EAST ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE

Mixed-Race Politics and

Neoliberal Multiculturalism
in South Korean Media

JI-HYUN AHN
 East Asian Popular Culture

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Yasue Kuwahara
Department of Communication
Northern Kentucky University
Highland Heights
KY, USA

John A. Lent
Temple University
School of Communication and Theater
Philadelphia
PA, USA
This series focuses on the study of popular culture in East Asia (referring
to China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea,
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 Ji-Hyun Ahn

Mixed-Race Politics
and Neoliberal
Multiculturalism in
South Korean Media
Ji-Hyun Ahn
School of Interdisciplinary Arts
and Sciences
University of Washington Tacoma
Tacoma, WA, USA

East Asian Popular Culture

ISBN 978-3-319-65773-8 ISBN 978-3-319-65774-5  (eBook)
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For G
 Acknowledgements

The acknowledgments is my secret yet favorite part of reading a scholarly

book. It makes me feel like I know the authors personally even though in
most cases, I have never met them. I imagine the academic journeys that
have brought them this far. It certainly feels magical that the time has
come and that I am now narrating my own story. I can confidently say
that this book would have never been possible without the support and
care from all of my mentors, colleagues, families, and friends. I thank all
of them who inspired and supported me to make this happen.
This book project grew from my doctoral dissertation during my time
in graduate school in the Department of Radio-Television-Film (RTF)
at The University of Texas at Austin (UTA). My deepest gratitude goes
to Shanti Kumar, my supervisor and an incredible mentor, whose intel-
lectual inspiration and persistent encouragement has left an imprint on
me as a scholar. I was also fortunate to work with great faculty mentors
within and beyond the RTF: I especially thank Mary Beltrán, Madhavi
Mallapragada, and Robert Oppenheim for their genuine support on my
work throughout graduate school.
The book would have not been published without my current institu-
tion’s support. The School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences (SIAS) at
The University of Washington Tacoma (UWT) has provided enormous
intellectual and emotional support for the project. I thank colleagues in
the Communication major—Divya McMillin, Bill Kunz, Chris Demaske,
David Coon, Sun Huatong, Randy Nichols, Ellen Moore, and Alex
Smith—for making UWT my intellectual home. I especially thank Divya

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

and Huatong for their excellent mentorship whose wisdom, passion,

and encouragement always inspired me, and Ellen for being such a great
company as we worked on our book publications at a similar timeline.
The book proposal working group, led by Turan Kayaoglu in Winter
2014, was instrumental to transforming my dissertation into a book.
I am grateful for my fellow participants of the working group—Emma
Rose, Etga Ugur, Vanessa de Veritch Woodside, and Ed Chamberlain—
who provided critical feedback on my book proposal and sample chap-
ters. I was fortunate to share my work at different venues within and
beyond the SIAS in the form of a brown bag talk and a round table dis-
cussion. I especially thank Turan for organizing such events and provid-
ing me opportunities to present my work. In addition, I would like to
thank my Media and Identity in Asia class students over the past four
years for their brilliant questions and rich class discussions—a part of
which is reflected in this book.
Beyond UWT, there are many scholars and friends whose insights
and friendship I cherish. My special thanks goes to Iwabuchi Koichi for
introducing me to the fabulous scholars in Asia through organizing
fascinating conferences and workshops primarily focusing on race and
racism in East Asia. Lee Sang-Gil and Yoon Tae-Jin have been my men-
tors since my M.A. when I first became interested in this topic for my
thesis. I also thank Cho Younghan for the opportunity for collabora-
tive work. The good old memories that I share with the RTF gang—
Sang Yoonmo, Choi Sujin, Lee Shinhea, Seo Hogeun, Lee Kyungsun,
Kang Minsoo, Kim Jinsook, and Min Bumgi—during my days in gradu-
ate school always makes me smile. Together with the RTF folks, I must
thank my dear colleagues and friends—Kwon Kyounghee, Hong Jung
Eun, Lee Seulhi, and Kim Sook-Hyun (to name just a few)—from the
Graduate School of Communication & Arts at Yonsei University where
I received my M.A. Their continued support and care even after gradua-
tion provided excellent emotional support. Ha Hyun Jeong has been an
amazing friend whose intellectual curiosity always sparked fruitful discus-
sion. Her humor and warm encouragement propelled the slow progress
in revising the book. I also thank Lin Tien Wen for inspiring me with her
spiritual journey and for working collaboratively toward our common
research interests. I thank Kim Jahun and Kim Kyungil for their prayers
and encouragement throughout my ups and downs. It is my great pleas-
ure and comfort that I still get to meet with my middle school and high
 Acknowledgements    ix

school gals whenever I go back to South Korea—we are all now on dif-
ferent career paths but the sense of humor and friendship have lasted
through the years.
Many institutions and organizations have provided financial support
for the research and book publication. At UTA, my dissertation project
was funded by a Continuing Fellowship (2012–2013) from the RTF
and a POSCO Korean Studies research fellowship from the Center for
East Asian Studies. At UWT, SIAS provided two consecutive years of
research awards (2015–2016 and 2016–2017) as well as research leave
in the autumn of 2015 that enabled me to conduct follow-up research
in Seoul, hire professional copy editors, and secure copyrights for images
and previously published articles. I am also grateful for the multiple
workshops where I was invited with full financial support to share a part
of my book project. They include the Negotiating Identities: Mixed-
Race Individuals in China, Japan, and Korea Workshop by the Center
for Asia-Pacific Studies at the University of San Francisco (2016); The
Rising Stars of Korean Studies Workshop by the Korean Studies Institute
at The University of Southern California (2014); and The Illinois/
Indiana National Dissertation Workshop for Asian Film and Media at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2012). I thank all the work-
shop participants for their enormously helpful feedback on my earlier
versions.
The earlier version of Chap. 3 was published as “Rearticulating Black
Mixed-Race in the Era of Globalization: Hines Ward and the Struggle
for Koreanness in Contemporary South Korean Media,” in Cultural
Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 2014, pp. 391–417 (Reprinted by Permission of
Taylor & Francis Publications, Ltd.). A part of Chap. 4 was also pub-
lished as “Desiring Biracial Whites: Cultural Consumption of White
Mixed-Race Celebrities in South Korean Popular Media” in Media,
Culture & Society, vol. 37, no. 6, 2015, pp. 937–947 (Reprinted by
Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd.). In addition, the Korean
Broadcast Advertising Corporation and Singapore-based men’s fashion
magazine August Man generously granted me copyright permissions for
the images used in the Introduction and Chap. 4.
I have presented my work at numerous conferences, and it is always
exciting attending academic conferences when unexpected encoun-
ters generate new possibilities for the future. I should mention that the
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication con-
ference in 2015 was particularly special as there I met my editor Shaun
x    Acknowledgements

Vigil from Palgrave Macmillan. I thank Shaun for his great passion for
and belief in my project since the day we first met. Together with Shaun,
Glenn Ramirez provided practical guidance and useful tips throughout
the production process. I also want to thank the East Asian Popular
Culture series editors Kuwahara Yasue and John Lent for publishing my
book as a part of this wonderful series. In addition, I must thank my pro-
fessional copy editors, Jessica Cobb and Shannon Nagy, for their excel-
lent professionalism. All remaining mistakes are mine.
Finally, I would like to express my utmost deepest gratitude to
my family. I am grateful that my grandparents on both my father and
mother’s sides are still living and healthy, watching me grow as an adult
and scholar; it is my great pleasure that I could be a part of their pride
and happiness. My younger brother, Ahn Jong Moon, has cooked
delicious (and healthy) dishes for me whenever I am back home. My
parents—Ahn Jai Sung and Lee Kyungmi—whom I admire the most
have shown unrelenting faith in me, which significantly shaped my per-
sonality. Without their love and prayers, I would never be able to make it
this far. I am dedicating this book to them.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 The New Face of Korea 35

Part I “I Am Proud to Be a Korean”:

Amerasian Celebrity Culture

3 From National Threat to National Hero 75

4 Consuming Cosmopolitan White(ness) 103

Part II Performing the Multicultural Reality:

Mixed-Race Children in Reality TV

5 Televising the Making of the Neoliberal

Multicultural Family 131

6 This Is (not) Our Multicultural Future 159

xi
xii    Contents

Conclusion 191

Notes 199

Bibliography 205

Index 227
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 A public service poster awarded the Best

Advertisement Award at the twentieth
Korean Public Service Advertising Festival
in 2001 21
Fig. 3.1 Poster for the film Black Woman (1982) 84
Fig. 3.2 Hines Ward and his mother, Kim Yŏnghŭi,
wearing Korean traditional costume 94
Fig. 3.3 Hines Ward (Ward had his name in Korean
tattooed on his right arm.) 96
Fig. 4.1 The cover image of August Man (March 2012) 113
Fig. 5.1 The multicultural setting of the show 136
Fig. 5.2 Boys and girls of the Karen tribe is performing
the tribe’s traditional dance in the New Year’s
festival (Episode 303) 137
Fig. 5.3 A screenshot of Pakistani people riding donkeys
in a rural town 140
Fig. 6.1 Cast members of Rainbow Kindergarten 166
Fig. 6.2 Cast members of Cackling Class 172
Fig. 6.3 Children at the morning assembly,
singing Vietnamese national anthem (Episode 1) 182
Fig. 6.4 The children visited a temple to explore
Vietnamese temple culture (Episode 6) 183

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 Outline of multicultural policies 50

Table 3.1 A section on media in “A Plan for
promoting the social integration of
mixed-race and immigrants” (2006) 79
Table 4.1 Daniel Henney’s filmography (2005–2013) 109
Table 6.1 National background of the children
participants on Rainbow Kindergarten 167

xv
Note on Names: For all Korean (and Asian) names in the book, I fol-
low the Korean tradition of putting the family name first followed by the
given name: e.g., Ahn (last name) Ji-Hyun (first name). For individuals
with an English given name and a Korean family name though, I follow
the American tradition: e.g., Sarah Park. In all other cases, the book fol-
lows the standard English publishing practice of putting the given name
before the surname.

Note on Korean language: I offer equivalent Korean terms in parenthe-

sis in italics. The Romanization of Korean words, names, and program
titles in this book follows the McCune-Reischauer system.

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Although he has a Vietnamese mother

Like you, this child is Korean
[He] cannot have a meal without kimchi
Admires King Sejong
Thinks Dokdo is our territory
Shouts out “tae-han-min-’guk” when watching a soccer game
[He] will join the military when he turns twenty
Will pay taxes and vote
Like you
Support multicultural families to nurture happiness for tomor-
row (Hana Financial Group 2008)

This 30-second TV commercial shows an elementary school boy born

to a Vietnamese mother and a South Korean father eating kimchi, writ-
ing an essay in Korean, showing his classmates his drawing of the Korean
national flag on the peak of Dokdo, and ardently cheering the South
Korean soccer team. A female narrator reads the passage above as the
commercial visualizes him performing Korean(ness).
This ad aired on national TV in 2008 as part of a campaign sponsored
by Hana Financial Group to promote social awareness of the increas-
ing numbers of multicultural families in South Korean society. The ad
urges (all) South Korean citizens to reconsider their general perception
of multicultural families by directly calling out the audience as “you”
and proclaiming that this Vietnamese-Korean boy is just as Korean as

© The Author(s) 2018

J.-H. Ahn, Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism 1
in South Korean Media, East Asian Popular Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65774-5_1
2  J.-H. Ahn

you are. The ad assures audiences that this biracial child is Korean not
only because he is performing traditional Korean cultural practices but
also because he will sincerely commit himself to the duties expected
of Korean citizens, such as paying taxes, serving in the military (a duty
expected of men), and voting. The ad is intended to be inclusive, dem-
onstrating that multicultural families are rightful members of Korean
society. But the commercial never tells the viewer exactly who is Korean
or what constitutes Korean(ness), nor addresses this unresolved question
of what it means to be ethnically Korean in an era of global migration.
Only a few decades ago, South Korea (hereafter, Korea) represented
itself as racially homogeneous through the myth of the “single-ethnic
nation” (tanil minjok) (Han 2007; Shin 2006). Yet this well-known
myth no longer seems to hold the same weight as in the past. In recent
years, Korea has experienced drastic growth of its foreign population due
to substantial global migration flows. The total number of (legal) foreign
residents in Korea tripled in the last decade, growing from 536,627 legal
residents (1.1% of the population) in 2006 to 1,741,919 (nearly 3.4% of
the population) in 2015 (Korean Statistical Information Service [KOSIS]
2016). Moreover, the number of mixed-race/blood1 children born to
international marriages experienced an eight-fold increase during the same
period, growing from 25,246 in 2006 to 207,693 in 2015 (KOSIS 2016).
These remarkable statistics indicate that Korea’s “face” is rapidly changing,
challenging traditional understanding of Korea as racially homogenous.
Since the 1980s, neoliberal restructuring of the global labor mar-
ket accelerated global migration. The rapid transition to privatization
created a new class of “precarious workers” in temporary or contract
jobs (Shin 2013). To fill a gap in low-skilled labor created by neolib-
eral restructuring, the aging of its population, and the nation’s low
birth rate, Korea welcomed a large number of temporary guest work-
ers from abroad, particularly from other countries in Asia. Since the
late 1980s, Korea has transformed from a labor-sending country into a
labor-importing country. In the early years of Korea’s liberalization, the
workers who migrated to Korea were mostly men, but these were fol-
lowed by a wave of women migrants in the mid-1990s who took various
migration paths as mail-order brides, contract marriage migrants, and
labor migrants in the sex/entertainment industry or in restaurants (see
Constable 2005; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). Alongside the “fem-
inization of global migration,” international marriage between Koreans
and Asians—usually between a Korean man and an Asian woman—has
 1 INTRODUCTION  3

rapidly increased since the 2000s. Accordingly, children of multicultural

families, born to this increasingly visible pattern of international marriage
between Korean men and Asian brides, have emerged as a distinctive
form of mixed-raciality in contemporary Korea. The social integration of
the growing number of children of multicultural families quickly became
an important governmental agenda, and the Korean government sub-
sequently embraced multiculturalism to manage its immigrant popula-
tion and to renew its national identity in accordance with these social
transformations.
The multiculturalism agenda is more than just a governmental policy
to regulate Korea’s growing immigrant population. It is also a part of a
larger social transformation into a neoliberal, global Korea that encom-
passes all sectors of society—from labor relations to family to popular
media culture. The TV commercial described above precisely captures
this moment of transformation. In the ad, Hana Financial Group, a
member of the market, not the state, was the actor that mobilized mul-
ticultural subjects to call for an open and multicultural global Korea.
Indeed, Hana Bank offered a special financial program targeting multi-
cultural families by offering an installment savings account with a higher-
interest earnings rate than a regular account.
In addition, the ad’s use of the image of an ordinary Vietnamese-
Korean boy to promote multicultural sensitivity is not unique. (Tele)
visual representations and social discussions of multicultural/multieth-
nic subjects (tamunhwa juch’e) including multicultural families, female
marriage migrants, mixed-race people, and ethnic Koreans, have become
quite common and explicit in Korean media and popular culture since
the mid-2000s. These representations expand the discursive space for
imagining a new multicultural global Korea. This substantive increase
in the multiculturalism discourse since the mid-2000s is symptomatic of
struggles over racial reconfiguration and signals broader social transfor-
mations in Korea, including the neoliberal restructuring of social orders
and units.
Considering multiculturalism as a mediated discourse of popular cul-
ture and public policy, this book studies how the increase of visual rep-
resentation of mixed-race Koreans formulates a particular national racial
project of neoliberal multiculturalism in contemporary Korean media. In
this study of the Korean racial project, I do not treat neoliberalism as a
master discourse that explains every current transformation on a national
and global scale. Instead, I conceptualize neoliberal multiculturalism as
4  J.-H. Ahn

occurring at the intersection of the neoliberal restructuring of the global

order and the national reshaping of the racial order. To critically engage
with the burgeoning power of multiculturalism as a (new) national-
building project in postcolonial and neoliberal Korea, I interrogate how
visual culture mediates our perception of multicultural reality and shapes
racial thinking in Koreans’ daily lives.
Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korean
Media considers televisual culture and its derived discourses as meaning-
making sites where cultural meanings of racial difference and Koreanness
are continuously shaped and negotiated. I argue that Korea used to con-
sider itself as a “pure-blood” society, but its blood is now mixed within
neoliberal capitalism. New multiethnic Koreans are now born in Korea
and mixed-race/blood Koreans who exist elsewhere (e.g., in the West)
represent Korean national identity and allow Korea to retain its (eth-
nic) nationalism even across national boundaries. Therefore, Koreanness
is now not necessarily geographically tied to Korea but extends beyond
national boundaries, while nevertheless bolstering nation, nationality,
and nationalism in the process.
This book presents four case studies that demonstrate particular
aspects of neoliberal multiculturalism in contemporary Korean media.
Rather than pull random case studies of mixed-race figures in Korean
popular media, I approach each case study as what I call “televised racial
moments” that articulate different layers of cultural politics. Within these
moments, gender, race, class, and sexuality intersect and produce multi-
ple ruptures where the nationality, citizenship, and ethnicity enter into
conflict and are reshaped. Specifically, these televised racial moments are
cultural sites for the production and contestation of mixed-race Koreans
whose (visual) presence demands a new imagining of what it means to
be a Korean in the era of globalization. They are symbolic figures whose
racialized (televisual) images become the cultural sites where neoliberal
ethics are narrated and taught in the form of entertaining commercial
media. Because the visual images of and discussions about these cases
were produced and circulated at the national level, each demonstrates
a unique aspect of the racial formation of neoliberal multiculturalism in
contemporary Korean media culture.
Specifically, I take celebrity culture and reality TV as two areas for
analysis because they vividly picture different logics that enter into
play when the Korean media appropriate racial differences. I ques-
tion why biracial celebrities born to an American parent and a Korean
 1 INTRODUCTION  5

parent are likely to be celebrated and commoditized while mixed-race

people born to one Korean parent and one (Southeast) Asian par-
ent appear only in the documentary genre or on reality TV. The first
part of my analysis focuses on televised racial moments that show how
both black and white Amerasian celebrities’ racialized bodies become
the meaning-making sites where blackness, whiteness, and (global)
Koreanness is contested and negotiated (Chaps. 3 and 4). Unlike those
celebrity-driven moments, however, it is crucial to note that a biracial
Korean with a (Southeast) Asian parent has never risen to celebrity sta-
tus in the Korean televisual landscape but has been chosen and elevated
through reality programs. Considering reality TV as a neoliberal televi-
sion genre, the second part of my analysis examines particular moments
where mixed-race children and their multicultural families are formu-
lated as a neoliberal subject(ivity) in the realm of reality TV (Chaps. 5
and 6). I attest that the reality TV genre offers particular cultural lan-
guages, grammars, and logics to address racial relations and the struggle
for Koreanness. Through a close reading of those four cases, the book
demonstrates how the complex articulation of the statist multicultural
project with the neoliberal market impulse formulated a new racialized
national identity.

Neoliberal Multiculturalism as Korea’s

National Racial Project
In the contemporary moment, “neoliberalism has become hegemonic as
a mode of discourse,” shaping how people think, live, and understand
the world around them (Harvey 2005, 3). Historically, neoliberal poli-
cies were initiated by the UK and the USA in the 1970s at a time of
domestic and international economic crisis. The crisis of Fordism led
to a long economic depression in both countries, and each declared the
failure of the state and the opening of the market. To maximize mar-
ket efficiency, both countries designed neoliberal policies to reduce state
intervention in the economy through deregulation and privatization; this
reduction was expected to produce a net social good. The role of the
state was redefined from exercising authority over markets to ensuring
free markets and fair competition to maximize private profits.
In contrast to the political-economist and Marxist approach to neo-
liberalism, Michel Foucault conceives of neoliberalism as an ethics that
produces a particular form of neoliberal subjectivity in addition to an
6  J.-H. Ahn

economic-political program. This conception of neoliberalism reflects a

shift in Foucault’s theorization of power from disciplinary power to biopo-
litical power in his later writing. To theorize “governmentality,” or a gov-
erning technique where power is exercised at the level of the population
as biopolitical power, Foucault (1991, 2003, 2007, 2008) argues that
(state) power facilitates market competition at all levels, from the indi-
vidual level of lifestyle to the collective level of law and policy. Foucault
(2007, 2008) argues that neoliberal governmentality exercises its power
through interventions into the conditions of the market, not the market
itself, so that the ideologies of the marketplace such as selection-by-com-
petition can effectively function at all levels of society.
Based on Foucault’s theorization of neoliberal governmentality as
well as a critical reengagement with Western neoliberalism, Aihwa Ong
(2006) argues that neoliberalism in Asia is not an economic-political sys-
tem as it is in the West but rather “a technology of governing that relies
on calculative choices and techniques in the domains of citizenship and
of governing” (Ong 2006, 4). In her formation of Asian neoliberalism, it
is a set of “optimizing technologies” (Ong 2006) that allows exceptions
to neoliberalism to sustain the hegemonic rule of the society. Unlike our
common understanding of Western neoliberalism where state power is
kept to a minimum, the neoliberal state in Asia remains robust and cen-
tralized because the state continuously makes exceptions to neoliberal
order based on strategic choices to benefit national interests.
The role of the state and its sovereign power is therefore central to
the formation of Asian neoliberalism. The Chinese state created excep-
tional “Special Economic Zones” and “Special Administration Regions”
that exemplify the expression of state sovereign power through neolib-
eral exceptions. According to Ong (2006), “In Asian milieus, the option
of exception has allowed states to carve up their own territory so they
can better engage and compete in global markets” (19). Other scholars
agree with Ong that, in the Asian context, the state remains an impor-
tant player in economic neoliberalism (Cho 2012; Choi 2012; Park, Hill,
and Saito 2012). They suggest the concept of “developmental neoliber-
alism” to highlight the role of developmental discourse in formulating
Asian neoliberalism. Along these lines, scholars argue that Asian govern-
ments pursued economic nationalism to carve out their own space in the
neoliberal world economy (D’Costa 2012).
Shifting focus from economic neoliberalism to the issue of “desire” in
the formation of neoliberal subjectivity in post-socialist China, Lisa Rofel
 1 INTRODUCTION  7

(2007) demonstrates that the realm of public culture, which includes

television soap operas, museums, daily newspapers, bars, and legal cases,
produces new “desiring subjects” that transform social relations. She
problematizes the notion of neoliberal subjectification as an individ-
ual response to socioeconomic structure, instead arguing that national
public culture mediates the creation of new subjectivity in China (Rofel
2007, 20, empasis in original).
Assenting to Rofel (2007), I argue that Korean multiculturalism is a
national racial project in the era of neoliberal transformation. This par-
ticular national project reconstitutes social relations in the realm of media
culture, which attempts to satisfy the competing needs and desires of
various agents, including the audience, the state, and the media indus-
try. Neoliberalism functions as a milieu, not as a determining factor, for
Korean neoliberal multiculturalism, where a particular type of multicul-
turalism is produced and nurtured to regulate the growing immigrant
population. I reject a dichotomous view of neoliberalism as a market
logic and multiculturalism as a state logic. Instead, I argue that the state
and markets act upon neoliberalism and multiculturalism to constitute
neoliberal multiculturalism as a national racial project.
Acknowledging that the neoliberal social order is racialized and gen-
dered, some previous scholars provide the elements of a conceptual
frame to understand how neoliberalism restructures the contemporary
experience of race (see Davis 2007; Melamed 2011; Parameswaran 2009;
Thomas and Clarke 2006). David Roberts and Minelle Mahtani (2010)
discuss the reproduction of racist ideologies under the neoliberal project,
arguing that:

Neoliberalization is understood as a socioeconomic process that has racial

implications, but little is said about the ways that neoliberalism modi-
fies the way race is experienced or understood in society. We suggest that
this theorization is incomplete. We recommend a move from analyses of
race and neoliberalism towards analyses that race neoliberalism. This kind
of analysis more clearly delineates how race and racism are inextricably
embedded in the neoliberal project. (Roberts and Mahtani 2010, 250,
emphasis in original)

Indeed, my analysis of the Korean multicultural project is rooted in the

understanding that race is an organizing principle of society that is mod-
ified and reinforced by neoliberalism. However, in this book, I deploy
the term neoliberal multiculturalism instead of race neoliberalism to
8  J.-H. Ahn

highlight multiculturalism as a national racial project and to discuss how

multiculturalism and neoliberalism collude and conflict in ways that are
reflected by contemporary Korean media culture. The concept of neolib-
eral multiculturalism speaks to the articulation of race and neoliberalism,
where race is a central dimension of multiculturalism discourse in Korea.
In addition, neoliberal multiculturalism foregrounds and complicates
questions of race, gender, and class. That is, while race is an important
dimension of neoliberal multiculturalism, it is not the only determining
factor driving the nationalistic impulse toward multiculturalism under
the neoliberal transformation of contemporary Korean society.
Jodi Melamed’s study of racial capitalism provides important
insight into the formation of neoliberal multiculturalism. In her book
Representation and Destroy, Melamed (2011) interrogates US state-rec-
ognized anti-racist discourse in relation to economic liberalism from the
postwar period to the 2000s. She divides the period into three phases
based on official anti-racism politics: racial liberalism (1940s to 1960s),
liberal multiculturalism (1980s to 1990s), and neoliberal multicultural-
ism (2000s to present). She argues that official anti-racist discourses were
produced in complex interactions among capital, the state, and American
universities (especially in the literary tradition) in an effort to imagine the
nation as anti-racist. However, these discourses actually served as a racial-
izing power that maintained white supremacy and fostered American
(global) capitalism. According to her, the third phase of US racial-lib-
eral hegemonic formation, neoliberal multiculturalism, took “an ethic of
multiculturalism to be the spirit of neoliberalism” (Melamed 2011, 42).
That is, the official anti-racism of the early twenty-first century USA co-
opted multiculturalism to bolster neoliberal racial capitalism. Similarly,
Minelle Mahtani (2014) finds that mixed-race people are perceived as a
model of multiraciality that endorses and embodies the vision of contem-
porary Canadian multiculturalism, thereby allowing a form of neoliberal
multiculturalism to thrive.
Whereas the neoliberal multiculturalism studied by Melamed (2011)
and Mahtani (2014) emerged as state-acknowledged anti-racism in the
multiracial West, I argue that Korean multiculturalism emerged as a tech-
nology for governing the (immigrant) population. As I shall elaborate in
Chap. 2, Korean multiculturalism is not explicitly intended as anti-racist;
instead, the government adopted multiculturalism as a tool to implement
assimilation policies to deal with the increasing number of foreign resi-
dents and multiethnic Koreans. These policies in fact reinforced the racial
 1 INTRODUCTION  9

line between full-blooded Koreans and other ethnic Koreans. This dif-
ference between Korea’s neoliberal multiculturalism and that of Western
nations is significant because in Korea, the notion of monoraciality
or a one-blooded nation has been central to the imagery of it as a uni-
fied nation. Acknowledging that neoliberal multiculturalism produces a
racializing power in global context, this book looks at the particular form
this racializing power takes in Korean multiculturalism.

Why Study Racial Mixing in Korea?

The topic of racial mixing has long been an important theoretical and
empirical research area across multiple disciplines, although its devel-
opment was not always seamless. For instance, initial studies on racial
mixing in the early twentieth century were motivated by eugenics and
the scientific racism of the time, reinforcing the idea that racially mixed
people are inherently inferior. In the American context more specifically,
research on racial mixing had become a taboo due to society’s social and
historical conditions. Telles and Sue (2009) write, “The elimination of
the mulatto category after the 1920 U.S. Census, the end of large-scale
European immigration by the 1920s, the academic shift from biological
to cultural explanations of race, and the virtual nonexistence of black-
white marriages until the end of anti-miscegenation laws in 1967 all
seem to have led to a diminished interest in the topic of race mixture and
multiracialism” (132).
Even under these oppressive social conditions, however, mixed-race
figures have been used as literary and media metaphors in popular cul-
ture such as novels and films. For instance, early Hollywood films and
English/American literature represented the black and white biracial fig-
ure as a “tragic mulatto” or a “monster,” reflecting the negative cultural
connotation of being biracial (Beltrán and Fojas 2008; Courtney 2005;
Nakashima 1992; Spencer 2011). These representational metaphors have
functioned as a powerful (ideological) framework that shapes mixed-race
subjectivity. In the American context, racial regimes rooted in the history
of European colonialism and slavery such as the one-drop rule, anti-mis-
cegenation laws, and Jim Crow laws constructed blackness as a “prob-
lem” to be eliminated or overcome, making the mixed-race experience
tragic and pathological (Davis 1991; Spickard 1989).
It was only in the beginning of the 1990s that what we can now call
critical mixed-race studies scholarship began to be recognized in the
10  J.-H. Ahn

USA and the UK. A couple of important anthologies that contributed

to the development of mixed-race scholarship in the contemporary era
include Racially Mixed People in America (Root 1992), Rethinking
Mixed Race (Parker and Song 2001), and ‘Mixed Race’ Studies: A Reader
(Ifekwunigwe 2004). Indeed, the growth of scholarship in mixed-
race studies over recent decades is striking.2 The launch of the biennial
Critical Mixed Race Studies conference in 2010 and the establishment
of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies in 2011 especially illustrate
scholarship’s remarkable growth in the USA. Without doubt, this intel-
lectual movement reflects the growing multiracial population in the USA
and around the globe, a product of today’s global migration. The glo-
balization of mixed-race studies, thus, comes naturally as exemplified by
the recent publication of Global Mixed Race (King-O’Riain 2014).
Despite a vibrant scholarship on mixed-race studies in the West (par-
ticularly in the USA and the UK), the issue of mixed-raciality remains
understudied in East Asia because of the strong ideology of ethnoracial
homogeneity, especially in the context of postwar national independ-
ence. The framework used to examine the mixed-race experience in the
USA or other Western nations cannot simply be transported to interpret
mixed-raciality in East Asia (Iwabuchi 2014b). In the West, mixed-race is
primarily discussed in relation to histories of slavery and European colo-
nialism, and black-white interracial marriage is located at the heart of the
multiracial experience. East Asian countries have no direct experience
of slavery, though some countries experienced Western colonialism and
imperialism (e.g., US militant imperialism in South Korea and Japan after
World War II and Spanish and US colonialism in the Philippines), mak-
ing the issue of white supremacy still an important and relevant historical
factor in East Asia (Iwabuchi 2014b, 662). In addition, mixed-raciality
in the black and white nexus is inadequate to explain the current rapid
increase of international marriage in East Asia caused by the neoliberal
restructuring of international labor. These marriages are mostly among
Asian spouses of different ethnicities and nationalities and are not neces-
sarily interracial per se. Under Western racial categories, the children born
to inter-Asian marriages would not be seen as mixed-race but simply as
Asian; in Korea, they are categorized as mixed-blood, complicating the
mixed-race category. Thus, while Western scholarship can inform analy-
sis of the mixed-race category in East Asia, a new framework is needed
to understand the category in relation to this particular sociohistorical
context.
 1 INTRODUCTION  11

Studying Mixed-Race in East Asia: The Centrality

of Blood in Ethnoracial Homogeneity
In Asia as Method, Chen Kuan Hsing (2010) conceives of Asia as a tool
to deimperialize the Cold War imagery of Asia. According to Chen,
“using the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point, societies in
Asia can become each other’s points of reference so that the under-
standing of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt” (Chen
2010, 212). This practice of inter-Asian referencing is useful and mean-
ingful in that it leads scholars to a better understanding of the Asian
experience and provides a critical framework to reevaluate the legacy
of colonialism and imperialism in Asia. Resonating with Chen’s idea of
Asia as method, scholars of inter-Asian media/cultural studies such as
Chua Beng Huat and Iwabuchi Koichi analyze the transnational flow of
media and culture in East Asia using the frame of inter-Asian referenc-
ing to de-Westernize theories and practices (see Chua 2004; Chua and
Iwabuchi 2008; Iwabuchi 2004, 2013, 2014a). In particular, Iwabuchi
effectively demonstrates the usefulness of inter-Asian referencing as a
method:

By re-embracing deep-seated western inflections in a global scale, inspired

inter-Asian comparison and referencing aims to refreshingly elucidate and
theorise specific processes in which the experiences of Asian modernisa-
tions have been formulated, whereby knowledge production derived from
Asian experiences leads to the articulation of visions and values that are
translocally relevant for transmuting not just Asian societies, but also
European societies and the world as a whole. (Iwabuchi 2014a, 47)

Building upon Chen’s concept of Asia as method and Iwabuchi’s

method of inter-Asian referencing, I argue that exploring mixed-race
subject(ivity) in East Asia is one crucial program for understanding con-
temporary Asian experiences. I coin the term “mixed-race as method”
to highlight the usefulness of the mixed-race category as an analytical
framework that renews our understanding of racial hybridity in East Asia
where the notion of ethnoracial homogeneity based on blood tie still
remains strong and where colonial/imperial history and experience con-
tinuously reshapes contemporary racial hierarchy and imagination, taking
Korea as a demonstrative case. Hence, even though this book concerns a
contemporary racial project, it is important to study mixed-race subjects
in relation to a larger historical context.
12  J.-H. Ahn

Many Asian countries share similar historical circumstances for the

development of mixed-race as an issue, such as American militant impe-
rialism in the region during the war and postwar periods, allowing schol-
ars to observe the traces of these historical junctures in contemporary
society. As Höhn and Moon (2010) point out in their study of the US
military empire from World War II to the present in Germany, Korea,
and Japan, the Cold War imagination is deeply rooted in each of these
nation’s historical memory and everyday cultural practices.
Beyond American imperialism, Japanese colonialism complicates our
understanding of mixed-race and racial thinking in the contemporary
East Asian context. In the mid nineteenth century, the discourse of pan-
Asianism emerged in opposition to white Western imperialists seeking
to subjugate a single Asian (yellow) race (Shin 2006). Subsequently, the
notion of Japan as one race and as a colonizing force significantly shaped
the racial order in its former colonies such as Korea and Taiwan (Kim
2008; Shin 2006). Nadia Kim (2008) notes, “Korea as a colony had
been subject to Japan’s notion of itself as a homogenous, monoethnic
race/nation—one that was superior to the rest of Asia and the West—
in the period leading up to and during World War II” (24). As such,
Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) in Korea altered the shape of the
modern Korean nation and mediated Koreans’ racial categorization and
ethnic nationalism (Pai 2000; Shin 2006).
It is particularly important to understand why and how the idea
of single-ethnic nation in both Japan and Korea emerged as a power-
ful ideological tool to delineate the modern nation-state. The Japanese
term minzoku and the Korean term minjok each came from the Chinese
characters 民 (people) and 族 (group), which have long been used to
describe a nation and its people. While these terms are generally used for
“nation,” they can also refer to “race” or “ethnie” (Shin 2006, 4), com-
plicating the discourse on race and nation in Japan and Korea.
The Japanese term minzoku was first used in the late nineteenth cen-
tury to construct a unique Japaneseness that justified Japanese colonial-
ism in Asia while overturning the Western racial hierarchy that posited
white Westerners as superior to deny Japan’s subjugation to the West
(Kawai 2016, 106). In this context, the Western notion of race (jin-
shu in Japanese; injong in Korean; both based on Chinese characters 人
(human) 種 (species)) became less relevant. Instead, the notion of min-
zoku, which was rooted in a shared language, culture, and bloodline,
 1 INTRODUCTION  13

emerged as a primary mechanism of prewar Japanese national identity.

Furthermore, the ideology of Japan as a family nation (kazoku kokka)—
“comprised of Japanese family units tied in blood through and headed
by the emperor” (Kawai 2016, 106)—essentialized Japaneseness as (bio-
logically) transmitted through the patriarchal bloodline.
Similar to Japan, the notion of nation as blood family has long been
essential to constructing Korea as a racially homogenous country (Han
2007; Lee 2008; Lim 2009). The common idiomatic phrase “One
nation (people), one blood” (hanminjok hanpitjul) illustrates that in
Korea, the blood metaphor works as a mechanism to draw a boundary
of inclusion and exclusion around Koreanness. In other words, Korea’s
strong ethnic nationalism is grounded in articulations of (one) nation
with (one) race/ethnicity, widely conflating national belonging with
race/ethnicity.
A closer look at terminology referring to biracial people in Korea
makes it clear how blood ties have played a key role in shaping the
national/ethnic boundary. The direct translation of mixed-race in
Korean would be honjong (혼종),3 but instead, Koreans use the word
honhyŏl (혼혈), which directly translates to “mixed-blood.” Koreans’
preference for the term mixed-blood is significant, demonstrating that
blood ties, rather than race, are the primary boundary marker for imagin-
ing Korea as an ethnically homogenous country.4 As Sue-Je Gage (2014)
argues, “Koreanness is believed to be transferred in the blood, as long as
the blood is considered ‘pure’ Korean blood” (252). Based on this logic
of purity, mixed-blood(edness) used to signify a marker of total other-
ness, demonstrating that “full” Koreans are full-blooded and the mixed-
blooded are located outside of the imagined boundary of the (ethnic)
nation.

Mixed-Race as Method: Theorizing Mixed-Race in Korea

Historically, there are two predominant mixed-race groups in Korea:
“Amerasian” and “Kosian.” Those two categories are historically spe-
cific terms that indicate different racialization processes (see M. Lee
2008; Paik 2011; Seol 2007). According to Mary Lee (2008), “the
term Amerasian was coined by the writer Pearl Buck to denote persons
born to one American and one Asian parent following the intervention
of the U.S. military in the Asia-Pacific region after World War II” (81).
The term Amerasian thus calls up images of postwar American military
14  J.-H. Ahn

presence in Asia. The existence of Amerasians is a pan-Asian phenom-

enon, though specific use of the term may vary depending on the soci-
ety. In the Korean context, Amerasian generally refers to a mixed-race
person born to an American father and a Korean mother, symbolizing
the unequal racial relations between America and Korea following the
Korean War (1950-1953). The presence of the American military in
postwar Korea significantly shaped racial thinking in Korea and repro-
duced America’s white-over-black racial system (Kim 2008).
The term Kosian was coined in the late 1990s to describe children
born of unions between Koreans and other Asians, usually Korean men
and Southeast Asian women. In contemporary Korea, mixed-race chil-
dren are born to many different types of international unions, but
most non-Korean spouses are from Asia: China followed by Vietnam,
Philippines, Japan, and Cambodia. Except for America, which ranks
ninth, the top ten sending countries of foreign spouses are Asian coun-
tries (MGEF 2013, 30). Because the dominant form of international
marriage is between a Korean national and Asian spouse, the hegemonic
discourse on mixed-raciality today pertains to mixed-race children of
Asian descent.
Yet the term Kosian is problematic in that it denotes the presumed
superiority of Koreans over other Asians (Lee 2008). Due to this con-
notation, government ministries changed the term Kosian to Onnurian
(whole-world citizen), but this term has not been broadly taken up by
Korean society. Instead, “children of multicultural families” (tamunhwa
gajŏng janyŏ), a term first suggested by a civil organization in 2003 and
later adapted by the Ministry of Education as a policy term in 2006, is a
more popular replacement for Kosian. Although the term “children of
multicultural families” does not carry the same derogatory connotations
as Kosian, it is also a limited term. Because the term includes the word
“children,” it is not an appropriate term for mixed-race adults (Jeon,
Kim, Nam, and Park 2008, 14). This politics of naming is important
because it indicates that the category of mixed-race is continuously (re)
shaped and (re)defined over time, which points to its constructedness.
In this book, I approach the mixed-race issue not simply as part of
a postcolonial research program in East Asia but also as an analytical
framework—or what I call “mixed-race as method”—to explore how the
contemporary Korean racial project of neoliberal multiculturalism pro-
duces racialized discourses about various types of ethnic Koreans. My use
of mixed-race as method is strategic for four different reasons. First, my
 1 INTRODUCTION  15

choice of mixed-race as an analytical unit tactically links two mixed-race

categories—Amerasian and Kosian—to challenge Korea’s differentiated
positions on global cultural maps with different referents. It allows me to
trace changes in governmental regulatory techniques toward racial oth-
ers and changes in the cultural meaning of the mixed-race category over
time. Whereas the presence of Amerasians in Korea indicates US mili-
tant imperialism, the contemporary visibility of Kosians is related to the
increased inter-Asian migration and the turn to economic neoliberalism
that followed the economic crisis in 1997. Specifically, while Amerasians
symbolize Korea’s military subordination to the USA, Kosians symbol-
ize Korea’s economic superiority to near Asian countries. The terms
Amerasian and Kosian thus carry contrasting connotations that illustrate
the changed status of Korea in the global imagination.
Pairing postwar Amerasian with contemporary Kosian is also a break
from previous scholarship on racial politics in Korea, which tends to
focus exclusively on Amerasian identity in the context of American
militarism (Gage 2007; Kim 2007; Margo 1997). While those stud-
ies accurately point out that American imperialism in postwar Korea
reproduced a US-centric racial system, they pay little or no attention to
how the recent elevation of Korea’s economic and cultural status within
and beyond the region, accompanied by the rise of inter-Asian migra-
tion, complicates or renews the “imperial” racial lines. This book there-
fore examines how imperial/colonial racial lines intersect with the newly
emerging racializing power of neoliberal multiculturalism by pairing
mixed-race categories of Amerasian and Kosian. It specifically explores
how notions of Americanness and (Southeast) Asianness are imagined
through the racialized images/bodies of Amerasians and Kosians on
Korean television, which, in turn, significantly impacts the search for a
new national identity.
Second, my use of mixed-race as method retheorizes neoliberal mul-
ticulturalism by explicating how the blood apparatus activates neolib-
eral Korean subjectivities. Although the idea of nation as blood family
is certainly deeply rooted in Korea’s history, as Korea entered the global
cultural economy, many began to perceive the term “mixed-blood” as
politically incorrect because it connotes inferiority to the notion of
“pure-blood.” The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination recommended that the Korean government ban
the use of terms like “pure-blood” and “mixed-blood” in 2007.5 In a
continued effort to eliminate racist practices in public policy, in 2015,
16  J.-H. Ahn

the Ministry of Government Legislation announced that the term

“mixed-blooded child” (honhyŏla) will be replaced by “children of multi-
cultural families” in all legal documents.
Despite these efforts, the power of the blood apparatus persists along-
side the new multiculturalism discourse. To understand the crucial role
that blood ties still play in contemporary racial project, it is impor-
tant to address the multiple layers of usage of the Korean term honhyŏl
(“mixed-blood”). The term honhyŏl has been used to broadly refer to
people born of both interracial and international unions, conflating
mixed-race with mixed-blood.6 The mixed-race/blood boundary is com-
plicated by the fact that not all children of international marriages are
considered mixed-race/blood. For instance, a person born to a Korean
parent and an ethnically Korean-Chinese national (chosŏnjok), is less
likely to be considered of mixed-race/blood than a person born to a
Korean parent and a Vietnamese parent. In other words, because blood
ties and ethnic homogeneity are deeply integrated into people’s under-
standing of Korea as a nation, mixed-race/blood people are defined
as those whose parents are racially or ethnically different from Korean,
regardless of nationality (see Seol 2007, 129–131; Seol 2014, 287–288).
In addition, mixed-race/blood persons born to a Korean parent and a
Japanese or Chinese parent, are also less likely to be counted as mixed-
race/blood because of their physical appearance (skin color and other
morphology), which may be almost identical to other Koreans. As such,
racism toward multiethnic people in Korea is multifaceted, articulating
the blood metaphor with other (racial) markers such as skin color and
nationality (see Han 2016).7 Therefore, in this book, I investigate how
the blood apparatus has survived and how it has changed its modality
under contemporary neoliberal multiculturalism. In other words, a trans-
formed notion of blood persists even in the new discourse, not as a bio-
logical fact but as an animating force.
Third, I use the mixed-race category to explore dominant racial lines
in relation to other racial/ethnic groups. Instead of considering mixed-
race as a unified and static racial category, I view it as a flexible and
dynamic category that intersects with other racial/ethnic categories. In
other words, the mixed-race category provides a launching point into
a broader discussion of Korean racial project that includes other mul-
ticultural subjects. Among the various types of multicultural subjects
in contemporary Korea, the mixed-race category offers an interesting
perspective on the classification of racial/ethnic categories. Ethnically
 1 INTRODUCTION  17

Korean-Chinese nationals (chosŏnjok) and North Korean defectors

(puk’an it’alchumin) are othered because of their nationality, even
though it is commonly believed that they share the same Korean blood-
line (see Seol and Skrentny 2009 for hierarchical nationhood among eth-
nic return migrants). By contrast, migrant workers (iju nodongja), female
marriage migrants (yŏsŏng kyŏrhon iminja), and ethnic Chinese (hwagyo)
are considered racial others as non-Koreans in terms of both nationality
and race/ethnicity (or blood tie). Because they do not share the Korean
bloodline, they can become Korean citizens only through affiliation,
such as by marriage to a Korean spouse.
This differentiation between national and blood “others” lends
mixed-race people born in Korea a unique character. They are techni-
cally Koreans by both bloodline and nationality. Yet the presence of
other bloodlines and nationalities in their parentage makes them only
“half” Korean. They are considered almost Koreans, but not quite. In
this sense, mixed-race provides a crucial analytical framework to inter-
rogate how the concepts of nation(ality), race, blood tie, and citizen-
ship are constructed and contested. In short, not only does mixed-race
as method examine how mixed-race categories have been produced over
time, but it also demonstrates how they are linked to other racial catego-
rization in the society.
Finally, my use of mixed-race as an analytical framework speaks to schol-
ars of Korean studies while also contributing to a globalizing body of
mixed-race studies by advancing the discussion on global racial hierarchy
and by examining how racialized desire and discourse travels across regions
and countries. Even though my “cases” are drawn from the Korean con-
text, the very existence and social construction of mixed-race catego-
ries such as Amerasian and Kosian in Korea are already transnational, and
their images and media discourses are even more so. To fully capture the
dynamics of these moving pieces requires a global perspective and analysis.
Thus, this book attempts to globalize Korean studies while also engaging
the specificity of local contexts in debates on various topics such as Asian
multiculturalism and the politics of racial visibility in popular culture.

