South Korea Struggles With Attitudes Toward Race

By CHOE SANG-HUN

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 hurlingracial and sexist slurs at them.

The situation would be afamiliar 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 reportedin the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging theman they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt,the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racistoffense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rivalpolitical parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation thatfor the first time would provide a detailed definition ofdiscrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life forthe two and half years he has lived here as a student and then researchprofessor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even incrowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, hefell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver wokehim up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensivegesture 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 thetime I felt hostilities, especially from middle-aged men.”

South Korea, a country where until recently people were taught to takepride in their nation’s “ethnic homogeneity” and where the words “skincolor” and “peach” are synonymous, is struggling to embrace a newreality. In just the past seven years, the number of foreign residentshas doubled, to 1.2 million, even as the country’s population of 48.7million is expected to drop sharply in coming decades because of itslow birth rate.

Many of the foreigners come here to toil at seaor on farms or in factories, providing cheap labor in jobs shunned bySouth Koreans. Southeast Asian women marry rural farmers who cannotfind South Korean brides. People from English-speaking countries findjobs teaching English in a society obsessed with learning the languagefrom native speakers.

For most South Koreans, globalization haslargely meant increasing exports or going abroad to study. But now thatit is also bringing an influx of foreigners into a society where 42percent of respondents in a 2008 survey said they had never once spokenwith a foreigner, South Koreans are learning to adjust — oftenuncomfortably.

In a report issued Oct. 21, Amnesty Internationalcriticized discrimination in South Korea against migrant workers, whomostly are from poor Asian countries, citing sexual abuse, racialslurs, inadequate safety training and the mandatory disclosure ofH.I.V. status, a requirement not imposed on South Koreans in the samejobs. Citing local news media and rights advocates, it said thatfollowing last year’s financial downturn, “incidents of xenophobia areon the rise.”

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

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

Centuries ago, whenKorean women who had been taken to China as war prizes and forced intosexual slavery managed to return home, their communities ostracizedthem as tainted. In the last century, Korean “comfort women,” whoworked as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army, faced a similarstigma. Later, women who sold sex to American G.I.’s in the yearsfollowing the 1950-53 Korean War were despised even more. Theirchildren were shunned as “twigi,” a term once reserved for animalhybrids, said Bae Gee-cheol, 53, whose mother was expelled from herfamily after she gave birth to him following her rape by an Americansoldier.

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

“When Itravel 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 Ihave done something incredible. There is a tendency here to controlwomen and who they can date or marry, in the name of the nation.”

Formany Koreans, the first encounter with non-Asians came during theKorean War, when American troops fought on the South Korean side. Thatexperience has complicated South Koreans’ racial perceptions, Mr. Seolsaid. Today, the mix of envy and loathing of the West, especially ofwhite Americans, is apparent in daily life.

The government andmedia obsess over each new report from the Organization for EconomicCooperation and Development, to see how the country ranks against otherdeveloped economies. A hugely popular television program is “Chit Chatof Beautiful Ladies” — a show where young, attractive, mostly Caucasianwomen who are fluent in Korean discuss South Korea. Yet, when SouthKoreans refer to Americans in private conversations, they nearly alwaysattach the same suffix as when they talk about the Japanese andChinese, their historical masters: “nom,” which means “bastards.” TammyChu, 34, a Korean-born film director who was adopted by Americans andgrew up in New York State, said she had been “scolded and yelled at” inSeoul subways for speaking in English and thus “not being Koreanenough.” Then, she said, her applications for a job as an Englishteacher 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 towhether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently marrieda German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boonto our family,” she said.

The Foreign Ministry supports ananti-discrimination law, said Kim Se-won, a ministry official. In 2007,the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discriminationrecommended that South Korea adopt such a law, deploring the widespreaduse of terms like “pure blood” and “mixed blood.” It urged publiceducation to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnicallyhomogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actualsituation.”

But a recent forum to discuss proposed legislationagainst racial discrimination turned into a shouting match when severalcritics who had networked through the Internet showed up. They chargedthat such a law would only encourage even more migrant workers to cometo South Korea, pushing native workers out of jobs and creatingcrime-infested slums. They also said it was too difficult to definewhat was racially or culturally offensive.

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