Han is 15 and fast becoming a regular on the catwalk, making his third appearance at the recent Seoul Fashion Week - a biannual event for South Korean designers. For one show, Han sported patched jeans and a plaid shirt partially covered by a puffy, silver vest.
The high school student is lanky. He has what Youn Bum, his agent at SF Models, calls a "distinct look", making him a rare commodity in the domestic market - and a victim of prejudice. [...]
Immigration has brought with it an increase in the number of children who are the offspring of a Korean citizen and foreign national, primarily from Southeast Asia. Close to two million foreigners live in a country of 50 million. The number of multi-ethnic persons is expected to reach 300,000 by 2020, up from 40,000 a decade ago, government statistics show. [...]
Biracial Koreans have come up against an entrenched concept of what it means to be Korean that's based on a supposed "pure bloodline", Gi-wook Shin, director of the Walter H Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, tells Al Jazeera.
Shin explains that it's a "myth" that the origin of this understanding of national identity comes from ancient Confucian values, as many South Koreans believe. [...]
Faced with the growing number of multi-ethnic births, as well as criticism from the United Nations, terms like "pure blood" and "mixed blood" are no longer used in official and educational materials, although the latter expression is still widely spoken and many Koreans don't see it as a pejorative.
No comments:
Post a Comment