A Note on Terminology
Though the term mixed-blood retains some currency in Korea, I use
the term mixed-race (or biracial) instead throughout the book to speak
to a broader scholarship in critical race studies and mixed-race studies.
18  J.-H. Ahn

This does not mean that the book blindly applies a Western (American
in particular) definition or usage of mixed-race to Korea. Instead, my
use of mixed-race in this book is context-driven and connotes the spe-
cific discursive practice of honhyŏl in Korean society. As scholars have
showed how global migration changes people’s use of and perception of
race, thereby challenging a US-oriented discussion of racial experiences
(see Kim 2008; Roth 2012), the term mixed-race in this book should
be acknowledged as one whose boundary and meaning is continuously
being fought over and evolving.8 As Mahtani (2014) reminds us, the
term mixed-race cannot be pinned down to a single semantic defini-
tion. Rather, mixed-race “can be understood only by relating its shifting
meanings and contours to historically and geographically located pro-
cesses” (Mahtani 2014, 31).
Along the same lines, regarding the terms related to particular
mixed-race categories such as Amerasian and Kosian (or children of
multicultural families), I am aware that every racial term indicates its con-
structedness and contains its own problems of power imbalance. Despite
the problematics of each term, I continue to use the terms Amerasian and
Kosian to indicate distinct racialization processes that each term signifies.
In the case of Kosian specifically, because the term engendered a few dif-
ferent variations as I described above, I use the terms Kosian, children
of multicultural families, and mixed-race children with an Asian par-
ent interchangeably to refer to a particular group of mixed-race people
whose numbers are visibly increasing with the number of international
marriages (particularly with Asian spouses). Last but not the least, I
should also note that I occasionally use the terms “multicultural” and
“multiethnic” interchangeably as the Korean word tamunhwa literally
refers to “multiculture” while also connoting racialized multiethnic sub-
jectivities as exemplified by the use of the term “children of multicultural
families” that refers to mixed-race/blood children. Yet whenever needed,
I specifically use the Korean word tamunhwa to demonstrate the term’s
racializing power in the Korean context (see Chap. 5).

Politics of Racial Visibility in Contemporary

Korean Televisual Culture
Visual materials such as television shows, films, commercials, and maga-
zines are the primary popular media where general Koreans see different
races. Racial visibility is crucial in shaping racial lines because we read
 1 INTRODUCTION  19

people’s race based on their visual appearance and physical markers such
as skin color, hair type, bodily shape, and facial contour, even as we are
aware that an essentialist view of race is “false” and that race is socially
constructed. In studying Korean racial project, it is therefore important
to consider the politics of visibility because the spectacle of racial bod-
ies in these popular cultural forms provides the materials used to imag-
ine particular racial/ethnic groups. Through visual representations of
race, Koreans (un)consciously learn how “typical Koreans” look as an
unmarked category and to distinguish looks that are different. This prac-
tice of looking generates racialized discourses. The idiomatic question,
“Is s/he mixed?” is not necessarily designed to learn about the object’s
racial/ethnic background but to comment on his/her exotic appearance,
which (automatically) imagines mixed-race people as non-Korean. Along
the same line, when (Korean) celebrities’ racial/ethnic identity is ques-
tioned because of their subtly different looks, it is necessary for them to
assure the public that they are indeed “pure” Korean. The visual cultural
arena and its derived discourses are thus meaning-making sites where
cultural meanings of racial difference and Koreanness are continuously
shaped and negotiated.

Seeing Race in (Tele)Visual Culture

Critical race studies scholar Takezawa Yasuko (2011) argues that the
politics of (racial) visibility is important to considering race as a social
reality. She notes, “Though there is no biological validity to race, one
is still unable to ignore its social reality: race continues to play a central
role in various aspects of our daily lives” (Takezawa 2011, 1). In a simi-
lar vein, LeiLani Nishime (2014), in her book Undercover Asian, points
out audiences’ inability to read multiracial Asian-Americans in American
visual culture and problematizes the politics of visibility. She argues that
multiracial Asian-Americans seem to disappear in American visual culture
not only because the visual vocabulary is limited but also because audi-
ences are not taught to see them in popular culture (Nishime 2014, xv).
Nishime’s claim also resonates with Michele Elam’s question of “Why do
we see more people as mixed-race now?” (Elam 2011, 6; emphasis in
original). Put differently, we begin to recognize a certain group of peo-
ple as a racial category only after we recognize and name the subtle dif-
ferences that distinguish this group. We see Blacks, Whites, Asians, and
Latinos because we have practiced reading bodily differences among
20  J.-H. Ahn

those groups. This is why, in the case of multiracial figures whose bodily
markers disturb the existing system of racial understanding, people pose
the question of “what are you?” to locate the racial(ized) body within
their (own) cognitive map.
In Korea, where racial/ethnic purity has long been practiced through
various ideological forms and institutions, any feature that does not look
typically Korean, whether hair type or skin color, is immediately caught
by the eyes of most Koreans. An anecdote about a “skin-colored” (sal-
saek) crayon exemplifies how the visual vocabulary for talking race mat-
ters in shaping Koreanness. The term “skin-color” (or cuticolor) was
widely used among Koreans to describe a single color—the skin color
of general Koreans. This term and color together suggested that there
was only one skin color in Korea, reinforcing the idea of Korean racial
homogeneity. As a young child growing up in the 1980s, I never ques-
tioned why people called this particular color skin-color, and I only used
the skin-colored crayon to draw “humans.” However, as foreigners and
people of color became increasingly visible in Korean society in recent
decades, the term skin-color became problematic and considered dis-
criminatory because skin color is diverse and because the term discrimi-
nates against other racial/ethnic groups. Thus, in 2000, the same crayon
was given a more neutral name—peach color. This seemingly innocuous
anecdote illustrates how people practice racial thinking in their daily lives
and demonstrates that visibility, or the practice of seeing, is essential in
reading and thinking race (Fig. 1.1).
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, globalization facili-
tated the circulation of both media/cultural content and people across
the globe, and racial visibility in both popular culture and daily life
increased dramatically in Korea. Together with the state-led globali-
zation and neoliberal reformation that began in the late 1990s, the
Korean media/cultural industry was liberalized, leading to the industri-
alization and “internationalization of Korean culture” (Lee 2013, 188).
In particular, the global success of Korean media and popular culture,
also known as the “Korean Wave” (hallyu), resulted from Korea’s race
for soft power and brand nationalism in the era of neoliberal globaliza-
tion (Kim 2013b). As the commodification of cultural diversity and the
practice of cultural hybridization have become essential strategies of glo-
balization, the “face” of the contemporary Korean media has become
more diverse through the incorporation of formerly “non-Korean” cul-
tural elements. For instance, it is now common for K-Pop idol groups to
 1 INTRODUCTION  21

Fig. 1.1  A public service poster awarded the Best Advertisement Award at the
twentieth Korean Public Service Advertising Festival in 2001. It presents three
different colors of crayon (white on the left, peach in the middle, and black on
the right) and it says, “All are skin color” on the top. In doing so, the poster
aims to critique the use of term “skin color” to refer only to one particular color
(peach color, in this case).
22  J.-H. Ahn

recruit multinational trainees and for television shows and films to cast
multiethnic entertainers in various roles. As a result, Korean visual cul-
ture is marked by increasing multiethnic and multiracial representation.
More importantly, these new visual images provide rich repertoires, nar-
ratives, and references for practicing ways of seeing racial/ethnic others
on a daily basis.

Reading Televised Racial Moments

My reading of mixed-race figures and their racialized discourses as tel-
evised racial moments is resonant with what Lawrence Grossberg (2006,
2010) calls “conjunctural analysis.” He explains:

A conjuncture is a description of a social formation as fractured and con-

flictual, along multiple axes, planes and scales, constantly in search of tem-
porary balances or structural stabilities through a variety of practices and
processes of struggle and negotiation.…It is not a slice of time or a period
but a moment defined by an accumulation/condensation of contradic-
tions, a fusion of different currents or circumstances. (Grossberg 2006, 4;
emphasis added)

Conjunctural analysis reveals how different and sometimes contradictory

contexts and discourses are articulated and produce a (social) logic that
is salient at a particular moment in time. This idea of conjunctural analy-
sis is deeply inspired by Stuart Hall’s articulation theory. As a founding
scholar of British cultural studies, Hall (1995, 1996, 1997) challenged
an essentialist understanding of (cultural) identity. He explains that
“articulation is the form of the connection that can make a unity of two
different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not
necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time” (Grossberg
1996, 141). In other words, it is a logic or mechanism that links differ-
ent concepts without essentializing one particular element.
Books such as Policing the Crisis (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke,
and Robert 1978) and The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS 1982) best
demonstrate Hall and other British cultural studies scholars’ intellec-
tual collaboration and effort to better engage with the issues of race,
class, state, and media, providing an excellent model for what conjunc-
tural analysis looks like. Their key argument is that race relations were a
central aspect of the economic and social crisis in the 1970s in the UK
 1 INTRODUCTION  23

(Solomos, Findlay, Jones, and Gilroy 1982, 28). Specifically, the image
of “mugging” serves as a perfect articulator of the crisis in 1970s Britain
(Hall et al. 1978, viii). Mugging suddenly became a social problem in
1970s Britain because the media reported black youths mugging as a
moral panic, which defined blacks as criminals who threatened (white)
British national identity, as a way to overcome the crisis (Gilroy 1982;
Hall et al. 1978).
Even though the crisis in 1970s Britain was a complex articulation of
the worldwide economic crisis and the failure of state policy including
welfare system, the ruling class and the state managed the crisis through
policing a certain type of crime, mugging, as a symbol of moral panic. In
other words, the ruling class reproduced its hegemonic power through
policing and managing the crisis. The media were central to this pro-
cess of shaping, reproducing, and circulating dominant ideologies of
the time. By labeling the events as muggings and blaming black youth
as a primary cause of the moral panic, the media defined who should be
punished and magnified blacks’ responsibility. The media actively par-
ticipated in creating a hegemonic understanding of blacks as a social
problem. In the meantime, the rise of muggings and resistant youth
subculture in 1970s Britain also represented a crisis of state hegemony,
meaning the society did not function properly through social consen-
sus anymore. Rather, it was in need of a strong, authoritarian state as a
way to overcome the national crisis. This is why the state, media, police,
and court system all together overreacted to the black youth muggings
(Solomos et al. 1982). In short, the (black) British media/cultural
studies scholars’ attempts to intervene in the racism offers meaningful
insights into the development of conjunctural analysis, demonstrating
the formation of a certain type of racial/racist state in 1970s Britain.
In accordance with conjunctural analysis, I carefully examine four tel-
evised racial moments in contemporary Korean media culture to analyze
particular instances of neoliberal multiculturalism that articulate different
contexts and discourses at once to produce a hegemonic status quo and
to soothe the national anxiety over increasing immigration. Each racial
moment is an emblematic media event signaling different aspects of con-
temporary racial politics that perform a more complex discursive func-
tion than simply illustrating the social inclusion of diverse racial/ethnic
groups in Korean society. Instead, these moments function as conjunc-
tures where competing desires for a new Korea generate cultural mean-
ings. As LeiLani (2014) rightfully reminds us, multiracial representation
24  J.-H. Ahn

itself should not be the end of our analysis; instead, “the ultimate goal of
a critical multiracial analysis is to discover and undermine the hierarchical
and differential power structures naturalized through those representa-
tions” (88).
In the similar vein, many critical media/cultural studies scholars
argued that media/cultural analysis cannot be isolated in a single mode
of textual representation. Instead, it should consider complex dynamics
among various cultural modes such as production, circulation, and con-
sumption. In their canonic study of Sony’s Walkman as a cultural text,
Du Gay et al. (1997) introduced what they call a “circuit of culture.”
They argued that each of the five cultural modes in this circuit—repre-
sentation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation—is not sep-
arable from the others but rather interrelated and interconnected. It is
therefore important to look at the dynamics and flows among those sites
by applying a holistic analytical framework to the media/cultural texts.
This model has since been used in numerous studies and modified by
other scholars to better explain the circuit of cultural consumption and
production (see D’Acci 2004, 425–430).
I assent to the basic premise of the model that every cultural text
needs to be understood in relation to its production and to other cul-
tural modes. In this book, I take televisual representations of mixed-race
figures and their derivative media discourses as my primary analyti-
cal sources. I do not treat them as self-evident, isolated documents but
rather as key links in a cultural web of a meaning-making process. This
type of televisual moment approach is especially relevant to today’s
media landscape where the television contents and form(at)s have
become much more flexible and resilient than ever before due to the
changing nature of the media industry and the rise of new media tech-
nology, altogether fundamentally reshaping the boundaries of television
(Kackman 2010; Lotz 2007; Spigel and Olsson 2004; Turner and Tay
2009). The emergence and the development of Internet television such
as Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) and smart TV as well as online platforms
such as Netflix that now produce their own TV content, for instance,
clearly demonstrates the expansion of the traditional sense of TV on all
levels (Kackman 2010; Lotz 2007).
More importantly, as the television viewing experience has become
increasingly interactive due to technological developments and the
growing convergence culture (Jenkins 2006), audiences are engaging in
media discourse even more actively through multiple media platforms
 1 INTRODUCTION  25

(e.g., social networking sites and web portals) and using multiple tech-
nological devices (e.g., smartphones). Therefore, I look at how televisual
representations are received in other media outlet—including traditional
print media (newspapers and magazines), online forums, webzines, and
online news articles—by their corresponding readers to highlight the dis-
juncture between the production and consumption of media/cultural
texts as well as the interactivity of consumption in today’s new media
environment. In doing so, I offer a more vivid and nuanced analysis of
the televised racial moments.

Seeing Mixed Koreans

Taking a critical media/cultural studies approach, this book engages
with materials from archives, the popular press, policy documents, tel-
evision commercials, and television programs as an intertextual network
that actively negotiates and formulates a new racialized national identity
in the current formation of neoliberal multiculturalism. In doing so, the
book provides a rich analysis of the ongoing struggle over racial reconfig-
uration in Korean popular media, advancing an emerging scholarly dis-
cussion on race as a leading factor of social change in Korea.
Chapter 2 maps out the discursive practice of imagining contempo-
rary Korea as it shifts from a monoracial society and insular economy
to a multiethnic global neoliberal state. I describe how race and nation
are articulated together in the media to provide a sociohistorical context
for the formation of neoliberal multiculturalism. In particular, I describe
the social production of mixed-race subjectivities such as the Amerasian
and the children of multicultural families because changes in these sub-
jectivities indicate a broader shift in how the Korean state governs racial
others and determines who is included and excluded in the nation. The
rhetorical transformation from a monoracial Korea to a multiethnic
Korea indicates a cultural, discursive shift in citizens’ beliefs about and
desires for the Korean nation more than it does a demographic change
in the Korean population. The chapter strategically reads governmental
policy on the mixed-race population alongside media/cultural policy in
a historical context to underscore how mass media and popular culture
shaped particular images of Korea.
The empirical sections of the book are divided into two analytical parts
with two chapters each. While these chapters are carefully organized as
analytical pairs to animate the book’s larger claims through comparison
26  J.-H. Ahn

and contrast, each chapter is readable as a standalone chapter because

each presents a different televised racial moment. Part I I Am Proud to
Be a Korean: Amerasian Celebrity Culture examines the media treat-
ment of prominent Amerasian celebrities to show how the mainstream
media co-opted the multiculturalism discourse. Chapter 3 investigates
Hines Ward as a key mixed-race media figure. I read his visit to Korea as a
“media event” and examine how this event led to the discursive explosion
of multiculturalism in Korean society in 2006. Ward is a black Amerasian,
a group previously neglected and oppressed in Korea. Thus, I argue that
the discursive articulation between his Amerasian background and the
popular discussion of multiculturalism became the cultural site of a “mul-
ticultural battle” for Koreanness in relation to Korea’s racist past. I locate
this event within the historical transition from a discursively monoracial
Korea to a nation struggling to establish its global identity. The chapter
argues that the Korean commercial media’s celebration of Ward masked
Korea’s past racism toward Amerasians and provided Kosians with a suc-
cessful mixed-race role model. By analyzing the particular modes used by
the media to articulate his blackness, Koreanness, and Americanness as
well as his global success as a male sports celebrity, Chap. 3 argues that
the Korean media and state appropriated Ward to project the national
desire to be global and multicultural. Ward’s (half) Koreanness was
described in terms of blood ties, yet the metaphor of blood works as
a logic of both inclusion and exclusion for mixed-race people. That is,
one drop of Korean blood is enough to be Korean only so long as one
remains faithful to Korea’s emerging global image.
Chapter 4 discusses white Amerasian actor and celebrity Daniel
Henney, an interesting counterpoint to Ward’s case. Media discourse
around Henney is disconnected from Korea’s racist past and is instead
articulated with discourses of transnational mobility, cosmopolitan white-
ness, and beauty. I contextualize the popularity of white mixed-race
celebrities and foreign entertainers within the globalization of Korean
popular culture to argue that Korean media appropriate Henney’s white-
nessas a marker of global Koreanness. I consider the Henney moment as a
neoliberal project that reorients racial lines by transforming beauty norms
and masculinity in contemporary Korean popular culture. Through a
thorough analysis of his visual representation in fashion magazines, TV
commercials, and TV dramas, the chapter demonstrates that his whiteness
is not a mere marker of his race but also an index of other intersecting
categories, including (trans)nationality, beauty, gender, and class.
 1 INTRODUCTION  27

In comparison to and in dialog with the first part of the analysis, Part
II Performing the Multicultural Reality: Mixed-Race Children in Reality
TV examines visual representations of ordinary mixed-race children who
appeared in reality TV programs and emerged as symbolic multicultural
figures. Taking the reality TV genre as a site where Korea’s multicultural
reality is constructed, Part II studies how reality TV mediates the issues
of (neo) orientalism, ethnic nationalism, and Asianness in reality-docu-
mentary programs and on reality-entertainment TV shows.
Chapter 5 looks at how the state-sponsored public broadcasting net-
work, the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), frames statist multicul-
turalism to deal with the increasing number of multicultural families
and their mixed-race children. I also examine one of Korea’s representa-
tive human documentary programs, Love in Asia (which aired on KBS-
1TV), in relation to the mission of the public broadcasting system and
the evolution of the documentary genre. I read the program not as an
isolated media text but as a cultural text where social relations are con-
tinuously redefined and renegotiated. Under this reading, the show illus-
trates Korea’s multicultural reality by mobilizing everyday life stories and
representations of ordinary Kosians as well as their multicultural families
within the hybrid documentary genre. I show that Love in Asia (KBS-1
2005–2015) televises normative images of the multicultural family to
(re)produce this racial subject as an “economic citizen” who can con-
tribute to the national economy. By analyzing how the show mobilizes
two types of cultural metaphors—the Korean Obama and the cultural
bridge—I insist that the show uses mixed-race bodies to construct the
neoliberal multicultural state.
Chapter 6 examines visual representations of mixed-race children
in the tradition of the commercial entertainment genre of reality TV.
Locating ordinary biracial kids at the center of the discussion, the chap-
ter contextualizes the recent rise of the reality-observation genre in
Korean commercial television in relation to the globalization of the real-
ity TV format and the Korean media industry’s neoliberal turn. Within
this context, the genre uses mixed-race children to envision Korea’s
multiethnic future. I analyze two reality-observation programs that cast
ordinary mixed-race children, Real Kids Story: Rainbow Kindergarten
(reinbou yuch’iwŏn; tvN 2011) and Cackling Class in Vietnam (kkok-
kodaek kyosil; tvN 2013) as the televisual site where Korean audiences
learn to read racial differences. By critically analyzing what particular
types of racial mixing (and international marriage) become (in)visible in
28  J.-H. Ahn

television culture, I argue that both shows televise the neoliberal remak-
ing of the familial unit on a transnational scale. In doing so, I also dem-
onstrate how observational reality TV mediates biracial politics.
The conclusion summarizes the study’s findings, discusses its con-
tributions, and suggests directions for future research. I review the
argument that neoliberal multiculturalism is a national racial pro-
ject in contemporary Korean popular culture. I conclude that whereas
Amerasian celebrities are mobilized as spectacular media events that
articulate their racial otherness to shape (global) Koreanness and fulfill
national (cultural) pride, reality shows that elevate ordinary mixed-race
people treat multicultural subjects as docile citizens and stereotype them
as a monolithic group while downplaying their otherness to make them
less threatening. The chapter offers suggestions for future research link-
ing (online) media culture, the anti-multiculturalism movement, and rac-
ism within and beyond Korea and East Asia.

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 CHAPTER 2

The New Face of Korea

This chapter describes the hegemonic imagining of Korea at particular

points in the nation’s history to dismantle the long-standing myth that
Korea is a one-blooded nation. In different historical contexts, ideo-
logical apparatuses, including the state and media, mobilized particular
modes of discursive articulation of Korea’s national identity as either a
“monoracial Korea” or a “multiethnic, global Korea.” Though notions
of racial homogeneity and ethnic purity have been articulated and rein-
forced throughout the modern era to strengthen the modern nation-
state in Korea, the growth of the immigrant population and other newly
emerging populations of ethnic Koreans both within and outside Korea
challenges the validity of these ideas. Thus, the new terminologies refer-
ring to a “multicultural society” and “multicultural families” developed
to describe these recent changes indicate a shift in the discursive practice
of imagining Korea as a racially homogenous country.
In this chapter, I argue that the rhetorical transformation from a (pre-
sumed) monoracial Korea to a multiethnic Korea is as much a discur-
sive shift in people’s general understanding of what the Korean nation
should be as it is a demographic change in Korea’s racial/ethnic minority
population. As described in the Introduction, Korea’s demography has
dramatically changed in the past few decades to include multiple ethnic
groups and substantial foreign populations. Yet Korea’s shift toward mul-
ticulturalism is not a straightforward response to demographic change.

© The Author(s) 2018

J.-H. Ahn, Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism 35
in South Korean Media, East Asian Popular Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65774-5_2
36  J.-H. AHN

Instead, these statistics are mobilized in particular contexts to (re)imag-

ine a new multicultural Korea.
The dominant rhetoric produced by the media, academia, and gov-
ernment about Korea’s multiethnic transformation is rooted in a par-
ticular formation of neoliberal multiculturalism. In this chapter, I use a
“race-nation-media articulation” framework to problematize this rheto-
ric and to examine the sociohistorical context in which it is produced. I
argue that the shift in Korea’s imagined national identity from a mono-
racial Korea to a multicultural Korea cannot be fully captured without
understanding how social categories of race, nation, and media intersect.
This framework is especially useful to delineate changes and continui-
ties in the various forms of Korean (ethnic) nationalism that have shaped
Korean national identity throughout modern and contemporary Korean
history. Whereas previous scholarship in Korean studies focuses on the
articulation of either race and nation (e.g., explaining the history of eth-
nic nationalism; see Pai 2000; Shin 2006) or media and nation (e.g.,
arguing that media institutions are an engine for national development
and modernization; see Cho and Park 2011; Han 2011; Lim 2011), it
is only by examining the complex articulation of race, nation, and media
that we can clearly examine changes in the national imagery of Korea.
Instead of offering a linear historical account of ethnic nationalism in
Korea, this chapter works to make sense of the contemporary rhetorical
shift from a monoracial to a multicultural national imagery. Specifically,
I narrate this shift by examining the social production of different types
of mixed-race populations in Korea. I examine how the mixed-race cate-
gory has been defined and contested over time and how mixed-race peo-
ple have been treated by the state and represented in media in relation
to Korea’s changed status in the global cultural economy. By examining
the sociohistorical development of the race-nation-media articulation in
Korea with an emphasis on social production of the mixed-race category,
this chapter describes how the Korean national identity has been imag-
ined differently in contemporary Korea as globalization and multicultur-
alism have become increasingly prevalent.

(De)constructing the Myth of Monoracial Korea:

Amerasians and State Racism in Postwar Korea
Scholars have theorized the modern Western nation-state as fundamen-
tally racially configured (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Foucault 2003b;
Goldberg 2002; Omi and Winant 1994), but the formation of the modern
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  37

racial state in East Asia followed a different path. East Asian countries
experienced a different set of historical influences in the past two centuries,
including Western imperialism, Japanese colonialism, and American mili-
tarism. After Japanese colonialism, Korea experienced a series of national
crisis, including the division into two Koreas (1948) and the Korean War
(1950–1953). These national crisis ignited a national aspiration to build a
strong, modern nation-state and led to rigorous modernization and indus-
trialization. Ethnic nationalism played a critical role in all three of these
pivotal moments in Korean history (Chang 2008; Pirie 2008).

Social Production of Amerasians in Postwar Korea

After the Korean War, the issue of mixed-race/blood emerged as a
“social problem” for the first time in Korea (Durebang 2003). Though
a mixed-race population existed in Korea even before World War II
(Nam 2008), it had never before challenged the hegemonic notion of
ethnic purity. However, the Korean War produced a large number
of mixed-race children and wartime orphans who became highly vis-
ible in society. The postwar situation thus produced a particular type
of human—mixed-race people—whose difference was inscribed in their
blood and on their skin. The term Amerasian was first introduced in this
historical moment to describe the increasing mixed-race population in
Korea (Durebang 2003). According to previous research, the number of
Amerasians grew in the 1950s and 1960s because of the installation of
camp towns and the rise of the prostitution industry in the camp town
districts (Kim 2009, 39–40).
Under Rhee Sŭngman’s First Republic (1948–1960), the state worked
to conceal the existence of the mixed-race population and to minimize
any potential social problems they might cause. The government was
very positive about sending mixed-race children to the “father’s coun-
try,” America, to secure national ethnic purity. According to scholars of
transnational Korean adoption such as Eleana Kim (2010) and Kim Park
Nelson (2016), many biracial children were adopted by American par-
ents through humanitarian Christian-based American adoption agencies
during this period. The overseas adoption policy was backed not only
by the Korean government but also by the US government as President
Eisenhower amended US immigration law in 1957 to allow the adoption
of Amerasian children from Korea.
Rhee’s government also employed practices to maintain a monoracial
national identity. The Korean Nationality Act, enacted in 1948, defined
38  J.-H. AHN

patrilineal descent as the sole determinant of Korean citizenship. To

obtain citizenship, mixed-race children with a Korean mother had to be
adopted by their maternal family to be officially registered as a family
member. But this process was quite difficult; so many mixed-race chil-
dren remained unregistered. According to statistics from 1959, the total
number of mixed-race/blood children was 1,020; among them, only
325 were granted Korean nationality, marking the rest as non-national
(Kim 2009, 52). Unregistered children were unable to attend school,
but even among registered mixed-race children, few were able to fin-
ish their compulsory education for various reasons, including economic
poverty, a lack of parental support, or peer bullying and discrimination
(Durebang 2003). Given that the schooling system is the place where
modern subjectivity is produced and where the dominant ideology is
reproduced (Althusser 1971; Foucault 1977), mixed-race people who
were left out of school were deprived of the opportunity to become
modern subjects.
The Korean Nationality Act of 1948 was not only racialized but also
gendered in its enforcement of the Household Registration Law (hojuje)
that granted Korean nationality by patrilineal descent. The law enforced
the notion that a man was the only suitable head of a family, reproducing
a patriarchal social structure. As long as patrilineal registration remained
the sole source of citizenship, the Korean nation maintained its racial
purity through the masculine bloodline. Thus, many Amerasians in post-
war Korea remained fatherless not only physically but also legally. In
1980, Korean government policy changed to allow Korean mothers of
mixed-race children to register their children, but these women had to
leave the father’s column blank. This means that even when mixed-race
children were legally recognized as Korean, they were still stigmatized as
foreigners by their blank column under “father” (Durebang 2003, 20).
The social problem of Amerasians in postwar Korea illustrates a power
imbalance where Korea was subordinate to US economic and mili-
tary power. This power imbalance influenced media and literary repre-
sentations of Amerasians. Although Rhee’s government was attentive
to media and cultural policy (Park 2010, 71), mixed-race people as a
social issue were largely invisible in the Korean media during the post-
war period. This is because Korea’s media and broadcasting system was
not stabilized enough after the sociopolitical turmoil of the Korean War,
and such portrayals would contradict the authoritarian regime’s interest
in uniting the nation.
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  39

In an article describing representations of mixed-race people and the

myth of a monoracial Korea in modern Korean novels from the 1950s
through to the 1970s, Choi Kang-Min (2006) finds that the social prob-
lems Amerasians faced were rarely at the center of the narratives. Rather,
Amerasian themes served as a literary device to reveal the tragic sta-
tus of camp town prostitutes (Choi 2006, 289). He notes that in the
1950s, the mixed-race issue was briefly mentioned only to describe the
camp town landscape, and in the 1960s, it was only used metaphori-
cally to describe Korea’s inferior status to America (Choi 2006, 310).
Furthermore, novelists of this period frequently characterized mixed-race
people, whether white or black, as mentally challenged or mute, locat-
ing them as unspeakable subjects within Korean history. In this manner,
novelists of the time constructed mixed-race bodies as “the abnormal”
against which full-blood Koreans are read as “normal” in Foucault’s
(2003a) sense. Hence, the national literature remained largely silent on
issues pertaining to mixed-race people in postwar Korea, and it was only
after the 1970s that Korean novelists began to discuss Amerasians in
earnest.
In a similar vein, because postwar Korea was under the heavy politi-
cal and economic influence of America, the Korean government
restricted media representations of America. According to Koh Dong-
Yeon’s (2009) study of the representation of American GIs in postwar
Korean cinema, any journalistic reports that harmed the national rela-
tionship with allied nations were banned under the Press Act and the
National Security Act. Until the 1980s, negative visual representations of
American GIs were highly censored by state law because Korea’s national
security depended on the American army and because the postwar resto-
ration relied on economic aid from the USA (Koh 2009, 152–153).
The first film to represent prostitutes in the American military camp
towns in the Korean national cinema was the 1958 film The Flower in
Hell (chiok’wa). This film clearly illustrates the restriction of visual rep-
resentations of American GIs under the Press Act, which made it
impossible to critically portray the unequal relations between the US
military and female sex workers (Koh 2009). Even though the film
portrayed a Korean female prostitute character as a “fallen woman,”
as the film title suggests, it never directly related camp town prostitu-
tion to the American military invasion or referred to the problems of
date violence and rape by American GIs. Instead, only positive images
of American popular culture, such as dance parties and pop songs, were
40  J.-H. AHN

allowed on screen in The Flower in Hell (Koh 2009, 153–155). In addi-

tion, other films of the time showed few mixed-race people whose fathers
were American GIs because such figures would remind Koreans of US
postwar imperialism and complicate the power dynamics between the
two nation-states. In short, in the postwar period, the social produc-
tion of Amerasians was considered a national tragedy. Under the state
legal regime and in the broader society, mixed-race people experienced
physical and symbolic exclusion from the local community and from the
nation.

Regulating Amerasians During the Modernization Period

In the postwar period, many citizens felt deeply that the nation was
destroyed and must be rebuilt from scratch. In response, the postwar
Korean governments quickly launched restoration projects with the
imperative of national development and rapid modernization. To build
a strong national identity, the postwar Korean governments effectively
mobilized the myth of racial purity and superiority while identifying
“enemies” and eliminating them from the national imagery.
Many Korean television history scholars agree that regular Korean tel-
evision broadcasting started with the establishment of the state broadcast-
ing system, KBS, in December 1961 (Cho and Park 2011; Han 2011;
Lim 2004, 2011). Earlier that year, Park Chŏnghŭi (1961–1979) estab-
lished The Third Republic of Korea after a military coup d’état. To gain
political legitimacy following the coup, Park’s regime initiated a moderni-
zation project to boost the Korean economy and founded the Supreme
Council on Media Policy in 1962 (Lim 2004, 2007; Park 2010).
During Park Chŏnghŭi’s nearly two decades of dictatorship, the state
mobilized television to quickly modernize the nation (Lim 2004, 2007;
Park 2010). The Park regime’s effort to reform the nation is best exem-
plified by the nationwide development campaign called the New Village
Movement (saemaŭl untong) initiated in the early 1970s. Heavily influ-
enced by the Japanese postwar restoration campaign, the New Village
Movement was a total mobilization of the Korean nation toward national
development, with an emphasis on the traditional Korean ethics of fru-
gality and co-operation (Park 2010). To effectively mobilize the nation,
the government established a New Village Broadcasting Headquarters
(saemaŭl pangsong ponbu) in 1972 whose primary purpose was to pro-
duce broadcast programs related to the New Village Movement and
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  41

to circulate them in every city and rural village (Lim 2011, 120). The
government asserted strong statist control over this broadcasting system,
requiring all stations to air a 20-minute program from 8:00 p.m. to 8:20
p.m. each evening that aligned with statist social agendas, such as anti-
communism, national security, and youth guidance (KBA 1997, 511).
Through this initiative, Park installed a communication infrastructure
that could effectively govern and mobilize the whole nation.
Capitalizing on the popularity of daily dramas during the 1970s, the
state television network-produced “national historical dramas” (minjok
sagwan’gŭk) that renarrated national history through the daily drama
format featuring the life stories of Korean historical figures who over-
came hardships (Lim 2007). In (re)discovering and celebrating these
important national heroes, the state rewrote national history to highlight
Korea’s racial/ethnic purity (Choi 2006). At the same time, few for-
eign programs were imported during the 1970s because the Park regime
strictly prohibited “foreign-originating” (oerae) forces such as “vulgar
commercialism” as part of its efforts to construct a national culture and
spirit (Park 2010, 77). In this way, the broadcasting system under Park’s
dictatorship functioned as a powerful ideological state apparatus, to use
Althusser’s (1971) terminology, that shaped strong ethnic nationalism.
In the meantime, the statist media apparatus treated communists as
“outside enemies” who threatened national security, and marginalized
any domestic group that threatened the superiority of Korea’s national
identity. The National Security Acts identified communists as the greatest
threat to national identity and security and established mechanisms for
stigmatizing them, punishing them, and eliminating them from the pol-
ity. The KBS was instrumental in propagating the state’s anti-communist
ideology and in creating a strong sense of national belonging. Program-
wise, one of the most notable television genres of the 1960s was the
“purpose-driven genre” (mokchŏkkŭk), which incorporated anti-commu-
nist narratives into its plots. Specifically, the state television network-pro-
duced True Story Theatre (shirhwa kŭkchang; KBS 1964–1985) was one
of the most popular television programs running from the 1960s to the
1980s, featuring anti-communist themes.
The Park regime also considered the homeless, the disabled,
prostitutes, hippies, and mixed-race people as “internal enemies”
whose existence deviated from what most in society considered the
“social norm.” Park banned broadcasts portraying hippies in 1971,
and in 1975, three national television networks—KBS, TBS, and
42  J.-H. AHN

