50% of Rural Kids to Be Biracial by 2020

By Jane Han
Staff Reporter

It's already been a year since 26-year-old Thien moved to Gangnjin, a small farming county in South Jeolla Province, but Korean still sounds like unbearable noise to her.

With a 35-year-old jobless husband and two elderly in-laws to take care of on a suffocating budget, the Vietnamese woman is not pleased with her pursuit of the much-fantasized ``Korean Dream.''

``I don't feel like learning Korean. I'm not interested,'' Thien said through a translator, Kang Kyung-ae, who heads a support center for multicultural families in the rural town of 40,000 people.

A disappointing mix of financial hardship, language barriers and nonexistent romance has made Thien become increasingly more quiet and bitter over the past several weeks.

``I want to make a decision, whether to leave or not, before I have children,'' said the immigrant, who has a mother and two brothers at home.

Kang, who provides counseling for some 150 immigrant women, says the first one to two years is the most vulnerable period in which interracial couples either make it through or break up.

``Proper support measures need to be put in place to help the growing number of mixed marriages last,'' she said.

According to the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, nearly 50 percent of the population below age 19 in South Korea's rural regions will soon become biracial due to the quickly growing number of interracial marriages in the farming and fishing community.

A report released Thursday said that the ratio of multiracial children stood at 1.3 to 2.5 percent in 2005, but the figure is expected to rise to the 24.5 to 49 percent range by 2020.

With most rural-born Koreans wanting to move to metropolitan cities for better education and white-collar jobs, the country's farms are now becoming fast populated by offspring of mothers from Vietnam, China, the Philippines and Mongolia.

This has been a social phenomenon widely seen and discussed in recent years, but the latest report calls for more urgent measures to protect families from collapsing.

A recent survey by South Gyeongsang Province, which has one of the highest influxes of foreign brides, showed that the divorce rate of interracial couples in the region has gone up almost 30 percent in one year.

Kim Joo-ee, an official of the province's multicultural home support center, said the central and regional governments, non-profit groups and other organizations provide plenty of cultural and education programs, but lack a systematic approach that hampers efficiency.

``Decision-makers crank out programs based on their point of view instead of listening to what the families want. It's a one-way street,'' she said.

jhan@koreatimes.co.kr

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