Korea Times' Foreign Community section reaches 20th anniversary

By Jon Dunbar

This year marks the 75th anniversary of The Korea Times. But there's a smaller anniversary, too: the newspaper's Foreign Community page is 20 years old. First printed on March 7, 2005, the Foreign Community section has provided a platform for diverse voices nearly every week since then.

The page began with Yoon Won-sup, a staff reporter who worked at the paper from 2003 to 2008. In 2005, he was in charge of the Embassy Row section, which covers similar but not entirely the same types of stories.

"While I was covering diplomats in Seoul, I could get other stories which didn't fit in Embassy Row," Yoon said. "So I talked to my boss about creating Foreign Community. It was great in a sense that expat readers of The Korea Times can communicate through the Foreign Community."

The top story of the very first Foreign Community page, titled "Foreign English Teachers Speak Out," was cowritten by Yoon alongside longtime features writer Jeffrey Miller.

Miller has contributed to The Korea Times since 1999, and while his output slowed down in 2008, he still writes for the paper occasionally. In 2005, mainly contributed to the opinion and travel sections, but some of his articles found a home on the Foreign Community page.

"When the page came out I thought that it provided a platform for more people to contribute to the paper other than the 'Thoughts of the Times' column. It also allowed residents to write about things happening in Korea that would be out of the mainstream news or cultural news," Miller said. "I was quite fortunate to be a part of The Korea Times family back then."

At first, Miller was the only foreign contributor to the page. Unlike much of the page's history, many articles at that time were written by Korean reporters, while efforts were underway to recruit foreign contributors.

For its third week, the section included a feature by Cathy Rose A. Garcia, titled "Catholic Church Home for Filipinos." Her early presence helped inject some much-needed diversity, ensuring it saw beyond the Western-based expat community and didn't neglect communities that are less visible, but often far larger.

Garcia was hired in February 2005 to work for The Korea Times, and left behind a five-year career as a business reporter in Manila. But since she wasn't fluent in Korean, she was tasked with doing the layout work for the World page and other sections.

"The managing editor CS Lee suggested I contribute stories about the Filipino community. For me, it was also a way to meet other Filipinos in Korea. I began by interviewing the Filipino priests at the Catholic church in Hyehwa-dong," she said. "I also started doing stories about the problems facing Filipino women who were married to Koreans, as well as Filipino women who were trafficked and ended up working at bars in Itaewon. I also began writing stories about the expats in Seoul.

"During the time I did contribute for the page, I thought there was value in writing about what foreigners experienced in Korea. I know most people think foreigners complain a lot, but it really did feel like Koreans didn't know what it was like to live there as a foreigner. It helped give Koreans some perspective."

In mid-2006, Garcia was promoted to staff reporter and assigned to the culture section, where her contributions helped make the section a little more multicultural. Because her Korean language skills were still lacking, she focused on Korean American and foreign artists and entrepreneurs.

"As a journalist, I always felt it was helpful to write about Korean culture from the perspective of a foreigner. I think KT's audience was primarily the foreign community and maybe Koreans wanting to practice English. So I preferred writing stories that foreigners living in Seoul would find informative, interesting and helpful, whether it's finding a cinema showing a Korean movie with English subtitles, or an authentic Mexican restaurant or how to get a credit card," she said. "I know Seoul has probably become more multicultural and life as a foreigner has probably gotten easier, but at that time, I felt like it was pretty difficult to find basic information in English."

Over the years, the Foreign Community page changed hands repeatedly. "That page got handed from person to person like a ball, as a kind of testing ground for any new recruit arriving at the KT," said Simon Phillips, who was a copy editor in the late 2000s.

In July 2005, Tony MacGregor published his first article for Foreign Community, titled "Myths About English Teachers Can Cause Problems." His friend David Watermeyer started contributing in October, with his first article, "International Friendship Club Joins Rice Harvest Festival in Kimje." The pair would remain prominent voices on the page for the next few years, using it to share their love of Korean culture.

After their time finished at the paper in late 2008, they pursued their fascination with Wonhyo, a major scholar of Korean Buddhism who lived in the seventh century. In 2011 and 2012, they started appearing in Foreign Community articles, but this time the articles featured them raising awareness about Wonhyo and attempting to establish a pilgrimage route in honor of the ancient scholar.

In 2007, John Redmond began contributing. After all the others moved on, Redmond spent several more years writing for Foreign Community. From about 2010 onward, he was by far the most prolific contributor, with his byline often the only one appearing in a given week, even in cases where there were five articles on the page.

It seemed like he was carrying the page totally on his own when I joined the paper as a copy editor in November 2015. At first, I wanted to write mainly about Korean underground musicians, and I wasn't happy about being steered toward the Foreign Community page instead.

For the next few years, the two of us kept the page going, until his sudden, surprising death on May 12, 2018.

With the shock of Redmond's death, I began to understand how much he had been doing for the paper. And not just the paper or the section, but also the community it served. Very often when I cover something, I discover Redmond already beat me to it years earlier. Suddenly, with him gone, I realized it would be up to me to keep the section going. And it hit me how much work that would involve, work that he used to handle almost all on his own.

To keep it going, we needed to step up our recruitment efforts. We reached out to bloggers who could contribute articles, either on general topics or their areas of expertise.

That included Hallie Bradley, author of thesoulofseoul.net, Matt VanVolkenburg of populargusts.blogspot.com and Dale Quarrington of koreantempleguide.com, among others.

We also started collaborative projects, such as inviting participants of Yongsan Legacy to share their memories of the disappearing Army garrison in central Seoul, welcoming members of Royal Asiatic Society Korea to share their expertise and reminiscing with Peace Corps volunteers who had served in Korea between 1966 and 1981.

In more recent years we've expanded coverage of foreign restaurants and artists, as well as English translations of Korean literature. By mid-2023, we had more article submissions than we had space, so Foreign Community expanded to two pages per week.

We've kept up a constant effort to explore new topics recruit more writers, but we still have much ground left to cover. If you want to be part of it, you're welcome to email [email protected].