MBC—agreed to ban entertainers with long hair because they were

seen as symbolizing a rock-and-roll spirit and resistance to the govern-
ment. During this period, police also had the authority to cut men’s
hair in the street to control individual freedom (see KBA 1997, 514–
515). To fit the social norm, one had to be a useful, diligent, and dis-
ciplined citizen who fits the state’s modernization project of national
economic development. As Park Sang Mi (2010) describes, “Through
newspapers, television, fiction, photographs, and film, South Koreans
were inundated with a cultural campaign urging them to become useful
members of society” (82). Any group that did not fit an ideal model of
modern subjectivity was considered “useless” and largely marginalized
from Korean society.
Mixed-race people were one of these “useless” groups because they
threatened national racial harmony. After the Korean War, all Korean
males were required to serve in the military to preserve national secu-
rity during the state’s ongoing ceasefire with the North. However, Park
Chŏnghŭi’s government excluded mixed-race males from the draft and
from voluntary service in 1972 because their racial otherness could dis-
rupt the unity of the Korean army and cause internal conflict. This exclu-
sion clearly reflects the Park regime’s belief that mixed-race men were
unfit to contribute to building the modern nation-state. Until 2010,
mixed-race men were disallowed from service in the Korean army, even
those who officially registered with the state and claimed citizenship.
Their exclusion further illustrates the influence of the masculine nation-
state and the total exclusion of mixed-race people from the modern
national project. By preventing mixed-race males from serving as mem-
bers of the Korean nation, state law simultaneously emasculated these
men and reinforced monoracial ethnic nationalism.
Whereas Amerasians in the 1950s after the Korean War were seen as
a social problem caused by a tragic national history of war, Amerasians in
the Park regime were seen as an individual problem arising from Korean
women’s personal choice to enter interracial relationships with American
GIs as camp town prostitution became more industrialized and system-
atic (Durebang 2003, 13). Interracial sex has long been taboo in Korea,
placing a heavy social stigma on mixed-race children. Family members
were ashamed of their mixed-race relatives and tried to keep them secret
to avoid being shunned. Korean women who married American soldiers
were seen as “prostitutes” due to the social stigma attaching to female
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  43

sex workers in camp towns (Kim 1998). Specifically, Korean sex workers
in camp towns were referred to as “Western princesses” (yanggongju) or
“yanki whores” and stigmatized as “disease carriers” who would destroy
Korea’s “superior” ethnic purity through sexual contact with “others”
(Westerners) (Moon 1997; Moon 2010).
This gendered social imagination of interracial sex/marriage was
also linked to gendered national allegory. In the 1970s and 1980s, the
Korean government considered the mixed-race population as proof of
its failure to protect Korea as a “pure” nation from the foreign inva-
sion symbolized by the US military camps in the heart of Seoul (see
Lee 2008, 74). The flourishing prostitution industry for the US sol-
diers in particular was viewed as a symbolic site where Korean women’s
bodies were conquered and abused by foreign men (Moon 1998). By
marrying or having sex with “other men (other nations)” these women
were considered to have disregarded “our men (our nation),” harming
Korea’s masculine national pride (B. Park 2010). Furthermore, Koreans
saw racial mixing and interracial sex as “contagious” and believed that
ethnic purity had to be protected through communal efforts (Moon
1997), which isolated mixed-race people even more from society. As
such, because of the social surveillance of female sexuality in general
and of interracial sex in particular, Amerasians and their Korean moth-
ers faced severe social discrimination and isolation not only systematically
but also symbolically and emotionally.
Within this sociocultural context, it is not surprising that racial oth-
ers and Amerasian issues were not considered serious topics for popular
cultural forums, including television, film, and literature. However, one
crucial mechanism that brought “Amerasian faces” into Korean popu-
lar culture was the development of the Korean popular music industry
in camp town amusement districts. Since the 1950s, the US military’s
long-term presence in Korea turned the camp town amusement districts
into hubs for show business. The camp towns were populated with cafes,
bars, nightclubs, and brothels catering to American soldiers. Bars and
nightclub owners acted as entertainment managers booking acts for their
establishments, and these amusement districts were precursors to Korea’s
modern entertainment industry (Lee and Jung 2010). The most suc-
cessful and popular camp town entertainment district was Itaewon near
the eighth US Army in Yongsan district in Seoul. Scholars show that the
eighth US Army in particular was a key site where the infrastructure of
44  J.-H. AHN

the Korean popular music scene was established (Lee 2007; Lee and
Jung 2010). Many underground singers who got their start in Itaewon
eventually debuted on national television, including some mixed-race
entertainers.
As the American GIs were the primary customers in the camp town
entertainment district, the nightclub owners in the camp towns some-
times told Amerasian singers to (only) sing American songs to attract
American GIs (Choe 2006). The most successful Amerasian singers who
got their start in the Itaewon during the 1970s and 1980s were Park
Ilchun, a black mixed-race man, Insooni, a black mixed-race woman,
and Yun Suil, a white mixed-race man. Despite the harsh discrimination
against mixed-race people of the time, these mixed-race singers were able
to gain fame based at least in part on their exotic appearance. Insooni
was famously “discovered” by the renowned manager and producer
Han Paekhŭi as she performed as a part-time singer in a club in Itaewon
because Han was looking for a new and fresh “face” for Korea’s first
female band (Shin 2015).
Managers believed that “mixedness” produced popularity for sing-
ers like Insooni and Yun Suil, so much so that they persuaded the full-
blooded Korean singer Ham Chunga to pretend to be white mixed-race
to gain fame in the 1980s. Thus, even in an era where the discourse of
racial homogeneity was dominant, biraciality was consumed as a part of
popular culture. Yet biracial popularity was still the exception rather than
the rule, and it was not without backlash. Even widely popular mixed-
race singers faced a harsh social climate during the 1970s and 1980s.
Koreans protested about the on-air performances of black mixed-race
singers such as Insooni and Park Ilchun because of their dark skin color.
These entertainers were put in thick yellow makeup and had their curly
hair covered to mitigate Koreans’ repulsion toward black mixed-race
individuals (Shim 2006; Sung 2010).
Despite a handful of exceptional Amerasian entertainers, mixed-race
people were almost entirely excluded from the national imagery in post-
war Korea. The state enacted racism by treating Amerasians as homo sacer
(sacred life), which Agamben (1998) defines as “a life that cannot be sac-
rificed and yet may be killed” (82). In other words, they were human
beings but not political subjects, so their life or death was not secured
by the sovereign power. Because they were not considered (political)
citizens, mixed-race people in modern monoracial Korea were erased or
rejected by the state law and in the national history.
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  45

Making Sense of the Transformation into a

Multicultural Global Korea
Ethnic purity was the primary engine driving the ethnic nationalism of
the developmental state during the modernization period, but this dis-
course lost some of its force as neoliberal globalization changed the con-
temporary political landscape. Postwar Korea’s ethnic nationalism did
not disappear altogether; rather, it remodeled its politics into multicul-
turalism as Korea changed the way it imagines and presents itself in rela-
tion to the rest of the world.
The year 1987 is pivotal in Korean history. This is the year when the
democratization movement abolished consecutive militant authoritar-
ian regimes—Park Chŏnghŭi (1961–1979) and Chŏn Tuhwan (1980–
1988)—and brought significant changes to various sectors, including
the media and cultural industry. After the collapse of consecutive mili-
tant authoritarian regimes, Korea underwent political democratization,
economic liberalization, and cultural diversification. Korea also gained
global exposure during this period through media/sports events such
as the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Olympic Games, both held in
Seoul. The late 1980s and early 1990s therefore marked a transitional
moment for Korea when the nation first enjoyed economic development
and cultural amusement under a democratic regime.
Many studies show that economic development was a top priority
for the Korean nation during modernization as well as in the contem-
porary era (Chang et al. 2008; Cho 2008; Kim 2000; Lee 2012; Pirie
2008). State-driven developmentalism is at the core of Korea’s (mod-
ern) nationalism. The Kim Yŏngsam (1993–1998) administration was
the first to implement globalization (segyehwa) as a national policy and to
mobilize the globalization discourse to carve out space for Korea in the
global economy. In 1996, Korea joined the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD), but only a year later, Korea
experienced an economic crisis that placed it under the control of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF system fundamentally
restructured the national economy in line with global neoliberalism.
After the national economic crisis of 1997, Korea had to remodel
its developmental(ism) ethos by transforming the nation into a neolib-
eral state (Cho 2008). Succeeding Kim Yŏngsam administration’s glo-
balization policy, the subsequent four regimes from Kim Taechung
(1998–2003) to Park Kŭnhye (2013–2017),9 regardless of their political
46  J.-H. AHN

party affiliations, pursued globalization to different degrees as a way

to upgrade national image and advance the national economy (Kim
2015).10 As I shall elaborate, contemporary Korean multiculturalism as a
neoliberal racial project must be contextualized in this series of state poli-
cies/efforts to achieve a “global Korea.”
Throughout this history, the Korean media system has been a primary
ideological apparatus shaping the discursive and ideological construction of
Korea’s transition from a monoracial to a multicultural national identity.
Importantly, the media system also underwent a transition between the
postwar era and the contemporary period, changing from a strong statist
apparatus to an increasingly liberalized and commercialized one. During
the postwar modernization period, the government dominated the broad-
casting system and exercised its power to effectively govern the nation. The
state’s earnest passion for the modernization project led to the develop-
ment of a national culture and spirit that eliminated cultural diversity and
freedom of expression. In the modernizing Korea of the 1960s through to
the 1980s, the state-driven media system was an engine for developing a
single national identity through statist racism devoted to racial purity.
Starting in the late 1980s, however, the Korean media experienced
democratization, liberalization, and commercialization, which resulted in
the era of multichannel and multimedia outlets (Han 2011; Jin 2011;
KBS 2011). In accordance with this rapid social change, the Korean
nation struggled to search for a new Koreanness suitable to the era of
globalization. Television and popular culture are increasingly power-
ful sites that mediate people’s imagining and practicing of this new
Koreanness. Accordingly, the changed nature of the Korean media indus-
try has altered the ways in which global Korea is imagined.
A race-nation-media framework helps capture Korea’s transition into a
multicultural and global nation in the contemporary era just as it helped
explain the construction of Korea as one-blooded nation in the postwar
era. Specifically, I argue that the current version of Korean multicul-
turalism is a new national racial project that not only produces racial-
ized subjectivities (e.g., the children of multicultural families) but also
forges Korea’s transformation into a neoliberal state by mobilizing these
(newly produced) subjectivities. Along the same lines, I also view globali-
zation of Korean popular culture, as exemplified by the Korean Wave,
as a national cultural program to rebrand Korea as a center of cultural
imagination in Asia. My argument is that these two seemingly distinct
programs are actually intertwined, and a race-nation-media framework
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  47

reveals a much more complex map of state and market coordination in

both projects. Thus, my intention is to examine the conjunctures where
the state and market collude or collide to produce neoliberal multicul-
turalism by emphasizing the persistent role of media in articulating state
projects even under diffuse and indirect state control.

The Development of Korean Multiculturalism

Academic discussions of Asian multiculturalism are burgeoning due to an
increase in global migration (Chang 2000; Chua 1998; Kymlicka and He
2005; Lim 2009). Scholars point out that multiculturalism was adopted
in East Asian countries to envision a new national identity that is more
inclusive of ethnic minorities (Bélanger et al. 2010; Graburn et al. 2008;
Lee 2011; Wang 2004). In particular, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea have
long been conceived as among the most racially homogenous countries
in the world. Yet recent demographic changes in national ethnoscapes
initiated discussions of multiculturalism in these countries (see Iwabuchi
et al. 2016). Whereas multiculturalism emerged as an anti-racist dis-
course/practice/movement in the West, the emergence of (East) Asian
multiculturalism can be better characterized as a nation-building pro-
ject that is “a complex form of nationalism, aimed at securing national
boundaries in an increasingly borderless world” (Ang 2001, 16).
Korea is among these Asian nations that use multiculturalism as a
national project to manage racial/ethnic diversity. The multicultural-
ism discussion first emerged in the late 1990s as humanitarian civil
society built grassroots networks to assist in the social integration of
migrant workers. Yet it was only after the mid-2000s that the Korean
government officially used the term multiculturalism in relation to
national policy under the Noh Muhyŏn administration (2003–2008).
As an initial blueprint, the Noh government announced the Plan for
Promoting the Social Integration of Migrant Women, Biracial People,
and Immigrants in April 2006. The goal of the policy was to inte-
grate Korea’s increasing population of diverse ethnic groups including
Korean-Chinese, North Korean defectors, migrant workers, multicul-
tural families, and mixed-race people while also solving the national
(labor) crisis caused by the aging population and low birth rate. Simply
put, Korea adopted multiculturalism as a mechanism to deal with the
increasing population of ethnic others in Korean society through
integration.
48  J.-H. AHN

Ever since the government adopted the term multiculturalism in a

national policy document to describe its initiative to develop a “multicul-
tural society” (tamunhwa sahoe), the rapid rise of multiculturalism dis-
course occurred in multiple sectors including local governments, civic
organizations, media, and academia. With no doubt, multiculturalism dis-
cussions have never been monolithic in Korea. Instead, Korean multicul-
turalism should be understood as a complex interplay among various actors
(e.g., popular media, government, academia, and civil organizations) and
vectors (e.g., political orientation and sources of funding).11 Reaching well
beyond the state’s policy agenda, multiculturalism has become a mediated
discourse that is articulated through popular culture and public debate;
hence, it may be more accurate to say that there has been a discursive
explosion of multiculturalism in Korean society since the mid-2000s.
More specifically, the mainstream Korean press in the mid-to-late
2000s popularly proclaimed that “Korea is becoming a multicultural
society.” A look at all published national daily and economic Korean
newspaper articles in the database (Korea Integrated News Database
System (KINDS) reveals that the term “multicultural society” was
entirely absent until 2001 when I searched it through using the “title
only” function in the database. However, the number of newspaper arti-
cles that contained the term multicultural society either in the title of the
article or in the body increased from 93 in 2005 to 9,649 in 2010.
This media rhetoric was produced, framed, and marketed in particu-
lar ways. Statistical data indeed show that diverse ethnic populations
are growing in Korea, and numerous newspaper articles use these data
to describe Korea’s changing “face” as increasingly multiethnic. These
articles feature headlines such as “In the era of 1% foreign population”
(Seoul Newspaper, December 20, 2005), “One of every eight newly-wed
couples are international couples” (Hankook Ilbo, April 15, 2007), and
“One of every twenty newborn babies are mixed-race/blood” (Sekye
Ilbo, July 30, 2014). Thus, statistics have become almost idiomatic as a
way to describe Korea’s transition into a multicultural society.
This transitional rhetoric, and the government and media’s use of
statistics to characterize certain types of populations, follows a particu-
lar logic. The rhetorical shift from a monoracial Korea to a multieth-
nic Korea indicates the media’s construction of “multicultural reality”
as a “social fact” through the endless (re)production of statistical data
as evidence. Considering that rhetorical change is a discursive practice
that formulates a particular subject position (Foucault 1973), the media
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  49

discourse on multicultural society directs the normative standards and

attitudes toward a (soon to be) multicultural society. In other words,
the explosion of multiculturalism discourse shapes a particular image of
Korean society (that is global and multiethnic) and prescribes a racialized
and hierarchical system of subject positions for all citizens.
In addition, Korean multiculturalism discourse becomes a cultural/
political vehicle for renewing Korea’s position in the global hierarchy.
According to Nora Kim (2015), “multiculturalism in Korea is con-
structed as a means, indicator, and object of development” (729). In
other words, Korea’s national aspiration for global influence drives its
multiculturalism policy. To meet a “global standard,” Korea aspires to
achieve social awareness and advancement in global citizenship. Put dif-
ferently, being a world-class nation/citizen is not just about reaching a
certain level of national economic growth as indicated by tangible sta-
tistical data such as GNP/GDP but it is also about being equipped with
mature civic awareness and social responsibility. In the contemporary
global context, the previous discourse of Korean ethnic purity seems
outdated as the image of the “global citizen” is increasingly hybridized.
Instead of a source of pride, national ethnic purity becomes an obstacle
that must be “overcome” for Korea to become a “global” nation. In glo-
balist discourse, cultural diversity and tolerance through multiculturalism
are considered national virtues (Jun 2014; Kang 2014).
To consider multiculturalism as a renewed nation-building project in
the era of neoliberal globalization, it is particularly useful to examine the
content of government-initiated multicultural policies as they currently
shape dominant form of multiculturalism discourse in Korea. Since the
Noh administration first treated multiculturalism as a state policy, multi-
culturalism has been practiced in earnest by the two subsequent regimes
of Lee Myŏngpak and Park Kŭnhye. Indeed, multiculturalism was one of
the most high-profile governmental policies of both the Lee and Park
administrations in the midst of these regimes’ rigorous (economic) neo-
liberalization. In particular, two representative multicultural bills and
their related policies—the Act on the Treatment of Foreigners in Korea
(chaehan oegugin ch’ŏu gibonbŏp) and the Multicultural Family Support
Act (tamunhwa gajŏng jiwŏnbŏp)—were respectively enacted in 2007
and 2008 (see Table 2.1).
Drawing from these two policy documents and other related docu-
ments, Korean multiculturalism policy discourse is marked by two dis-
tinctive yet related characteristics,12 which together demonstrate why
Table 2.1  Outline of multicultural policies

Act on the Treatment of Foreigners in Korea Multicultural Family Support Act (2008)
(2007)
50  J.-H. AHN

Proposed policy based on the act • The First Basic Plan for Immigration • The First Basic Plan for Multicultural Family Policy
Policy (2008–2012) (2010–2012)
• The Second Basic Plan for Immigration • The Second Basic Plan for Multicultural Family
Policy (2013–2017) Policy (2013–2017)
Policy goals • To help foreigners in Korea adjust to • To improve the quality of life of members of multi-
Korean society and reach their full potential cultural families
• To create a society where Koreans and • To contribute to social integration by ensuring
foreigners in Korea understand and respect that members of multicultural families enjoy a stable
one another with the aims of contributing family life
to the development of Korea and social
integration
Main policy actions • Support economic stimulus and attract • Build a “Multicultural Family Support Policy”
human resources from overseas (openness) system of organizations
• Promote social integration that respects • Strengthen management of international marriage
shared Korean values (social integration) mediation and the system to verify foreigners before
• Prevent discrimination and respect cul- entry
tural diversity (human rights) • Strengthen support for the settlement and inde-
• Ensure a safe society for Koreans and pendence of marriage migrants
non-Koreans alike (public safety) • Create an environment to foster the healthy
• Promote co-prosperity with the interna- growth of children in multicultural families
tional community (cooperation) • Enhance society’s understanding of
multiculturalism
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  51

Korean multiculturalism policy is a sign of neoliberal reform of the

Korean nation-state. First, multiculturalism policy emerged as part of
an immigration policy to regulate increasing numbers of migrants and
multiethnic Koreans. It may seem odd at first that the conservative Lee
Myŏngpak and Park Kŭnhye administrations, which were primarily sup-
ported (and elected) by older voters supporting national economic
development, ardently embraced multiculturalism as a leading state pol-
icy. The primary values of multiculturalism—cultural rights and cultural
pluralism—are typically embraced by progressive parties, not conserva-
tives. But the Korean government did not embrace multiculturalism as
a political philosophy or moral ethic. Instead, multiculturalism was
introduced as an immigration policy to manage increasing numbers of
various types of immigrants whose presence was meant to benefit Korea
economically. Korea needed to import cheap labor from abroad due to
a labor shortage in the industrial sector, and the government initially
mobilized the multiculturalism agenda to fill this labor gap by recruiting
cheap, dispensable, temporary migrant workers (Kang 2014). One media
critic explains that the Saenuri Party—both Lee and Park administrations
were based—took the advantageous position in the election by appro-
priating immigrant issues including multiculturalism policy as a way to
reboost the national economy (Cho 2015).13 In other words, the con-
servative Saenuri Party supports the multiculturalism agenda because it is
beneficial to national economic growth.
The market-driven rationale for Korean multiculturalism policy
was informed by economic research. In particular, the Lee administra-
tion’s First Basic Plan for Immigration Policy (2008–2012) (che 1ch’a
oegugin chŏngch’aek kibon’gyehoek) was heavily informed by the Samsung
Economy Research Institute’s 2008 report “Ten Economic Trends in
Korea.” The Institute’s 2008 report described the potential national eco-
nomic benefits of increasing the number of migrant workers in Korea.
From the perspective of market-driven neoliberalism, the report sug-
gested that multicultural policy is profitable as a source of low-wage
migrant workers for corporations. As a part of immigration policy, mul-
ticulturalism is double-pronged, restricting the long-term residency of
low-skilled laborers while supporting the residency of high-skilled pro-
fessionals. More precisely, Korean multiculturalism policy functions as a
social mechanism on whom to include or exclude in terms of labor and
citizenship and how to (systematically) control their duration of resi-
dency in Korea.
52  J.-H. AHN

Second, Korean multiculturalism policy is a highly gendered policy of

assimilation.14 The government’s multicultural policies heavily focus
on female marriage migrants and multicultural families, marginaliz-
ing other types of racial/ethnic minorities (Ahn 2013; Han 2012; Kim
2011). Based on the Act on the Treatment of Foreigners in Korea, the
Korean government produced the first and the second Basic Plan for
Immigration Policy (see Table 2.1), which (re)defines the boundary of
lawful (migrant) workers. The current immigration policy does not allow
permanent residency for labor immigration; it only allows temporary
residency. Yet marriage migrants are allowed permanent residency along
with the acquisition of nationality. Through those policies, the nation
established a flexible labor policy that attracts high-skilled labor while
limiting the number of (il)legal migrants in low-skill jobs and encourag-
ing the immigration of woman marriage migrants from Asia.
Oh Kyung Seok (2007) argues that the government exercises a
“divide and rule policy” by treating different groups of migrants dif-
ferentially. Whereas low-skilled migrant workers are treated as tempo-
rary labor (thus not a target of assimilation), female marriage migrants
are treated as subjects of assimilation who will reproduce Korea’s future
laborers and undertake domestic care work for Korean men. In other
words, government multicultural policy supports the assimilation of
female marriage migrants and their (biracial) children because they offer
a solution to a number of national crisis: the aging population, the lack
of care workers, and the low birth rate. I have elsewhere argued that it
signals a broader shift in the Korean multiculturalism policy’s framework
from the perspective of “labor” to that of “family” and “welfare” (Ahn
2013).
Female marriage migrants receive favorable treatment in a particu-
lar form of multiculturalism that is tied to Korea’s patriarchal system
in which patrilineal kinship is prioritized over all other familial rela-
tions. Between 2001 and 2014, there were 418,920 international mar-
riages in Korea; nearly three-quarters of these were between a Korean
man and a foreign woman. This type of international marriage is pre-
ferred because it is less threating to patrilineal kinship. The enactment
of the Multicultural Family Support Act reflects this gendered policy
of assimilation toward female marriage migrants. According to the Act,
state and local governments shall provide information on living in Korea
and educational support for marriage migrants (Article 6); make efforts
to prevent domestic violence in multicultural families (Article 8); provide
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  53

health care support before and after childbirth (Article 9); and provide
childcare and education (Article 10). As these specific articles demon-
strate, the Multicultural Family Support Act primarily aims to integrate
female marriage migrants into Korean society, with a special focus on
these women’s participation in childbirth and childcare. In addition, the
Act required the establishment of Multicultural Family Support Centers
(Article 12) throughout the country in order to better support social
integration of multicultural families on a local, community level. These
centers provide classes on the Korean language, Korean culture, and
Korean manners as well as professional legal support.15
Because the current multiculturalism policy primarily targets only a
particular type of multicultural family—a family consisting of a Korean
husband, a female marriage migrant, and their children (Kim 2011)—it
has received significant criticism for marginalizing other types of mul-
ticultural families, such as unions between a Korean wife and a foreign
man, especially a foreign man from an economically less developed coun-
try. It is not a coincidence that the programs offered by the Multicultural
Family Support Centers target female marriage migrants and lack con-
tent targeting multicultural families with foreign husbands. A recent
webzine interview with Udaya Rai, a Nepalese labor activist who married
a Korean woman, vividly pictures how the state’s multiculturalism policy
has overlooked pairings like Rai’s (Koo 2015). Rai says in the interview:
“When a South Korean man marries a foreign woman, they receive sup-
port in the name of multiculturalism. But we [foreign men] are not like
that. We are not considered ‘multicultural.’” (Koo 2015). Rai’s assess-
ment is accurate in the sense that current Korean multiculturalism is
highly gendered and assimilative, reinforcing the patriarchal racial order
in Korea. All in all, the increase in multicultural families reconfigures the
racial order in Korean society, but it does not fundamentally challenge
the hegemonic familial relationship based in patriarchy, which (partially)
explains why current state-led multicultural policies promote assimilation
for female marriage migrants and their children.

Children of the Multicultural Family as a Sign

of Neoliberal Multicultural Korea
The neoliberal transformation is not just about projecting economic
rationality in the national economy. It also transforms individual life
style along with family relations and structure. The neoliberal transition
54  J.-H. AHN

brought changes in existing familial types as familial life has been thrown
to precarious status under the ever-changing flexible economic system.
More specifically, as the movement of capital and labor becomes more
and more flexible and mobile, the work/labor environment has been
transformed: a life-long economic stability for nuclear families (along
with health insurance and children’s educational tuition) which used to
be guaranteed for the workforce is not promised anymore and it is now
individuals themselves that have to manage economic instability.
Foucault’s analysis on neoliberalism is useful in this context as his
analysis offers insights on how neoliberal governmentality reforms the
ways in which we think of labor, capital, and individual freedom, all
of whose interaction produces a neoliberal subjectivity. In his analysis
of neoliberal governmentality, Foucault (2008) shifts the language of
Marx’s “labor power” to “human capital.” In particular, family, as a basic
unit of society, becomes the site where human capital is reproduced and
transmitted to the next generation. Foucault explains:

Economic factors are still and always at work here inasmuch as people with
high incomes are people who possess a high human capital, as is proven by
their high incomes. Their problem is not so much to transmit to their chil-
dren an inheritance in the classical sense of the term, as the transmission of
this other element, human capital, which also links the generation to each
other but in a completely different way. Their problem is the formation
and transmission of human capital which, as we have seen, implies the par-
ents having the time for educational care and so on. (Foucault 2008, 244)

Building upon Foucault, Susan Koshy (2013) furthers the discussion on

the formation of the neoliberal family. She explicates: “The neoliberal
understanding of human abilities as sources of potential income rede-
fines child-rearing by treating a broader range of activities of care and
cultivation, and not only educational and professional training, as poten-
tial ‘investments’ in the human capital of children” (Koshy 2013, 345).
She demonstrates that Asian-American families, as exemplified by Amy
Chua’s “Tiger mom” syndrome in 2011, emerged as a model neoliberal
family in the USA. As a new form of knowledge-migrant family, many
Asian-Americans (after the Immigration Act of 1965) have successfully
achieved high social status/positions by effectively transmitting and
reproducing the high human capitals to their children through educa-
tional investment.
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  55

In Korea, the economic crisis in the late 1990s and control by the
IMF significantly impacted familial life and produced a newer type of
“mobile and dispersed family” that revised the modern nuclear fam-
ily model. Because many fathers lost their jobs during the IMF period,
patriarchal power in the family was greatly weakened (Moon 2002).
Fathers became mobile labor, moving across the cities to earn money and
mothers had to work as part-timers or maids, which led to the forced
dismantling of family units, turning them into mobile and dispersed fam-
ilies. On the transnational scale, the emergence of the “wild goose fam-
ily” (kirŏgi gajok) in post-IMF Korea captures the neoliberal making of
the Korean family—particularly the (upper-)middle-class family—that is
comparable to Asian-American families in neoliberal America. The wild
goose family broadly refers to a family whose father stays and works in
Korea while other family members such as wife and children live abroad
to get their children educated in advanced and preferably English-
speaking countries such as the USA, Canada, and Australia in order
to acquire higher educational, cultural, and social capital. This newly
emerging, globally dispersed family is a neoliberal remaking of the famil-
ial unit in that they choose to send their children abroad to gain better
education and achieve higher linguistic capital in the hope of acquiring
stable, high-income jobs in their future (Cho 2008). In this sense, the
emergence of the wild goose family can be seen as a Korean (upper-)
middle-class family’s strategy to overcome national economic crisis
through reformulating familial relations so that they can more effectively
transmit human capital from generation to generation.
Whereas wild goose family is a global restructuring of the (upper-)
middle-class family whose racial/ethnic composition is unquestionably
homogenous in the post-IMF period, the neoliberal restructuring of
the familial unit today has taken place in even more transnational and
transracial scale through international/interracial marriage in this era of
global migration. The emergence of the new transnational and multira-
cial family complicates existing racial lines by transcending national and
racial boundaries in making the neoliberal family.
In particular, the rise of the multicultural family through contracted
marriage and mail-order brides lies at the opposite spectrum of the wild
goose family in that it demonstrates how the female body from the
developing nations is (transnationally) mobilized and (re)articulated
in the lower-class family’s family-making process in Korea (Cho 2008).
The neoliberal parenting practice that the upper-or middle-class family
56  J.-H. AHN

conducts is not a viable option for the lower-middle-class, multicultural

family because those families are mostly lacking in (already-accumulated)
social and human capital that they can utilize for their children. Yet this
does not mean that they are free from the neoliberal family transforma-
tion. Even though they may lack human capital, they also undertake sim-
ilar yet different types of neoliberal practices in order to fit in and survive
in the neoliberal Korea.
Because the number of multicultural families is rapidly growing, the
social integration of such families’ children on all levels including edu-
cation, family and social life, and career has become a primary agenda
in Korea’s global multicultural transformation. Under the current pol-
icy, all members of multicultural families, but especially female mar-
riage migrants and their mixed-race children, must relearn and readjust
their individual duties and familial relationships. To facilitate this, the
neoliberal government targets multiple aspects of multicultural fam-
ily life with precision. This is best illustrated by the Life Cycle-Based
Countermeasures for Enhancing the Support for Multicultural Family
(tamunhwagajok saengaejugibyŏl match’umhyŏng jiwŏn’ganghwa
daech’aek) policy proposed in 2008. The document lists specific action
points that multicultural families can follow throughout their familial
life, including pre-marriage/pre-immigration, the early family stage, the
childcare and settlement period, and the (self) empowerment period.
The life of the multicultural family, particularly that of female marriage
migrants and their children, is carefully “calculated” and “optimized” to
adapt to Korean society as a useful human resource (Ong 2006). Female
marriage migrants (mothers in multicultural families) are mobilized to
educate and raise their (biracial) children as Korea’s “future labor” that
embodies global (cultural) competence (Jun 2012).
Whereas the Amerasian was a symbol of a homo sacer (Agamben
1998), existing at the edge of the (symbolic and imaginative) national
boundary, the contemporary children of multicultural families represent
a different type of state racism by forging a particular form of (racial-
ized) subjectivity. In the current neoliberal multicultural era where
racial/ethnic diversity is treated as a source of economic profit, the
children of multicultural families are interpolated as “human capital”
that is of potential benefit to national interests (Lee 2012). Their mix-
edness is considered the embodiment of the national development that
connects Korea to other nation-states (see Chap. 5). In short, by locat-
ing multicultural families at the center of its policy documents, Korean
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  57

multiculturalism mobilizes female marriage migrants and the children of

multicultural families as useful citizens/laborers who can help transform
Korea into a neoliberal state, shaping a particular version of neoliberal
governmentality that updates and reinscribes racial lines in contemporary
Korea to align with Korea’s transformation into a neoliberal multicul-
tural society.

Globalizing Korean Media and Popular Culture

In accordance with the rapid social change, popular media and culture
have become more and more powerful and important forums that medi-
ate people’s imagining and practicing of Korea’s transformation into a
multicultural/multiethnic society. More specifically, the increasing num-
ber of multiethnic and multiracial representations in Korean television
provide rich repertoires, narratives, and references for creating racialized
discourses, leading to the rearrangement of the racial order in Korea.
Accordingly, the changed nature of the Korean media industry has
altered the ways in which the global Korea is imagined.
While the power of the state was absolutely critical in (re)structuring
the media system and shaping public opinion during almost thirty years
of military dictatorship in modern Korea, this power diminished after
1987 (though it never fully dissipated) due to the democratization
movement and economic liberalization. Because of these structural
changes, economic and technological factors—not just the state—have
influenced the cultural geography of the Korean media industry, such
as the rise of audience power, the expansion of the broadcasting market
both domestically and internationally, the development of communica-
tion/media technology, the growth of the advertising market, and the
economic reform after the crisis of 1997 (Kim 1996).
The Korean media is still not purely market-driven in the contempo-
rary era, but economic neoliberalism increased the commercialization
and globalization of the Korean media. This era witnessed the end of
many governmental restrictions not only on foreign investments but also
on media content. Korea was not the only Asian country to experience
this change; influenced by the Asian economic crisis of 1997, Taiwan
and Singapore also liberalized and commercialized their media industries
(Tay 2009). In addition to the advent of media liberalization, the 1990s
also ushered in the multichannel and multimedia era. The Korean gov-
ernment decided in 1989 to build a digitized, integrated cable television
58  J.-H. AHN

infrastructure that allowed for the adoption of cable TV in 1995 and

satellite TV in 1996 (Shim 2002). Other local and private broadcast-
ing networks flourished, and channels were diversified. This explosion
of television channels produced increasingly keen competition among
broadcasting networks (Lee and Joe 2000). Simply put, the trend of cul-
tural policy changed from preserving national/traditional culture in the
1960s–1970s to globalizing and commercializing Korean culture in the
1990s–2000s (Lee 2013).

The Korean Wave as a Neoliberal Project

It is not possible to fully figure Korea’s national aspiration toward an
“advanced society” (sŏnjin’guk) and “global leadership” without under-
standing Korea’s race for soft power in the twenty-first century. Like
many other countries as exemplified by “Cool Britannia” in the 1990s
and “Cool Japan” in the 2000s (see Iwabuchi 2002), Korea employed
the strategy of “nation-branding,” or making national culture marketable
as a brand image, to upgrade its national image on the global cultural
map. The Korean Wave precisely exemplifies this transformation of the
Korean media/cultural industry under neoliberal globalization. As the
Korean media industry was increasingly commercialized and deregulated
throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, Korean popular culture gained
popularity in other Asian countries and across the globe. Reversing the
unidirectional global flow from center to periphery (Hannerz 1997;
McMillin 2007; Thussu 2007), the Korean Wave involved inter-Asian
media/cultural circulation and regional consumption (Cho 2005; Cho
2011; Chua and Iwabuchi 2008; Huang 2009; Kim 2006). In its initial
stage, scholars discussed the success of the Korean Wave in terms of cul-
tural proximity within East Asia, and the phenomenon was considered
a sign of cultural regionalization. However, the success of the Korean
Wave later expanded to reach the USA, Western Europe, and the Middle
East, despite a language barrier and differences in cultural background
(Oh 2012).
Although the Korean Wave is primarily market-driven, its global suc-
cess would not have been possible without supportive state policies.
Under the Kim Taechung administration of the late 1990s, the govern-
ment first announced a Five-Year-Plan for Promoting the Broadcasting
Industry (1998–2002) (pangsong yŏngsang sanŏp chinhŭng 5kaenyŏn
’gyehoek); the program has since been renewed every five years. Each
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  59

Five-Year-Plan, regardless of whether it was implemented by a conserva-

tive regime or a democratic one, includes specific strategies for mobiliz-
ing broadcasting and visual content to promote the national image and
brand the nation. Established in 2003 under the Ministry of Culture and
Tourism, the Korea Foundation for International Culture Exchange, for
instance, has conducted various cultural festivals, organized academic
conferences, and published research and policy documents regarding the
Korean Wave to expand the global boundaries of Korean popular culture.
Scholars have argued that the Korean Wave is a national project that
uses the cultural industry to achieve the national aspiration for global
prominence (Cho 2005, 2011; Huang 2009; Kim 2006; Lee 2008,
2012; Shim 2006). More specifically, it is a postcolonial national pro-
ject that rearticulates the image of modern Korea in the postcolonial
and post-Cold War context, expressing Korea’s cultural sovereignty and
redefining/relocating the Korean nation on the global cultural map (see
Lee 2012). As a national media project, the Korean Wave changed how
Korea is imagined in the era of globalization, effectively transforming
Korea’s national image into that of a cool, modern, advanced society.
In the process, some Korean Wave stars—actors, musicians, and sport
celebrities—who gained regional or global popularity served as brand
ambassadors of Korea. As cultural diplomats, these celebrities were able
to accomplish more in foreign affairs than real politicians. For example,
because of its huge popularity with Japanese audiences, Winter Sonata
(KBS-2 2002) eased political tensions between Korea and Japan. Actor
Pae Yongchun, who played a male protagonist in Winter Sonata, was
able to elevate Korea’s national image internationally in a way that politi-
cal ambassadors never had before (Jung 2011; Mori 2008). Likewise, the
popularity of Korean drama relaxed political tension in the Middle East
when Korea sent troops to Iraq (Kim 2006, 53). Soft power propelled by
the national cultural industry shores up the nation’s hard power by mak-
ing the national image more appealing and welcoming.
The cultural boundary of the Korean Wave is currently expanding to
incorporate other East Asian forms of popular culture as well as Western
(particularly American) elements. In other words, the content of the
Korean Wave is becoming increasingly hybridized and globalized as pro-
ducers grow more keenly aware of global markets and global audiences
(Hong and Lee 2010; Jin 2016; Kim 2013). This global hybridization
renders Korean pop culture “odorless” (Iwabuchi 2002) and easily trans-
ferrable to other regions that share few cultural similarities. The robust
60  J.-H. AHN

success of the Korean Wave in the global market directly influenced the
rise of multinational, multiethnic casting in contemporary pop groups,
television drama, film, and reality TV to establish broad cultural appeal.

Coloring Korean TV
As Korean media and popular culture have globalized, contemporary
Korean television has become more racially and ethnically diverse, reflect-
ing the struggle for racial reconfiguration. During the early 1990s, tel-
evision networks began to produce programs featuring foreigners and
foreign countries, expanding Korean television beyond the boundaries of
Korea. For example, Go, Earth Explorers (tojŏn jigu t’amhŏmdae; KBS-2
1996–2005) explored the cultural eccentricities of countries around
the world. A follow-up program, Amazing Asia (nollaun Asia; KBS-2
2005–2007) described peculiar customs and mysteries throughout Asia.
Capturing a similar interest in foreigners, the program Exclamation
Mark! (nŭkkimp’yo!; MBC 2001–2004, 2004–2007) aired a segment
titled “Asia! Asia!” that told the stories of Asian immigrants and migrant
workers in Korea and accompanied them on trips to their home coun-
tries. These programs indirectly reflected the rise of inter-Asian migration.
Programs with an outward focus showing foreigners and cultures
abroad emerged in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, but programs
featuring different racial groups in Korea did not appear on television
screens until the mid-2000s. After the government adopted the term
multiculturalism as part of its immigration/assimilation policy, multicul-
tural TV programs proliferated. These programs incorporated the state’s
narrative of multiculturalism, and they achieved some popularity with
Korean audiences.
In 2005, a single-episode television drama—Bride from Hanoi (Hanoi
shinbu; SBS 2005)—was the first to deal with inter-Asian migration to
Korea, just at the time when multiculturalism began to be publicly dis-
cussed as a social agenda (see Ryu 2009). After seeing audiences’ positive
response to the show, Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS) aired a longer
version of a similar story in Golden Bride (hwanggŭm shinbu; SBS 2007).
These popular and successful dramas told the story of a romance between
a Vietnamese bride and a Korean man. Though both dramas featured
Vietnamese brides, Korean actresses played these female protagonists.
One might assume that this casting was based on nothing more than a
lack of Vietnamese actresses who speak Korean. Yet producers’ avoidance
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  61

of casting “real Vietnamese” in the leading role requires further attention

because it could signify their belief that a particular type of racial other is
undesirable for inclusion in a national television network drama.
By contrast, whites and white mixed-race individuals are cast in a
number of dramas. According to Ju Hye Yeon and Noh Kwang Woo’s
(2013) study of the visual representation of non-Korean characters
in Korean television drama between 2005 and 2012, white or white
biracials from either America or European countries were cast in lead-
ing and/or supporting roles whereas other ethnic characters, espe-
cially those from Southeast Asia, mostly appeared as extras and rarely
appeared even in supporting roles (345–346). In terms of characters’
occupation or class status, the white or white biracial characters work
in professional, high-paying jobs such as doctors or lawyers, portray-
ing this group as what Ju and Noh (2013) call an “adoration group.”
By contrast, the dramas presented Southeast Asians as underprivi-
leged, low-paid workers, constructing them as a “sympathy group.”
Strikingly, these dramas include no black (or black mixed-race) leading
characters, locating black as the least desirable and visible race in televi-
sion drama.
Though whites are popular in the entertainment genre, entertain-
ment shows tend to have more diverse casting. Talk shows, human doc-
umentary shows, reality shows, and survival audition programs actively
incorporate multiethnic members to illustrate Korea’s global relevance
and to maximize the shows’ appeal. To list a few emblematic multicul-
tural programs: Love in Asia (KBS1 2005–2015), A Chat with Beauties
(minyŏdŭrŭi suda; KBS-2 2006–2010 & KBS-1 2010), Now on My Way
to Meet You (ije mannarŏ kamnida; Channel A 2011–present), and Non-
Summit Meeting (pijŏngsang hoedam; JTBC 2014–present).
Entertainment shows featuring non-Korean cast members can be cate-
gorized into four sub-groups depending on the content of the show and
the ethnic makeup of the main cast members. First, one set of programs
tells the stories of ordinary female marriage migrants and portrays their
familial relationships with their husbands, mixed-race children, and/
or parents-in-law. Love in Asia is the most representative show of this
category, as are Nice to Meet You, In-Law (pan’gapsŭmnida sadon; SBS
2007–2009) and Mother In-Law and Daughter In-Law Story (tamunhwa
kopuyŏlchŏn; EBS 2013–present). These shows put an entertaining twist
on the reality-documentary format, and they aim to show the familial
relations and dynamics of multicultural families.
62  J.-H. AHN

Shows in the second category are commercial entertainment pro-

grams featuring (ordinary) foreigners living in Korea. A Chat with
Beauties and Non-Summit Meeting are two of the most successful shows
in this category. Taking a talk show format, A Chat with Beauties casts
16 “beauties” from around the globe who now work/study in Korea.
Each week, the 16 “beauties” discuss various topics regarding their lives
in Korea with a Korean guest star. Non-Summit Meeting follows simi-
lar format but with male cast members. The discussions on Non-Summit
Meeting address a wider range of topics, including foreign affairs and
sensitive social issues such as (global) terrorism, intergenerational con-
flict, the (global) economic recession, and job market competition. As
Iwabuchi (2010) astutely argues in his analysis of how a Japanese talk
show that primarily casts ordinary foreigners reinforces multinational-
ism to accomplish the national aspiration to be acknowledged as multi-
cultural and global, these Korean talk shows mobilize the “ordinariness”
and “globalness” of the foreigners and their comments on Korean soci-
ety in a highly gendered and commercial manner.
It is important to note that the first and the second category dem-
onstrate two contrasting streams of (gendered) global migration today.
The first group of shows focuses on female marriage migrants from the
Global South who undertake care-labor/service-labor in the Global
North in global labor circuits (see Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003).
In contrast, the second group signifies the stream of global migration
involving cosmopolitan, flexible citizens (from the Global North) who
work as professionals or pursue well-paid careers in Korea. For this rea-
son, previous studies have compared and contrasted representative shows
from each category—e.g., Love in Asia and A Chat with Beauties—to
examine how they differently visualize female migrants in Korean televi-
sion (see Kim et al. 2009).
Along with these two steams of global migration, a third category of
shows represents a migration trend unique to Korea by casting North
Korean defectors—a large group that has been growing in recent years
(for example, approximately 27,000 North Koreans live in South Korea
as of 2014). Featuring a similar format to A Chat with Beauties, the
show Now on My Way to Meet You casts female North Korean defectors
to talk about their lives in the North to foster understanding between
the two societies. Another show featuring North Korean defectors,
Love Between a South Korean Man and North Korean Woman (nam-
nam-puk-nyŏ; TV Chosun 2014–2017) is a reality show that tracks
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  63

the daily experiences of two South Korean male entertainers and two
North Korean defector females who are brought together in virtual
“marriages.”
Fourth, some broad entertainment shows that cast many ordinary
Koreans also include mixed-race figures. For example, some ordinary
mixed-race people participated on audition programs such as K-Pop
Star (SBS 2011–2017) and The Great Birth (widaehan t’ansaeng; MBC
2010–2013); some ordinary mixed-race people have also appeared
on human documentary shows such as Human Theatre (in’gan
kŭkchang; KBS-1 2000–present). It is worthwhile to note that Rainbow
Kindergarten (tvN 2011) and Cackling Class in Vietnam (tvN 2013) are
two commercial television shows whose main cast members are mixed-
race children living in Korea. Whereas Rainbow Kindergarten focused
on biracial children whose fathers mostly come from Western nations,
Cackling Class primarily casts the children of multicultural families whose
mothers are from Vietnam. These shows utilize the observational real-
ity format with the entertainment genre and demonstrate how differ-
ent types of racial mixing become visible in the realm of reality TV (see
Chap. 6). If mixed-race metaphors and media figures are easily co-opted
by the mainstream media as a marker of post-racial society in the West
(see Dawkins 2012; Elam 2011; Mahtani 2014; Squires 2014), mixed-
race discourse in Korea, especially in conjunction with multiculturalism,
serves as a marker of multiethnic, global Korea, presented as a national
asset for an open and multicultural society.
All four sub-categories of “multicultural TV programs” utilize a cast-
ing strategy best characterized as “niche-market casting” or “multiethnic
casting.” These shows rely on ethnic diversity as a major driving force.
The shows materialize ethnicity in a visible way, mobilizing visible dif-
ferences in costume, language, food, or appearance for the purpose of
increasing audience ratings. The existence of multicultural/multiethnic
TV programs demonstrates not only that ethnic diversity is profitable but
also that Korean society is required to promote social awareness of the
increasing population of multiethnic Koreans and foreigners.
In the era of neoliberal capitalism, culture is commodifiable, and
cultural diversity as well as racial/ethnic difference serve as (cultural)
resources to maximize profit. In considering the rise of (new) nation-
alism in Japanese cinema in relation to global capitalism, Ko Mika
(2010) uses the concept “cosmetic multiculturalism,” first intro-
duced by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, to demonstrate how multiculturalism
64  J.-H. AHN

is co-opted by mainstream films to reshape Japanese national identity.

