, or during my photographing. No matter how lonely I was feeling in Korea, I always felt strangely comfortable during my visits.
Jonathan Scott Goldman
Fall, 1998