By Jason Lim
One of the enduring founding myths in Korea is that Korean people are ethnically ― and exclusively ― homogenous. Which is nonsense, of course. Korea was peopled by an organic and complex mixture of various groups from both North and South Asia. Recent studies show that Koreans have genetic affinities with Manchurians, Yunnan-Chinese from southern China, and Vietnamese, which all goes to show that humans have been migrating for thousands of years and intermixing with local populations to create new ones.
However, until now, migrations have been a slow and incremental process. This gave different population groups time to blend into one another genetically, physically, and culturally, giving rise to a new group self-identity to evolve over time.
Not anymore. Economic globalization and mass transportation have conspired to drive large numbers of different peoples to various places around the world in years, not centuries. America is no longer the only melting pot. In the last decade, Europe has seen a dramatic rise in immigrant populations with South Asians in Britain, Turks in Germany, and North Africans in France. The resulting intergroup contacts have led to angst-ridden and politically explosive soul searching as to what it really means to be a British, German, or French citizen.
Which naturally begs the question: what does it mean to be a Korean in today’s world?
Like European nations, the demand for cheap labor in Korea has been met by a steady supply of laborers relocating from China, Philippines, and other areas in Southeast Asia. Further, the peculiar socioeconomic demographics in Korea drive rural men to find wives from Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, China, and Cambodia. A widely used figure has it that one out of eight marriages in Korea is between a Korean man and a Southeast Asian woman who is ``fresh off the boat.” Arirang TV, which recently ran a documentary called the ``Story of Hand in Hand” highlighting interracial marriages, counts 36,204 households in Korea that are biracial.
And there is one thing that has not changed over time. That is, marriages lead to children. In Korea’s case, there are large numbers of biracial children.
Which begs a second and more important question (at least to me): what happens when our children don’t look Korean like us?
How will Korean society, so steeped in the myth of a homogenous people safeguarding its ethnic purity from countless outside invaders, deal with an invasion from within? How will the Korean society cope with an increasing number of Korean children who increasingly won’t look ``Korean” in the traditional, homogenous sense?
Granted, the government has taken a proactive stance in trying to deal with inevitable tsunami of diversity. They have extensive and highly visible “multicultural family” programs that seek to welcome and integrate biracial households and their children into the mainstream.
While well-intentioned, the Korean government’s policy seems to be a self-contradicting combination of assimilation and multiculturalism. Assimilation can be defined as the washing away of intergroup differences while multiculturalism assumes that the highlighting and celebration of intergroup differences will lead to a more open acceptance of these differences. The government wants to assimilate the ``multicultural” families by highlighting their different heritages.
The problem with Korea’s diversity issue is not with culture per se, since most of the ``multicultural” children are Korean, born and raised, albeit with non-Korean mothers. These children are not immigrants. They are fully ― culturally and linguistically ― Korean. They will just happen to look different.
Rather, this has to do with how Koreans are supposed to look like. More precisely, it has to do with our collective and unconscious bias on what ``look” constitutes a Korean versus what ``look” doesn’t. Can mainstream Korean society overcome such a deeply ingrained collective bias so that our own children do not become discriminated against by their own people?
This is not an easy task, especially for a nation whose very survival depended on the unifying pride of its mythical homogenous purity. For millennia, a Korean was a Korean because he or she looked like a Korean. Now this time-honored formula will have to change if we don’t want to make disenfranchised minorities out of our own children. And Korea doesn’t have hundreds of years whereby the intermixing is gradual and shifts in collective phenotype essentially invisible. Korea must do this in the next decade or so.
No one should be self-righteous or flippant about this great challenge that Korea faces. It will be difficult and fraught with legitimate fears and dangers. This will be nothing less than redefining what it means to be a Korean in the modern era, moving away from a simple, look-based definition to something more complex and profound. But Korea must face it. Korea will have to collectively co-author a new national narrative that is more inclusive.
Korea shocked the world with its ``Miracle on the Han River.” This time, perhaps Korea can inspire the world with a wholly different sort of a miracle: reinventing itself as a people.
Jason Lim is a non-resident fellow at the Peace Foundation, a non-partisan think tank researching policy options for peace on the Korean Peninsula. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com. You can also follow him on Facebook.