Ko (2010) argues that multiculturalism is mobilized to reinforce (new)
Japanese nationalism in the era of globalization, though the cultural
site of cosmetic multiculturalism also provides a limited space for racial
others to resist and raise their voices. In other words, to (re)vitalize
nationalism, Japanese cinema utilizes visual representations of racial/
ethnic others (the oppressed) to make nationalism more politically cor-
rect while sustaining hegemonic ruling ideologies toward the racial
ethnic others. Similarly, the recent increase of multiethnic representa-
tion on Korean TV offers space, although limited, for us to rethink the
modality of Korean ethnic nationalism. Thus, what becomes important
is how nationalism reformulates its logic, articulating other competing
ideologies such as multiculturalism and neoliberalism through visual
representations.

Conclusion
The ideological construction of Korea as a racially homogenous nation
has been significantly challenged by domestic and international pressure
on Korea to reshape its national identity as a more open, diverse, and
global society. The rise of the multiculturalism discourse and media rep-
resentations of racial others on Korean television is a national project to
imagine Korea as a multicultural, global Korea under its current neolib-
eral social transformation. This rhetorical shift in imagining Korea from
a modern monoracial Korea to a multicultural, global Korea is used to
redefine the nation internally and to aggressively upgrade its national sta-
tus on the global cultural and economic map.
In this chapter, I examined the sociohistorical conditions of the (dis-
cursive) transformation from a modern monoracial Korea to a mul-
ticultural, global Korea using a race-nation-media framework. This
analysis showed that the Korean developmental state’s nationalist desire
for global prominence in the neoliberal era motivated the discourse of
cultural diversity, racial politics, and multiculturalism in Korea’s televisual
landscape. More specifically, I argued that as part of a (new) statist devel-
opmental impetus, Korean multiculturalism maintains the ethos of the
developmental state while remodeling it by appropriating racial/ethnic
diversity as a way to imagine a global Korea.
The discursive shift in Korea’s treatment of mixed-race groups includ-
ing Amerasians and Kosians (or the children of multicultural families)
 2  THE NEW FACE OF KOREA  65

illuminates historical changes in state racism as the nation transitioned

from a modern monoracial Korea to the contemporary multicultural,
global Korea. In postwar Korea, Amerasians symbolized state racism in a
discourse that excluded racial others from the national imagery to main-
tain racial purity. This discourse was articulated by militant authoritarian
regimes that were allied with a strong statist media complex. In the con-
temporary period, the children of multicultural families (with an Asian
migrant foreign parent) emerged as part of the neoliberal restructuring
of the labor system to attract a low-wage labor force. These children have
been embraced by contemporary governmental policies on multicultur-
alism, bringing racial issues to the forefront of contemporary Korean
discourse.
The social meanings and boundaries of both the Amerasians and
children of multicultural families are always contested and reshaped in
conversation with the dominant society’s norms. Whereas Amerasians
reminded Koreans of the legacy of US imperialism, the newly formulated
category of children of multicultural families illustrates a different raciali-
zation that calls into question the meaning of Asianness (specifically,
Southeast Asianness). Put differently, contemporary mixed-race discourse
is a discursive space where the notions of Asianness and Koreanness are
contested in a transnational context, producing hierarchical racial lines.
Just as Amerasians in postwar Korea were central to the modern state
formation of monoracial Korea, discourse around mixed-race children
(especially those with one Korean parent and one parent from another
Asian country) in contemporary Korea is the cultural arena for configur-
ing Korea’s transition into a neoliberal global state.
Acknowledging that the historical memories and ruptures inscribed
into the (racialized) body of mixed-race figures are crucial to under-
standing the current national reshaping of racial order, it becomes
important to look at how the cultural meaning of biraciality is reartic-
ulated and reimagined in a contemporary Korean media landscape. We
see more mixed-race representation in the media today, yet even in this
context, some types of racial mixing are more or less visible than others.
This chapter argued that mixed-race visibility and mixed-race discourse
should be linked to a larger map of state policy and media practice. The
remainder of the book will explore which specific historical memories of
mixed-race are highlighted or obscured and for what purpose, and it will
locate the televisual genres and grammars that produce the biracial dis-
course. The following four chapters investigate particular televised racial
66  J.-H. AHN

moments, complicating our understanding of the current racialization

process under the national racial project of neoliberal multiculturalism.

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Daily, March 9. Retrieved from http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/
article/article.aspx?aid=2917530.
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Reregulation and Market Forces in the Post-Broadcast Era. In Television
Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era, ed.
Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, 105–114. London, New York: Routledge.
Thussu, Daya Kishan (ed.). 2007. Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-
Flow. London, New York: Routledge.
Wang, Li-jung. 2004. Multiculturalism in Taiwan. International Journal of
Cultural Policy 10 (3): 301–318.
 PART I

“I Am Proud to Be a Korean”:
Amerasian Celebrity Culture
 CHAPTER 3

From National Threat to National Hero

I’m proud to be a Korean. That’s something when as a little kid I was ashamed of. I
had to overcome a lot, being teased a lot by American kids about me being 50 percent
Korean, being 50 percent African American.
(Hines Ward16).

On April 3, 2006, the Seoul-Incheon International Airport was crowded

with Korean fans to welcome American Super Bowl hero Hines Ward
and his Korean mother, Kim Yŏnghŭi. Born in Korea to an African
American GI and a Korean mother, Hines Ward migrated to the USA
at the age of one with his mother because of severe social discrimination
against mixed-race people in Korea in the 1970s. Ward grew up in the
USA and eventually became a successful player in the National Football
League (1998–2012). He was named Most Valuable Player (MVP) in
February of 2006, the year his team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, won the
Super Bowl. The Korean media widely reported his MVP award. When
Ward and his mother visited Korea for the first time to explore his roots
two months later in April 2006, they were wholeheartedly welcomed
by Korean society, turning his glorious “homecoming” into a national
media event.
During their brief, ten-day visit to Korea, Korean national television
news programs and the Korean press avidly followed their every move
as Ward and his mother were treated as national guests. President Roh

© The Author(s) 2018

J.-H. Ahn, Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism 75
in South Korean Media, East Asian Popular Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65774-5_3
76  J.-H. Ahn

Muhyŏn invited Ward and his mother to the Blue House (the President’s
official residence and executive office) for a luncheon to reward his
hard work and achievement. The Korean press reported the President’s
conversation with Ward in great detail (Kim 2006). The President
highlighted Ward’s world-class success as a black biracial Korean and
said, “Korea should take an action to build the society where mixed-
race/blood people can be successful” (Kim 2006). President Roh then
charged governmental officers with drafting a grand plan for a multicul-
tural society. In addition to this meeting with the President, Ward was
granted honorary Seoul citizenship by then-Mayor Lee Myŏngpak.17
The Korean media’s representation of a black mixed-race Korean as a
national hero represented a radical shift in media practice and racial poli-
tics in popular culture. No black body had been exalted like Ward’s in
the entire history of Korean television. As a Blasian (mixed-race Asian
African American) sport celebrity, the Korean commercial media glam-
orized and commercialized Ward’s black body in a different way from
those of previous black mixed-race celebrities and from contempo-
rary white mixed-race entertainers. This chapter analyzes the Korean
media’s sensational approach to Hines Ward’s homecoming in 2006
as a symbolic media event, signaling one particular aspect of neoliberal
multiculturalism that redefines Korean(ness) in the era of neoliberal
globalization.

The Hines Ward Moment

To get at the heart of the struggle for national identity and the issue of
racial politics in the contemporary Korean televisual landscape, we must
first turn to the sensational media event of Hines Ward’s 2006 visit.
Dayan and Katz (1992) use the term “media event” to describe events
that are carefully calculated, scripted, and celebrated by the media to
unite a society. The live broadcasting of historical events such as Princess
Diana’s funeral produces visual spectacles for general audiences to share
collective memories. Following Dayan and Katz, I suggest that Hines
Ward’s trip to Korea is one such event produced by the complex of the
Korean media, state, and citizens. Hines Ward’s MVP award and subse-
quent trip to Korea were considered so newsworthy by the Korean media
that his appearances and statements were broadcast live, interrupting
regular broadcasting or reportage (Dayan and Katz 1992, 5).
 3  FROM NATIONAL THREAT TO NATIONAL HERO  77

Hines Ward garnered media attention in February 2006 when he was

named MVP, and interest in Ward remained high through April of that
year, when he visited Korea. Over the course of those three months,
123 newspaper articles appeared with “Hines Ward” in the title, and
540 articles contained his name either in the title or body.18 This vol-
ume of articles is especially significant when we compare it to the num-
ber of newspaper articles about Hines Ward in the three months before
he received the award. From November 2005 to January 2006, there
were only five articles with “Hines Ward” in the title, and only twenty
articles contained the words “Hines Ward” in either the title or body.
These numbers clearly illustrate the media’s close attention to Ward’s
“return” to Korea and the extent to which the Hines Ward moment
was discussed at a national scale. In addition to an approximately twenty-
fold numerical increase in published news articles on Hines Ward, news
coverage of Hines Ward deepened in February to April 2006, covering
not only his career but also topics related to mixed-raciality and racism in
Korea.
Echoing the fever-pitch of newspaper coverage of Hines Ward, televi-
sion screens repeatedly projected and (re)produced an image of him as a
football star and appropriated it in a way to demonstrate the idea that he
was making a glorious return to Korea. Television shows described his
personal history and his success as a black mixed-race individual in the
USA, and visual images of Ward emphasized his blackness as a marker of
racial otherness as well as a new Koreanness. The Hines Ward moment
was the first time Korean television represented a black body with honor
and respect, both constituting and reflecting a racial reconfiguration in
the Korean televisual landscape.
On April 3, 2006, the day of Ward’s arrival, all three national televi-
sion networks’ news programs broadcast segments over ten minutes in
length featuring his NFL success, and his visit to Korea with his mother
was treated as headline news. According to media critics (Jeong 2006),
Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) was the most ardent follower
of Hines Ward news; within a single one-hour daily news program, MBC
aired six stories related to his trip to Korea. MBC also broadcast a televi-
sion talk show called Together with Super Bowl Hero Hines Ward on April 8
to boost the station’s ratings. To call attention to biracial issues in Korea,
other networks aired similar television documentaries and talk shows based
around Hines Ward. KBS Channel 1 (KBS-1) allocated a one-hour time
slot for the Hines Ward documentary, Hines Ward and His Korean Mother
78  J.-H. Ahn

Take Over the Super Bowl after he was nominated as the Super Bowl MVP;
the network also rebroadcast a previously aired documentary from 1998
called Korean Mother and Black Son Hines Ward. This unusual program-
ming by the national networks clearly demonstrates that Hines Ward’s
MVP award and trip to Korea constituted a significant media event.
Fans and news reporters crowded every stop on Ward’s homecoming
trip. Korean media televised his visit to hospital where he was born, his
visit to the Korean Folklore Village where he experienced Korean tra-
ditional culture with his mother, and his meeting with biracial children
arranged by the Pearl S. Buck International Foundation. This final meet-
ing inspired Ward to establish the “Hines Ward Helping Hands Korea
Foundation” in 2007 to support biracial children in Korea. Ward also
appeared on television talk shows and commercials, both of which were
produced as televised national spectacles for domestic audiences. In addi-
tion, the Korean media commercialized his image and—by referenc-
ing his global success—made his blackness desirable and marketable.
According to a newspaper article titled “On Hines Ward’s First Night
Home—Service Comparable to a National Guest Attracted Attention”
(Park 2006), every product that Ward used, wore, or ate was promoted
or funded by Korean corporations. Because his trip attracted so much
media attention, advertising sponsors were eager to use him, to use the
words of one journalist, as a “walking billboard” (Kim 2006).
The media discourse regarding Hines Ward opened up public dis-
cussion on the issues of migrant workers’ and mixed-race individuals’
human rights, topics rarely discussed publicly or considered appropri-
ate subjects of governmental policy prior to this event. During and after
Ward’s visit, hundreds of newspaper articles used Ward’s celebrity to
question the long-standing myth of Korea’s monoraciality and to crit-
icize racism toward racial others including mixed-race people. In turn,
these articles contributed to the development of national/governmental
policies on mixed-race people and multiculturalism.
The state responded by embracing Ward’s image as a mixed-race media
figure and embracing a particular vision of multicultural Korea. As a con-
sequence of Ward’s celebrity, in 2006, the Korean government announced
the Plan for Promoting the Social Integration of Mixed-Race and
Immigrants. This policy document included a section on how to utilize
media/television to improve social awareness of Korea’s multiculturalism.
In a section titled “Improving Social Awareness on Mixed-Race People,”
the document specifically refers to the Korean media’s use of Hines Ward
 3  FROM NATIONAL THREAT TO NATIONAL HERO  79

as an exemplary case to reconcile social conflicts and improve social inte-

gration (Presidential Committee on Social Inclusion 2006, 14–15). It
reports: “It is necessary to sustain public concern on multiculturalism
heightened by Hines Ward’s Super Bowl MVP win and his visit to Korea
and to use the Hines Ward case as a turning point to improve national
awareness.” Accordingly, the Plan proposed a few actionable items to cre-
ate multicultural awareness mobilizing mass media (see Table 3.1).
The proposal clearly shows how Korean media and the government
appropriated Ward’s case to remake the national narrative of a multicul-
tural society. Media discourse regarding Ward reiterated the contempo-
rary social agenda of multiculturalism, claiming his popularity as evidence
that “Korea is now becoming a multicultural society” (Lim 2009).
Given the significance of Hines Ward’s Korea visit, it is understand-
able that Korean media and scholars labeled the case “the Hines Ward
symptom” (Lee 2008) and “the Hines Ward syndrome” (Jun and Lee
2012; Lim 2009). Although I agree with the connotations of these
expressions, I prefer the term “the Hines Ward moment.” Whereas
the term symptom or syndrome emphasizes its superficial (sensational)

Table 3.1  A section on media in “A Plan for promoting the social integration

of mixed-race and immigrants” (2006)

A Proposal for Intensive Multicultural PR

1. Hosting Presidential and ministerial events (April-May)
• Greeting Hines Ward and his mother (April 4) and visiting the Filipino community’s
weekend market (April)
• Visiting mixed-race related events (May)
• Hosting Andre Kim’s charity fashion show (June)
2. Broadcasting special programs and reports and releasing newspaper feature articles
(May to present)
• K-TV The Power to Change the World, the Blue Government; Youth debate (May 1)
• KBS-1TV: Love in Asia (May-June); four consecutive series on multicultural society
• MBC-Radio: Utilizing The Radio Era is Now (May)
• Publishing feature articles on mixed-race people and [Korea’s] multicultural society
(April-June)
3. Releasing public campaigns and promotional materials | Appointing an honorary
ambassador (June to present)
• Publishing public campaign and promotional materials with the themes of discrimina-
tion against mixed-race people and [Korea’s] multicultural, open society
• Appointing famous celebrities as ‘multicultural honorary ambassadors’
80  J.-H. Ahn

implications, the term moment puts more emphasis on the conditions

that the event created for Korean society. Going one step further, it is
the moment of articulation, led by the Korean media and government
that needs to be analyzed to deeply understand the significance of the
Hines Ward fever for Korean society. While the Hines Ward moment
created a discursive space for the unspeakable matters of mixed-race and
race relations in Korea, it is not Hines Ward the individual who created
this moment. The change in Korean policy occurred not due to the pres-
ence of a specific individual but rather as a matter of discourse system-
atically articulated through a certain social logic that (re)structured social
relations (see Hall 2011; Holmes and Redmond 2006; Marshall 1997).
The “conglomerate interests” informing Ward’s “iconography” (Perez
2005, 224) transformed his figure into a “signifier” of a new face of
Korea as global and multicultural. The media appropriated his multiple
dimensions of race, gender, and class as well as his personal biography to
construct the particular media event that I call the Hines Ward moment.
The moment in which the Korean media represented Hines Ward,
a black mixed-race Korean, as a national hero was a monumental one
not only in terms of media practice but also in terms of racial politics
in broader context. Hines Ward became an emblematic media/cultural
figure in 2006 because Korean society needed his image at that point in
time. Racial relations in Korean society were shifting, producing tensions
that required a symbolic figure to be articulated to imagine a new, mul-
ticultural Korea. In other words, the Hines Ward moment was produced
as a media spectacle that condensed the national desire to be a part of
neoliberal global system in the midst of Korea’s neoliberal reformation.
The Hines Ward moment occurred at a particularly critical moment for
Korean society, as the Roh Muhyŏn administration first announced the
Korea-US Free Trade Agreement in 2006 and signed it in 2007.
The Hines Ward moment can be considered a national project, dem-
onstrating how the state and commercial media articulated the nation-
building project of a multicultural, global Korea. This moment was
driven by the articulation work of major players—government, com-
mercial media, and academia—all aspiring to brand Korea as a multicul-
tural and global power (Ahn 2012). Therefore, the national fever over
Hines Ward cannot be attributed to a single source; it became a phe-
nomenon through the combined influence of government policies, the
Korean commercial media, and audiences’ desire to join the global cul-
tural circuit.
 3  FROM NATIONAL THREAT TO NATIONAL HERO  81

Narrating the Past Through

a Vision of the Future

What brought Korean society to its Hines Ward moment? How did Hines
Ward attain a mythical symbolic status in Korean society? Hines Ward as
a symbol can be decoded to understand how the category of mixed-race
(re)mediates and (re)shapes pre-existing racial and social relations. Korea’s
passionate embrace of Hines Ward signifies a search for a new Korean
identity, and the process by which he became a symbol of a multicultural
society and social integration illustrates that the notion of Koreanness is
shifting as it faces the new circumstances of globalization. I argue that the
discursive practice of the Hines Ward moment acquired its mythical status
by successfully accomplishing two different acts: first by erasing Korea’s
racist past and second by envisioning Korea’s multicultural future.
As an Amerasian, Hines Ward is part of the first generation of the
mixed-race population that emerged after the Korean War. His visual
image as a black mixed-race body thus represents his blackness and
half-Koreanness and encapsulates Korea’s modern history of racism.
Television interviews, talk shows, and newspapers reproduced and nar-
rated Ward’s family biography and the hardships his mother had to over-
come. In the 1970s, Ward’s mother, Kim Yŏnghŭi, worked as a waitress
at a night club in an US military camp town in Seoul. There, she met
Hines Ward Sr., an African American soldier. They married, had a child,
and moved to the USA when the younger Hines Ward was only a year
old. Yet the couple soon divorced, and Kim Yŏnghŭi had to survive in a
foreign country by herself with her young child. She considered return-
ing to Korea but decided against it because of the discrimination her
son would face as a mixed-race child. In one interview, Kim Yŏnghŭi
said “Korean people treat these [biracial] kids terribly. That’s why, even
when Hines’s daddy left me, I couldn’t come back to Korea. I knew it
would be easier for me, but for Hines, it would be terrible” (Greenfeld
2006). In addition, when describing the discrimination she experienced
in Korea based on her marriage to a black man in the television program,
Korean Mother and Black Son Hines Ward (KBS-1 1998), Kim confessed
that she moved to the USA because her family was ashamed of her son’s
dark skin color. Even after she moved to the USA, her marriage to a
black American was treated as a secret by her family. However, this dark
82  J.-H. Ahn

side of Ward’s family history was given only a passing glance in the work
of reimagining a multicultural Korea. As previous chapters explained,
Korea has a long history of repressing racial others, including mixed-race
people. However, the cultural meaning of the term mixed-race changed
in the era of globalization and hybridization. In this particular historical
moment where contemporary Korea contains new populations of immi-
grants and racial others whose presence demands integration into the
nation, the discursive formation of Hines Ward issued an “indulgence”
for Korean nation’s past abuses of mixed-race people (Kim 2006). By
welcoming Hines Ward, a black mixed-race individual, Korean society
hid its previous racism and revealed its desire to join the global and mul-
ticultural frontier.
Hiram Perez discusses a similar form of “organized forgetting” (Perez
2005, 242) in the case of the media celebration of Tiger Woods’ multira-
ciality in the USA. He argues that celebrating Tiger Woods’ success and
multiraciality dehistoricized America’s racist past, including its history
of the one-drop rule and anti-miscegenation. Instead, it presented an
ideal image of a new multicultural society where racist historical events
no longer matter. As Michael Richards (2000) notes, television media is
especially relevant to such “organized forgetting” as part of a reformu-
lated national identity:

The continuing renewal of national identity requires a form of forgetting

past origins, ethnicities and places, and there is no doubt that television
has been implicated in both denying and suppressing the past, as well as in
extracting preferred features of national identity and using them to recon-
stitute the present and its relationship to the future. (Richards 2000, 34)

The Korean media mobilized a particular image of Hines Ward to rec-

oncile Korea’s racist past with its multicultural future. By enthusiastically
welcoming Hines Ward, Korean society glossed over the uncomfortable
issue of past racism and celebrated his individual success to open up a
new possibility for imagining Korea.

Hines Ward Versus Insooni: Historicizing

the Consumption of Blackness
In the history of the Korean entertainment show, a handful of black mixed-
race celebrities enjoyed a certain degree of popularity even before the Hines
 3  FROM NATIONAL THREAT TO NATIONAL HERO  83

Ward moment. Insooni and Park Ilchun were two of the best recognized
black Amerasian signers in the late 1970s and the 1980s, and Yun Mirae
is a successful female singer and rapper who debuted in the late 1990s and
still appears on television. Their exotic appeal and musical ability as black
mixed-race entertainers were commodifiable even in the 1980s and 1990s,
joining a global trend of consuming blackness in popular culture.
The consumption of blackness in Korean popular culture is isolated
to the realms of music and sports based on the stereotypical belief that
biology predisposes black people to be physically strong and vocally tal-
ented. Every one of the handful of black mixed-race figures who gained
media attention after the Hines Ward moment works in these realms as
well. For instance, Michelle Lee, one of the participants of the survival
audition program K-Pop Star (SBS 2011–2017), was ranked among the
top five in the first season in 2011 and debuted as a solo singer in 2014.
As a black biracial born in 1991 in Korea, her debut song “Without
You” gained some media attention, though her popularity quickly
faded. In sports, soccer and basketball produce some of the more rec-
ognizable black biracial Korean players, including Mun T’aechong and
Chŏn T’aep’ung (professional basketball players), Chang Yeŭn (a pro-
fessional runner), and Kang Suil (a professional soccer player). These
black Amerasian entertainers/athletes gained a certain level of national
popularity, but their success did not create the social sensation associated
with Hines Ward. In other words, Hines Ward was articulated in a man-
ner that was distinct from any other black mixed-race celebrity.
A comparison between Hines Ward and another black mixed-race
celebrity Insooni (Kim Insun; see Fig. 3.1) provides critical insights into
the media articulation of Ward. Born in 1957, Insooni was arguably
one of the most famous and successful black mixed-race entertainers in
Korea before the Hines Ward moment. After her initial debut in 1978
as a member of a female vocal group, the Hee Sisters (hŭi jamae), she
established a successful solo career as a singer that has lasted throughout
the last four decades. Although her fame waned at certain points in her
career, she regained national popularity in 2004 by connecting with the
younger generation through a joint performance with the young hip-hop
musician Cho PD.19
Although Insooni was not as popular as an actor as she was as a singer,
her exotic appeal that captured audiences’ attention allowed her to cross
over into acting in 1982. The film Black Woman (hŭngnyŏ 1982) cast
Insooni in a leading role as a black mixed-race woman who was born
84  J.-H. Ahn

Fig. 3.1  Poster for the film Black Woman (1982)

 3  FROM NATIONAL THREAT TO NATIONAL HERO  85

after the Korean War. The film was the first melodrama in Korean cinema
to feature a romance between a black mixed-race woman (Insooni) and
a Korean man. She played a black biracial character Nan who became a
prostitute after her fiancé Hyŏnsŏk left her. Nan gained fame and finan-
cial success in show business using her remarkable talent and exotic
appeal, but she could not get over Hyŏnsŏk. Nan later found out that
Hyŏnsŏk left her not because he did not love her anymore but because
he was losing his sight. The couple eventually reunited, but the film
ended with their joint suicide.
Although the film was not a great commercial hit, it was remark-
able as the first melodrama to present a black biracial woman in a lead-
ing role, provoking social dialog around mixed-race people (Bae 2014).
Yet Insooni’s black body was (only) consumed to arouse exotic/erotic
desire by presenting her character as sexually active and seductive. For
instance, the film poster used the tagline “the mystery of black sexual-
ity,” which exoticized Insooni’s black body and sexuality (see Fig. 3.1).
Furthermore, like in Hollywood films following the “tragic mulatto”
trope, the tragic ending of Black Woman signified the impossibility of
a happy end to black biracial romance, reflecting the social stigma sur-
rounding interracial intimacy.
As Amerasians born after the Korean War, Insooni and Ward share
several similarities. Both were born to a Korean mother and a black
American GI, but their fathers left when they were born (Insooni) or at
a year old (Ward). Each was raised by a single (Korean) mother. Because
their fathers were absent, the media portrayed the fathers negatively
while celebrating their mothers as part of their success. In other words,
the media discourse asserted that their Korean mothers raised them to be
diligent, strong, and self-sacrificing in contrast to their black fathers who
irresponsibly abandoned them (Lee 2006; Shin 2015). This discourse
also frames other contemporary black Korean athletes and celebrities.
For instance, Chang Yeŭn, Kang Suil, and Michelle Lee share a simi-
lar family story in that they were raised by a Korean single mother after
being abandoned by their (American) black father. This similar famil-
ial story of famous black biracial Koreans negatively frames blackness
by associating blackness with irresponsibility and despicability, locating
blackness at the bottom of racial hierarchy in Korea while also ignoring
the transience of camp town relationships and the pressures families place
on interracial couples.
86  J.-H. Ahn

Insooni and Ward belong to different celebrity genres (Insooni in

music and Ward in sports), but both of these genres associate black-
ness with racial stereotypes and exoticize blackness as the source of
their unique talents (Jun and Lee 2012; Kim 2014). However, while
Insooni’s success and celebrity is deeply rooted in the national popularity
of Korean music, American football is little-known in Korea, where it is
considered a foreign sport. Yet Ward was the celebrity to gain mythical
status, even without tapping into national interest in a particular form
of entertainment (music or sport). Despite similarities in biography and
in skin color (in comparison to most Koreans), Hines Ward and Insooni
have differences in their subjectivities that altered the Korean media’s
framing of their mixedness and that explain the different levels of celeb-
rity they acquired.
The most obvious and significant difference between these two fig-
ures is nationality: Insooni is a Korean and Hines Ward is an American.
As a (native) Korean who spent her entire life in Korea, Insooni began
her career as a singer in a camp town entertainment district in the
1970s before breaking into the Korean entertainment industry. In con-
trast, Hines Ward was born in Korea but spent his whole life in the USA
as an American citizen. These differences in background and national-
ity mean that the two figures embody distinct cultural meanings of what
it means to be black and Korean. Interestingly, though Insooni was a
Korean citizen, it was Ward who became a symbol of social integration.
The Americanness that attached to Hines Ward’s Korean body (or
blood) played a crucial role in his articulation. As a successful (Korean)-
American returnee from one of the most “advanced” societies in the
world, his body became a mythical text that stood for social/racial
integration in contemporary Korea. Because of the relative obscurity
of American football in Korea, Hines Ward’s success was unexpected,
making the Hines Ward moment an interruption of routine for Korean
media and audiences. By contrast, Insooni’s public presence has been
steady for four decades, though her career has had its ups and downs.
The honor and success Ward garnered in the USA as a mixed-race
black Korean made him a living testament to the “American Dream”
(Moon 2006). His race or skin color did not prevent his accomplish-
ments, suggesting to the Korean nation that advanced societies are
beyond such bases for discrimination. In this sense, the ardent celebra-
tion of Hines Ward’s glorious return signifies Korea’s national desire to
 3  FROM NATIONAL THREAT TO NATIONAL HERO  87

be a more open and advanced society. It connotes that Korea, like the
USA, welcomes racial diversity and is on the path to becoming a more
open and global society where mixed-race individuals and racial minori-
ties can achieve success. In other words, the Korean media embraced his
Americanness to articulate Korea’s globalism.
To move forward to a more open and global society, Korea must
first deal with its racist past. This explains why, even though Insooni is
also a successful mixed-race role model, she never attained the status of
“national hero” as Hines Ward did. Because she grew up in Korea, she
is well aware of Korea’s racist past. Her body and personal history repre-
sent Korea’s structural racism. As she said in several interviews, Insooni
left high school early because her family was poor and because she could
no longer endure the racial discrimination and alienation that she experi-
enced in school as a mixed-race individual. A well-known anecdote about
Insooni is that she had to cover her curly hair (a visual indicator of her
blackness) with a scarf on a television show in the 1980s to mitigate audi-
ences’ repulsion toward black mixed-race individuals (Sung 2010).20
Given this background, in one interview with a mixed-race Korean about
the Hines Ward moment, Mr. Pae, the chair of the Korea Federation for
International Families (kukche kachok hankuk ch’ongyŏnhaphoe) and a white
mixed-race person, said that he felt more proud of Insooni than Hines
Ward because he knew well the hardships she had to overcome to make it
as a successful black mixed-race singer in Korea (Lim and Song 2007).
By contrast, Hines Ward’s record bears few traces of Korea’s rac-
ist past due to his early immigration to the USA. The racism he fought
against was American racism. In an interview with Asian American Policy
Review, Ward expressed the frustration he experienced as a black mixed-
race child in America:

Ward: Growing up with a mom who did not speak much English and who
did not look American was very frustrating at times. I was even more frus-
trated and saddened when I was called names because I did not look like a
full-blooded African or Korean American kid. (Lee 2007, 20)

The difficulties Hines Ward faced as a biracial African and Korean-

American in the USA differed from those Insooni faced in Korea due to
the distinct racial relations within these two countries. Insooni’s past is a
record of particularly Korean forms of discrimination that includes “too
88  J.-H. Ahn

many” incidents to be erased to envision a new future. Thus, Insooni

was not a proper object on which the Korean media might project its
desire. Instead, to escape the nation’s racist past, the Korean media selec-
tively promoted Hines Ward’s image, appropriating his blackness and his
Americanness to hide the nation’s racist past and project a national desire
for global status.

Envisioning the Future of a Multicultural Korea

Though Hines Ward is Amerasian, his ideological construction spoke
to the dramatic increase in the Asian mixed-race population (Kosians)
whose presence stood as a challenge to racial/national unity. The Hines
Ward myth sent the ideological message that mixed-race people in
Korea can achieve the success of Hines Ward if they work hard, what-
ever their circumstances. On behalf of Korean society, it also gave the
children of multicultural families the message that they can be celebrated
like Hines Ward if they remain faithful to the nation and become suc-
cessful Koreans. In other words, the Hines Ward myth generated a fan-
tasy of the “Korean Dream” for Asian mixed-race people and for other
racial minorities such as migrant workers, ethnic Chinese, and ethnically
Korean-Chinese nationals. These messages were ideological, obscur-
ing issues of social structure, such as class issues, that many mixed-race
Koreans face, and promising a rosy future that mirrors Hines Ward’s suc-
cess. As Kim Sung-Yoon (2006) rightly argues, the Hines Ward moment
does the ideological work of concealing class/race antagonism between
(full-blood) Koreans and mixed-blood Koreans.
Ward’s mother, Kim Yŏnghŭi, was particularly skeptical of the Korean
media’s hype surrounding her son, explicitly discussing the issues of
income and employment confronting multicultural families:

Kim said she had spent 30 years “without looking at Koreans and without
thinking about them. What do you think would have become of us if I had
kept living here with Hines? He would probably never have been able to
be anything but a beggar. Do you think I would even have been able to
get work cleaning houses?” (Football Star’s Mother Looks Back in Anger,
2006)

In this quote, Kim eloquently made the point that Ward was celebrated
through an idealization of the Korean nation that did not reflect the
 3  FROM NATIONAL THREAT TO NATIONAL HERO  89

daily lived experiences of ordinary mixed-race people. Ward’s mythi-

cal success story was utilized to mask sociostructural inequalities disad-
vantaging racial minorities by emphasizing the importance of individual
hard work to overcome hardship. This echoes a neoliberal ideology that
blames individuals for the effects of structural inequality on their lives,
framing social and political issues as individual matters (Harvey 2005).
Therefore, in addition to hiding the nation’s racist past, the Hines Ward
discourse envisions a multicultural future where mixed-race figures are
unencumbered by structural racism. In other words, the national celebra-
tion of Hines Ward successfully sutures the gap between the racist past
and the multicultural future.
One television commercial featuring Hines Ward effectively demon-
strates the ideological practices of the Hines Ward myth.21 The ad for
Korean Exchange Bank visually encapsulates how the myth projects the
image of a new Korea. In the ad, Ward stands as a symbol of social inte-
gration. The commercial begins with Hines Ward practicing/playing
football on a playground, presumably somewhere in the USA. His fellow
players present as racial/ethnically diverse. In the cheering section, one
boy, presumably Korean, is holding a placard reading, “Go Hines Ward,
Victory.” A blond white boy next to him is cheering Hines Ward as well.
In the following scene, Hines Ward is running through city streets hold-
ing a football with a narrated voiceover saying, “When he feels down and
weary, he rushes here.” Ward stops in front of Korean Exchange Bank.
The commercial ends with the voice over, “Embracing Korea, [he is or
we are] running toward the world.” This short commercial illustrates the
ability of the Hines Ward myth to envision a multicultural, cosmopolitan
Korea.
Interestingly, the voiceovers in the ad are performed by a native
Korean actor, Chi Chinhŭi, who narrates for Hines Ward, speaking to
Korean audiences. This choice of narrator signifies both the sender and
the recipients of the commercial’s message regarding the cosmopolitan,
multicultural nature of Korea. Just as Perez (2005) demonstrates that
Nike’s “I am Tiger Woods” commercial series utilizes his multiraciality
to project the ideal of multiculturalism and a color-blind society in the
USA, Ward’s Korean Exchange Bank commercial envisions a cosmo-
politan, open, new Korea by appropriating his success as a black mixed-
race Korean. The narrative of a new, multicultural Korea is supported by
Ward’s own statements to the Korean press:
90  J.-H. Ahn

Underscoring the importance of acceptance against prejudice, Ward said,

“This world is not one race, we are all living in a melting pot. You can learn
a lot from someone else’s culture.” (Lee 2006, emphasis added)

The Hines Ward moment brackets Korea’s racist past and present, func-
tioning as a signifier of social integration for a multicultural, global
Korea. By complicating and welcoming issues of race and nationality, this
moment signals to the world the increasing hybridity of Korean society
as the nation joins the transnational, global (cultural) economy (Jung
2009). If we agree that the visual representation of black mixed-race
individuals, for better or worse, connotes a change how we imagine what
it means to be a Korean in the global era, it is necessary to closely look at
how this Koreanness is reshaped and redefined.

Blood That (Still) Matters

Blood has long served as a powerful metaphor and social apparatus for
imagining racial boundaries in many countries and regions of the world.
(Davis 1992; Hollinger 2011; Sturm 2002; Wilson 1992). The blood
metaphor takes on different meanings depending on the national, his-
torical, and cultural context, yet the blood apparatus has played an essen-
tial role in imagining a united national identity as well as shaping the
racial order across multiple societies. As I described in the Introduction,
blood has operated as a powerful metaphor for imagining what consti-
tutes Koreanness, for understanding how individuals navigate this liminal
identity, and for investigating the rigidity of imagined boundaries around
nationhood and citizenship. The (contemporary) blood metaphor, as it
appeared in the Hines Ward moment, transgresses what used to be rigid
racial boundaries in Korean society, complicating issues of nationality,
bloodline, and racial categorization.
Despite his American nationality, the Korean media enthusiastically
accepted and appropriated Hines Ward based on his Korean blood ties
and his American success. Specifically, the Hines Ward moment reveals
the arbitrary logic of bloodline as a metaphor for defining Koreanness.
For one who is successful and faithful to the Korean nation, even “one
drop of Korean blood” is enough to be a Korean. Because he exemplifies
these qualities, Hines Ward’s “half” Korean blood, despite his American
nationality and dark skin color, is enough to be Korean. This conditional
 3  FROM NATIONAL THREAT TO NATIONAL HERO  91

social acceptance of mixed-race people demonstrates that neoliberal mul-

ticulturalism formulates and produces a particular type of mixed-race
subjectivity: one should be (economically) successful and beneficial to
Korea to be fully accepted as Korean.
One journalist critiqued the Korean media’s appropriation of the nar-
rative of blood to praise Hines Ward’s successful return when blood is
also used to discriminate against native mixed-race Koreans:

For many Koreans, Ward’s half-Korean heritage was enough to make him
the darling son of Korea. Some even remarked that he was “a Korean at
heart.” The reality for the majority of biracial Koreans is that half is not
nearly enough. The stigma placed on biracial Koreans is that they are not
Korean. In many Koreans’ eyes, one must be a full-blooded Korean to be a
Korean. (Ro 2006)

Ward’s acceptance reveals the hypocrisy of a Korean multiculturalism that

only accepts mixed-race Koreans if they are successful and proud. Yet it
was not just pride or success that made Ward Korean; Korean media also
used the blood metaphor to incorporate Ward’s half-Koreanness into a
new national imagery. One newspaper article titled “Black Korean Hines
Ward’s Touching Story: ‘Korean Blood’ Writes American Dream” stated:

“I’m a half-Korean. I will do my best for the Korean community. My

(Korean) mother’s blood flows in my body,” emphasized Ward.…Although
Ward, with an athlete’s speed and instinct, has a different skin color, the hot
Korean blood flows in his body. (Moon 2006, emphasis added)

In this excerpt, blood functions as an apparatus to delineate national

identity. The Korean media interpolates Ward as Korean because his
mother is a full-blood Korean. The expression “hot Korean blood flows in
his body” utilizes the blood metaphor to galvanize the country’s ethnic
nationalism. Here, his Korean blood takes precedence over his blackness.
The logic of blood only makes sense in the Hines Ward moment
through its articulation with the Korean commercial media’s appro-
priation of his global fame. If he were not a high-profile sports celeb-
rity in America with fame and money, the Korean commercial media
would not have highlighted Ward’s Korean blood. The honor conferred
upon Hines Ward as a sports celebrity is reminiscent of the treatment
received by other Korean transnational sports celebrities. These athletes
92  J.-H. Ahn

are treated as heroic national sports players who enhanced Korea’s global
visibility and upgraded the nation’s status in world sports. In particular,
transnational Korean athletes such as Park Ch’anho (US major league
baseball player; now retired), Kim Yuna (world champion figure skater;
now retired), Park T’aehwan (world champion swimmer), Park Seri
(world league golfer; now retired), and Park Chisŏng (European premier
league soccer player; now retired) elevated Korea’s national status on the
global cultural map. These athletes serve as cultural vehicles for Korean
audiences to express their national pride (Cho 2008; Joo 2012).
Yet Hines Ward is not a (full-blood) transnational Korean athlete,
but a mixed-race Korean African American. In the Hines Ward moment,
national pride was projected onto his black male athletic body, empha-
sizing his powerful, strong, masculine image in relation to American
football. This emphasis on a particular black masculinity was tied to “the
widespread global commodification of American black masculinity in the
arenas of sports and entertainment” (Parameswaran 2009, 199). Though
blackness was considered shameful in Korea’s recent past, the Hines
Ward moment reappropriated blackness as a marker of strong masculin-
ity through its articulation with the global stereotyped belief in black
athletes’ natural excellence in sports (see Washington 2012 for Ward
in American media).22 His black body and his Americanness recalled
other globally famous black American sports celebrities, such as Michael
Jordan, Dennis Rodman, and Kobe Bryant, whose fame is entirely dis-
connected from Korea’s racist past.
Hines Ward was also distinct from full-blood transnational Korean
celebrity athletes, in that he was required to perform Koreanness to
prove that he was a faithful Korean. His demonstrations of Koreanness
were a way to mitigate his mixed-race identity. Though full-blood
Korean celebrity athletes are expected to be patriotic, their Koreanness
is never questioned. In contrast, in the case of Hines Ward, the media
reproduced a rhetoric where acceptance of his biraciality was tied to
Ward’s faithfulness to Korea.

