By Kim Heung-sook
``Bandhobi,'' a 107-minute film featuring the friendship and romance between a young Bangladeshi migrant worker in Korea and a high school girl of his host country, is likely to bring smiles and laughter to its viewers at the 10th Jeonju International Film Festival in early May, but living such relationships in reality might be like walking on thin ice.
The rate of unmarried 20-year-old or older men in Korean farming villages is double that of women of the same age group and four out of 10 single men in farming areas get married to foreign women. As a result, half of rural children will be biracial by the year 2020. Last year alone, 122,552 foreigners immigrated into Korea for marriage and 87 percent of them were female.
You could say life is vindictive if you are aware of the excessive emphasis Korea used to put on its ``pure blood.'' There were many Koreans who prided themselves in being a ``homogenous'' people. They welcomed foreigners as tourists and business partners, but not as family members until recently. Interracial people were ``side glanced'' only because they looked different
Now, the Korean population is growing multicolored at an unprecedented speed, particularly in rural areas, breaking the time-honored prejudice against interracial marriages. It is desirable that Korean blood becomes more absorbing and Korean society more multicultural, but it is regrettable that the change is occurring faster than the change of people's mindset, and some have to suffer from the lack of understanding or failure to embrace the latest development.
According to an analysis of divorce counseling conducted by the Korea Legal Aid Center for Family Relations for interracial couples, the majority of counseling requests were made by foreign wives. Of the 1,467 couples who took counseling at the center's headquarters in Seoul and six provincial chapters, 1,401 consisted of foreign wives and Korean husbands.
Nearly 73 percent or 1,020 foreign wives filed for divorce counseling. For 52 percent of them, the reason was ``extremely unfair treatment,'' which means violence, by the spouse or parents-in-law, the center said. Conflicts over economic issues came next (26.1 percent), followed by different ways of life and values (20.5 percent). For Korean men who sought counseling for divorce from their foreign spouses, the most popular reason was difference in the ways of life and values.
Of the 1,401 foreign wives, 798 were from China, 189 from Vietnam, 155 from the Philippines, 80 from Japan and 38 from Russia, among others. Nearly 30 percent of the 122,552 foreigners who immigrated to the country last year for marriage, or 35,707, were ethnic Koreans from China, followed by Chinese (32,080) and Vietnamese (27,092), The Korea Times reported last week quoting a Ministry of Justice estimate.
In a front page story headlined ``Cultural gaps trouble mixed marriages,'' this newspaper quoted 39 percent of 293 ``migrant wives'' surveyed as saying that their Korean husbands had little or no knowledge about their cultures. Only 19 percent said their husbands had sufficient knowledge. Fifty-two percent said their husbands had poor command of their native tongues. These cultural gaps, entwined with personal problems, have distressed many couples to the extreme, even resulting in the deaths of wives from overseas.
Amid mounting public awareness that the nation's future relies heavily on its growth as a multicultural society, governmental and non-governmental organizations are increasing support for foreign brides to help them adapt to their new homes and environment more easily. Initial programs were focused on the foreigners' learning of the Korean language and customs, but these days, more and more efforts are exerted to make the learning a mutual process: The Korean spouses learn the language and culture of their foreign spouses and vice versa.
Owing much to the concerted efforts of Koreans and their foreign spouses, Korea will become a more open society in time, but there is one crucial thing the foreigners need to know to minimize their difficulty of adaptation here. It is the fact that Korea has many adaptation problems on its very hands, having dramatically transformed itself from a ``hermit kingdom'' to an industrialized country in a short period of time, and that the nation's social consciousness lags behind its economic development.
I don't want to dampen bridal spirits, but I hope my foreign sisters will not decide on marriage with Korean men on just rosy assumptions. I hope they will think about ifs and buts before their decisions. Once they come here, I hope they will remember one phone number just in case: 1577-1366. It is the hotline for the Emergency Support Center for Migrant Women, which offers counseling in eight languages ― Vietnamese, Chinese, Russian, English, Mongolian, Thai, Cambodian and Tagalog.
Good luck to you all, dear brides!
kimsook@hotmail.com
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