Living in a Yellow Submarine: Third Culture Experience of Korean Missionary Kids at Faith Academy

Abstract

Although the ministries of their parents are local-church related, Korean adolescent Missionary Kids (MKs) at Faith Academy are hardly involved with the local culture. Instead, strong western cultural influences are indicated in church attendance, nationality of friends, and media consumption. This acculturation of western elements appears to be deliberate, if not anxious, experience regulated, on the one hand, by the need to learn western skills and concepts to enable them to succeed in school and eventually compete on the global stage, and, on the other, by the impending possibility of going back to a highly monolingual and monocultural Korean society.