Performing Koreanness
In Spring 2015, I assigned this Hines Ward chapter for my undergradu-
ate course “Media and Identity in Asia.” When I showed Ward’s image
to introduce him, one student asked, “Does he look like a Korean to you?
Because to me he does not look Korean at all.” This question generated
 3  FROM NATIONAL THREAT TO NATIONAL HERO  93

a rich class discussion where students questioned what constitutes a

“Korean look” and how we see or read racial/ethnic difference in vis-
ual culture. The student’s question is valid in the sense that Ward’s black
body and his phenotype as a black biracial individual, at least visually, sig-
nals his non-Koreanness. Furthermore, his inability to speak Korean bol-
sters perceptions of his foreignness. Yet Korean media treated Ward as a
“proud Korean,” and his pride seemed to trump his (perceived) foreign
blackness. In other words, Ward acquired Koreanness not by his look but
by performing Koreanness.
To produce the Hines Ward moment, the media emphasized Ward’s
admiration for his mother and her self-sacrificing, unconditional love
for him. His filial piety strengthened his (tenuous) blood tie to Korea.
Because the virtue of filial piety is highly valued in Korea, his perfor-
mance of this virtue made Ward more Korean. To establish that Ward
was even more devoted to his mother than the average Korean, Korean
television channels allotted considerable airtime to the close relationship
between Hines Ward and his mother.
The KBS-1 television serial on Hines Ward and his mother heavily
focused on the mother-son relationship. The show described the 3,500
square foot mansion Ward built for his mother so that she could live
the rest of her life in comfort (later, however, she decided to move to a
smaller house because she felt that the mansion was too big for her). He
decorated the house in a Korean aesthetic so that his mother would feel
at home and even had a home spa installed. His words of exaltation and
gratitude for his mother, including “She is everything to me,” “She is my
inspiration/motivation,” and “She made me successful” demonstrated
his respect for his mother’s sacrifice and her unconditional love. By capit-
ulating Ward’s touching expressions of admiration for all that his mother
did for him, the Korean media mythologized his mother as a strong and
sacrificing “great Korean mother,” highlighting his Korean side and rein-
forcing a particular image of Korean female subjectivity.
To perform as a full Korean, Ward also had to learn Korean practices.
Television shows and news reports on Ward emphasized his engagement
with traditional Korean culture. One of the main events of his 2006 trip
to Korea was a visit to the Korean Folk Village with his mother, where
they experienced various markers of Korean traditional culture includ-
ing playing Korean traditional games and music, eating traditional foods
such as rice cake and kimchi, and witnessing a traditional wedding cer-
emony (see Fig. 3.2). All of these experiences were nationally televised
on that day’s news.
94  J.-H. Ahn

Fig. 3.2  Hines Ward and his mother, Kim Yŏnghŭi, wearing Korean traditional
costume

This proof of Koreanness through performing Korean culture con-

stitutes an important aspect of Korean multiculturalism. Comparing
American and Australian multiculturalism, Stratton and Ang (1998)
point out that “while the US designed its national identity through ideo-
logical means, Australia did it through cultural means” (141, emphasis in
original). In other words, the more ideological American multicultural-
ism emphasized the acceptance and embodiment of American “values”
(e.g., belief in the American Dream), whereas Australian multiculturalism
aimed to sustain its national identity by uniting the nation through the
preservation of one particular “culture.” Like the Australian case, Korea
framed its national identity through cultural means under the program
of neoliberal multiculturalism. Embracing or embodying the Korean
way of life through Korean customs and culture remained important to
Koreanness, even as Korea embraced multiculturalism.
In addition to practicing Korean culture, Ward proclaimed himself to
be Korean and said that he took pride in his Korean identity. This proc-
lamation and these performances together reveal the national/cultural
 3  FROM NATIONAL THREAT TO NATIONAL HERO  95

anxiety about him as a Korean. In several interviews, he stressed that he

was now proud of his “(half-)Koreanness,” suggesting that he was not
always proud of being Korean. A newspaper article published in Korea
Herald, introduced his story as follows:

Korea’s newfound hero, Hines Ward, a half-Korean who won Most

Valuable Player in this year’s Super Bowl, said he expects to learn more
about his heritage during this trip to the country of his birth. “I am very
happy to be here, to come back to where it all started” Emphasizing that
he remains true to and proud of his race, Ward said, “I am proud to be
a Korean. I get the best of both worlds. I am very privileged and very
blessed to have two backgrounds”. (Lee 2006, emphasis added)

In an interview that appeared in Asian American Policy Review, Ward

explained how he felt about being biracial.

AAPR H ow would you describe your ethnicity? Black? Korean? Korean

American? African American? Did you feel more connected to
certain parts of your heritage at specific junctures in your life?
Ward  I would definitely describe myself as Korean African American.
I felt more connected with my African American side growing
up, but now, with my visits to Korea, I feel like I reestablished
a connection with my Korean side, a side that has really been
missing for quite some time. I truly feel a part of both cultures
and am blessed to receive the best from both worlds. (Lee 2007,
19–20).

These interviews in the Korean and American press indicate that Ward
embraced his Korean identity and his visit to Korea (re)shaped his mul-
tiple identities as a mixed-race person. It is well-known in Korea that
Ward had his name in Korean tattooed on his right arm to remember
and cherish his Korean heritage (see Fig. 3.3).
Yet even as the media celebrated Ward as a proud Korean, national
anxiety toward the increasing mixed-race population in Korea persisted.
This celebration was one way to calm the anxiety. Because Ward was an
ardent narrator of Korean identity, he was articulated as an icon of social
integration. In 2011, Ward’s success story was included in the com-
mon fifth grade Ethics textbook as a part of the “We are Proud Korean”
96  J.-H. Ahn

Fig. 3.3  Hines Ward (Ward had his name in Korean tattooed on his right arm.)

section, which discusses oversees Koreans in relation to Korean national

identity. This inclusion of Ward’s story in an elementary school textbook
 3  FROM NATIONAL THREAT TO NATIONAL HERO  97

captures the dominant society’s ongoing appropriation of Ward as a

proud Korean.
The effusive celebration of Hines Ward successfully disguised the
national anxiety toward racial others. National anxiety around “impu-
rity” through racial diversification in the increasing population of ordi-
nary mixed-race Koreans was transferred/projected onto the Hines
Ward moment. To alleviate this anxiety, the media produced Ward as
an image of the model mixed-race Korean. Whereas the public viewed
ordinary mixed-race people as a potential problem for Korean national
identity, the Hines Ward moment signaled mixed-race people’s potential
to become Korean as “good, tamed citizens.” Through the Hines Ward
moment, Korean multiculturalism thus reveals its Janus-faced nature:
even as Ward, a mixed-race black Korean American, was celebrated,
many mixed-race Koreans who were raised in Korea and who practiced
Korean culture in their everyday lives were excluded from the status of
(full) Korean. Korean multiculturalism works through this contradiction.
On the one hand, it projects a new, multicultural, transnational, global
Korean identity while on the other, it regulates and excludes “impure”
others from the national imagery.

Conclusion
This chapter discussed the Hines Ward moment wherein Korean African
American football player Hines Ward was articulated and celebrated by
the Korean media as a new, multicultural Korean hero. Treating the case
of the media event surrounding Hines Ward rather than Hines Ward the
individual, the chapter described how images of Ward’s black, masculine,
athletic body articulated with the blood matrix to produce a narrative of
mixed-race Koreanness that was tied to global success.
Hines Ward’s visit to Korea produced open discussion regarding the
previously unspoken matter of mixed-race Koreans and initiated the rise
of multiculturalism discourse in Korean society. The Korean media’s
lionization of Ward as an icon of multicultural national identity rep-
resents a substantive change from a history where black Koreans were
long marginalized. The celebration of Hines Ward’s victorious return to
Korea and the discursive explosion around both the Hines Ward moment
98  J.-H. Ahn

and multiculturalism signaled the changes in how the Korean nation is

imagined in the global era.
Hines Ward’s ascendance as an emblematic mixed-race media figure
demonstrates how the Korean media functioned as an ideological appara-
tus to articulate and circulate particular narratives and create a discursive
space for the nation and its members to talk about the issues surround-
ing race and Koreanness. In other words, the Hines Ward moment not
only speaks to the statist multicultural discourse, but it also indicates
how the discourse of multiculturalism is mediated by contemporary
commercial Korean media. In a historical context where mixed-blood
has been (and continues to be) used to exclude individuals from the sta-
tus of Korean, Ward’s sports celebrity combined with his embodiment
of Korean values (through a celebration of Korean identity and culture
and through filial piety) makes his “blood” sufficiently Korean. Yet the
media’s emphasis on these other factors of celebrity and Korean values
suggests that mixed-Korean blood alone is not enough to secure one’s
status as Korean, even under neoliberal multiculturalism.

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 CHAPTER 4

Consuming Cosmopolitan White(ness)

I’m definitely a Korean actor until the day I die

—Daniel Henney23

To pair with the discussion of the Hines Ward moment, this chapter
utilizes Daniel Henney—a transnational white Amerasian fashion model
and actor—as an anchoring text. I demonstrate that neoliberal mar-
ket forces, which have led to the commercialization and globalization
of Korean popular culture, are a primary instance that articulates social
discourses around whiteness, (global) Koreanness, and transnationality.
Born to a Korean adoptee mother and an Irish-American father, Daniel
Henney is an interesting cultural text in that he embeds flexible and
transnational mobility and transgresses national and racial boundaries.
Initially known to Korean audiences as a fashion model who appeared on
several television commercials, Henney gained broad popularity through
his first acting role in the Korean drama My Lovely Samsoon (nae ilŭmŭn
kimsamsun; MBC 2005). “Although Henney didn’t play a leading role,
the drama gave him extensive exposure—an estimated 50% of Korean
households tuned in for the series finale—and quickly catapulted him to
stardom” (Tseng 2008).
Henney’s instant national celebrity in 2005 is comparable to the Ward
moment in the sense that his image as a gentle, smart, and romantic
white biracial Korean was ardently celebrated and consumed by general

© The Author(s) 2018

J.-H. Ahn, Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism 103
in South Korean Media, East Asian Popular Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65774-5_4
104  J.-H. AHN

Korean audiences, particularly women. Although his fame gradually

declined due to his lack of Korean language proficiency, it is worthwhile
to note that Daniel Henney was the first emblematic biracial white fig-
ure in contemporary Korean popular culture whose fame was nation-
ally exalted. For this reason, whenever new white mixed-race celebrities
are introduced and become popular, they are quickly labeled “the sec-
ond Daniel Henney,” which illustrates the particular way in which bira-
cial whiteness is framed and appropriated by the Korean media and
audiences.
Ward and Henney are similar in the sense that both are mixed-race
celebrities, but these celebrities differ in their race, and they also each
draw a different map of discursive articulation. The Hines Ward moment
was unique in that his presence openly raised and publicized long-stand-
ing discrimination against mixed-race people and the monoracial myth
in Korea. In other words, Korea’s racist past, as exemplified by the social
discrimination against mixed-race people around the camp towns, trig-
gers the Hines Ward moment. Thus, mixed-race people and migrants
from near Asia are included in the discursive formation of Korean mul-
ticulturalism through the Hines Ward moment. By contrast, Henney is
disconnected from the historical association with negative stereotypes
toward mixed-race people because he is primarily articulated with dis-
courses of transnationalism, flexible citizenship, and cosmopolitanism.
This chapter looks at how Henney’s racialized body as a white bira-
cial Korean-American creates discursive space for projecting the nation’s
desire to be global by embracing his transnational mobility and global
flexibility. I especially pay keen attention to the complex interplay among
race, gender, class, and sexuality that produces a particular quality of
(biracial) whiteness in contemporary Korean commercial culture that I
call “Asianized (Western) cosmopolitanism.” Under Asianized (Western)
cosmopolitanism, Henney’s biracial whiteness articulates multiple attrac-
tive qualities of globalism, complicating our understanding of racial
hybridity in relation to Korean national identity.

Questioning the Cultural Currency of Whiteness

The current popularity of white mixed-race celebrities in contempo-
rary Korean popular media is especially significant in relation to the
uneven cultural currency held by whiteness throughout the national
history. In postwar Korea, both black and white mixed-race identities
 4  CONSUMING COSMOPOLITAN WHITE(NESS)  105

were considered so shameful that they were excluded from the national
imagery. White mixed-race individuals had to struggle against severe
cultural and statist racism due to their racial impurity; their struggle was
similar in quality though lesser in degree than that of black mixed-race
individuals (Choi 2006; Lee 2008; Lim 2009). Yet today, it seems that
the white mixed-race celebrity has bleached away its negative stereo-
types to become commodified as a particularly desirable marker of beauty
through its otherness. There are now more multiracial celebrities actively
working in the Korean entertainment industry than ever before, and
their number is growing.
Koreans’ consumption and framing of the image of Yun Suil, one
of the most famous white mixed-race singers in the 1970s and 1980s,
helps illustrate the changed cultural status of biracial whites. Born to a
white American soldier and a Korean mother, Yun achieved fame when
his debut song “I Would Not Love Anymore” (salangmanŭn anhkessŏyo)
became a national hit. His later songs, including “Apartment,” “Blissful
Confession” (hwangholhan kopaek), and “Terminal” also became national
hits firmly establishing Yun as a popular singer throughout Korea.
Although he achieved fame as an adult, Yun experienced social discrimi-
nation and shame due to his mixed-raciality when he was young.
In a newspaper article from April 8, 1978, the reporter detailed Yun’s
family history, his struggle to fit in as a biracial child, and his career path
as a singer (Ahn 1978). The reporter editorialized that Yun’s voice com-
bined with his personal history of being biracial powerfully articulates
Korea’s feeling of deep sorrow (han) throughout its modern history.
Yun was born to a (North) Korean mother who migrated to the South
during the Korean War and a white American GI father who abandoned
them. The reporter argued that this personal history is the embodiment
of Korea’s modern national tragedy, which resonates with Yun’s vocal
talent as a singer and authenticates the deep sorrow his voice conveys.
Yun Suil’s biracial whiteness incited a certain degree of popular-
ity and curiosity in general audiences. But Yun’s racialized white body
was not consumed as an exotic fantasy as biracial white bodies are today
because of the persistent social stigmatization of mixed-race people (Seo
2005). Even decades later, on the television talk show YeoYuManMan
(KBS-2 2003–present) on April 13, 2011, Yun shared that when he
was a schoolchild, he struggled to sing the national anthem at a school
assembly because of the shame he felt when others questioned whether
he was truly Korean.24 His mother married a second time to register
106  J.-H. AHN

Yun with the family registry, and when he visited his stepfather’s siblings
to introduce himself, he was asked never to visit again. In other words,
his biracial whiteness signified national sadness rather than the nation’s
global prominence.
As Yun’s case shows, in modern monoracial Korea, white mixed-
race individuals and even celebrities faced severe discrimination in their
daily lives. Yet these individuals were still more easily consumed than
black mixed-race performers because the color white was easily articu-
lated within the dominant white-over-black racial system imported
through American imperialism (Kim 2008). This system is reflected in
Korean novels of the 1970s that represented white Americans positively
as a majority group and as the ruling class in America while describing
blacks as cruel and inhuman (Choi 2006). This portrayal of blacks as
an American minority racial group allowed Korean authors to criticize
the USA indirectly during a period when it was risky to condemn white
Americans because of Korea’s dependence on the US military (Choi
2006, 300). In this sense, whiteness held significant cultural currency in
the past, but over the years, the cultural meaning of white mixed-race
identity came to articulate other cultural forms and events as well.
In the contemporary period, many Korean television shows in the
entertainment genre cast foreigners to attract audiences. Foreigners
who speak Korean have been cast on the popular entertainment televi-
sion shows A Chat with Beauties (KBS-2 2006–2010) and Non-Summit
Meeting (JTBC 2014–present) as discussed in Chap. 2. Though some
critics view such casting as tokenizing (cultural) diversity (Kim 2007;
Song 2008), producers believe that foreigners and foreign celebrities
can provide Korean audiences with a fresh look and a fresh perspective.
Most foreign cast members on these shows are white Westerners and/or
white mixed-race celebrities (Park 2011). In 2005, the year when Daniel
Henney and other white mixed-race celebrities successfully debuted in
Korean dramas, a newspaper article identified “mixed-race” as one of the
five key cultural trends of the year (Song 2005). The newspaper article
says:

Daniel Henney, Dennis Oh, and David McInnis, all of whom are mixed-
race fashion models, successfully landed in Korean broadcasting. All three
were born to a Korean mother and a Western-descendant father. They
have emerged as a number-one priority for commercials because they share
some degree of Western elegance without too much of the exoticism that
 4  CONSUMING COSMOPOLITAN WHITE(NESS)  107

other foreigners usually have. It is a notable change that the conventional

wariness of mixed-race people has disappeared from Korean society. In par-
ticular, Daniel Henney has dominated the commercial market through [his
appearances in] automotive and fashion commercials, with his appealing
metrosexual image. (Song 2005)

Henney and the other white mixed-race fashion models named in the
article appeared in numerous ads for clothing and cosmetics. Their popu-
larity as white mixed-race celebrities in Korea distinguishes them from
other mixed-race Koreans, such as black mixed-race and Asian mixed-
race individuals, who are stigmatized because they do not embody a
desirable mix of white exoticism and Korean familiarity. As explained in
the previous chapter, a few emblematic black mixed-race stars such as
Insooni and Hines Ward gained national celebrity in Korea, but these
examples are few in comparison to those of white mixed-race celebri-
ties. For this reason, some media commentaries argue that the dominant
popularity of white mixed-race celebrities over other racial minorities
demonstrates white supremacy in contemporary Korean popular culture
(Park 2011).
The popularity of white mixed-race celebrities as trendy markers of
globalism and a new ideal type of beauty in Korean popular culture is
influenced by a global popular culture discourse on biraciality (or multi-
raciality) that transitioned from revulsion at “miscegenation” to embrac-
ing mixedness as embodying idealized beauty standards. The USA and
the UK share a mainstream discourse celebrating “Generation Mixed”
(Wyatt 2008) and “Generation E.A. (ethnically ambiguous)” (Arlidge
2004; La Ferla 2003) as representing a post-racial, color-blind future
society, though many scholars have criticized this utopian vision of multi-
raciality (Elam 2011; Ibrahim 2012; Mahtani 2014; Nishime 2014).
Likewise, Japan introduced the term hāfu to replace the previous
negative representation of and discourse on konketsu (mixed-blood) to
describe biracial people’s highly marketable attributes. In these examples,
global popular culture is able to successfully commodify racial mixing,
but this certainly does not mean that mixedness is now universally cel-
ebrated. Rather, a particular type of mixing is desired depending on its
complex articulation with other attributes such as gender, age, class, and
sexuality.
For instance, white-appearing hāfu have enjoyed greater popularity
than any other ethnic celebrities in Japan (Carter 2014; Iwabuchi 2014).
108  J.-H. AHN

More broadly, the cultural consumption and the high acceptance of

biracial whites in both Japan and Korea signifies that only a particular type
of globalism is acceptable—one that is associated with white Europeans
or Americans. The preference for biracial whiteness is also highly gen-
dered in both countries, though in different ways. While the most pop-
ular images of hāfu in Japan are female fashion models and entertainers
(Iwabuchi 2014), in Korea, the most popular biracial whites are men with
one Euro-American parent. In addition to Daniel Henney, Denis Oh,
and David McInnis, the recent celebrities Ricky Kim,25 Sean Richard, and
Julien Kang are all white mixed-race males born to a Korean mother and
a Western-descendant father. Interestingly, few white mixed-race female
performers have achieved a celebrity that matches their male counterparts.
Though a few biracial white female figures/celebrities have emerged, such
as Jennifer Young Wisner, Diana Kim, and Bianca Mobley, their exotic
appeal and white appearance was not mobilized in Korean commercial
popular culture as they were for the male stars. Likewise, in 2011, the
female pop idol group “ChoColat” ambitiously debuted in an attempt to
capitalize on the trend of biracial whiteness in the Korean entertainment
industry (three of ChoColat’s five members were white biracial Koreans).
Yet the group failed to gain national attention and soon disappeared,
illustrating gendered mobilization of whiteness (see Chap. 6 for further
discussion).

Daniel Henney, Transnational Mobility,

and Global Koreanness

Henney’s transnational mobility illustrates the multifaceted nature of

biracial whiteness in contemporary Korean popular culture. As a trans-
national celebrity, Henney first started modeling in the USA as a college
student in 2001. He soon became a top model after American designer
and then creative director of Gucci, Tom Ford, booked him exclusively
for the 2003 Gucci show “Tom Ford’s Asian Sensation,” and Ford called
him “the most beautiful Asian model ever.” Working as a top fashion
model, Henney was featured in numerous global corporate luxury-brand
shows like Giorgio Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, and Ralph Lauren, trave-
ling to metropolitan cities around the world, such as Paris, London, New
York, Milan, and Hong Kong.
Daniel Henney became an instant national celebrity in Korea for his
acting role in the drama My Lovely Samsoon. This role was followed by
 4  CONSUMING COSMOPOLITAN WHITE(NESS)  109

Table 4.1  Daniel Henney’s filmography (2005–2013)

Title Year Producing Genre Character Role

country

My Lovely 2005 Korea TV Drama Henry Kim Supporting role

Samsoon (MBC)
Spring Waltz 2006 Korea TV Drama Philip Semi-leading role
(KBS-2)
Seducing Mr. 2006 Korea Film Robin Heiden Leading role
Perfect
My Father 2007 Korea Film James Parker Leading role
X-Men Origins: 2009 USA Film Agent Zero Supporting role
Wolverine
Three Rivers 2009 USA TV Drama David Lee Pilot program
(CBS) (aired for only
three episodes)
The Fugitive: 2011 Korea TV Drama Kai Semi-leading role
Plan B (KBS-2)
Shanghai Calling 2012 USA Film Sam Leading role
Spy 2013 Korea Film Ryan Semi-leading role

role in Spring Waltz (KBS-2 2006), the final installment of the season-
themed dramas directed by Yun Sŏkho that included Winter Sonata,
the drama that swept through the East Asian region in the early 2000s.
Henney was labeled “the Korean Wave star.” Though Spring Waltz was
not as successful with domestic audiences as other installments of the
season-themed dramas, it was still highly exportable, pre-selling to nine
other countries, including Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand,
and Taiwan, before it aired in March 2006. While continuing his acting
career in Korea, Henney also debuted in Hollywood in 2009 in the role
of Agent Zero in the blockbuster action film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine
(see Table 4.1 for Henney’s career path in Korea and the USA).
Henney’s transnational career illustrates the movement of global capital
that moves across nations and regions as well as his individual character
as a flexible citizen who transgresses national boundaries without being
bound to a single national identity (Ong 1999).
In all three Korean dramas in which Henney took supporting or
semi-leading roles—My Lovely Samsoon, Spring Waltz, and The Fugitive:
Plan B—Henney functioned as a symbol of Asianized (Western) cosmo-
politanism by presenting as a marker of a flexible, cosmopolitan citizen.
110  J.-H. AHN

The characters were a warm-hearted doctor who came to Korea to take

care of the girl he loves (My Lovely Samsoon), the global manager of a
pianist who is also a personal friend (Spring Waltz), and the owner of a
global shipping company (The Fugitive: Plan B). These dramas actively
incorporated Henney’s transnational mobility and hybrid identity as a
Korean-American into the drama narrative to project Korea’s changed
global status. In the 1990s, trendy Japanese dramas were popular
throughout Asia because they visualized “Asian modernity” and wove it
into the drama narrative (Ang 2007; Iwabuchi 2002, 2004). Likewise,
the Korean Wave dramas of the 2000s illuminated a contemporary Asian
lifestyle that embraces so-called “Asian values,” such as familial life. In
this context, Henney’s image symbolizes Asian cosmopolitanism by
embodying Asian values with a Western mask.
In particular, My Lovely Samsoon successfully incorporated Henney’s
image of Asianized (Western) cosmopolitanism into its drama narra-
tive. The drama was hugely popular among young female audiences not
only in Korea but also in other Asian countries.26 Through the roman-
tic-comedy genre, the drama depicted Korean women in their thirties
as they struggle to live a modern, independent life. Because of recent
shifts in women’s social status in Asia, young women viewers empa-
thized with the characters’ need to confront shifting values regard-
ing career, marriage, love, sex, and family in contemporary Korea.
The drama illuminated various aspects of the (new) female subjectiv-
ity together with Korea’s changing global status by articulating wom-
en’s desire to be independent and professional; the young generation’s
search for new relational models in love, marriage, and family; and
women’s rising status as powerful consumers (Jung 2007; Kim 2006;
Kim 2005, 2013).
Daniel Henney’s sudden appearance in the Korean drama makes sense
in the context of this cultural shift. Henney’s character Henry Kim in
My Lovely Samsoon illustrated the globalization of Korea while catering
to female audiences’ romantic fantasies about a gentle and caring man.
The character Kim gave up being a successful doctor in America to come
to Korea to care for his unrequited love, Hŭichin (played by Chŏng
Ryŏwŏn), who had cancer. As a Korean-American adoptee, the charac-
ter Kim also yearned to visit his “motherland,” making him acceptable
to Korean audiences despite of his poor Korean language proficiency.
The character was successful because Henney’s status as a transnational
celebrity/model is well articulated within the overall drama plot through
 4  CONSUMING COSMOPOLITAN WHITE(NESS)  111

Kim’s global mobility. Henney’s existence in the drama provided space

for Korean audiences to imagine a global Korea.
In addition to his transnational mobility, Henney’s celebrity is ani-
mated by his hybrid, flexible identity as biracial. In an interview with
the Los Angeles Times, the reporter describes Henney in the following
manner:

He [Daniel Henney] spent little time thinking about his mixed ethnicity
as a kid growing up in a small town Michigan, “a very naive place of 1,100
people where all the kids there ever thought about was hunting and fish-
ing. I always just thought of myself as a white guy,” he says. But race was not
ignored. There was teasing from friends, who would bow to him, or tease
him about the ramen noodles his mother stocked in the kitchen.

The Japanese, who have a proven market for Korean TV and movie stars,
are just beginning to notice the Henney phenomenon, sending report-
ers to Seoul to interview him. “The Japanese see me as a Korean, not an
American,” he [Henney] says. (Wallace 2007, emphasis added)

The excerpt illustrates that Henney’s racial/national identity as a white

mixed-race individual and a Korean-American is read differently by dif-
ferent local audiences as he moves across regions. In the USA, Henney’s
body is predominantly seen as “Asian” (or non-white) as exemplified by
Tom Ford’s remark, but the Korean media captures his Korean blood tie
to mobilize his exotic appeal as a white biracial person to present a global
image of Korea, just as it did with Hines Ward. Likewise, Henney’s
hyphenated nationality and ethnicity takes on different dynamics in dif-
ferent contexts. In America, he is seen as a Korean-American, such that
his ethnicity is subordinate to his nationality; in Korea, he is viewed as
white-Korean, which indicates that his race (white) is appended to his
ethnicity (Korean). Yet in the case of white-Koreans, whiteness also sig-
nifies American; America is racialized as white in the Korean imaginary.
In addition, Henney’s impression that the Japanese read him as Korean,
not as American, suggests that in the Japanese context, racial proxim-
ity is preferred to citizenship when reading Henney’s body. Put differ-
ently, some Japanese audiences might read Henney as Korean because he
looks (more) like an Asian. The existence of diverse readings of Henney’s
racial(ized) body point to his flexible citizenship as well as his hybrid,
multiple identities and signifies difference in racial relations across differ-
ent countries and regions.
112  J.-H. AHN

Production and Consumption
of Cosmopolitan Whiteness

While Henney’s transnational mobility ties contemporary national iden-

tity to transnational, flexible subjectivity, his biracial identity as a white
Korean-American significantly reconfigures the cultural meaning of
mixed-race as well as whiteness in Korean society. That Daniel Henney
appeared on numerous commercials (over 50 television commercials in
2008 alone) highlights his market competitiveness and demonstrates
how his gentle, luxurious, romantic, and sexy image appeals to a large
consumer demographic. According to Tseng (2008), “Advertisers
flocked to him, wanting to capitalize on his newfound fame, and soon
he was all over the place, selling everything from cell phones to beer to
clothing to cars.” Among the commercial values that he embodies, his
exotic appeal as a racial hybrid stands out as an obvious marker of his
otherness.
In an interview with Park Myŏngch’ŏn, director of the “Odyssey
Sunrise” television commercial—the first Korean television commercial
featuring Henney—he explained his decision to cast Henney: “While
blond (white) foreign models do not appeal to Koreans, native Korean
models are not refreshing enough for Korean audiences” (Ten-Asia
2009). An analyst of television commercials likewise stated that “many
Koreans think that his image is elegant and high-class, which, I believe,
also originated from the coexistence of his exotic yet oriental look”
(Park 2006). Put differently, Henney’s racial otherness as a mixed-race
celebrity is exotic enough to make Korean audiences curious about him
yet familiar enough to make them feel intimately connected through a
shared Koreanness, defined in terms of blood ties.
The prevalence of whiteness as a marker of desirable otherness in con-
temporary Korean popular culture is mediated by the beauty and cos-
metics industry. As a visible trend in fashion and celebrity culture, racial
hybridity is supported by a rhetoric that says “mixed-race people are
beautiful/handsome because they can have the best of both worlds”
(Lee 2006). This is clearly shown in the manner that beauty magazines
and/or newspapers typically introduce Daniel Henney as “the perfect
combination of the West and the East.” In the Singapore-based inter-
national male beauty magazine August Man (March 2012), Daniel
Henney appears on the cover with the title, “Daniel Henney Transcends
Transnational Eastern and Western Boundaries and Roles” (see Fig. 4.1).
 4  CONSUMING COSMOPOLITAN WHITE(NESS)  113

Fig. 4.1  The cover image of August Man (March 2012)

114  J.-H. AHN

The value attached to his racial hybridity—that he can transgress and

transcend Eastern and Western boundaries—is mystified and commer-
cialized in the articulation work of the beauty industry.
This mystification of Henney’s hybridity indicates the transforma-
tion of masculinity in Korean popular culture within a larger context.
While Henney’s mixed-raciality as a white Korean-American produces an
exotic-yet-familiar appeal for Korean (and Asian to some extent) audi-
ences, his metrosexual masculinity stands out in the transnational pro-
duction and consumption of his image. In this sense, Henney serves as
a cultural text that shows how the notion of whiteness is (re)imagined
and (re)constructed through the transnational consumption/circula-
tion of Korean popular culture and how whiteness as a discourse works
through its articulation with other social categories such as gender and
class. Henney’s (racial) identity as a white mixed-race celebrity does not
simply indicate his white “race” but rather articulates the desirable values
of cosmopolitanism, soft masculinity, high social class, and Americanness.
The British journalist Mark Simpson (2002) first introduced the term
“metrosexual” to refer to “a young man with money to spend, living in
or within easy reach of a metropolis—because that’s where all the best
shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are.” Metrosexuality signifies the
lifestyle of a young man who is well informed about fashion and beauty
trends and well equipped with sophisticated cultural taste and the finan-
cial resources to indulge that taste. The global circulation of metrosexual
masculinity indicates the male desire to be more physically attractive in
postmodern, contemporary society (Jung 2011; Simpson 2013).
The rise of this new masculinity should be understood in the con-
text of masculinity in crisis as well as the commercialization of mascu-
linity (Shugart 2008). Since the 1980s, feminist and queer movements
have challenged previously hegemonic norms of masculinity as manly,
macho, and tough. In addition, advertisement-driven lifestyle branding
began to rigorously market beauty and fashion products to male con-
sumers. As a part of metrosexual lifestyle branding, gay fashion and gay
style influenced consumer culture for both heterosexual and homosexual
men. As exemplified by men’s style magazines such as GQ, Cosmopolitan
Homme, Arena, and Maxim and television shows like Queer Eye for the
Straight Guy (Bravo, 2003–2007), metrosexuality has become a cultural
logic that provides a rationale for the commercialization of masculinity
beyond a mere fad or trend (Darling-Wolf 2006; Shugart 2008; Simpson
2013). Tim Edwards (2006) argues that in the era of metrosexuality,
 4  CONSUMING COSMOPOLITAN WHITE(NESS)  115

“masculinity is perceived to be increasingly predicated on matters of how

men look rather than what men do” (97, emphasis in original).
Embracing the metrosexual image, Henney has become one of the
most prominent figures in the commercial market for men’s beauty and
fashion items. He has been appointed spokesperson for several different
cosmetics brands such as Biotherm (a global brand) and Amore Pacific
(a domestic brand). Amore Pacific’s “Odyssey Sunrise” for men adver-
tisement was the first to successfully mobilize Henney’s exotic and met-
rosexual image for Korean audiences.27 As the men’s skin care products
industry emerged and expanded over the past few decades, the coupling
of the metrosexual with the exotic in Henney’s image played an impor-
tant role in shaping new male aesthetics in neoliberal Korea.
Henney’s metrosexual image adds “skin color” or “skin tone”—a
marker of race—to the cultural map of metrosexuality as a new male aes-
thetics. Men’s beauty magazines and cosmetic brand lines indicate that
men, as well as women, are powerful consumers of beauty products in
Korea. Tied into the developing beauty industry, the skincare industry
is central to Korean beauty discourse. The term p’ibu miin (skin beauty)
refers to the importance of clean skin to Korean notions of beauty. This
importance is not limited to women but is embraced by male consumers
as well. Biotherm Homme, a skincare line that includes sunblocks and
whitening peels, has utilized Henney’s whiteness as a commercial mar-
keting strategy for five years.28 Henney’s clean facial skin is represented
using black and white visual effects that make his face appear shinier,
cleaner, and whiter.
Advertising for whitening cosmetics typically targets women, and
previous scholars note that the Asian cosmetic industry caters to and
shapes Asian women’s desire to be “whiter” (Ashikari 2005; Glenn
2009; Kawashima 2002; Koshy 2001; Leonard 2008; Parameswaran and
Cardoza 2009; Saraswati 2010). Critiquing previous scholarship that
argued that the boom in skin-whitening is evidence of women’s desire
to emulate upper-class Western European whiteness, these recent stud-
ies demonstrate that skin color intersects with other categories, such
as nation, class, race, and gender. Specifically, Ashikari Mikiko (2005),
Joanne Rondilla (2009), and Ayu Saraswati (2010) insist that the mean-
ing of skin-whitening varies with cultural context. In the Japanese case,
skin tone functions as a visible marker of Japaneseness. According to
Ashikari (2005), “Japanese white skin as one of the important symbols
of Japaneseness has been imagined in reference to the changing meaning
116  J.-H. AHN

of ‘race,’ and aesthetic taste concerning skin tone rooted in the domestic
history and culture has cooperated with the racialization of skin color”
(84). Along the same lines, closely reading skin-whitening ads that
appeared in the Indonesian fashion magazine Cosmopolitan, Saraswati
(2010) introduces the notion of “cosmopolitan whiteness” and argues
that whiteness is transnationalized, transcending racial and national
boundaries. Saraswati argues:

Cosmopolitan whiteness is a signifier without a racialized, signified body.

Cosmopolitan whiteness can and has been modeled by women from Japan
to South Korea to the United States. There is no one race or ethnic group
in particular that can occupy an authentic cosmopolitan white location
because there has never been a “real” whiteness to begin with: whiteness is
a virtual quality, neither real nor unreal. (Saraswati 2010, 18)

This virtual quality of whiteness is where the cultural meaning of white-

ness furcates. Whiteness is not simply a racial/ethnic category; it can
also be a desirable quality of transnational mobility and/or beauty that is
imagined among people who actively produce/consume the meaning of
whiteness. Whiteness can acquire cosmopolitan/transnational status by
articulating upper-class consumers around the world. As such, Henney’s
appearance in television commercials indicates cosmopolitan whiteness as
a desirable marker of globalness rather than a desire to be racially white.
The cultural values associated with Daniel Henney’s whiteness—gen-
tle, high-class, metrosexual, chic, and transnational—are characteristics
of cosmopolitan whiteness. Commercial Korean television has utilized
Henney’s global, cosmopolitan whiteness to sell the highest value and
the most profitable goods, such as electronics (including cell phones, tel-
evision sets, and telecommunication companies), apartments, cars, and
luxury goods.
Daniel Henney also appeared in a series of television commercials
alongside white Hollywood star Gwyneth Paltrow to advertise the cloth-
ing brand Bean Pole International. According to a Korea Times article on
Henney’s Bean Pole International commercials,29 the local business stra-
tegically cast transnational celebrities to globalize its brand image:

Bean Pole is a casual clothing brand of Cheil Industries, a Samsung affil-

iate. “In order to become a global brand, we must focus on producing
high-quality products along with a high-class image,” said Won Jong-Mu,
 4  CONSUMING COSMOPOLITAN WHITE(NESS)  117

vice president of Cheil Industries. “To enhance brand awareness of Bean

Pole abroad, we have decided to designate Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel
Henney as our new models.” According to the official, Paltrow’s elegant
and intellectual image and Korean-American Henney’s exotic features
are considered to represent Bean Pole’s “Collection Line,” a premium
line that will be launched in the fall, as ‘chic and stylish.’ (Korea Times,
“Gwyneth Paltrow to Appear in Korean Ad” 2005)

After the company aired its commercial with Daniel Henney and
Gwyneth Paltrow, Bean Pole sales increased 28.1% (Tseng 2008), sig-
nifying that the strategy to use transnational celebrities to globalize the
brand was successful. All four Bean Pole International television ads were
shot in London (one of the best-known metropolitan cities in the world).
The ads showed the classic London skyline and two white Western mod-
els (Henney and Paltrow) working in the city wearing elegant looking
clothing made by Bean Pole. Without any narration except Henney’s
voiceover of “Bean Pole International” at the end, the first two ads suc-
cessfully visualized cosmopolitan and global subjects. The latter two ads
had English narration with Korean subtitles. Though subtitling is unusual
for a Korean domestic ad, the ads also targeted international audiences.
Henney and Paltrow’s English narration provided an authentic cosmo-
politan appeal through their unaccented “standard” American English.
English is the lingua franca of globalization, and Koreans are eager to
learn the language (Jahng 2011; Park and Abelmann 2004). Both public
schools and private institutions actively recruit native speakers as teach-
ers, and many prefer to hire white teachers, making it difficult for foreign
people of color to find English teaching jobs in Korea (Arnold 2007;
Myers 2014). Even overseas Koreans who were born in English-speaking
countries are sometimes rejected for “native English teacher” positions
because their “Korean look” makes them less “qualified” (Lim 2013).
These examples reveal an underlying assumption that only white people
speak “proper” or “standard” English (Myers 2014), demonstrating the
racialization of the English language.
In this context, Henney’s fluent American English combines with his
whiteness to produce an authentic cosmopolitan appeal to general (trans-
national) audiences. Thus, Henney’s English-speaking roles in Korean
dramas and commercials do not simply indicate his lack of Korean flu-
ency; they also indicate “the construction of Daniel as an English
‘expert’ [which] aligns him with the figures of the high-class white
118  J.-H. AHN

professional and the high-status Korean speaker of English” (Lo and Kim
2011, 447).
Henney’s double identity as a Korean-American mixed-race celeb-
rity produces tensions. While Koreans want him to show loyalty to the
country through Korean fluency, they also want to consume his Western
and cosmopolitan outlook, which are articulated by his whiteness and
Americanness, including his English proficiency. Henney’s fame as a
“white” mixed-race person is not merely a matter of race or skin color.
Rather, his mixed-raciality and cosmopolitan whiteness articulates a
variety of different layers in contemporary East Asian or global culture,
including the (Asian) norm of beauty, the neoliberal subjectivity of flex-
ible citizenship/identity, and the global value of English and its asso-
ciation with (transnationalized) Americanness. In this sense, Henney’s
cosmopolitan whiteness is a neoliberal articulation of a particular mode
of Koreanness and whiteness.

Imagining a National Boundary Through a Transnational

Celebrity: In-Between the Korean Wave Star and the
Hollywood Star
Despite his flexible identity as a transnational celebrity, Henney identi-
fies himself as a Korean actor. In an interview with CNN and the online
magazine Meniscus, he elaborated on his self-identification as Korean and
how he positions himself in between Korea and America:

CNN: Do you consider yourself a Korean actor or an American

actor?
Henney: I’m definitely a Korean actor until the day I die. Korea gave
me my career. Korea is where I made my mistakes, where I
had my highs and my lows. It’s where I learned the ropes.
If it wasn’t for Korea, I wouldn’t be here (Woo 2009).

