South Koreans Struggle With Race, Sunday November 01,2009 Korea Options

[The Watcher]

South Koreans Struggle With Race



Hahm Ji-seon and her friend, Bonogit Hussain, were riding a bus near Seoul when insults were hurled at them.

By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: November 1, 2009

SEOUL — On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them.

The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even — as in Ms. Hahn’s case — simply traveled in the company of a foreign man.

What was different this time, however, was that, once it was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

“Things got worse for me this time, because I was with a Korean woman,” Mr. Hussain said in an interview. “Whenever I’ve walked with Ms. Hahn or other Korean women, most of the time I felt hostilities, especially from middle-aged men.”

South Korea, a country where until recently people were taught to take pride in their nation’s “ethnic homogeneity” and where the words “skin color” and “peach” are synonymous, is struggling to embrace a new reality. In just the past seven years, the number of foreign residents has doubled, to 1.2 million, even as the country’s population of 48.7 million is expected to drop sharply in coming decades because of its low birth rate.

Many of the foreigners come here to toil at sea or on farms or in factories, providing cheap labor in jobs shunned by South Koreans. Southeast Asian women marry rural farmers who cannot find South Korean brides. People from English-speaking countries find jobs teaching English in a society obsessed with learning the language from native speakers.

For most South Koreans, globalization has largely meant increasing exports or going abroad to study. But now that it is also bringing an influx of foreigners into a society where 42 percent of respondents in a 2008 survey said they had never once spoken with a foreigner, South Koreans are learning to adjust — often uncomfortably.

In a report issued Oct. 21, Amnesty International criticized discrimination in South Korea against migrant workers, who mostly are from poor Asian countries, citing sexual abuse, racial slurs, inadequate safety training and the mandatory disclosure of H.I.V. status, a requirement not imposed on South Koreans in the same jobs. Citing local news media and rights advocates, it said that following last year’s financial downturn, “incidents of xenophobia are on the rise.”

Ms. Hahn said, “Even a friend of mine confided to me that when he sees a Korean woman walking with a foreign man, he feels as if his own mother betrayed him.”

In South Korea, a country repeatedly invaded and subjugated by its bigger neighbors, people’s racial outlooks have been colored by “pure-blood” nationalism as well as traditional patriarchal mores, said Seol Dong-hoon, a sociologist at Chonbuk National University.

Centuries ago, when Korean women who had been taken to China as war prizes and forced into sexual slavery managed to return home, their communities ostracized them as tainted. In the last century, Korean “comfort women,” who worked as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army, faced a similar stigma. Later, women who sold sex to American G.I.’s in the years following the 1950-53 Korean War were despised even more. Their children were shunned as “twigi,” a term once reserved for animal hybrids, said Bae Gee-cheol, 53, whose mother was expelled from her family after she gave birth to him following her rape by an American soldier.

Even today, the North Korean authorities often force abortion on women who return home pregnant after going to China to find food, according to defectors and human rights groups.

“When I travel with my husband, we avoid buses and subways,” said Jung Hye-sil, 42, who married a Pakistani man in 1994. “They glance at me as if I have done something incredible. There is a tendency here to control women and who they can date or marry, in the name of the nation.”

For many Koreans, the first encounter with non-Asians came during the Korean War, when American troops fought on the South Korean side. That experience has complicated South Koreans’ racial perceptions, Mr. Seol said. Today, the mix of envy and loathing of the West, especially of white Americans, is apparent in daily life.

The government and media obsess over each new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to see how the country ranks against other developed economies. A hugely popular television program is “Chit Chat of Beautiful Ladies” — a show where young, attractive, mostly Caucasian women who are fluent in Korean discuss South Korea. Yet, when South Koreans refer to Americans in private conversations, they nearly always attach the same suffix as when they talk about the Japanese and Chinese, their historical masters: “nom,” which means “bastards.” Tammy Chu, 34, a Korean-born film director who was adopted by Americans and grew up in New York State, said she had been “scolded and yelled at” in Seoul subways for speaking in English and thus “not being Korean enough.” Then, she said, her applications for a job as an English teacher were rejected on the grounds that she was “not white enough.”

Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

The Foreign Ministry supports an anti-discrimination law, said Kim Se-won, a ministry official. In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that South Korea adopt such a law, deploring the widespread use of terms like “pure blood” and “mixed blood.” It urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

But a recent forum to discuss proposed legislation against racial discrimination turned into a shouting match when several critics who had networked through the Internet showed up. They charged that such a law would only encourage even more migrant workers to come to South Korea, pushing native workers out of jobs and creating crime-infested slums. They also said it was too difficult to define what was racially or culturally offensive.

“Our ethnic homogeneity is a blessing,” said one of the critics, Lee Sung-bok, a bricklayer who said his job was threatened by migrant workers. “If they keep flooding in, who can guarantee our country won’t be torn apart by ethnic war as in Sri Lanka?”

[crazydude]

Interesting article - thanks for sharing it OP.

I know very little about Korean culture but with the recent popularity of everything Korean, like a lot of people I am intrigued too.

Before reading this article I never knew how obsessed Koreans were about national purity. What i did find confusing was the love-hate relationship they have for Americans. Though this article doesn't allude to the obession with American culture but I do know that their yonger generation carry that perception, so to read that they are racist towards them don't make a lot of sense or the author failed to explain the anamoly.

[SNK_1408]

^ The article is biased, American journalist was trying to paint Korea was racist country.

Please note South Korea is Not migrant intake country.
Most foreign residents in South Korea are temporary stayers and these with long term residency are these married to Koreans and they are fully assimilated into Korean society and mostly take up naturalized citizenship.

Although Korea is Not racist country (Racist country have race hate groups and racist political party, Korea don't have any of this), Koreans are tends to stereotype people, even different regional Koreans themselves have this tendency among Koreans.

All you'll get is verbal racist comments in Korea, you don't get to see race hate groups beating up foreigners. Besides foreigners do get well-treated by Korean government and people, most foreigners never get to experience "hate" or "racism" however getting jobs, marriage, joining exclusive membership etc.. are problem for foreigners in Korea.

Korean society is very family oriented and if you're not family members or close relatives then you will experience discrimination. Also, Koreans don't trust foreigners, I think that's one of main problem and Korea is one of most homogeneous society. There wasn't foreigners up until early 1900s, and there was no immigration to Korea.

It was during 1990s we started to seeing a lot of foreigners especially these from China, mostly Korean ethnic from China then a lot of SE Asian ladies found their way to marrying Korean husbands. Most of these Korean men married to foreigners are from rural area as they couldn't attracted local Korean women. Korean women now days don't like living in rural area and making farming for their lives. This created problem for local Korean government, and this created booming business for arrange marriage service with SE Asian countries to Central Asia.

There are huge number of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Russian, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Kazakhs, Mongolian & Filipinos as well as ethnic Koreans from overseas wives living in rural areas of Korea. We now start to seeing a lot of Turkish, Iranian, Nepalis and Indian coming into Korea. There is even TV talk show dedicated to Korean men married to these wives from above listed countries, I think it's called "Love Asia". Where foreign wives talk about their experience in Korean life.

[The Watcher]

^ The article is biased, American journalist was trying to paint Korea was racist country.

Author: Sang-hun Choe, New York Times correspondent in Seoul, South Korea

[Anime_UK]

Its not a good image for South Korea. Also its wrong for people to be so narrow minded and ignorant.

[amic]

It's easier to point and condemn racial discrimination when we in the US have lived in a melting pot of ethnicities and backgrounds while Asian countries have only recently been open to people of other races and backgrounds. (Even then, we're still struggling with it.)

It takes time and education to change bias and prejudice. Based on this article, it seems the govt of Korea is taking proper steps towards that.