[KS] The Unmarried Foreigners

[Clark W Sorensen]

Like Adam, I don't have the goods on this, but I seem to remember from reading memoirs and other first-hand accounts that many of the long-term foreigners in 19th century Korea had local lovers/housekeepers. Nobody seems to make a big deal about it in the case of foreign males.

Clark Sorensen

On Wed, 16 Oct 2013, Adam Bohnet wrote:

> I don't do any work on the 19th century, which I assume is the period which 
> Robert Neff is investigating.
>
> But I wonder if the question needs to be reworked. Sorry to answer a question 
> with more questions, but some obvious follow-up questions include:
>
> 1. Western diplomats are outside of the  ordinary status system anyway. By 
> the late nineteenth century, they were also backed up by gunboats, and so 
> existed, in a sense, above the ordinary status system. How would ordinary 
> Koreans even encounter the married or unmarried lives of European diplomats? 
> Are there particular circumstances that you are thinking of? For that matter, 
> any particular diplomat?
>
> 2. And, sorry to nitpick,  "ordinary Koreans" also sounds a bit vague to me. 
> I am guessing that, beyond Korean politicians and diplomats, the only people 
> who would have a close enough encounter with a diplomat that they could 
> actually determine marital status would be various types of domestic workers 
> + shopkeepers.  The former, especially, were presumably not likely to be the 
> sort to successfully claim yangban status, and speak disapprovingly about 
> unmarried status of their masters - for that matter, they may not have had 
> terribly regular marital lives themselves, since during the 
> eighteenth-century, at least, the base-born frequently did not live terribly 
> Confucian lives. Otherwise, there might also have been Korean Christians at 
> the churches that the diplomats attended, but they, of course, were very much 
> not ordinary in their religious beliefs
>
> How one would set about discovering the thoughts of domestic workers is 
> another question again, of course. It would be lovely to know more.
>
> 3. The most famous community of unmarried Westerners in Korea were, of 
> course, Roman Catholic priests. I am too lazy to look this up, but I vaguely 
> remember the unmarried status of priests being one of many reasons that 
> Catholic priests were criticized. Of course, there were other reasons to 
> criticize a priest, especially before opening, but that might be a point of 
> departure. Especially before opening Catholic priests were living within the 
> villages, and, far from keeping a diplomatic silence on the subject of their 
> marital status, were loudly proclaiming the vital importance of chastity for 
> priests  (something they shared, in any case, with Buddhist monks). So it is 
> not surprising that this might be noticed.
>
> 4.  Back to the question of how would anybody even know. Before the opening, 
> Japanese, Chinese and other envoys would not, I think, generally bring their 
> wives along on a diplomatic mission (I suppose Tumen valley Jurchen wives 
> might have tagged along, legally or illegally, during the early Choson - I 
> should look this up) nor did Koreans bring their wives on trips to Beijing. 
> The fact that an old European diplomat was wandering about Seoul without a 
> long-suffering diplomatic wife to help arrange the party at the consulate 
> strikes me as something which would cause more of a fracas within the Western 
> diplomatic community than within Korean society. In fact, I have been told 
> quite recently of the enormous value of a good diplomatic spouse - in this 
> case, for a Canadian diplomat.
>
> Those are my thoughts on the subject, at least.  It sounds like an 
> interesting topic, but I wonder if the question should be reworked.
>
> Yours,
>
> Adam
>
>