Meniscus: 
Going to [your] productions like X-Men, the TV show
Three Rivers and so on: Would you ever go back to doing
K-dramas or Korean movies, or would you like to stick
more with the English-speaking roles and movies such as
Shanghai Calling?
Henney: I’m actually in Korea doing a Korean movie right now—a
big action movie. I love Korean films, I love Korean
 4  CONSUMING COSMOPOLITAN WHITE(NESS)  119

directors and I think it’s important for me. I consider

myself a Korean actor. This is where I got my start. So I
want to make sure that I honor those fans here and want
them to know that I’m serious about doing films here.
I think it’s very important. Of course, I want to do more
American projects, or English-speaking projects, because
I do feel a closer connection to the dialogue. But when it
comes to the actual films in general, especially action mov-
ies, I really feel that Korea makes some amazing action
films. So I always want to be a part of that if I can. If they’ll
have me, I’ll still do it, you know? (Chan 2012)

Henney’s identification as a Korean actor indicates his loyalty to the

Korean audiences that gave him his popularity. In addition, identify-
ing himself as Korean may provide a strategic advantage for Henney’s
continued global success because Korea has become a regional hub for
media and popular cultural circulation. Riding the Korean Wave made it
easier for Henney to find roles in Hollywood (Park 2009).
Yet Henney’s Koreanness remains under suspicion. While native
Korean celebrities’ global fame is celebrated as part of the national
aspiration for a global Korea, Korean media and audiences have ques-
tioned Daniel Henney’s commitment to Korea because of his ambigu-
ous national/racial identity. A discussion of Henney’s Koreanness
that appeared on a public Internet forum provides some insight into
this suspicion. The discussion was prompted by the online article, “If
Daniel Henney becomes a world star, would it be the pride of Korea?”
(2009), which also appeared in the national daily newspaper JoongAng
Daily. The article argues that Daniel Henney is not a Korean Wave star
because he is an American citizen who does not speak Korean very well.
According to the author, because Henney was never truly a Korean
actor, his global celebrity has nothing to do with the Korean nation.
This article presents an interesting moment of rupture from the main-
stream media’s quick embrace of Henney as a Korean Wave star, sug-
gesting fissures in the way Korean national identity is imagined through
transnational celebrity. Thirty-five comments were posted online in
response to the article. These comments provided various perspectives
that differ from the mainstream media narrative. The comments listed
below, and the article they respond to, do not represent general Korean
audiences, but they illustrate how Henney’s ambiguous identity opens
120  J.-H. AHN

up cultural space for audiences to rethink what it means to be a Korean

in the era of global migration:

A:  S trictly speaking, he is not Korean. We don’t necessarily associate

him with the Korean Wave, but it is not bad at all to have a pro-
Korea actor in Hollywood.
B:  We don’t have to fuss about him being Korea’s pride. However,
since he is a Korean-American, it is good for Korea (He is at least
not harming Korea!).
C:  It’s so hard to be a Korean. Ethnic Chinese and Jews are actively
making connections even in situations where they seem to have no
support and cooperating with one another. Likewise, we should
not disregard people who are interested in Korea even if they just
want to make a profit out of Korea. Moreover, the Korean national
image is not so familiar to foreigners, so we don’t get treated as
well as we deserve. In this context, even if it’s just in a short blurb,
it is better [for Korea] to get some exposure in [international]
entertainment news. I think it’s more of benefit, not a loss. Abroad,
when people say “Korea,” many of them think of Kim Jung Il
[the former North Korean premier]. We are desperately in need of
handsome-guy marketing.
D:  I agree with (C). The number of Asian mixed-race people is now
increasing due to international marriage and monoracial Korea is
becoming less and less appropriate. We are living in the global world
and that’s just an old-fashioned, narrow way of thinking.
E:  I think it’s ridiculous to clarify whether Henney is Korean or not.
In this [global] world today, it is very narrow-minded to find some-
one appealing [only] because s/he is Korean. Maybe that is because
[you believe that] a monoracial, single nation is superior. If Henney
succeeds in Hollywood, we will be proud of him because of the fact
that he once worked in Korea and became famous. This would be
true abroad as well. Is the fact that he is a half-Korean by blood
that important abroad? Just like Nicole Kidman is Australian and
a Hollywood star, but nobody really cares that she is Australian.
Our nation [Korea] is becoming more and more multicultural today,
and, in this circumstance, I think it is not important to support him
[only] because he shares Korean blood.
F:  I don’t like him…. Since he wasn’t able to make it abroad, he came
to Korea and earned some money riding on his mixed-raciality.
 4  CONSUMING COSMOPOLITAN WHITE(NESS)  121

He then flew back to work abroad again. He is not even a Korean

citizen, and he barely speaks Korean. I don’t understand why people
like him. He just takes money from us. (If Daniel Henney Becomes
a World Star, Would It Be the Pride of Korea? 2009, all emphasis
added)

These comments illustrate the contentious popular discourse regarding

cultural nationalism in contemporary Korea. As some of the comments
indicate, Henney’s multiracial, global image has been commercialized by
the Korean media and consumed by global audiences, improving Korea’s
national image. For instance, (C) argues that Korea needs a new, more
aggressive nation-branding strategy that utilizes the images of “hand-
some” celebrities. (C)’s comments indicate Koreans’ desire for a new
national image in the era of globalization projected through commercial
marketing strategies. The comments of (D) and (E) indicate Koreans’
awareness that their nation has been reconfigured from an “old-fash-
ioned” monoracial, single-ethnic nation to a multicultural, global Korea.
This shift indicates a belief that globalization is an irreversible process
that is right to influence a change in Koreans’ way of thinking/imagining
the world and the Korean nation-state.
The commenters’ different readings of Henney’s (racialized) body
indicate their particular stances toward nationalism. For commenters (A)
and (B), Henney’s positive portrayal of Korea is more important than
whether or not he is Korean. Likewise, commenters (C) and (E) argue
that regardless of Henney’s nationality or blood tie to Korea, whether
his image is beneficial to Korea is the most important factor in evalu-
ating him as a Korean. In the Hines Ward craze, Ward’s Korean blood
tie was appropriated and commercialized by the mainstream media, and
his image as a successful sport star in the USA was integrated into the
national image of a multicultural, global Korea. Similarly, even comment-
ers who believe Henney is not Korean value him in relation to the eco-
nomic benefit he brings to the nation.
Commenters (A) and (F) agree that Henney is not Korean, but they
take different attitudes toward Henney’s relationship with Korea. (A)
believes that Henney will enhance Korea’s national image while (F)
reads him as an American citizen and criticizes him as a “foreign enter-
tainer” exploiting the Korean market. The notion that even one drop of
Korean blood is enough to be Korean so long as one is successful applies
here. Despite their racial difference, Ward and Henney both acquired
122  J.-H. AHN

the status of rich, successful, transnational celebrities who exemplify the

(global) excellence of Koreanness. Their global (upper-)class status is the
primary articulator of their Koreanness in the work of commercial media,
and it diminishes their racial difference. Yet, as shown in (F)’s comment,
even when biracial celebrities demonstrate Korea’s national excellence
through their talent, their Koreanness is still suspect.
Despite Henney’s transnational appeal to global audiences, his popu-
larity never exceeded the level of fame he reached when he began acting
in Korean dramas. In 2009, he began to seriously seek roles in American
television and movies, and his visibility in the Korean media decreased
even though he traveled between the two countries and shot a few
Korean television dramas and films (see Table 4.1). Among the various
factors that degraded his visibility and popularity, his lack of Korean flu-
ency prevented Korean audiences from fully embracing him, as it did for
commenter (F).
Adrienne Lo and Jenna Kim (2011) examine Henney’s language (in)
competency in the early years of his career in Korea and find that the
Korean popular media used a positive framing to describe Henney’s per-
fect English and his determination to learn to speak Korean. They argue
that early in his career, the media presented Henney as “a hard-working
neoliberal figure” who invested significant time and effort into becoming
culturally and linguistically competent in a global era (Lo and Kim 2011,
447). But this framing of Henney’s Korean competency did not last.
After Henney left for Hollywood in 2009, domestic audiences began to
question why his linguistic proficiency had not improved. Henney’s lack
of Korean fluency almost a decade after his 2005 debut harmed his vis-
ibility and popularity in Korea (Choi 2015). Though his cosmopolitan
whiteness made his image as a transnational celebrity extremely com-
modifiable to the Korean mainstream media, his inability to fully perform
Koreanness ultimately prevented Korean audiences from fully embracing
Henney as a Korean star. His lack of fluency made Henney appear less
than fully loyal and passionate.
By contrast, other foreign entertainers who successfully estab-
lished careers on Korean television, such as Sam Hammington (white
Australian), Julian Quintart (white Belgian), and Samuel Okyere (black
Ghanaian) speak fluent Korean. Most Korean television shows primar-
ily target domestic audiences, and foreigners who speak fluent Korean
and who are very knowledgeable about Korean culture appeal to Korean
audiences. Fellow entertainers and audience members compliment their
 4  CONSUMING COSMOPOLITAN WHITE(NESS)  123

Korean language ability with statements like, “You are almost like a
Korean” or “You must have been a Korean in your previous life.” By
contrast, Henney’s poor progress in learning the Korean language dis-
appoints audiences, and Henney’s roles have always been limited to
Korean-American characters who primarily speak English. Thus, even
though biracial Korean celebrities are widely consumed based on their
“exotic yet similar” appeal, performers who are not fluent in Korean
struggle to maintain their popularity. Likewise, Denis Oh, a white
mixed-race celebrity who was once called “the second Henney,” success-
fully debuted on the Korean drama Sweet Spy (MBC 2005), but he was
quickly phased out of Korean television because his poor Korean lan-
guage proficiency distracted Korean audiences.
Henney’s racial hybridity combined with his language (in)compe-
tency produces a particularly ambivalent identity. Ien Ang, a big name
scholar in critical media/cultural studies, is a person of Chinese descent
who was born in Indonesia, educated in the Netherlands, and who
teaches in Australia. In her book On Not Speaking Chinese, Ang (2001)
explains that not speaking Chinese functioned as a symbolic marker of
otherness in both Asia and the West. She was seen as a “fake Chinese”
because she could not speak the language of her ancestors even though
she looked Asian (Chinese). She notes that not speaking Chinese “is a
condition that has been hegemonically constructed as a lack, a sign of
loss of authenticity” (Ang 2001, 30). Yet Ang’s lack of authenticity was
(solely) due to not speaking Chinese; her Chinese look was never ques-
tioned. By contrast, Henney’s “ambiguous look” as biracial meant that
he already lacked authentic Koreanness. He was expected to perform
Koreanness to overcome this lack of authenticity. Henney’s lack of flu-
ency in Korean—regardless of his own efforts to learn—signals not only
his lack of authenticity but also his inability or unwillingness to perform
Koreanness.
Early in Henney’s career, his Korean blood tie was just enough for
him to be labeled as a Korean. But over time, his failure to perform
Koreanness by speaking Korean in public meant that his blood tie
was not enough to count as Korean. Instead, his fluent native English
coupled with his whiteness produced a more authentic cosmopoli-
tan appeal to a general (transnational) audience while making him less
Korean in the eyes of Korean audiences—even as his racial body is high-
lighted as a marker of globalism by the mainstream Korean media. In
other words, Henney’s Koreanness is reconfigured not in an essentialist
124  J.-H. AHN

way that is defined by geographic national boundaries or by blood ties

but in a transnational way in which Koreanness is translated into and
transcended by different markers of globalism.

Conclusion
This chapter examined how the cultural meaning of white Amerasian
shifted in contemporary Korean popular culture through read-
ing Daniel Henney as cultural site of contestation. By situating white
mixed-race figures within the historical context of Korea’s modern
monoracial period through the contemporary multicultural global era,
I attempted to historicize the contested meaning of whiteness and
to indicate the ruptures that whiteness creates as it articulates with
other indexes, such as nationality, gender, and class, in contemporary
Korean popular culture. Henney’s Koreanness is primarily articulated
with transnational mobility and flexible identity in the commercial
Korean media to promote the national brand image of a global Korea.
Moreover, his (exotic) whiteness is presented as a desirable marker of
cosmopolitan metrosexuality through its articulation with the beauty/
fashion industry. These different layers of articulation indicate that
the cultural currency of whiteness has never been stable in Korea and
the global circulation of media/popular culture facilitates new ways to
articulate and mobilize whiteness in the global capitalist economy. Just
like blackness, whiteness reconfigures itself in relation to the shifting
meanings of Koreanness.
Under the neoliberal impulse of market forces and the multicultural
desire of the state, the Korean commercial media is smoothing the his-
torical ruptures associated with the category of white mixed-race. It
significantly rearranges its cultural meaning from that of modern mon-
oracial Korea. Unlike the Hines Ward moment, where his blackness
and mixed-raciality were discussed under the frame of multiculturalism
and the battle over the state’s multicultural policy, Henney’s whiteness
and transnational mobility have a primary association with the Korean
media industry’s neoliberal market impulse. Furthermore, while Ward’s
blackness has been commercialized and glamorized through the work
of Korean commercial media just like Henney, his blackness was high-
lighted only in the framework of nationalist multiculturalism and his
physical ability as a black male athlete.
 4  CONSUMING COSMOPOLITAN WHITE(NESS)  125

In contrast, as a white mixed-race celebrity, Henney does not have to

fight for cultural recognition or engage in a multicultural battle because
whiteness is already desirable and has cultural currency. Instead, the neo-
liberal commercializing project is the leading factor that makes Henney’s
racialized body highly marketable. As David Oh and Omotayo Banjo
(2012) put it, “multiculturalism becomes a mechanism to not only sup-
port neoliberalism but to support whiteness/Americanness” (462).
Likewise, Henney’s biracial whiteness suggests elevated class status—not
only for himself, but for Korea on a global stage.

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 PART II

Performing the Multicultural Reality:

Mixed-Race Children in Reality TV
 CHAPTER 5

Televising the Making of the Neoliberal

Multicultural Family

Love in Asia (KBS-1 2005–2015) is arguably one of the most representative

and long-running multicultural Korean TV shows in the hybrid reality-doc-
umentary format exclusively featuring multicultural families and their mixed-
race children. The program ran for almost ten years, broadcasting a total of
453 episodes between November 5, 2005 and February 22, 2015. Given
today’s fast-changing programming pattern and the short lifespan of most
shows, it is astonishing that this one program aired for almost a decade.
The 300th episode of Love in Asia, which aired on January 3, 2012,
kicked off a four-episode special series on the children of multicultural
families to celebrate the show’s long run. In the opening sequence of
Episode 300, the show eloquently described Korea’s changing demog-
raphy. It said that in 2010 ten out of every hundred marriages were
international marriages and four of every hundred newborn babies were
mixed-race/blood children born to international unions. By introducing
demographical changes, the episode reminded viewers that the future of
Korea depends on caring for this growing population of biracial children.
Over the ten years of its run, Love in Asia’s casting reflected a steady
increase in the number of multicultural families in Korea, and the show
stands as a clear example of the growing visibility of televised represen-
tations of multicultural families. Yet in the face of this demographic and
visual change, it is remarkable that no spectacular Korean-born30 biracial
figure of Asian descent has emerged who is celebrated in the Korean tel-
evisual landscape to the same degree as Hines Ward and Daniel Henney.

© The Author(s) 2018

J.-H. Ahn, Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism 131
in South Korean Media, East Asian Popular Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65774-5_5
132  J.-H. Ahn

Instead, racial others who are not Amerasians but who are central to the
discussion of multiculturalism—Korean-Chinese, female marriage migrants,
multicultural families, and migrant workers—are selectively chosen and ele-
vated in the realm of reality programs but not ardently celebrated.
The absence of Korean-born Asian mixed-race stars is related to
the nature of multiculturalism in the Korean media landscape. The
Amerasian celebrities described in the previous chapters were media
figures “outside” the nation, facilitating their usefulness as symbolic
markers on which to project the national desire to be multicultural and
global. By contrast, ordinary racial minorities are “internalized” racial
others whose experiences and existence come uncomfortably close to
the daily lives of other Koreans. This difference explains the more quo-
tidian nature of the images and discourses that circulate about the chil-
dren of multicultural families and other ordinary minorities in the genre
of reality television. This difference also explains why, as a medium for
the “ordinary,” the reality television arena is a critical site for the cultural
struggle for Koreanness under neoliberal multiculturalism.
This chapter and the next investigate how the reality TV genre tel-
evises the familial relations of multicultural families. They show that real-
ity TV offers a different logic of racialization for multicultural families
and ordinary mixed-race children as compared to the logic of racializa-
tion used to celebrate exceptional Amerasian figures. Just as the Ward
moment and the Henney moment were televised racial moments that
formulated a particular logic of neoliberal multiculturalism in the arena
of celebrity culture, I conceive of reality TV representations of multicul-
tural families as another set of televised racial moments that script and
(re)produce a particular racialized discourse on multicultural families and
mixed-race children in a time of neoliberal multicultural transformation.
Specifically, this chapter reads the show Love in Asia to address how
multicultural issues and lives are framed and broadcast in the hybrid
human documentary reality TV format. My analysis primarily focuses on
the episodes of Love in Asia that place children of multicultural families
at the center of the narrative in order to examine how the show racial-
izes female marriage migrants and their mixed children. I argue that Love
in Asia mobilizes visual images of multicultural families in two different
ways. First, the show revitalizes (state) developmentalism by represent-
ing them as (racial) “others.” Second, the show constructs a neoliberal
Korea by presenting multicultural families as a (new) neoliberal subjectiv-
ity. I show that these two seemingly contradictory frames of multicultural
 5  TELEVISING THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURAL FAMILY  133

families function as a dialectic pair to shape a version of Korean neolib-

eral multiculturalism.

Reading Love in Asia

Media historian Lee Jongsoo (2002) argues that throughout Korea’s
history, various social changes have altered the central themes of human
documentaries. In the 1960s and the 1970s, the primary themes of
human documentaries were social development and overcoming hard-
ships. In modern monoracial Korea, the state and media enjoyed
strong ideological ties and television was an engine for the linked pro-
jects of modernization and cultivating national culture. For 22 years of
this period, the human documentary program entitled Human Victory
(in’gan sŭngni; KBS 1968–1980) aired on KBS. The show primarily por-
trayed heroic individuals who overcame hardships to achieve success. The
program aimed to inflame audiences’ patriotism while modernizing the
nation by presenting these figures as symbolic of national development
(Lim 2009, 22).
In line with the social transformation of the media environment
elaborated in Chap. 2, the focus of the documentary genre shifted in
the 1990s and 2000s to the everyday lives of ordinary people and social
minorities (Lee 2002). In recent years, the human documentary genre
has transitioned again to become more privatized and personalized as
state/media power has decentralized (Corner 2002) and the contem-
porary human documentary has become more entertaining and more
commercialized (Lim 2009). As the recent successor to Human Victory,
Human Theatre (KBS-1 2000–present) is a long-running television doc-
umentary program that focuses more on personal stories and entertain-
ment. While Human Victory centered on the stories of patriotic figures in
the modernization project, Human Theatre is more interested in showing
the ordinary life stories of everyday people. Although Human Theatre is
not an explicitly multicultural program, the show attempts to depict the
various “faces” of ordinary people in Korea. In recent years, the number
of episodes representing racial minorities, including mixed-race people,
female marriage migrants, multicultural families, and foreigners as “ordi-
nary” people in Korea has increased (Hong and Kim 2010; Lee 2002).
This trend indicates these minorities’ inclusion in imagining a Korean
nation.
134  J.-H. Ahn

The rise of human documentary programs that primarily cast multi-

cultural subjects since the mid-2000s should be understood within this
historical tradition of reality-documentary programming in Korea. Love
in Asia was the first such program, followed by similar human documen-
tary programs featuring familial relationships in multicultural families,
including Nice to Meet You, In-Law (SBS 2007–2009) and Mother in-law
and Daughter in-law Story (EBS 2013–present). As the first and longest-
running multicultural TV show, Love in Asia consistently enjoyed a fairly
high and stable audience rating, with a ten-year average of 13% nation-
wide. The program appealed to general Korean audiences, though I will
describe below what a more detailed analysis of audience demograph-
ics tells us about the content of the show. Because of these high ratings
and because the show aired on the public broadcasting channel (KBS-1)
whose mission is to facilitate public interest and promote social awareness
of national agendas, the show had a strong influence on public opinion
regarding multiculturalism and mixed-race Koreans. In addition, Love in
Asia won several awards for increasing multicultural sensitivity, includ-
ing the Best Program Award for Gender Equality, the Cultural Diversity
Program Award, and the Prime Minister’s Award.
Love in Asia almost exclusively featured multicultural families; within
this boundary of multicultural families, the show showcased various types
of non-traditional families, including blended families from second mar-
riages, single parent families, and adoptive families. Yet the most pre-
dominant and typical family type that the show treated involved a female
marriage migrant from Asia (or the Global South more broadly), her
Korean husband, and their biracial children, reflecting the basic orienta-
tion of the Korean government’s multicultural policy (see Chap. 2). Love
in Asia visualized and instantiated state-led multiculturalism not only
in its casting but also through its representation of cast members’ mun-
dane interactions with governmental institutions. In other words, Love
in Asia knit statist multiculturalism policy together with the everyday
life experiences of the immigrants and multicultural families in Korea in
the reality-documentary format. In doing so, Love in Asia constructed
the multicultural reality of Korean society and played a significant role in
propelling multiculturalism as a national project.
Love in Asia was situated in the hybrid “edutainment” genre, combin-
ing education/cultivation with entertainment. Love in Asia utilized the
direct cinema technique of the human documentary format to emphasize
 5  TELEVISING THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURAL FAMILY  135

reality, but it added elements such as a studio set and a studio audience
to provide entertainment and relatability (Lee 2006). Specifically, the
format of each episode consisted of two segments. The first half showed
a pre-taped documentary of the everyday lives of the subjects. Through
this video-document, the program displayed the protagonists’ joys as
well as their struggles and concerns. The hosts, a set of panelists, and
the in-studio audience watched the documentary together, and then the
show brought the family into the studio to engage in conversations with
these viewers. In the second half of the episode, it also showed the fami-
lies visiting the non-Korean (female) marriage migrants’ homeland and
natal (foreign) families together.31
Over the course of the show’s decade run, there were some small
adjustments to the format, but it generally remained the same. This for-
mat had the effect of simplifying and/or suturing multicultural families’
struggle for Koreanness. To increase the human drama, the program pat-
terned a narrative of crisis and resolution. Specifically, in the first, pre-
taped half of each episode, the documentary introduced hardships that
the multicultural family experienced such as financial difficulties, lan-
guage problems, difficulties educating children, and familial discord.
The shows’ narrative then turned to the resolution of these difficulties
and the happy lives the families now live in Korea. In doing so, the show
dramatized familial love and happiness in Korea and this formalized nar-
rative structure within each episode had the ideological effect of shap-
ing well-assimilated images of multicultural families in Korean society
(Lee 2006). In a similar vein, many previous studies of Love in Asia tend
to focus on the textual representation of female marriage migrants and
its ideological implication of reinforcing patriarchal gender norms (Kim
2012; Kwon 2013; Lee 2011; Lee 2006).
Moving beyond the discussion of visual representation of female mar-
riage migrants in the show, I attend to how the neoliberal reshaping of
the national racial order via multiculturalism appeared on Love in Asia.
I reject a simplistic understanding of the show as statist propaganda on
multiculturalism policy while acknowledging that governmental co-
optation was an active force on the show. Instead, I insist that the show
should be read as a complex web of media-cultural practice that produces
a televised racial moment, capturing a particular aspect of neoliberal,
multicultural racial formation.
136  J.-H. Ahn

Visualizing Multiculturalism and Retrospective

Developmental Nationalism
Love in Asia concretized the supposedly abstract notion of multicul-
turalism and mobilized particular images of the multicultural family to
rehabilitate (state) developmentalism. The program presented cultural
difference in an essentialized, materialistic manner, treating ethnicity
as a tangible object. For example, in the studio segments, the program
hosted five to seven multicultural panelists who were featured as the
subjects of previous episodes. These panelists functioned as representa-
tives of marriage migrants. They came from various countries, including
China, Japan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Uzbekistan. The panelists always
wore the traditional clothing of their culture, even when people in their
own countries no longer wore these clothes in daily life (see Fig. 5.1).
Love in Asia’s framing of culture was heavily dependent on material-
ity in the form of food, clothing, songs, and national flags. The program
tried to reduce the abstract, intangible qualities of culture into simple,
tangible, material displays and was careful to spend an equal amount
of time and resources on each of the different cultures. In an analy-
sis of how the (educational) programs offered by Multicultural Family
Support Centers mobilize cultural difference, Joon Kim (2011) argues
that multicultural(ism) policies and programs enact a form of “cultural

Fig. 5.1  The multicultural setting of the show (Jasmine Lee on the left corner
and Iresha Perera on the right corner of the first row)
 5  TELEVISING THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURAL FAMILY  137

Fig. 5.2  Boys and girls of the Karen tribe is performing the tribe’s traditional
dance in the New Year’s festival (Episode 303)

fetishism,” making cultural difference a commodity. Likewise, Love in

Asia presented cultural difference in a commodifiable manner, emphasiz-
ing the traditional and “authentic” aspects of cultural difference. When
the main protagonist of each episode visited his or her home country
together with family members, the visual footage first introduced the
traditional cultures of the homeland and intentionally emphasized exotic
aspects of the culture to dramatize difference.
For example, in Episode 300, Minho, a mixed boy born to a Korean
father and a Malaysian mother, visited Malaysia with his mother. The epi-
sode first showed Minho trying on traditional Malaysian clothing at the
market. Later, they visited his grandfather’s tomb to show Indonesian
and Islamic customs and rituals in asking after one’s ancestors. Also
emphasizing cultural difference, Episode 303, which aired at the begin-
ning of the Lunar New Year, portrayed Nanyoe, a marriage migrant from
Myanmar, participating in the rituals of her native ethnic minority Karen
tribe (see Fig. 5.2). Nanyoe’s family enjoyed their traditional New Year
celebrations of plays, dance, and food, and Nanyoe served her family
rice cake soup (ttŏkkuk), a traditional Korean New Year dish, in turn. As
such, these visual footages were designed to give audiences in Korea a
138  J.-H. Ahn

sense of the protagonist’s home country and to establish an expectation

of cultural acceptance.
These portrayals exoticized the home countries of the non-Korean
spouse/parents by using documentary techniques to depict different
cultural practices and products. The episodes’ approach resembled the
style of a “travel channel” or an “anthropological adventure” in that it
depicted a foreign culture with an air of curiosity. The economic gap
between Korea and other countries in (Southeast) Asia framed this mode
of representation, injecting a power imbalance into representations of
exotic cultural difference. The show represented Korea as more economi-
cally and technologically advanced, locating Korea in a superior position
to other Asian countries on Love in Asia. Thus, the gaze that looks at dif-
ferent cultures reveals the cultural superiority of Korea. In this sense, the
show’s portrayal of difference was similar to what Hwang In Sung (1999)
calls “ethnographic voyeurism” in that viewers get pleasure from feeling
(spurious) superiority by watching “savage” and/or “eccentric” cultures.
Ironically, although the program aimed to bring Asian people liv-
ing in Korea nearer to Koreans, Love in Asia represented Asian people
in an alienating manner by exoticizing their cultures, reinforcing an us-
and-them dichotomy. The mechanism by which Love in Asia produced
knowledge about Southeast Asia is similar to that of orientalism. In his
article “Yellow Skin White Mask,” Ha Sang Bok (2012) explains how
Korea’s colonial history shapes its contemporary racial hierarchy. Using
Frantz Fanon’s work on black consciousness in postcolonial Algeria, Ha
(2012) argues that Koreans locate themselves in the superior position
by identifying themselves as a modern, white West while constructing
Southeast Asians from less developed countries as an uncivilized, pre-
modern Orient (see also Eom 2011, 173; Ha 2012, 545).
The cast members of Love in Asia were not chosen at random;
instead, they were carefully selected by the production team (Cha et al.
2016). The production team chose mostly female marriage migrants
from economically less developed countries who lacked the financial
means to visit their home countries on their own, without support from
the show. Thus, many of the show’s participants were female marriage
migrants from developing countries such as Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and
Malaysia. In contrast to the demographics of the show, the largest group
of female marriage migrants in Korea was in fact Chinese, including
ethnically Korean-Chinese nationals. Yet because China was cheaper to
visit and because their ethnic/cultural difference is less striking, Chinese
 5  TELEVISING THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURAL FAMILY  139

women were less likely than Southeast Asian women to appear on Love in
Asia (Kwon 2013).32
Though Love in Asia maximized the dramatic appeal of its protago-
nists by exoticizing (ethnic and cultural) differences, it also identified and
highlighted similarities to emphasize assimilation. When a cultural prac-
tice in the home country was similar to a Korean cultural practice, the
show’s announcer commented on the similarity. The show mobilized dif-
ference to heighten viewing pleasure and indicated (cultural) similarity to
enhance cultural intimacy (Kim 2012, 126).
Together with the dynamics in the production side of Love in Asia, it
is important to highlight that the primary viewers of Love in Asia were
aged 30 to 69. In particular, viewers aged 50 to 69 made up over 70%
of the show’s audience (Cha et al. 2016, 1482). One reason these older
viewers enjoyed Love in Asia is because the show recalled the good old
days of modern Korea. The scenery of economically less developed coun-
tries in Asia reminded them of Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, when
Korea was very poor yet experiencing rapid economic development (Cha
et al. 2016). This comparison allowed elderly audiences to feel apprecia-
tion for Korea’s development. Indeed, the exotic element of the visual
images of other Asian countries came not only from curiosity regarding
cultural difference but also from nostalgia for the Korean past.
For instance, in Episode 304, Minsŏ and her family visited her father’s
family in rural Pakistan. By showing the lack of transportation infrastruc-
ture in the area, the episode indirectly showed that her father’s home-
town was undeveloped. The episode also showed images of Pakistani
people riding donkeys in the market that evoked a pre-modernization
period (see Fig. 5.3). Likewise, in Episode 301, Hyŏnchin’s family took
a very old and small train to visit Yala National Park in Sri Lanka. The
narrator explained that people in Sri Lanka use the train to get to nearby
cities because the country’s transportation infrastructure such as high-
ways and buses is not developed. When the train jerked back and forth,
the narrator commented, “the rattling sound reminds me of the trains in
the 50s and the 60s,” evoking nostalgia for the Korean past, especially
among older viewers. By framing (South) Asian people as coming from
economically less developed countries in this manner, the program “oth-
ered” its protagonists.
I call this nostalgia toward Korea’s modernization project of the
1960s and 1970s “retrospective developmental nationalism.” While
some may view nostalgia as a negative feeling that enables people to
140  J.-H. Ahn

Fig. 5.3  A screenshot of Pakistani people riding donkeys in a rural town

escape present hardships, some other scholars hold a more complex view
of nostalgia as positive and generative for a vision of a “better” future
(Boym 2001; Niemeyer 2014; Velikonja 2009). In her book The Future
of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym (2001) explains that nostalgia is not always
retrospective but can also be prospective. She writes, “The fantasies of
the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact
on the realities of the future” (Boym 2001, 2). Following this logic,
Koreans’ nostalgia for a time when people had few material possessions
but felt passionate about the nation’s modernization through develop-
ment reboots the national desire for contemporary economic develop-
ment and rearticulates post-developmental nationalism. In other words,
by showing economically less developed countries in a way that aroused
nostalgia for the modern period in Korea when developmental national-
ism was a primary paradigm (Cho 2008; Pai 2000), the program recalled
the national development project’s success, also known as “the miracle of
the Han River.”
Under the neoliberal restructuring initiated by the IMF crisis, drastic
social change combined with national anxiety toward an uncertain future
to arouse nostalgia for Korea’s miraculous economic development in
the past. Put differently, Koreans’ nostalgia for the past was triggered by
the anxiety that Korea could return to “peripheral” status in the global
 5  TELEVISING THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURAL FAMILY  141

economy. In this sense, nostalgia is not merely an individual, private feel-

ing but collective and social. This nostalgia is also reflected in a notable
increase in cinematic representations of the 1960s and 1970s during the
contemporary post-IMF, neoliberal period (Kim 2011). These represen-
tations mystify and glorify developmentalism by idealizing life during the
1960s and the 1970s.
In The Past is a Foreign Country, David Lowenthal (1985) astutely
demonstrates that the past is ceaselessly reproduced, reinterpreted, and
reinstated in the present. When Korean visual representations recall the
1960s and the 1970s, they haunt a society marked by economic crisis
with longing for an earlier ethos of national advancement. This nostalgia
intersects with time and space, validating the othering process. Whereas
nostalgic films directly restore the nation’s glorious past, Love in Asia
found Korea’s past in other Asian countries’ present. This othering pro-
cess reinforced a linear narrative of “progress” and “modernity,” locat-
ing Korea as the future of other Asian countries. In this seamless visual
narrative of progress, Korea was in the present tense and other countries
the program visits were in the past tense, overlapping with images of
Korea’s pre-modernization period. In addition, the family reunions tel-
evised on the show were rare events (occurring once every five to ten
years) because the cast members chosen tended to be women who did
not have the financial resources to travel home on their own. This made
the reunions tearful and touching events that aroused sentimentality
for familial love in Korean audiences. Portrayals of the happy moment
when extended families were reunited reminded audiences of a time a
few decades earlier when extended families lived together (Cha et al.
2016). This nostalgic and paternalistic emotion that Love in Asia elic-
ited from Korean audiences played a significant role in shaping the con-
temporary statist multicultural project. The othering process of depicting
other Asian countries as less developed, foreign, and exotic located Korea
as a country ahead of time in terms of national development, offering
a (new) narrative for revitalizing the national aspiration for (economic)
development.

Contested Metaphors: Making Neoliberal Subjectivity

Love in Asia not only constructed retrospective developmental nation-
alism but it also molded a particular subject position for the multicul-
tural family within a neoliberal Korea. While the show mobilized national
142  J.-H. Ahn

aspirations for economic development by othering multicultural families

through stereotypical images, it also interpolated members of multicul-
tural families as neoliberal subjects by animating several different (cul-
tural) metaphors. In this section, I describe two of these metaphors: the
“Korean Obama” and the “cultural bridge.”

Yearning for a Korean Obama

In 2012, for the first time in Korean politics, Jasmine Lee—a female
migrant woman who was born in the Philippines and naturalized as
a Korean citizen after marrying her Korean husband—was elected
congresswoman by proportional representation for the Nineteenth
Congress. It is significant that the first naturalized congressperson
was a female marriage migrant from the Philippines instead of a white
Westerner like other famous naturalized Koreans—Ida Daussy (from
France), Robert Harley (from America), and Bernhard Quandt (from
Germany). It demonstrates the centrality of multiculturalism and mul-
ticultural subjects—mixed-race people, female marriage migrants,
multicultural families, immigrant workers, and ethnic Koreans—to gov-
ernmental policy.
Jasmine Lee (and her family) first gained public attention through
Love in Asia. She was the main protagonist of Episode 67 in 2007, and
she continued to participate in the show as a multicultural panelist (see
Fig. 5.1). She also appeared in a few films and television shows, including
an educational program called Korean Language for Foreigners: Middle
Level and the film Punch (Wandŭgi; 2011), one of the most successful
and popular of the so-called “multicultural films” that explicitly deal
with multicultural issues in Korea. Capitalizing on this public visibility,
Jasmine Lee was able to create a political career.
Lee’s election would not have been possible without organizational
support. Noting a need for political representation for multicultural
subjects, the Ministry of Gender and Family and the Center for Korean
Women and Politics initiated a three-year project called “Making the
First Female Marriage Migrant Politician” in 2008. Lee participated
in 2010, and was the first participant to be elected to a parliamentary
office. The project was nicknamed the “Korean Obama project” by the
Korean media (Kim 2008; Lim 2009). The nickname implied that Korea
might someday have an influential multicultural figure like President
Obama who fully embraced one’s multicultural/multiracial background.
 5  TELEVISING THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURAL FAMILY  143

Likewise, in a series of three feature articles titled “Korean Society Speaks

about Obama” published in Seoul Newspaper in 2008, the reports use
Obama as a signifier that symbolizes America as an advanced society
where his racial hybridity did not hinder him from being President—the
nation’s most powerful and influential political figure. These articles also
utilize Obama’s story to critically reflect on multiculturalism policies in
Korea where multiracial people face administrative, political, and cultural
discrimination.
The Korean Obama project symbolizes the state and media’s inability
to locate spectacular figures among mixed-race Koreans of Asian descent
and/or other multicultural subjects. Multicultural subjects have not been
celebrated in a media event like either the Ward moment or the Henney
moment because most come from economically less developed countries,
negating their desirability. For this reason, the government and media
called upon a remote figure in President Obama to represent a spectacu-
lar mixed-race person who was born and raised in multiracial contexts.
The Korean Obama project signifies Korea’s desperate need for an analo-
gous symbolic figure to reach its multicultural subjects, presenting Korea
as an imaginative place where a Korean Obama will be possible in the
near future.
Beyond a political project, the Korean Obama metaphor also provides
a dream narrative to the children of multicultural families. In Episode
271 of Love in Asia, when the host of the show asked each multicul-
tural child about his/her dream for the future, Sŭngkŭn, son of Jasmine
Lee, answered, “I want to be a second Obama so that I can be the first
politician from the second generation of multicultural families in Korea”
(emphasis added). That Sŭngkŭn brings in Obama to capture his dream
as a biracial child in Korea requires further attention as it shows how
Obama as a transnational symbol of a successful biracial figure is used
in the future dream narrative of a mixed-race child in Korea. Taking the
future as a conceptual framework to delineate a life-making process in
neoliberal East Asia, Ann Anagnost (2013) insists that “envisioning the
future becomes a performative process that powerfully shapes the present
as well as the future” (7). In other words, narratives of the future (in
this case, the future of multicultural Korea imagined through the body of
biracial children) is an active performance that shapes a particular frame-
work to interpret present transformations that will (in)directly affect
the future. It is in this sense that Sŭngkŭn’s wanting to be a “second
Obama” tells us about much more than that individual’s dream. Indeed,
144  J.-H. Ahn

it is a sign that Korea is desperately seeing a (new) role model in envi-

sioning a multicultural Korea and the “second Obama” metaphor signals
an ideal type of global talent who cleverly utilizes their multicultural/
multiethnic background to become an influential global leader.
It seems that this yearning for a Korean Obama narrative is perva-
sive in many other sectors including education. Jiguchon International
School (chikuch’on kukche hakkyo), a (Christian-based) alternative school
for multicultural children established in 2011, was nicknamed “Obama
School” as it accepts mixed-race children regardless of their race or
nationality. The school’s mission is to raise multicultural children to
overcome hardships and racial discrimination to become a (global) leader
like Obama (Baek 2011). In a similar vein, a newspaper article titled
“Is a ‘Korean Obama’ an impossible dream?” (Lee 2008), published in
a citizen-journalism online news magazine OhMyNews, opines that the
Korean government must support the children of multicultural families
so that Korea can produce many “Korean Obamas” in various fields such
as sports, politics, law, and so forth.
Just as Obama was a political and cultural figure whose (media) dis-
course unpacked complex racial relations within the USA and became
a social symbol of post-racial society (Squires 2014), the narrative of
yearning for a Korean Obama served as a common rhetoric for imagin-
ing a multicultural Korea, producing a global web of Obama as a cultural
text (see King-O’Riain 2012; Yano 2013). In other words, the Obama
metaphor, as a transnational cultural signifier, inscribes different racial
relations, simultaneously liking the neoliberal, global racial order with
national racial politics in the juncture of the neoliberal state-making pro-
cess in Korea.

