61st Korea still has long way to go to be truly multicultural society

By Kim Jae-won

It’s hard to feel at home in a foreign country, even more so when you’re trying to raise a family there. I experienced this first-hand, living in Vancouver for three years and having my first child there.

Not that my memories of the beautiful British Columbian city are mostly bad _ that actually couldn’t be further from the truth. But adjusting to a different language, a different culture, different food and an entirely different way of living is obviously a huge challenge, even in a city like Vancouver that provides a global example of multicultural cohesion.

I could also say with confidence that foreigners parenting a family in Vancouver would be a much more comfortable and rewarding experience than doing the same in my hometown of Miryang, South Gyeongsang Province. The gap between the two cities in terms of multicultural readiness appears as stretched as the geographical distance between them.

I arrived in Vancouver shortly after I married my wife in November 2005, enrolled as a graduate student at the University of British Columbia. I had never lived in a foreign country before, so I approached life in Vancouver with a mix of excitement, anxiety and fear.

Language was the most immediate barrier to overcome. Although I had been confident in my English skills, I quickly found that ordinary Canadians never speak quite as slowly as the language instructors in Seoul do and will mix their daily conversations with words that I had never heard before.

And that was before my wife gave birth to our first child, Clement, in February 2007. Clement was born prematurely at 34 weeks, so his health was obviously our most critical concern, not to mention the difficult thought of raising an infant in a foreign country.

Although we could have been better prepared for Vancouver, the city was more accommodating than we ever imagined. Shortly after Clement’s birth, the municipal government sent an infant specialist, Karen, to our home regularly to examine his health and growth.

Karen quickly became Clement’s closest friend, guiding his exercises and playing toys with him. She helped me and my wife just as much, serving as a mentor for Canadian culture and life and introducing choice places to visit, eat and shop.

We were fortunate to be in a city that connected us with people like Karen. Too bad the same thing couldn’t be said for many marriage migrants in Miryang, who struggle to cope with the differences in language and culture, not to mention racism and discrimination.

Upon our return to Korea in 2008, my wife couldn’t help but notice how different it is to give birth and raise a child in Vancouver than it would for a foreign wife in Miryang.

My wife was stunned after a nurse at a local hospital casually said that children born of Filipino mothers will lag behind in language learning compared to babies born to Korean parents. The nurse also claimed that, due to language problems, foreign mothers were more likely to neglect the physical problems of their children because they were reluctant to visit hospitals.

``It was very upsetting to hear that. The nurse was speaking to a group which included some foreign women,’’ my wife said.

Although my wife wasn’t the most fluent English speaker in Vancouver, doctors there were patient in giving her time to explain her condition thoroughly. In some cases, my wife communicated with doctors through online interpretation service provided by Google.

``I got a lot of help from Canadians during my stay in Vancouver, and I never once felt humiliated. However, it’s baffling to see Koreans mistreating married migrants from other Asian countries like this,’’ she said.