http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5e3f800e-e050-11dd-9ee9-000077b07658.html
Matthew Engel
Huge flocks of ring-necked parakeets have made their home in Surrey over the past few years. These are exotic Asian birds which have either charmed the locals by adding colour and diversity to the landscape, or irritated the hell out of them, bringing forth complaints about their noise, diet and toilet habits. This is the traditional split of opinion on immigrants.
Just up the A3 in New Malden, the exact reverse phenomenon has taken place. Thousands of migrants have arrived, but so quietly that it took years for people to notice. They are Asian, but their plumage is drab and conformist. They make no noise and create no waves.
This bland and discreet commuter suburb has received the blandest and most discreet influx imaginable. Yet, as you walk down the high street now, the phenomenon is obvious. New Malden has turned into Koreatown.
It would be no surprise to see a Korean restaurant anywhere in London these days. But in New Malden there are at least 20, backed up by Korean travel agents, estate agents, beauty salons, supermarkets and herbal remedy shops. And in places, it’s impossible not to notice the distinct whiff of pickled cabbage. No one knows exactly how many Koreans live here, though it is thought there must be at least 15,000 in New Malden and nearby. The Land of the Morning Calm has merged with the Land of the Morning Rush.
Yet the locals only really cottoned on in 2002, when the South Korean soccer team reached the semi-finals of the World Cup. As the tournament went on, the community descended on The Fountain pub, which erected a big screen in the garden. Then a strange thing happened.
“Afterwards, you wouldn’t even have known there had been a major event,” said Derek Osborne, the local Lib Dem councillor and now leader of Kingston upon Thames council. “They even picked up every cigarette end in the garden, and the Koreans are heavy smokers.”
The resentment created when poor migrants take over traditional working-class areas is well documented right across western Europe. This is a bourgeois invasion. Korea and Britain could hardly be more remote and different from each other. Yet these two groups, the Home Counties British and the Korean newcomers, are astonishingly similar: self-contained, reticent, desperate to avoid offence and very bad at making connections, partly because they are both hopeless at foreign languages.
The newcomers started to accrete here from the 1980s because the South Korean embassy was in nearby Wimbledon, but New Malden was cheaper. Then the Korean conglomerates – LG, Samsung, Hyundai – emerged and set up London offices, where managers would be posted on three- to five-year contracts. Naturally, they wanted a ready-made expat community and welcoming landlords. “The Koreans are the most popular tenants in the area,” says Chris Lee of Jin’s Letting agency. “They look after the houses and the companies pay the rent.”
But the isolation in the early days was total. The first Korean restaurant-owner in New Malden put up a notice saying “No English”, meaning that no one there spoke any; he soon had a visit from the council dealing with a potential racial discrimination charge.
Integration was pitifully slow. Korean families work on traditional hierarchical lines: the men took the train to the office, leaving their wives to draw whatever support they could from their compatriots. And that’s still how it works. Local officials have only the vaguest idea what might be happening within the Korean community. “If there is something negative to report, we don’t tend to hear of it,” said Brigitte Pfender of Kingston council. “Any social services or child welfare issues are not necessarily known. To take council help would be considered shameful.”
But what evidence there is suggests the children are fine, although – by local standards – somewhat overworked. They need intensive language tuition when they come into the schools but often emerge as high-flyers. The teachers get annoyed solely because they put in the hard slog only to see the children take wing academically and then return to Korea before they can bump up the school’s SATs results and league table placing.
The British find the Korean work ethic terrifying. The children take extra classes every afternoon and go to Korean school on Saturday. And church on Sunday is also the norm.
Ken Myung, a shipping agent who has been in the area since 1997, and his wife Rachel are among the growing minority who have settled here and started to anglicise themselves (they’re still Kyung and Seoung to old friends). Their son Joshua/Yu Meen is only four, has just started at Malden Manor primary school and is already taking extra Korean and taekwondo lessons.
Malden Manor has 60 Koreans out of 430 pupils, but reports minimal problems and many playground friendships. It is clearly harder for older arrivals, who turn up at secondary school with no English. But that can lead to an intriguing sub-phenomenon, whereby the women – who often find it hard to settle initially – stay behind when their husbands go home to allow the kids to pass UK exams.
There may be another consideration.“One thing I can tell you about Korean women,” says Ken Myung, “is that after two or three years, they don’t want to go back. They get a lot of family pressure back in Korea.”
Behind the leaded windows and net curtains of New Malden’s mock-Tudor semis, the lives led by neighbouring families are always mysterious. That is doubly truer when those neighbours are Korean. The community’s politics are also fairly impenetrable. The Korean Residents’ Society, which once played the leading role in sorting out problems, appears moribund following a disputed election so vituperative that even local councillors now shrug their shoulders rather than try to understand the issues involved.
And as the Koreans embed themselves, there are the beginnings of an underclass working in the shops and restaurants – some of them North Korean refugees who have extra-strong reasons to keep their heads down and their noses clean.
Overall, New Malden feels like a success story, as is South Korea. But we should never forget the people’s pain – imagine life in Britain if there had been almost no communication for decades with anyone north of the Trent. And it is easy to forget the drawbacks of any exile, however comfortable.
To an Englishman, the supermarkets on the High Street look and smell like Korea. Not to a Korean. “It’s different,” says Ken Myung. “The taste is different. At home everything would be fresh. English vegetables don’t taste the same.”
And it is easy to forget the low-level irritation felt by the locals every time a long-established shop closes and gets replaced by yet another Korean business. That does seem to be as bad as it gets, though. As one woman put it to me, “If you’re going to have an ethnic group in your community, I recommend the Koreans.”