Children of the Multicultural Family as a Cultural Bridge

To raise future Korean Obamas that embody global (cultural) compe-
tence, female marriage migrants (the mothers in multicultural families)
must utilize and maximize their human capital to increase their social
and cultural capacity. Love in Asia presented idealized images and nar-
ratives of model female marriage migrants doing just that. Jasmine Lee
(from the Philippines), Iresha Perera (from Sri Lanka), and Watanabe
Mika (from Japan) served as multicultural panelists on the show for
many episodes (see Fig. 5.1), and the show presented them as model
 5  TELEVISING THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURAL FAMILY  145

female marriage migrants who built their careers on their multicul-

tural backgrounds. Jasmine Lee and Iresha Perera both participated
in the Korean Obama project. Both remained on Love in Asia as pan-
elists even after Lee became the first congresswoman as a naturalized
Korean and Perera started work as a multicultural human rights instruc-
tor. Watanabe Mika has taught Japanese at the Yuhan University as
an adjunct professor and in 2013 was elected the first president of the
“Global Community Association,” an association of NGOs and local
organizations supporting female marriage migrants and multicultural
families. Taking an advantage of her bilingual ability and her personal
interests in play and culture, Watanabe Mika works hard to promote cul-
tural exchange between Korea and Japan (Kang 2013).
The multicultural panelists in the show exemplified the representation
of women marriage migrants as useful economic citizens. Similarly, their
mixed-race children were presented as a useful future human resource for
Korea’s economic development. As Lee Sohoon (2012) points out, the
children of multicultural families are increasingly valued as “global tal-
ents (gûlobŏl injae)” based on “their potentials and abilities to under-
stand the cultures and languages of two countries” (Lee 2012, 16).
In 2009, the neoliberal multicultural state capitalized on this value
by instituting a bilingual program for the children of multicultural fami-
lies (Cho and Seo 2013). Previous assimilation policies only prioritized
Korean language skills for biracial children, but in a globalizing context,
the paradigm shifted to treat the bilingual ability to “bridge” two dif-
ferent cultures and countries as human capital. The government now
stresses the importance of being equipped with languages of both par-
ents. The national network of Multicultural Family Support Centers
now offers diverse language courses to the children of multicultural
families to support them to learn the non-Korean parent’s language.
In the same vein, in 2010, the Ministry of Gender and Family started a
program called the “language gifted class” (ŏnŏ yŏngjae kyoshil) so that
the children of multicultural families can receive dual language education
(Episode 301).
Reflecting this shift toward bilingualism in multicultural policy, Love
in Asia demonstrated that the children of multicultural families with
bilingual abilities were better positioned for global success. In Episode
300, Minho decided not to go to college despite Korea’s obsession with
higher education. Instead, he wanted to be a heavy equipment engi-
neer in his father’s business. Because he could speak both Malaysian
146  J.-H. Ahn

and Korean, he planned to expand the business by exporting old heavy

equipment and vehicles to Malaysia. The episode presented Minho as
a good example of how the children of multicultural families can build
their own paths to success. The host’s final remark to wrap up the show
reinforced the idea that bilingual ability is a form of global human capital
for mixed-race children:

It was impressive that they all grew up well, becoming excellent citizens
of Korea. It is also very helpful that he [Minho] speaks his mother’s native
language, Malaysian, very well and that he actively incorporated his moth-
er’s culture into his dream goal. […] There still is a (negative) stereotype
on children of multicultural families. Yet in this era of globalization, it
seems that they are rather born with strength. (Love in Asia, Episode 300,
male announcer)

Love in Asia provides other examples of global success achieved by the

children of multicultural families. Episode 271 introduced two such
stories. ShinShin, born to a Korean father and a Myanmarese mother,
became a popular singer in Myanmar by translating Korean pop songs
into Myanmarese. The show explained that the key to her success was
her ability to translate subtle cultural nuance because she was deeply
engaged with both countries. Nani, born to an Indonesian father and
a Korean mother and educated in Korea until high school, decided to
move to Indonesia to learn more about “another” side of her identity.
After majoring in the Indonesian language at an Indonesian university,
she found work in a construction company as a translator/consultant.
The project she worked on at the time of the show was to build a city
airport railway in Indonesia jointly funded and constructed by a Korean
construction company. The show demonstrated her contribution to the
project by facilitating communication between the two companies.
Both ShinShin and Nani were presented as “cultural ambassa-
dors” and “global talents” who secured promising futures by adopting
both cultures. The celebratory tone taken by Love in Asia to present
the (potential) ability of the children of multicultural families to serve
as a cultural bridge, demonstrates that mixedness is a (new) neoliberal
social good that can generate (economic) profit at both the individual
and national level by utilizing (racial and cultural) mixing as a source
of global competence. Mainstream media largely share this narrative
of “bilingual ability as asset” or “mixedness as social capital” (Cho and
 5  TELEVISING THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURAL FAMILY  147

Seo 2013; Lee 2012). The following newspaper article exemplifies this
hegemonic view:

Bilingual education is important. Experts have shown that bilinguals gen-

erally acquire higher intellectual flexibility and broader perspective on
social issues than monolinguals. If one becomes a bilingual, it promotes
one’s cultural awareness/sensitivity so that one can secure wider job selec-
tion, such as diplomat, businessman, and tour guide, not only in Korea but
also in the mother’s country. The mother’s country may be a developing
country now, but it could potentially surpass Korea in a decade or two.
(Park 2010)

Under this view, biraciality can secure opportunities to maximize eco-

nomic gains by bridging “both worlds.” Following this discourse,
Hankyoreh, a national daily newspaper, published a series of feature news-
paper articles titled “Mixed-Blood People Will Smile From Now On”
(honhyŏl ichen usŭllaeyo). The articles introduced diverse ordinary mixed-
race people who were working to mobilize their biraciality to achieve
their dreams as a banker, a singer, a professional soccer player, and a
lawyer.
Reflecting hegemonic discourse on biraciality, the biracial children
who appeared on Love in Asia expressed that they wanted to be ben-
eficial to Korea when talking about their futures. Minho wanted to con-
tribute to Korea’s economy by exporting machines to Southeast Asian
market. Likewise, both Hyŏnchin (Episode 301) and Ŭna (Episode 302)
wanted to become translators, and both clearly articulated this future
dream within the framework of national interests. Hyŏnchin elaborated:

I always wanted to live in Sri Lanka. However, after visiting Sri Lanka this
time, I realized that whether I live in Sri Lanka or in Korea is not impor-
tant. What’s important is that I want to be a person who helps Sri Lanka
in Korea while helping Korea in Sri Lanka. Whether I live in Sri Lanka or
in Korea does not change my country because my nationality is Korean.
(Episode 301; emphasis added)

The cultural bridge metaphor for the sake of maximizing national inter-
ests is apparent here. The episode ended smoothly with this claim that
Hyŏnchin wants to be a translator who can help both nations simulta-
neously, reinforcing the idea that the children of multicultural families
are indeed productive and beneficial citizens fully equipped with the
148  J.-H. Ahn

desirable trait of bilingualism in the age of neoliberal globalization.

However, as many scholars of critical mixed-race studies have persistently
argued (see Mahtani 2014; McNeil 2012; Spencer 2011), we need to
be critical of this metaphor of mixed-race children as a cultural bridge.
These scholars remind us that it is a false promise to assume that mixed-
race children can naturally reconcile different races or cultures because it
(re)essentializes race as a biological factor (see Mahtani 2014, 202–203).
Together, the cultural metaphors used to frame the children of mul-
ticultural families as potential future Korean Obamas and as a cultural
bridge are perfect vehicles to construct a neoliberal state. They transform
multicultural subjects into model citizens suited to building a neoliberal
state.

The Impossibility of a Korean Obama:

A Struggle for Koreanness
Love in Asia generated and reproduced typical images of multicultural
families through repetitive storytelling. But the show also provided some
critical moments that challenged idealized mixed-race metaphors such as
the Korean Obama and the cultural bridge by pointing out their impos-
sibility. Those moments are important televisual sites where the social
boundary of Koreanness is contested and racial antagonism is revealed—
though it is often quickly sutured by the repetitive narrative structure
of the show. I pay close attention to these moments in the hope of
deconstructing the hegemonic narrative of the children of multicultural
families.

The Racializing Power of Tamunwha

On May 20, 2014—the seventh Together Day (Segyeinŭi Nal)33—Love
in Asia aired a special episode on the children of multicultural families
who attended an alternative school for multiethnic children. In the epi-
sode, the show interviewed (biracial) students about their experiences
of racial discrimination in their previous school. One Ghanaian-Korean
biracial girl answered:

The older students teased me a lot for being a foreigner. To be hon-

est, I have never been to any other countries around the world, and I’ve
 5  TELEVISING THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURAL FAMILY  149

lived my entire life in Korea. It was the first time that I was treated as a
foreigner.

A Bangladeshi-Korean girl shared a similar experience, saying:

Older boys pushed me on the stairs because they hated that my skin is so
dark and that I am a tamunhwa [biracial]. They teased me, saying that I
am ‘black chocolate.’ I thought to myself, ‘Why was I born as a tamun-
hwa?’ I hated being born as a tamunhwa at that time.

The first response indicates that dark skin is a sign of perpetual foreign-
ness and that one is an outsider who could never be a “true” Korean
despite sharing a Korean blood tie and Korean citizenship. Except for
an exceptional few like Hines Ward whose outstanding talent mitigates
their foreignness, dark skin signifies non-Koreanness. In a similar vein,
the second response shows how the Korean term tamunhwa (multicul-
ture) is racialized, producing hierarchies of power that subordinate the
children of multicultural families, especially those with ethnic difference
inscribed in their body through skin color. Though the term tamunhwa
comes from the term “children of multicultural families” (tamunhwa
gajŏng janyŏ), which was intended to integrate multicultural subjects by
avoiding the language of blood, it came to be used as a way to distin-
guish between children with two Korean parents and (biracial) children
with one non-Korean parent.
In a serial newspaper report titled “Jasmine is Korean” (Kang 2010),
Jasmine Lee astutely describes how the term tamunhwa has acquired
racializing power. She shares two anecdotes based on her experiences.
One is when her son, then a third-year elementary school student,
informed her that he was exempted from a school activity fee because he
was the only child of a multicultural family in his school. A few days later,
she received a phone call from community center to pick up a free 20 kg
rice package for her multicultural family. She wondered why her middle-
class family needed this free rice, and recognized that the gift was based
in a common assumption that (all) multicultural families are poor. The
second anecdote involved a program for social integration and multicul-
tural harmony that Jasmine’s family participated in. When the partici-
pants had to move to another location, a staff member divided them into
groups to board the two buses: one for “Korean families” and another
for “multicultural families” (Choe 2012). These anecdotes demonstrate
150  J.-H. Ahn

the differentiating power of the term tamunhwa, which has come to stig-
matize the children of multicultural families as non-Korean.
The term tamunhwa constructs multicultural families as economi-
cally desperate and their (biracial) children as non-Korean. When peers
call a biracial student tamunhwa or when a biracial person asks “Why
am I (called) a tamunhwa?” that child develops a particular understand-
ing of what it means to be a biracial. This is a moment of racialization
that constitutes a biracial person as a racialized subject(ivity). In Black
Skin, White Mask, Frantz Fanon (1967) talks about his own moment
of self-realization as a black man. The moment came when a white girl
passing by, said “Look, a Negro! Mama, see the Negro! I’m fright-
ened!” He only then began to realize that he is a black when a white
calls him “a Negro.” In other words, he is racialized as a black subjectiv-
ity when called out by a white encounter. Likewise, calling out a bira-
cial kid as “Hey you, tamunhwa” is a moment of racialization. It clearly
draws a (symbolic) line between a pure-blooded Korean (the one who
calls) and a mixed-race/blood Korean (the one who becomes a racialized
subjectivity).

Dark Skin Matters: South Asianness, Skin Color

and Racial Imagination in Korea
Episode 301 featured Hyŏnchin, a child of a multicultural family who
wanted to become a translator and who took an old train to visit a park
in Sri Lanka. Her case raises meaningful points about biracial iden-
tity. While her younger sister Yunchu had adjusted to Korean society,
Hyŏnchin had trouble at school where friends teased her for her dark
skin color and her “foreign” mother. Hyŏnchin’s mother said on the
show:

When I went to the school to pick her [Hyŏnchin] up, her friends said
to Hyŏnchin, ‘Hey, your African mother came.’ Hyŏnchin argued back
against her friends, saying, ‘Don’t say that about my mom. My mom is not
an African. She is Asian [like you]’ That was a heartbreaking moment to
me. (Episode 301, emphasis added)

Although the show did not linger on this moment, the fact that
Hyŏnchin was teased by her friends for having darker skin contains sev-
eral important layers of meaning regarding the articulation of skin color,
 5  TELEVISING THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURAL FAMILY  151

racial imagination, and Koreanness. Hyŏnchin and her mother’s dark

skin color made her friends assume that her mother came from Africa.
This cognitive displacement cannot be simply disregarded as children’s
naivety. Instead, it vividly captures how the dominant society sees and
treats dark-skinned people in Korea. Hyŏnchin’s friends’ teasing shows
how Africa is othered as a singular “black continent,” and it indicates
how dark skin acts a marker of “foreignness.”
Hyŏnchin’s episode echoes other similar stories of everyday racism.
A news article reported that one bar in Itaewon, a popular districts for
foreigners and tourists in Seoul, posted a written message at its entrance,
reading “We apologize, but due to Ebola virus we are not accepting
Africans at the moment” (Lee 2014). The article states, “The statement
triggered thousands of angry comments online, both from expats and
locals―especially after the public learned of reports that the bar admit-
ted a white person from South Africa, while banning almost all dark-
skinned individuals, regardless of their nationalities” (Lee 2014). In the
similar vein, “an Uzbek-born Korean made news in 2011 when she was
denied entry to a public bath whose proprietor cited fear of HIV among
foreigners” (Choe 2012). Scholars such as Michel Foucault (2003) and
Nikolas Rose (2007) have examined how biopower—power exercised
over life itself—formulates a (new) racism. Controlling and managing
certain types of disease (e.g., AIDS) is a primary governing technology
for a nation in exercising its sovereign power. As such, framing Africans
or South Asians with darker skin as potential disease carriers operates
within the racializing power of biopolitics by regulating and controlling
how general Koreans think of and treat a particular group of (racialized)
subjects (read: dark-skinned people).
Unlike blood, skin color makes visible the otherwise invisible line
between Korean and non-Korean. The issue of skin color, and dark skin
in particular, raises larger question of what constitutes Koreanness, or to
be more precise, what constitutes a Korean look. The Internet harass-
ment of Ch’oe Suyŏng, one of the members of the K-Pop female idol
group Girls Generation, illustrates the connection between visual and
discursive racial practice in relation to a Korean look. Ch’oe has been
targeted for malicious comments on the Internet in Korea accusing her
of “look[ing] like a Filipina.” The anonymous commenters excoriated
her with statements like “Southeast Asian bitch, get out!” even though
she was a pure-blood Korean. Comments like these are not unusual on
public Internet forums. They imply that Filipinoness (and Southeast
152  J.-H. Ahn

Asianness more broadly) is an undesirable marker of otherness to Korean

audiences.
Episode 173 tells even more stories of previous racist school bul-
lying experienced by students at the alternative school. Norman,
whose mother is from Pakistan, ran away from home for some time
due to harsh school bulling. Peers teased him for his dark skin color
and bodily odor. No one in the classroom wanted to sit next him, and
he was ostracized from all classmates. Chinuk whose mother is from
Indonesia, dropped out of elementary school and joined the Asian
Community School because he could no longer stand the bullying
from his peers.
As Nikia Brown and Koo Jeong-Woo (2015, 48) put it, because
“Southeast Asian-Koreans usually possess distinct physical features
that cause them to stand out among their ethnic Korean peers,” they
are more likely to be teased and excluded. This stigmatization of mul-
ticultural children of South Asian descent is also reflected in the 2012
national survey of children of multicultural families. According to the
survey (MGEF 2013, 628), 13.8% reported that they experienced social
discrimination as children of multicultural families. The ethnicities most
likely to report this discrimination were children of Pakistani descent
(29.4%) followed by children of Philippine descent (17.1%). In a differ-
ent question that asked whether the children are proud that one of their
parents is from foreign country, 28.4% of biracial children of Cambodian
descent and 26.3% of biracial children of Philippine descent responded
that they were not proud and felt unconformable with others knowing
that one of their parents is from a foreign country (MGEF 2013, 621).
It is much easier for mixed-race children born to a Chinese or a
Japanese parent to pass as (full-blood) Koreans because their phenotype
typically looks similar to general Koreans due to perceptions of racial
proximity (Cho and Song 2011, 63). Some children with Southeast
Asian parents are also able to perform passing for their (racial) identity
if they look similar to their Korean peers (Brown and Koo 2015). Thus,
phenotype is a crucial factor that shapes racial lines between Korean and
non-Korean, although phenotype alone is not a determining factor. For
instance, Japanese-Koreans struggle to fit in when they are “outed” by
their fellow Korean peers because of Korea’s uneasy national relation-
ship with Japan (e.g., disputes over exploitation of comfort women and
territory) (Brown and Koo 2015). Although a complex articulation of
multiple factors such as skin color, phenotype, and nationality of the
 5  TELEVISING THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURAL FAMILY  153

non-Korean parent all matters to the identity formation of children of

multicultural families, Love in Asia flattens this complexity to shape an
ideal typical subject position that is congruent with dominant society’s
rule and need.

Conclusion
This chapter explained how the multicultural reality TV show Love in
Asia in the human documentary edutainment genre televised a particu-
lar version of multiculturalism. The show locates a certain type of mul-
ticultural family at the center of its narrative. These families— consisting
of women marriage migrants, their Korean husbands, and their mixed-
race/blood children—are also a primary target of current governmental
multicultural policy. At the center of the show’s narrative, Love in Asia
portrayed these families’ daily lives in a manner that corresponded to the
development of governmental policies. I argued that Love in Asia mobi-
lized cultural difference and commodified (exotic) culture from the non-
Korean spouse’s country to maximize audiences’ viewing pleasure. In
turn, this exoticization othered female marriage migrants and their home
countries. By framing the non-Korean spouse’s country as Korea’s past
(and as pre-modern), the show located Korea in the superior position and
elicited nostalgia toward developmental nationalism while revitalizing the
national aspiration for economic development in the contemporary era.
The show also tactically mobilized members of multicultural families
in building neoliberal multicultural Korea. Two cultural metaphors—a
Korean Obama and a cultural bridge—framed the children of multicul-
tural families and female marriage migrants and carved out particular
subject positions. As a transnationally circulated signifier, the Korean
Obama metaphor offered an ideal type of global talent who overcame
(racial) hardships and successfully mobilized his multicultural back-
ground. Love in Asia also framed the children of multicultural families
as a cultural bridge who could support national economic advancement
by fully embracing and utilizing “both” cultures. While these metaphors
transformed the children of multicultural families and female marriage
migrants into useful economic citizens who could help build a neoliberal
multicultural Korea, the show in particular also presented some critical
ruptures that challenged these idealized, model images and indicated the
impossibility of multiculturalism in Korea.
154  J.-H. Ahn

In discussing critical moments where it disrupted the hegemonic mode

of neoliberal multiculturalism, I demonstrated how the term tamunwha
acquired a racializing power, functioning as a symbolic fault line that distin-
guished multicultural families from the rest of society. Furthermore, the dark
skin color that was associated with being Southeast Asian from an economi-
cally less developed country constructed Southeast Asianness (and multicul-
tural families more broadly) as something foreign and worthy of oppression.
This notion of Southeast Asianness as perpetual foreign(ness) indicates
the impossibility of Korean multiculturalism in the sense that when one’s
­phenotype indicates Southeast Asianness, one can never be fully Korean.

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 CHAPTER 6

This Is (not) Our Multicultural Future

Media scholar Joshua Meyrowitz (2009) once argued that TV is the

most popular mass media form that shapes our sense of identity by pro-
viding particular ways of seeing others and presenting how others see
us. As a dynamic television genre that has evolved over time, becoming
more entertaining, commercialized, and personalized (Corner 2002;
Kilborn 1994; Nichols 1994), reality TV today is perhaps the most
popular and powerful TV genre that reflects our daily cultural practices
through the depiction of ordinary people’s life stories.
A few fictional films and novels treating multicultural issues offer
rich supplements to Korea’s multicultural reality narratives (Chung and
Diffrient 2015; Jirn 2014; Oh and Oh 2015), but reality TV has been
more powerful in shaping the multicultural discourse because viewers
believe it depicts the unscripted “real” lives of ordinary people—in par-
ticular, the children of multicultural families. By depicting the supposedly
“true” stories of multicultural subjects, reality TV programs featuring
biracial children provide rich cultural resources and narratives where
audiences learn and practice racial(ized) thinking.
In the human documentary genre, Love in Asia offered a televised
racial moment that mediated the issues of state-sponsored multicultural-
ism and (bi)racial politics. Pairing with the preceding discussion of Love
in Asia, this chapter examines how the emerging genre of observational
reality TV draws upon similar yet distinct logics in televising familial rela-
tionships and mixed-race representation. In particular, I describe the

© The Author(s) 2018

J.-H. Ahn, Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism 159
in South Korean Media, East Asian Popular Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65774-5_6
160  J.-H. Ahn

discursive practice around different types of international marriage and

racial mixing in televisual media texts where the image of new types of
transnational and transracial families is morphed and contested. Two
shows that mainly cast biracial children, Rainbow Kindergarten (tvN
2011) and Cackling Class (tvN 2013), exemplify how entertaining real-
ity TV shapes the racial order, furthering the multiracial nation-build-
ing project through a particular logic constrained by media format and
genre. By closely reading mixed-race representation and its media dis-
course in Rainbow Kindergarten and Cackling Class, I argue that obser-
vational reality programs that visualize ordinary mixed-race children
constitute a televisual site to narrate the utopian vision of Korea’s multi-
cultural future. In doing so, I demonstrate how both shows mediate the
racial visibility of different types of transnational and transracial families
and describe how the discourse on mixed-race children in both shows
animates the emerging debate over multiculturalism in Korea.

The Reality TV Craze and the Familial

Turn of Korean Reality TV
Reality TV is a site where a global media format intersects with local
specificity. The adaptation of the Reality TV genre to suit the particular
tastes of various regions throughout the world, also known as “glocali-
zation,” is central to the global success of the genre. Scholars in global
media studies have investigated how the format has traveled to and
translated into various local markets, in turn modifying the relationship
between the global and the local (Kraidy and Sender 2011; Moran 2009;
Oren and Shahaf 2012; Straubhaar 2007).
The global rise of reality TV, moving “from the margins of television
culture to its core in dominating fashion,” reflects major changes in the
television industry (Orbe 2008, 345). Whereas network TV’s scripted
dramas such as Friends and ER were the representative programming
model of the 1990s, Survivor in the 2000s represented a new “post-net-
work TV” model of television production. Reality programming lowered
production costs by casting ordinary people and offered diverse oppor-
tunities for audience engagement across a variety of platforms, attract-
ing younger viewers (Turner and Tay 2009). It emerged in an era of
new media technology and convergence culture (Jenkins 2006), where
TV was consumed on multiple channels and through multiple outlets,
including smartphones, digital multimedia broadcasting, and IPTV. TV
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  161

culture today is more interactive, incorporating audiences’ demand for

new media content.
This shift from network TV to post-network TV coincides with the
neoliberal turn of the global TV industry. Since the 1980s, the USA and
the UK have utilized neoliberal global capitalism to defeat economic
recession. In turn, the TV industry sought out new strategies to mini-
mize economic loss leading to the more rigorous liberalization and com-
mercialization of the TV industry in markets around the globe.
Korea was one of these markets. Korea’s multimedia/multichannel
explosion, which began in the late 1990s, accelerated the commerciali-
zation of the television industry, bringing foreign capital and programs
onto the Korean broadcasting scene. The “Big Three” terrestrial net-
works—SBS, MBC, and KBS—had long functioned as an oligopoly, so
cable and satellite networks initially struggled to develop program con-
tent and establish a foothold in the market. One strategy these networks
used was to import foreign programs—particularly reality TV due to its
low production cost—and to copy successful foreign formats to fill their
schedules with programs likely to succeed (Jin 2016). The accelerated
commercialization of the Korean media industry and the importation of
new TV content and formats from abroad made some cable and satellite
channels (e.g., Mnet and tvN) popular enough to compete with the oli-
gopolistic terrestrial networks, though these networks retain considerable
power in shaping the Korean TV landscape (Yim 2010; Youn 2006).
The influence of new cable channels is exemplified by the phenom-
enal success of Mnet’s Super Star K (Mnet 2009–present),34 a Korean
version of American Idol, which prompted all three terrestrial networks
to schedule their own audition programs—The Great Birth (MBC 2010–
2013), Top Band (KBS-2 2011, 2012, and 2015) and K-Pop Star (SBS
2011–2017). In 2010–2011 alone, Korean TV’s terrestrial, cable, and
comprehensive channels broadcast 29 reality survival programs (Korea
Creative Content Agency [KOCCA] 2011, 50). Reality TV is now one
of the most successful and popular formats on Korean TV.
Yet despite the success of competition-based talent shows in Korea
and abroad, the popularity of this format has waned since 2013. In
its place, observational reality TV has emerged as a new popular trend
(KOCCA 2013, 283). Audiences exhausted by the cutthroat nature of
competition shows embraced a different type of show that could “heal”
their tired minds and that celebrated the joys of everyday life. “Meek
entertainment” (ch’ak’an yenŭng) has grown in popularity because the
162  J.-H. Ahn

“reality” outside the home of restructured neoliberal workplaces feels

devastatingly inhumane to many Koreans. Audiences seeking emotional
comfort in TV instead turn to reality shows emphasizing “rest,” “travel,”
and the “slow life” (Kang 2015; Lee et al. 2014).
Taking what I describe as a “familial turn in Korean (reality) TV,”
many Korean reality programs in the meek entertainment genre feature
family and children as central themes. Whereas Western/American real-
ity TV shows focusing on families tend to rely on extreme cases (as when
families with polarized views swap wives—e.g., Wife Swap) or sensational
topics (such as cheating in Cheaters), Korean observational reality TV is
concerned with high moral standards and tends to portray characters or
situations that conform to social norms (Kim 2011).
Starting in the early 2010s, observational reality TV programs began
to broadcast shows with a wide variety of familial relationships. For
example, My Dear Son in Law (chagiya baengnyŏn sonnim; SBS 2009–
present) presented male celebrities and their mothers-in-law; Mother
In-Law and Daughter In-Law Story (tamunhwa kopuyŏlchŏn; EBS 2013–
present) showed foreign female marriage migrants and their (Korean)
mothers-in-law; Dad! Where Are You Going? (appa! ŏdiga?; MBC 2013–
2015), Return of Superman (syup’ŏmaeni dorawatta; KBS-2 2013–pre-
sent), and Oh! My Baby (SBS 2014–2016) showed male celebrities and
their children (mostly kindergarten-aged); Take Care of Father (appalŭl
put’akhae; SBS 2015) presented male celebrities and their adult daugh-
ters (mostly university students); and What is Mom? (ŏmmaga mwŏgillae;
TV Chosun 2015–present) showed female celebrities and their children.
The theme of family relationships was common among all channels and
channel types (KOCCA 2013, 284).
Dad! Where Are You Going? premiered in 2013 as one of the first
observational reality shows in the form of meek entertainment whose
primary cast members were kindergarten-aged kids. The program’s
premise was to show a celebrity father spending time with his child as
they traveled to rural Korea. The show was an instant success. It was
awarded the MBC Entertainment Grand Prize in 2013, and the for-
mat was successfully exported to China. Due to its huge success both in
Korea and abroad, shows with a similar premise subsequently launched
on two other terrestrial broadcasting channels: Return of Superman and
Oh! My Baby. These child-focused reality shows were all scheduled in
weekend primetime slots (from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. on Saturdays and
Sundays).
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  163

As new iterations of this show format emerged, the ages of the

children involved decreased from early elementary school (Star Junior
Show Bungeoppang) to kindergarten (Dad! Where Are You Going?) to
infant (Return of Superman) and even to birth (The Birth of a Mother).
This drop in age is attributable to the pleasure audiences get from see-
ing participants’ unexpected and uncontrolled emotions and reactions,
which makes observational shows more “believable” than “scripted” and
“controlled” versions of reality TV (Yoon 2014). Because children, and
especially infants who cannot yet communicate verbally, are less con-
trolled than adults, they provide audiences with greater viewing pleasure.
The shows can be more aptly characterized as “childcare entertainment”
(yuga yenŭng) rather than “child entertainment,” because they televise
celebrities’ triumphs and errors in parenting. These shows often attempt
to present the world from the viewpoint of children, offering emotional
relief to audiences who take on the children’s bright and whimsical vital-
ity (Yoon 2014).
Reality TV shows like these narrate what familial relationship should
look like in Korea through the portrayal of the “real life” interactions
among celebrities and their family members, including children, in-laws,
and spouses. Their realistic depictions of family allow audiences to reflect
on their own familial relationships. Like reality TV makeover shows,
observational shows turn audience members into neoliberal subjects who
ceaselessly reflect on and change their own life practices and styles to
craft a new self (Raisborough 2011). In this sense, reality TV is a cultural
technology that inculcates neoliberal ideologies by controlling and polic-
ing individual behaviors (Murray and Ouellette 2009; Ouellette and Hay
2008).
More specifically, meek entertainment reality TV shows provide
“awakening moments” or “teaching moments” not only for the shows’
participants but also for audiences. Through the observational reality
TV format, those shows capture changing subjectivities within familial
dynamics and offer opportunities for audiences to “better” themselves
through continuous self-reflexivity—a neoliberal stance (Ouellette and
Hay 2008). As Korean media scholar Lee Hee Eun (2014) points out,
meek entertainment makes (self-)surveillance ethically encouraged and
productive by offering a cultural site where neoliberal ethics—designing
and making oneself desirable and marketable—are endlessly produced
and renarrated.
164  J.-H. Ahn

Racial Visibility, Gendered International

Marriage, and Contested National Identity
Rainbow Kindergarten and Cackling Class emerged amid the growing
commercialization of Korean TV and the emergence of family-centered
meek entertainment programs. Each show mobilizes biraciality in the
context of childcare entertainment, mediating racial politics through
reality TV. Although biracial figures sometimes pop up in entertainment
genres such as audition programs for the sake of “cultural diversity,” it is
notable that these are two among a very few television programs that pri-
marily cast biracial children for entire programs.
Rainbow Kindergarten and Cackling Class each produced different
biracial images with distinct implications for biracial visibility. Rainbow
Kindergarten depicted so-called “global families” involving an inter-
national marriage between a Korean woman and a foreign man, mostly
from economically developed countries in the West. Cackling Class
represented “multicultural families” involving an international union
between a Korean man and a foreign bride, mostly from economically
less developed countries in Asia (see C. Lee 2014). More specifically, the
biracial children on Rainbow Kindergarten almost all had fathers from
Western countries; by contrast, Cackling Class exclusively recruited bira-
cial children whose mothers were Vietnamese.
The reversed gender dynamics reflected in Rainbow Kindergarten and
Cackling Class are crucial to understanding racial visibility on Korean
TV. The most visible interracial/international marriages in televisual cul-
ture precisely coincide with these two types of marriage: between a white
man and Korean woman or between a Korean man and an Asian woman.
Unions outside these two polarized forms are less visible (e.g., unions
between a Korean man and a white Western woman) or almost invisi-
ble (e.g., unions between a black or Southeast Asian man and a Korean
woman) in (tele)visual culture. Given that it is “through the realms of
media and popular culture that racialized beliefs about relationships, inti-
macy and marriage are produced and reproduced” (Childs 2014, 685),
this racialized and gendered (in)visibility of interracial/international mar-
riages on Korean TV deserves much closer attention.
Visibility does not simply refer to an increase in visual representation
but to a web of cultural meaning and social discourse constituted by a
dialectics between visibility and invisibility. The growing visibility of bira-
cial children actively produces knowledge on racial(ized) subjects within
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  165

a complex web of policy documents, media discourse, and public discus-

sion on multicultural subjects. To name this knowledge, we must look
at which types of racial mixing are highlighted as well as which types of
mixed-race representation become visible for which purposes. Because
each program treats a different type of racial mixing—the children of
global families in Rainbow Kindergarten and the children of multicul-
tural families with a Vietnamese mother in Cackling Class—the chil-
dren’s biracial identity is differently mobilized, creating distinct racial
hierarchies.

Rainbow Kindergarten: Racialized Desire on the Move

Rainbow Kindergarten was broadcast between February 26, 2011 and
December 24, 2011, airing a total of 43 episodes. The show was com-
mercially successful, reaching a 2.29% national rating at its peak. Given
that Saturday 11:00 a.m. was not a primetime slot and that the show was
aired on a cable channel, the show was arguably a national hit, especially
as 1% was usually considered a “success” for a cable program.35
The premise of the show was to observe the peer dynamics among
six “kindergarteners”—three boys and three girls—and one male
“teacher”—a well-known comedian—in a classroom-like setting. The
show quickly gained in popularity and cast an additional four children—
two boys and two girls—through an open-competition audition format
to make the show more diverse and dynamic (see Fig. 6.1). The show’s
narrative was primarily driven by a who-likes-whom coupling among
the ten children, whose relational dynamics emerged as they engaged in
other activities, including competitions such as a quiz game or commu-
nal tasks such as cooking a meal. In doing so, the show aimed to capture
children’ unfiltered emotional reactions of happiness, excitement, envy,
anger, disappointment, and sadness as they participated in missions and
tasks.
Rainbow Kindergarten did not explicitly frame itself as a multicultural
show, but seven of the ten children it featured were biracial. Table 6.1
details the racial backgrounds of the children on Rainbow Kindergarten.
All but one (Chinkyu) of the biracial children were born to a foreign
father and Korean mother. Most of these foreign fathers were from
Western countries such as the USA, Spain, and the UK, except for
Aleyna, whose father was from Turkey.
166  J.-H. Ahn

Fig. 6.1  Cast members of Rainbow Kindergarten. Top row from the left:
Daniel, Lincoln, Aleyna, and Cristina | Middle row from the left: Hyŏnsŏ,
Toyun, Chinkyu, and Kiera | Bottom row from the left: Gabrielle and Saerom

Because Rainbow Kindergarten did not disclose non-Korean par-

ents’ races (it only disclosed parents’ nationalities), the races of the bira-
cial children were somewhat unclear throughout the show. Despite
never explicitly discussing biracial children’s race or racial identity, the
show sometimes provided glimpses of non-Korean parents by presenting
them communicating with their child or conducting a mission together
at home. These glimpses of the non-Korean parents’ images provided
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  167

Table 6.1  National background of the children participants on Rainbow

Kindergarten (*indicates biracial)

Name Gender Year of Birth (age when Parents’ Nationality

the show aired)

*Daniel Hyunwoo Boy 2006 (6) American father

Lachapelle Korean mother
*Gabriel Isaac Schroeder Boy 2005 (7) American father
Korean mother
Toyun Wu Boy 2006 (6) Korean father
Korean mother
Hyŏnsŏ Yeom Girl 2005 (7) Korean father
Korean mother
*Cristina Fernandez Lee Girl 2005(7) Spanish father
Korean mother
*Aleyna Yilmaz Girl 2006 (6) Turkish father
Korean mother
Joined after audition (appeared since Episode 16)
*Lincoln Paul Lambert Boy 2007 (5) American father
Korean mother
*Chinkyu Jo Boy 2006 (6) Korean father
Russian mother
*Keira Lisbeth Poulton Girl 2006 (6) British father
Korean mother
Saerom Yeom Girl 2006 (6) Korean father
Korean mother

(limited) clues for audiences to read race based on skin color and national-
ity. For example, Lincoln and Kiera were read as white biracial when their
Western European/American white fathers’ bodies appeared onscreen.
Given these limited clues for reading race, the question of whether
the biracial children were really white biracial is less important than the
contexts in which a particular type of racial mixing was seen as white
biracial and became more visible and attractive. Indeed, all of the bira-
cial children on the show had a lighter/whiter skin color than general
Koreans, which made their appearance much more appealing to viewers.
As argued in previous chapters, a certain type of racial mixing becomes
consumable or commercialized only when it successfully articulates other
desirable traits such as linguistic competency, high-class status, and/or
good-looking appearance.
That the biracial children on Rainbow Kindergarten were adorable
and good-looking enhanced their consumability and contributed to
168  J.-H. Ahn

the show’s overall popularity. All of the biracial children acquired a cer-
tain level of popularity throughout the show. Aleyna, Cristina, Daniel,
Gabriel, and Lincoln (a new member added after the audition) were
arguably the most popular cast members, gaining considerable national
media attention. Their names ranked high—among the top ten search
terms in real time—in Korea’s major Internet search engines such as
Naver and Daum whenever the show aired. Audiences commented
that these children were good-looking, posting statements on message
boards such as, “Are they human or angels?” “They seem like they have
stepped out of a fairytale,” “So adorable,” “I wish I could raise children
like them” (Lee 2013). People called them “eyeball-purifying” (an’gu
jŏnghwa) children, meaning that their childlike nature and lovable
appearance was healing to audiences.
After the show ended in December 2011, these five biracial cast
members continued to appear in other forms of mass media, including
children’s fashion magazines, TV commercials, and TV talk shows. In
particular, Aleyna, Daniel, and Lincoln successfully established careers
as professional children’s fashion models and entertainers.36 Aleyna
appeared on the TV shows Global Bungeoppang (formerly Super Junior
Show Bungeoppang) and Human Documentary Good People (sarami jot’a;
MBC 2012–present) and debuted as a child actor in the drama Save the
Family (kajokŭl chik’yŏra; KBS-1 2015). Lincoln shared a similar path:
he was also on Global Bungeoppang and debuted as a child actor in the
drama Witch’s Castle (manyŏŭi song; SBS 2015–2016). Daniel appeared
in numerous kids’ fashion magazines and commercials as well as TV pro-
grams and music videos. Because the show produced these child stars,
Rainbow Kindergarten earned a reputation as a “gateway to main-
stream” fame for the children it cast.
Rainbow Kindergarten was an entertainment show that observed the
dynamics among the ten children, so their parents were generally invis-
ible, if not completely absent, throughout the show. Yet the biracial chil-
dren’s very presence necessarily implied heterosexual interracial sex and
marriage. International marriages accounted for 10.5% (34,235 cases)
of all marriages in Korea in 2010 (326,104 total cases), and marriages
between foreign men and Korean women accounted for only 23% (7,961
cases) of international marriages. Marriages between a foreign man
from the West and a Korean woman represented an even smaller num-
ber (2,431 cases)—yet the children of these marriages received substan-
tial representation on Rainbow Kindergarten. This illuminates gendered
and racialized sexual desire in a global context, where only a particular
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  169

type of racial mixing—in this case, a union between American/European

fathers and Korean mothers—is preferred.
Indeed, interracial dating and marriage between (white) Western men
and women of color (in particular, Asian women) is not uncommon in
many postcolonial nations (Ghosh 2006; Lan 2011; Ray 2015; Ryue
and Park 2010). As global migration becomes more prevalent, interra-
cial dating and marriage are increasingly visible in contemporary Korean
society. In their study of interracial dating among Koreans in their twen-
ties, Ryue Kyung-Hwa and Park Ji-Hoon (2010) show that interracial
intimacy and desire is racially hierarchical, intricately intersecting the
dating partners’ nationalities, genders, races, and occupations. Through
in-depth interviews, they described the racialized cultural imagination
of interracial dating in Korean society. When some interviewees dated
a white partner, they were circumspect about referring to the partner’s
race to avoid the appearance that their motives were instrumental. This
defensive attitude communicates the hegemonic view that dating or mar-
rying a white person conveys symbolic or practical value to a Korean.
Gender dynamics complicate this hegemonic standard: whereas a Korean
woman dating a white man is seen as “sexually liberal or promiscuous,” a
Korean man dating a white woman is seen as a “winner,” who triumphs
over the racial stereotype of Asian men as sexually unattractive or physi-
cally weak (Ryue and Park 2010, 64–67). This gendered and racialized
romantic desire in interracial intimacy is not isolated to Korea but shared
by other East Asian countries, such as Taiwan (see Lan 2011).
Because Rainbow Kindergarten was highly weighted toward a cer-
tain type of interracial marriage between a (white) Western father and
a Korean mother, the show excluded other types of biracial children,
such as black Koreans or children with a non-Korean Asian parent. This
reflects the production team’s management of the selection of cast mem-
bers. One online commenter using the name “Kelly Kim” expressed his/
her frustration about this aspect of Rainbow Kindergarten on an online
community board, saying, “Those children are beautiful. Yet I’m a bit
frustrated. While multiculturalism is on the rise in recent years, we still
face [a lot of] racism. If, by any chance, anyone in the production team
in tvN reads this posting, please cast more diverse races [of racially mixed
children] on the show so that the audience can be more sensitized [to
different races]” (April 25, 2011). If we agree that “invisibility is often a
refusal to see rather than an impossibility of seeing” (Kohnen 2016, 14),
we need to consider why certain racial mixing is rendered invisible.
170  J.-H. Ahn

The audition process for the four new members of Rainbow

Kindergarten (Episodes 16–22) illustrates how the show managed racial
diversity and visibility. The show touted the audition as taking place on a
global scale, selecting children from about 500 applicants from around
the world. When the show narrowed its pool to six finalists, four were
biracial children with fathers from America, Australia, or the UK—a
racial balance perfectly congruent with the existing cast members.
Three of the four new cast members finally selected by the show—Kiera,
Lincoln, and Chinkyu—were white biracial children. The selection of
these finalists appeared carefully managed to exclude other types of bira-
ciality from the show.
The producers may not have directly excluded black or Asian bira-
cial Koreans. Instead, their exclusion may have resulted from the com-
plex articulation of many other factors, such as candidates’ economic
situations and geographic location. A producer from tvN stated in an
interview:

We made it so that anyone could apply to audition for Rainbow

Kindergarten. However, realistically, the selection was limited to those
whose parents could take the time to bring their children to the shoot-
ing location every week. Children of multicultural families, mostly Kosians,
realistically face many restrictions [to shooting] because they live in rural
areas and experience economic hardships in some cases. (Park 2011)

Thus, it was not necessarily race per se that excluded certain possible can-
didates. Rather, parents’ (especially mothers’) availability for the shoot-
ing schedule may have been a key factor in the selection process. The
children who ultimately joined the show were able to do so because
their mothers had the time and resources to transport their children to
the filming location, which is an indirect marker of a household’s eco-
nomic status, which correlates with both class and geographic location.
However, regardless of the influence of family resources, the (final) racial
composition of the participants in Rainbow Kindergarten demonstrates
that a particular racial hybridity was seen as appropriate to advance the
show’s commercial interests.

Cackling Class: Defeating Racial Stereotype

Following Rainbow Kindergarten’s success, tvN created a similar real-
ity TV show two years later in 2013. Cackling Class exclusively cast
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  171

biracial children—in particular, five children of multicultural families

with Vietnamese mothers and Korean fathers (see Fig. 6.2). Though the
Children of multicultural families had appeared previously on television
as part of human documentary programs such as Love in Asia and Oasis
(KBS-2 2013), both of which aired on the public broadcasting chan-
nel KBS, Cackling Class was the first show in the commercial entertain-
ment genre to portray biracial children of Southeast Asian descent.
Unlike Rainbow Kindergarten, which lasted about a year, Cackling
Class aired only six episodes, from December 21, 2013 to January
25, 2014. The premise of Cackling Class was to provide five ordinary
Vietnamese-Korean children with a trip to Vietnam where they would
spend eight nights and nine days with two celebrity male “uncles” as
guides. Cackling Class differentiated itself from other human documen-
taries by promoting “cheerful and happy” images of multicultural chil-
dren. Such images were lacking in many news reports on multicultural
families (Choi 2013).
The program sets the tone for the audience at the beginning of the
first episode. The narrator says:

Three hundred thousand multicultural families! The number of multicul-

tural families is growing. The children of multicultural families, born to
Vietnamese marriage migrants who have planted roots in Korean society,
working in various occupations, gather together at the Cackling Class. All
five children will grow up as global leaders who bridge both countries.
This is their first trip to their mothers’ country without mom. (Cackling
Class in Vietnam, Episode 1)

After the first episode, each subsequent one began with an intro
sequence with a caption reading, “Even though our languages and cul-
tures are different, we are all one as we share the same dream. Now
begins Cackling Class in Vietnam—a touching project that supports the
children of multicultural families, symbols of transnational hope, to grow
as global leaders.” This introductory message made clear that the show’s
aim was to let Vietnamese-Korean “global leaders” experience their
mothers’ country as Koreans.
To immerse the children in Vietnamese culture, they attended a
Vietnamese elementary school near one participant’s grandparent’s
home. After school, the whole group visited the families of each child’s
mother, one-by-one, to have direct experiences with Vietnamese culture.
172  J.-H. Ahn

Fig. 6.2  Cast members of Cackling Class. Tongmin, Minu, Yeji, (Kikwang Lee,
Minjun Kim: the two celebrity “uncles”), Yujin, and Yesŭl (from the left)

The show was not a public service program; rather, the “trip to the
mother’s country” format was designed to promote Vietnamese-Korean
children’s self-esteem as a form of “meek entertainment.”
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  173

On Cackling Class, Vietnamese-Korean international marriage was a

stand-in for multicultural family discourse in Korea. Vietnamese wom-
en’s migration has been a visible social trend since early 2000s due to the
drastic gender imbalance among single adults in rural areas. After many
Korean women left agricultural communities to pursue urban opportuni-
ties, rural bachelors sought foreign brides from abroad, particularly from
economically less developed countries. Mail-order brides and contracted
marriages via brokers became popular marriage practices in rural commu-
nities, and Vietnamese brides were preferred due to presumed cultural
similarities (Kim 2010). For this reason, the number of international
marriages between Vietnamese women and Korean men grew dramati-
cally, and Vietnamese women are the second largest marriage migrant
population after Chinese (including Korean-Chinese).
Sociological and anthropological studies on international marriages
between Vietnamese women and rural Korean men via marriage bro-
kers reveal both ethical and social problems such as the commodification
of Vietnamese sexuality, sex trafficking, and domestic violence caused
by the power imbalance between the Korean husband and his migrant
Vietnamese wife (Kim 2012; Kim et al. 2006; Kim and Kim 2013). This
led to the stigmatization of international marriage between Korean men
and Southeast Asian women more broadly. Accordingly, visual repre-
sentations of female marriage migrants from Southeast Asia (typically
Vietnam and/or the Philippines) in TV and film predominantly frame
multicultural families as a “rural problem,” creating and circulating nega-
tive stereotypes (Cha 2013; Kim 2010; Kim 2012).
To defeat these negative stereotypes, Cackling Class worked to pro-
duce positive images of multicultural families by carefully selecting model
cast members. All five multicultural families on the show were presented
as successfully assimilated to Korean society. The Vietnamese mothers
were presented as ideal types of female marriage migrants who were use-
ful and economically productive (all of them had lived in Korea for eight
to twelve years). For instance, Yesŭl’s mother was a language instructor
in Seoul, working for the city government. The show emphasized her
graduation from Hanoi University with an honor (Summa Cum Laude),
which broke the prevailing stereotype that Vietnamese brides are unedu-
cated. The show filmed her working in an office in the heart of Seoul,
implying that Yesŭl’s mother is a role model not only for her daughter
but also for other marriage migrants. Yujin’s mother was a salary woman;
Tongmin’s mother worked as a barista in a coffee shop; Yeji’s mother
174  J.-H. Ahn

was helping on the family’s sesame leaf farm while serving as chair of the
Multicultural Family Society in her community; and Minu’s mother gave
a birth to a second child a month before filming began. Though Minu’s
mother was a housewife, the show clearly implied she contributed to the
economy through her reproductive and domestic labor.
Policy documents, newspapers, and the popular online/offline maga-
zines take a similar tactic of presenting female marriage migrants as fully
empowered and useful citizens. These media circulate successful stories
of female marriage migrants who are working as bilingual instructors,
multicultural instructors, translators, and librarians to demonstrate that
these female marriage migrants are neoliberal subjects who diligently
take care of themselves as they strive to adopt ideal subject positions.
This modern image of multicultural families may appear novel to
Korean audiences used to seeing multicultural families on TV portrayed
as rural and poor, working in agriculture or in industrial manufacturing
jobs. While Love in Asia tried to offer some images of “model” multi-
cultural families, Cackling Class presented a cohesive, sanitized image
of multicultural families to combat the stereotype that these families are
poor, desperate, and lower-class. In particular, Cackling Class presented
an urban, middle-class image of Vietnamese-Korean multicultural fami-
lies by showing their urban apartments and homes and highlighting the
careers of Vietnamese mothers.
This middle-class image was reinforced by portrayals of the mothers’
families in Vietnam. Those families were portrayed as well-off, living in
large, spacious homes (Minu’s family had enough rooms to host all five
children and the two celebrity “uncles”), and running large farms with
livestock. Yeji’s grandparents were both soldiers during the Vietnam War,
and they dressed in their military uniforms to greet Yeji and the other
children. Their uniforms were adorned with stars showing that both
retired with honor, signifying their higher status in Vietnam. The house
was large enough to appear castle-like, though not located in a city, and
the family owned a vast cornfield. Though these images did not por-
tray a cosmopolitan urban lifestyle, they still contrasted with the domi-
nant Korean media portrayal of Vietnam as pre-modern (see Chap. 5).
By showing that these multicultural families had a stable life in Korea
and well-off families in Vietnam, the show reconstituted perceptions of
Vietnamese-Korean multicultural families.
The show initially received a positive response for its good inten-
tion of nurturing multicultural sensitivity, but it never garnered the
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  175

wide viewership or audience excitement of Rainbow Kindergarten.

Specifically, Cackling Class originally planned to visit other countries
such as Mongolia, Cambodia, and Malaysia in future seasons (Park
2013), but the ratings were too low for the network to schedule a sec-
ond season.
Though the cheerful images of Vietnamese-Koreans in Cackling Class
were distinct from the children presented in the previous chapter who
were bullied by classmates for being “different,” they never received adu-
lation from audiences that elevated them to the level of child celebrities.
Though the biracial children in Rainbow Kindergarten had a different
phenotype from their fellow Korean peers, their presence was not ques-
tioned or challenged by audiences; instead, they were praised as “beau-
tiful/handsome.” By contrast, Cackling Class drew a starkly different
discursive map of biraciality and Koreanness.
Prior to Cackling Class, Minu appeared in pop music artist Psy’s
globally famous “Gangnam Style” music video in 2012. Minu became
famous for his excellent dance performance in the video, and he was
nicknamed “Little Psy.” Yet the media attention toward Minu created a
backlash related to anti-multiculturalism. After his mother’s Vietnamese
ethnicity was publicly revealed, online portals and communities filled
with racist slurs and comments. His management agency’s webpage was
temporarily shut down due to heavy online traffic targeting Minu with
anti-multiculturalist sentiments.
In contrast to the biracial children on Rainbow Kindergarten who
gained popularity and built careers after the show, as a biracial child with
a Southeast Asian parent, Minu struggled to gain positive social recogni-
tion. This backlash against him clearly illustrates the social status of chil-
dren of multicultural families with a Southeast Asian parent. None of the
children on Cackling Class, not even Minu, gained any significant media
attention after the show. As biracial Southeast Asian Koreans, these chil-
dren were not objects of desire/fascination but of compassion or vitriol.
These contrasting levels of (social) acceptance are reflected in the dif-
ferent status of the English and Vietnamese languages on the two shows.
The first episode of each show offered a language class: an English les-
son in Rainbow Kindergarten and a Vietnamese lesson in Cackling Class.
In the first episode of Rainbow Kindergarten, it was clear that Cristina,
Gabriel, and Hyŏnsŏ—who were all seven years old—spoke excel-
lent English. Although Aleyna, Daniel and Toyun had a lower level of
English proficiency, they still understood the instructor’s English and
176  J.-H. Ahn

were able to communicate in English. By contrast, on Cackling Class,

only one child (Yujin, who once lived in Vietnam as a child) was able
to speak Vietnamese in the first episode. No other member could speak
even a little Vietnamese. This contrast reveals the different linguistic cur-
rency of English and Vietnamese in Korean society: whereas speaking flu-
ent English indicates acquisition of high linguistic competency and high
socioeconomic capital, speaking Vietnamese is less desired (or even nec-
essary) in Korea.
Moreover, except for Chinkyu, all of the biracial children on Rainbow
Kindergarten used English names whereas all of the Vietnamese-Korean
biracial children on Cackling Class used Korean names. Together with
the different linguistic currency of English and Vietnamese in Korea, the
politics of naming among biracial kids in the two shows reveals the dif-
ferent cultural meaning attached to racial mixing. While English names
in Rainbow Kindergarten were a marker of the “globalization of Korea(n
ethnicity),” expanding its boundary by adding cosmopolitan appeal,
Korean names in Cackling Class indicated the “Koreanization of Asian
ethnicity,” signifying (a total) assimilation of Asian mixed-race children
into Korean society. Further, these uses of English/Korean names pre-
cisely corresponded to the racial/national background of each child’s
father, prioritizing the patriarchal bloodline in Korean society. For exam-
ple, unlike the biracial children with white Western fathers on Rainbow
Kindergarten who use English names, Chinkyu was the only biracial
child with a Korean father, and he used a Korean name. This exceptional
example bolsters the importance of the patriarchal bloodline tradition
in Korean society, even with multicultural families. Although Korea’s
“new” national racial project under neoliberal reforms has brought trans-
national/transracial marriages and multiethnic families to the fore, it
does not significantly challenge patriarchal blood lineage. Rather, it acti-
vates patriarchal blood kinship, creating divergent racial lines based on
the distribution of parents’ nationality and race across gender.

Wandering Multiculturalism: Mobilizing Biraciality

in Imagining Korea’s Multicultural Future

Both Rainbow Kindergarten and Cackling Class observed young chil-

dren’s peer dynamics in “school” environments. This setting is both
symbolic and strategic for two different reasons. First of all, it provides
an ideal environment to observe children’s interpersonal dynamics as
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  177

they participate in the positive activity of education. These shows pro-

vide children with scholarly lessons in language (Rainbow Kindergarten
Episode 1) and courtesy (Rainbow Kindergarten Episode 10) and life
lessons in national and cultural difference (Cackling Class). The shows’
relationship to edutainment safely and implicitly mobilizes a narrative of
children as Korea’s future.
Second, the school-like setting increases audiences’ viewing pleas-
ure by interweaving a narrative of child development. The children on
these shows learn new things, and audiences watch this learning jour-
ney, providing meek entertainment or healing entertainment while mask-
ing the voyeuristic nature of observational reality TV. In other words,
observational reality TV featuring children offers the viewing pleasure of
unexpected situations based on children’s innocence and less controlled
behavior without any of the ethical dilemmas that accompany sensational
or sensual reality programs targeting adults.
Even though both Rainbow Kindergarten and Cackling Class shared
similar “school” environments, the two shows mobilized biraciality to
visualize Korea’s multicultural future differently depending on their for-
mat and narrative structure. This is most apparent when examining how
these shows televised familial relationships, especially parent-child rela-
tionships, as how the shows mobilized children’s biracial bodies in rela-
tion to the future.

Rainbow Kindergarten: Racial Harmony in the Guise of Lookism

The class(room)-like setting of Rainbow Kindergarten created an over-
arching theme for the show, and cast members’ peer dynamics and
emotional reactions functioned as the primary forces driving the narra-
tive. For instance, the first episode of Rainbow Kindergarten started by
offering a lesson with a professional kindergarten English instructor. In
addition, in Episode 10, the whole group visited Hanok Village, where
hundreds of Korean traditional houses are located, to get a lesson on
Korean traditional courtesy and how to do a traditional bow. Beyond
these “classic” lessons, the children participated in a Marine boot camp
for kids to practice bravery (Episodes 32–33) and participated in virtual
marriage to see what married life is like (Episodes 35–37).
Although the show was not centrally about parenting and par-
ents’ presence was limited; the parents of the children on Rainbow
Kindergarten were presented as (perfect) helpers, mentors, and/or
178  J.-H. Ahn

managers of their kids. When the show challenged the children to put
on a fashion show (Episodes 29–31 and 34), each member met with a
professional model and designer to consult about how to be a successful
model on the runway. In Episode 29, the fashion show director encour-
aged Kiera and Hyŏnsŏ to lose weight; Cristina and Chinkyu to prac-
tice runway walking and pose; Lincoln to exercise harder to be taller;
Gabriel to do a puzzle to maintain his concentration longer; and Aleyna
to prepare a fashion book for other classmates. In the following episode,
each member undertook these missions at home with the help of their
parents.
As they helped their children with their missions, the parents (and
especially the non-Korean parents) were presented as caring. Chinkyu
and Cristina met at Chinkyu’s house, and Chinkyu’s Russian mother,
a law school graduate who worked as a professional fashion model
in Russia, taught them how to walk the runway like a fashion model.
Lincoln’s (American) father played with Lincoln to help him exercise and
build muscle, and Kiera’s (British) father helped Kiera reduce her weight
by directing her on what (not) to eat and by exercising together. Because
Aleyna was already working as a fashion model for children’s clothing,
the show pictured her at a children’ fashion magazine photoshoot. On
the way to the photoshoot, Aleyna’s (Korean) mother was presented as a
perfect manager who took care of Aleyna’s shooting schedule and helped
her decide what to wear and how to smile on camera. These parents were
portrayed as excellent mentors and managers who transmit social capital
to their children in various ways. As Susan Koshy (2013) puts it, family
is the site “for the formation and accumulation of human capital (edu-
cation, training, emotional, and mental characteristics) in a neoliberal
order” (345).
Rainbow Kindergarten offered a uniquely framed space where biracial
children were a numerical majority. In this highly managed space, being
biracial did not necessarily function as a distinctive marker but instead
acquired an unmarked quality. Rainbow Kindergarten obscured racial
difference between biracial children and full-blood Korean children,
never articulating differences of identity, skin color, and/or linguistic
proficiency. Though conflicts and emotional turmoil emerged among
the children, driving the show’s narrative, these issues were not linked
to racial identity or difference. The show appeared to illustrate perfect
(racial) harmony, where racial difference neither existed nor mattered. By
showing that biracial children and full-blooded Koreans got along well
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  179

and by avoiding race as an issue, the show naturalized racial/ethnic dif-

ference between the two groups as if there were no difference at the first
place.
However, it would be wrong to read the racial harmony portrayed by
Rainbow Kindergarten as a marker of what scholars in the multiracial
West have called a “post-racial society” or “color-blind society.” Instead,
racial difference was rendered invisible and transcended through the
articulation of whiteness and lookism reflected in the show’s narrative
structure and format. Praise for each participant’s looks is a primary nar-
rative technique in observational reality TV; in Rainbow Kindergarten,
this technique naturalized the articulation between white biraciality and
beauty.
Indeed, lookism, along with emotional affection among boys and
girls, was an essential driving force behind the show’s general storyline.
When the children played a Jenga game, the penalties for crashing the
bricks were “sing to someone you like,” “take a walk around the class-
room, carrying someone you like on your back,” or “peck the person
you like the most” (Episode 3). During the individual interviews, the

matching process: “Why did you choose ○○ for your partner?” “How
producers asked questions that dramatized the emotions involved in the

do you feel about not pairing with ○○?” “Whom do you want as your
partner next time?” “Will ○○ choose you next time?” By asking these
questions, the show increased emotional tensions between the boys and
girls and intensified peer dynamics.
The show baldly mobilized various activities that incited lookism and
evaluation of peers, including a swimsuit contest, a popularity vote, and
an individual talent show. On one episode where the boys each chose
one girl to invite their homes (Episodes 11–12), all of the boys chose
Cristina. When the boys were asked, “Why would you like Cristina to
come?” all of them answered, “She is pretty.” After the girls together
watched the boys’ pre-taped invitation videos, Aleyna and Hyŏnsŏ were
deeply disappointed not to be chosen. When Aleyna asked Hyŏnsŏ,
“Why weren’t we chosen [by the boys]?” Hyŏnsŏ answered, “Because
Cristina is pretty.”
Whereas the boys chose to be paired with Cristina for her looks, the
girls all chose to be paired with Gabriel because of his leadership qualities
and his prankster personality, reinforcing gendered stereotypes. It is also
noteworthy that both Gabriel and Cristina were biracial children, and
they were the most popular of the kids, though this was never explicitly
180  J.-H. Ahn

discussed within the show. Indeed, Rainbow Kindergarten highlighted

biracial beauty without talking about biracial identity. Instead, the pro-
gram showed the popularity of biracial children within the group. Any
references to biracial children’s national or racial identities were oblique,
referencing for example, Gabriel’s family vacation in America. Even when
biracial children’s non-Korean parents appeared on the show, it was not
to discuss their biracial identity but to complete a mission together.
More than any other set of episodes, the fashion show project illus-
trated the relationship between biracial beauty/popularity and lookism.
The episodes intertextually mobilized another successful competition-
based reality show, Project Runway Korea (The Project Runway episode
that cast Rainbow Kindergarten kids aired as Season 4, Episode 9). In
Rainbow Kindergarten’s fashion show project episodes, the children
raced to choose a costume and to be chosen as the final runway model.
Chinkyu and Cristina, both biracial, were selected to wear the final cos-
tume as a couple.
During the course of the show’s run in 2011, almost all of the biracial
cast members appeared in kids’ fashion magazines, which demonstrates
that their biraciality was received as good-looking in the children’s con-
sumer market. A magazine article titled “A Child Star, Is It Good or Bad
for Children?” (2013) published in Best Baby, one of the most popular
childcare magazines, interviewed three mothers of rising kids’ fashion
models, including Daniel’s mother. The article points out that the child
fashion model market has become increasingly competitive and biracial
kids are becoming more visible in the fashion model market these days.
One interviewee, a Korean mother whose child was born to a French
father, said in the interview that she had no choice but to open an online
community for biracial children who want to be fashion models (and
their mothers) because she received too many questions about how to
enter the industry.
Finally, in Episode 41, the children are all asked to do something
good to get a ticket to an amusement park. Gabriel and Chinkyu
paired up to pick up garbage on a downtown street in Taegu city.37
The street was crowded with people who wanted to see them and take
a picture, transforming the street into a fan event. When the Rainbow
Kindergarten team eventually visited the amusement park, their last task
before entering the park was to get stamps from the amusement park vis-
itors by pleasing them. All teams attracted a small crowd, but a very large
crowd followed Gabriel and Daniel, asking to take photos and expressing
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  181

how cute they were. Due to their high popularity based on their appear-
ance, Gabriel and Daniel easily received as many stamps as they wished
from the crowd. In instances like this one, the show highlighted biracial
children’s popularity not by directly mobilizing biracial identity or racial
difference but by indirectly showing ordinary people’s fascination toward
them in the form of observational reality TV.
Considering that whiteness is not a social fact or biological trait but
a sign constructed through repetitive narratives, images, and practices
(Shome 2014), Rainbow Kindergarten’s construction of (light-skinned)
biracial children as natural beauties reveals how whiteness mediates the
racial visibility of a particular type of racial mixing on screen. Put dif-
ferently, the racial harmony on the show was made possible by elevat-
ing whiteness, making biracial children’s markers of foreignness such as
speaking excellent English and their good-looking appearance accept-
able or even desirable, which, in turn, makes (light-skinned) Amerasian/
Eurasian children much more visible in the Korean televisual landscape in
general.

Cackling Class: Empowering Children of the Multicultural Family

Whereas Rainbow Kindergarten offered various types of “classes” in
Korea, Cackling Class brought kids to their mothers’ country and
offered educational lessons in the classroom format of a Vietnamese
elementary school as well as the non-traditional format of exploring
Vietnamese culture through travel. Cackling Class combined the travel
show genre with observational TV, mobilizing the humanistic drama
generated by travel. The act of travel produces stories about foreign
encounters and unexpected situations, which inevitably generates com-
parative reflection on the familiar (and known) and unfamiliar (and
unknown). This mobility in the form of travel generates room for trans-
national imagination, which in turn constructs and reshapes one’s cul-
tural identity (Appadurai 1996).
On the trip, the children of Cackling Class experienced life and cul-
ture in their mothers’ country. The show intentionally highlighted
cultural differences to inform audiences about daily life in Vietnam.
The show introduced elementary school life by letting children join a
Vietnamese school as visiting students. In the first episode, the program
showed a morning assembly where the students gathered in the school-
yard to sing the Vietnamese national anthem, “Marching to the Front”
182  J.-H. Ahn

Fig. 6.3  Children at the morning assembly, singing Vietnamese national

anthem (Episode 1)

(see Fig. 6.3), something that rarely happens in contemporary Korean

elementary schools. Cackling Class also showed the students’ hour of
siesta in the afternoon, a cultural tradition that does not exist in Korea
(Episode 2).
Similar to Love in Asia, Cackling Class mobilized cultural difference
on the mother’s side. Both shows put considerable effort into explain-
ing different cultural practices and lifestyles to Korean audiences using
audio-visual techniques such as voiceover narration and/or subti-
tles. However, Cackling Class’ manner of utilizing cultural difference
diverged from Love in Asia’s in a few distinct ways.
Unlike Love in Asia where the non-Korean parent/spouse’s cultural
difference was easily co-opted and Orientalized to illustrate Korea’s
superior position, Cackling Class presented a much more careful repre-
sentation of the mother’s culture by moving away from a superior-ver-
sus-inferior dichotomy (although this does not mean that it completely
abandoned this framework). Cackling Class provided onscreen captions
headed by “Vietnamese Tip” to briefly explain Vietnamese culture when-
ever necessary (see Fig. 6.4). For example, one caption gave the name of
a Vietnamese food and a similar food in Korea (Episode 3); another said
what it means to burn incense in a Vietnamese household (Episode 4);
and yet another explained how Vietnamese Buddhist temple culture was
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  183

Fig. 6.4  The children visited a temple to explore Vietnamese temple cul-

ture (Episode 6)

different from its Korean counterpart (Episode 6). Whereas Love in Asia
often took a value-laden approach to comparisons, expressing imperial-
istic desire (e.g., “the rattling sound of the Sri Lankan train reminds me
of the trains in Korea in the 50s and the 60s” as mentioned in Chap. 5),
the “Vietnamese Tip” captions in Cackling Class offered more “neutral,”
knowledge-based information on cultural difference and life practices.
Cackling Class also adopted a unique strategy to narrate cultural dif-
ference by transmitting mothers’ childhood memories to their children.
Each morning, the children received pre-taped message from their moth-
ers. In the videos, their mothers shared stories from their childhoods
and offered suggestions for food, games, and locations to explore and
experience. For instance, Minu’s mother suggested that they play a game
of pool (Episode 1); Yujin’s mother recommended visiting an aquafarm
(Episode 2); Tongmin’s mother suggested tasting various types of mar-
ket food (Episode 3); Yeji’s grandfather recommended exploring a jun-
gle (Episode 4); and Yesŭl’s mother suggested a temple visit (Episode 6).
By having children participate in recommended activities directly based
on their mothers’ childhood memories in Vietnam, the show sought to
strengthen the bonds between child and mother, transmitting the moth-
ers’ personal memories as well as Vietnamese culture and traditions to
their children. The children completed the cultural activity “missions”
184  J.-H. Ahn

suggested by each mother together as a team, and the show made clear
that these activities were designed to facilitate the children’s understand-
ing of their mothers’ backgrounds, which would eventually help them
explore their biracial identity as Koreans.
This theme of visiting the mother’s home country in Cackling Class
was related to multiculturalism policy. Many civic organizations for mar-
riage migrants and local governments run home-visit programs for mul-
ticultural families with the intent of strengthening ties among family
members and supporting successful settlement in Korea (Kim and Kim
2013). The Korean Foundation for Women (hankuk yŏsŏng chaetan)
has sponsored a home-visit program for Vietnamese women marriage
migrants since 2007. This trend of children visiting their mothers’ home
countries indicates an important shift in policies toward the multicultural
family. Previously, to be Korean, a mother’s side was ignored or deleted
in pursuit of total assimilation for the children of multicultural families.
However, as biraciality is increasingly framed as an “asset” or a “global
talent” under the neoliberal restructuring of the familial unit as discussed
in Chap. 5, the children of multicultural families are now encouraged to
learn more about their mothers’ sides because doing so is deemed ben-
eficial to national interests. In other words, Cackling Class reflects grow-
ing individual and institutional efforts to improve (cultural) recognition
of the mother’s heritage.
The father of Cackling Class participant Tongmin commented on this
improved recognition in an interview:

Tongmin will be entering elementary school next year. I hope that this
trip to Vietnam becomes a seed to nurture the culture where Tongmin can
proudly introduce his mother’s country, not with shame, and proudly say
that his mother is Vietnamese. I am sending him to Vietnam hoping that
my wish would come true in the near future. (Episode 2)

Reflecting Tongmin’s father’s hope that his son could one day be proud
of his mother’s heritage, Cackling Class aimed to foster the self-esteem of
children of multicultural families by building a positive emotional bond
with the country where the mother was born. Indeed, over the course of
the show, the children narrated a story of self-realization through travel
to their mothers’ country. In the final episode (Episode 6), Minu said, “I
thought Vietnam was [just] my mother’s country. But now I think Korea
and Vietnam are equally my country.” Echoing Minu, Minjun, one of the
 6  THIS IS (NOT) OUR MULTICULTURAL FUTURE  185

“uncle” celebrities who accompanied the trip as a guardian, said, “The trip
aimed to explore mother’s country. I hope that our children feel proud
of Vietnam when they go back to Korea.” In addition, on the final day
of the trip, the kids were reunited with their Vietnamese mothers, who
joined the team as a surprise. The mothers spent the last night of the
show together with their child and family in Vietnam, a narrative device
that dramatized the emotional moment of family reunion. On this last epi-
sode, the children told their mothers what they had learned throughout
their trip. Through their narratives of learning, Cackling Class reinforced
the idea that these children were growing into future global leaders by
embracing their mothers’ culture as a source of pride, not shame.

Conclusion
This chapter examined visual representations of biracial children on
observational reality TV to ask what types of racial mixing have become
(more) visible in Korean televisual culture. Reading the emergence
of reality TV as a sign of a neoliberal turn in the televisual landscape, I
argued that meek entertainment that portrays familial relationships, par-
ticularly in the form of observational reality TV, is a site where neolib-
eral family-making takes place. I conceived of Rainbow Kindergarten and
Cackling Class as two representative televisual sites where the national
racial order intersects with the neoliberal turn of Korean TV, formulating
two different types of transnational and transracial families in the age of
neoliberal multiculturalism in Korea.
Both Rainbow Kindergarten and Cackling Class offered (perfectly)
sanitized multiracial spaces in a cheerful school-like setting where biracial
identity or identity conflicts never come to the fore. Instead, these shows
emphasized that the children—and the nation itself—is coming of age
into a multicultural future. These shows cast biracial children but they
avoided discussion of race, either by silencing that discussion (Rainbow
Kindergarten) or by framing biracial identity only in a safe and cheerful
mode, covering everyday racism (Cackling Class).
In addition, I explained the social structural conditions and the tel-
evisual genre conventions in which certain types of biracial images are
produced and consumed by examining biracial representation in both
shows in a comparative manner. Whereas biracial children with white
European/American fathers became iconic children’s stars based on their
good looks after appearing on Rainbow Kindergarten, the children of
186  J.-H. Ahn

Vietnamese mothers in Cackling Class failed to acquire media attention

and were only consumed as unthreatening and well-assimilated. Indeed,
Cackling Class was a commercial entertainment show like Rainbow
Kindergarten; however, biraciality was not commercialized in the same
way as on Rainbow Kindergarten. In Rainbow Kindergarten, neither
biracial kids’ racial identity nor their Koreanness was emphasized; instead,
their adorable appearance was highlighted and marketed. In contrast,
Cackling Class served the public interest in providing positive images of
multicultural families by emphasizing and exploring another “half” of
hybrid identity. Put differently, light-skinned biracial children with white
European and/or American parents in Rainbow Kindergarten repre-
sented objects of fascination that produced humor and commercial value,
whereas biracial children with Southeast Asian parents in Cackling Class
became visible only under the humanistic and paternalistic impulse, even
when appearing on commercial entertainment TV shows.

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 Conclusion

In 2015, Huffington Post Korea celebrated its first anniversary by pub-

lishing an article based on an in-depth interview with Jasmine Lee, then
a member of the Nineteenth National Assembly (2012–2016). The arti-
cle addressed Lee as a symbolic and representative figure for the next
decade in Korea (Kim and Kim 2015). To open the article, the reporter
contrasts Jasmine Lee with Fleur Pellerin, challenging Koreans’ general
perception of who is Korean. Fleur Pellerin was born to Korean parents
in Seoul, Korea with the name Kim Chongsuk in 1973, but six months
after birth, she was adopted by a French family. Pellerin visited Korea
for the first time in 2013 after she was appointed as a Minister of Small
and Medium-Sized Enterprises, Innovation and the Digital Economy
in 2012 (She later became a Minister of Culture and Communication
in 2014). By contrast, Jasmine Lee was born in Manila, the Philippines,
and her full Filipino name was Jasmine Bacurnay y Villanueva. She mar-
ried a Korean husband in 1995 and naturalized as a Korean in 1998. She
speaks fluent Korean and had lived in Korea for almost two decades. The
contrast between the two is clear: while Pellerin is not Korean by nation-
ality, she is Korean by bloodline; and while Lee is not Korean by blood-
line, she is Korean by nationality (Kim and Kim 2015).
The comparison was only briefly introduced as a vignette to open the
article, but it is meaningful to consider in more detail Korean society’s
(and the Korean mainstream media’s) different approaches to Pellerin
and Lee. Just like in Ward’s case, the Korean mainstream media reported

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

J.-H. Ahn, Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism 191
in South Korean Media, East Asian Popular Culture,
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192  Conclusion

Pellerin’s new appointment as a French minister with excitement,

highlighting her Korean blood tie. When she visited Korea in her offi-
cial capacity in 2013, media attention was high both because a French
minister was visiting Korea and because she was a Korean adoptee.
However, in an interview with Le Monde in February 2016, shortly after
she resigned from the minister position, Pellerin expressed her uneasi-
ness about her first visit to Korea. She said, “The media attention was
such that it was a pretty unpleasant experience. A swarm of reporters was
waiting at the airport. People stopped me in the street, made ​​me gifts,
showing a conception of the nation based on genes. For the Korean pop-
ulation, it was like there is a Korean woman in the French government!”
(Cojean 2016). Because she firmly identifies as French (not as Korean),
Pellerin was embarrassed at the Korean media’s eagerness to claim her
Koreanness based on a (tenuous) blood tie that she did not identify
with. It is notable that this pattern of projecting Korean pride onto any
successful descendants around the globe based on their (partial or full)
Korean blood tie has become almost a cliché in the Korean media.
In contrast to this national embrace, as the first naturalized multicul-
tural congressperson, Jasmine Lee faced a major racist backlash during
her tenure of office (Kim and Kim 2015). While Lee’s election created
discursive space for Korean nationals to reconsider what it means to be
Korean and how the nation should envision its future in the century of
global migration, her personal transition was not an easy one. She was
targeted by the anti-multiculturalist movement and racist comments such
as “Go back to your home country!” or “How could a Filipino bitch
become a Korean congressperson?” appeared online and in the press
(Kim and Kim 2015). These comments revealed the tensions inherent
in the national racial project of multiculturalism that had been ongoing
since the mid-2000s.
Despite her strong wish to continue her work as a congressperson,
Lee failed to secure her seat for the Twentieth Congress in 2016. Lee’s
“rise” (as a media figure in her earlier public life) and “fall” (as a politi-
cal figure) precisely captures how current Korean multiculturalism works.
She was loved by Korean audiences when playing a pitiful Vietnamese
mother in the film Punch (2011) because Koreans could project their
fantasies of marriage migrants onto this fictional character. However, as
she became a politician who speaks for immigrant right and the social
welfare of multicultural families, she suddenly became a target of hatred
and xenophobia upon which Korean people projected their complaints
about immigrant issues (e.g., accusing immigrant workers of taking
 Conclusion   193

native Koreans’ jobs or blaming multicultural families for wasting “our”

taxes for “their” welfare).
This contrasting societal and media treatment of Pellerin and Lee is
prototypical of many repeating cases: successful Koreans abroad are
claimed as Korean even with tenuous blood ties whereas naturalized
Koreans living in Korea should remain docile and quiet, otherwise they
will be punished and excluded from Koreanness (even if they are offi-
cially granted Korean nationality). Yet increasing numbers of children
of multicultural families complicate the intersection of blood tie with
nationality. These children are Korean by both blood tie and nationality,
but their Koreanness is still in question. This (new) type of mixed-race
child born in Korea not only disrupts previously rigid racial/national
boundaries but also reinscribes racial lines at the critical juncture of
Korea’s yearning for a global Korea.
***
This book was a study of the textual, institutional, and discursive poli-
tics of neoliberal multiculturalism in contemporary Korean popular cul-
ture. It explored the moments of rupture and disjuncture that biracial
bodies bring to the formation of neoliberal multiculturalism, a Korean
national racial project that realigns racial lines under the country’s neo-
liberal transformation. Specifically, the book examined four televised
racial moments that demonstrate particular aspects of neoliberal mul-
ticulturalism by demanding distinct ways of reimagining what it means
to be Korean in the contemporary globalized era. It studied how the
Korean media articulates neoliberal multiculturalism as a nation-building
project that strengthens, rather than dilutes, national pride by allow-
ing Korea to assert its global nature. Korean TV depictions of biracial
Koreans exemplify the nation’s turn away from explicit use of the “one-
blood” racialized nationalist discourse and toward an embrace of mul-
ticulturalism—in particular, a form of multiculturalism that is linked to
economic development through global cosmopolitanism and through
economically productive marriages and family structures. Yet the old
one-blood discourse remains salient for viewers, who can now actively
engage in public conversation regarding their consumption of media
multiculturalism through online forums. Thus, the nation-building
project articulated by Korean TV depictions of mixed-race looks less
like a linear progression toward ethnic pluralism and more like a dialog
between the discourses of globalization and essentialized Korean identity.
194  Conclusion

In Chap. 2, I presented a history of how the Korean state dealt with

racial diversity and biracial persons within its borders since the Korean
War and how media depictions reflected state approaches. This history
provided a background to understand the intersecting forces that I call
“race-nation-media articulation,” which animated the televised racial
moments to follow. This chapter advanced previous scholarships on eth-
nic nationalism and the statist formation of Korean media by explaining
the complex dynamics among race, nation, and media in constructing
a particular mode of national identity—either Korea as racially homog-
enous or Korea as global and multicultural.
I then addressed the four televised racial moments in pairs. The first
pair involved two celebrities from America who are biracial, with one
Korean parent. Hines Ward, who is a biracial black football star, repre-
sents a moment of erasure, where Korea strives to erase its racist past and
imagine a new multicultural Korea. By contrast, Daniel Henney, a bira-
cial white fashion model and actor, represents a moment that is (entirely)
disconnected from history, where Korea tries to embrace its global flex-
ibility and cosmopolitanism as signs of dominance. In expressing these
moments, television programmers emphasized these figures’ racial-
ized masculinities. Whereas Ward’s black sports-star masculinity could
remain hegemonically masculine while also performing tender devotion
to mother and country, Henney’s metrosexual masculinity suggested
Asianized (Western) cosmopolitanism, and he appeared as a cultural
vehicle for showcasing Korea’s elevated status in a global cultural map.
Yet even as they exemplified these moments and thus articulated particu-
lar national ideals, their mixed status meant that both celebrities retained
only a tenuous claim on Koreanness that could be called into question at
any time by full-blood Koreans.
In the second pair of racial moments, reality TV sutures concerns
over multicultural families formed through marriages between Koreans
and people from other nations, whether in Asia or beyond. The tel-
evision show Love in Asia represents a moment where Korea asserts its
position as a global center in relation to economically less developed
countries. In contrast to either the Hines Ward and Daniel Henney
moments, this moment does not erase or ignore Korea’s past. Instead,
it draws on nostalgic depictions of developing countries and family reun-
ions as recalling the nation’s “glorious past” during the era of national
development to celebrate the nation’s current global development pro-
ject. In addition, whereas Henney represented a moment of dominance
 Conclusion   195

through cosmopolitan consumption in the globalized economy, Love in

Asia tied multicultural marriages to economic productivity at home and
global capital investment abroad (e.g., in the city airport railway project
in Indonesia). And whereas the Ward moment emphasized cultural unity
(depicting Ward in traditional Korean clothes, for example), Love in Asia
deployed cultural difference as discrete and non-threatening. The final
moment of reality TV shows depicting multicultural children—Rainbow
Kindergarten and Cackling Class—pairs with Love in Asia as a sanitized
depiction of multicultural family life. Through the depiction of children
in classroom settings, these shows televise Korea’s multicultural future
where full-blooded Korean children and mixed-race children enjoy per-
fect (racial) harmony as if race (or racial difference) does not matter
(Rainbow Kindergarten) and where the children of multicultural families
are fully empowered as mixed Koreans by visiting their mothers’ home
country and exploring its culture (Cackling Class).
The book made the case that the blood tie (not necessarily racial mix-
ing) is a powerful metaphor for (re)imagining a new national identity in
Korea. While on the surface, a blood-centric racial order is seen as out-
dated and something to be overcome to meet a “global standard” under
neoliberal multiculturalism in contemporary Korea, the book showed
that blood persists as a racial(izing) apparatus through its articulation
with other social factors such as skin color, phenotype, parent’s nation-
ality, and household economic status. I highlighted how the old blood
matrix survived by changing its modality under neoliberal multicultur-
alism. For instance, Ward’s external appearance could be overlooked
because his internal blood animated his Koreanness in the form of filial
piety and devotion to Korea. By contrast, despite Henney’s Koreanness
or desirable white appearance, his blood was ultimately found lacking
because it did not drive him to passionately follow Korean tradition/cul-
ture and to learn Korean. Likewise, the children on Love in Asia per-
formed their Koreanness by articulating their desire to contribute to the
Korean economy. Furthermore, women marriage migrants (the moth-
ers of multicultural families) in Love in Asia and Cackling Class demon-
strated their suitability to transmit Korean blood to their offspring by
not only performing Koreanness (e.g., good wife and daughter-in-law)
but also presenting themselves as useful economic citizens (e.g., engag-
ing in productive or reproductive labor as career women or mothers).
Yet the blood matrix is mobilized inconsistently. Henney’s Korean
blood was ultimately questioned because of his perceived lack of
196  Conclusion

commitment to Koreanness, and the biracial children of multicul-

tural families who appeared on Love in Asia and Cackling Class had to
“prove” their status as good, economic citizens of Korea. By contrast,
no one questioned or examined the Korean blood of the biracial children
on Rainbow Kindergarten; instead, the show highlighted the desirable
traits of their mixedness—such as speaking excellent English alongside
their perfect Korean and light-skinned beauty. While Henney’s speaking
of excellent English aroused a similar cosmopolitan appeal to the chil-
dren in Rainbow Kindergarten, his (lack of) Korean language proficiency
made his already tenuous Korean blood tie much more questionable; in
addition, Henney’s mother was a Korean adoptee. By contrast, the bira-
cial children on Rainbow Kindergarten spoke perfect Korean and lived in
Korea, so their race (or blood tie) was treated as a non-issue.
My findings make a few significant contributions to the fields of
mixed-race studies, media/cultural studies, and Asian studies with an
emphasis on Korean studies. First, this book contributes to the intersec-
tion of mixed-race studies and Korean studies by linking media discourse
on two distinctive categories of Amerasians and Kosians in a mixed-race
as method framework. Given that previous scholarship on mixed-raciality
in Korea tends to exclusively focus on Amerasians in the postwar con-
text, the book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary interdis-
ciplinary scholarship by explicating the changing cultural meanings of
biraciality in the age of globalization while also focusing on the chang-
ing relationship between the television genre and racial representation in
contemporary popular media and culture. Moreover, while a handful of
scholars have examined how race (or racial/ethnic diversity) is realigned
in the current phase of neoliberal multiculturalism (see Mahtani 2014;
Melamed 2006), no one to my knowledge has examined how the blood
matrix functions as a principle activating factor of neoliberal multicul-
turalism. This study therefore offers a critical intervention into current
scholarship on race neoliberalism by explaining how race survives and is
altered in globalized and neoliberal contexts.
Second, this book also advances our understanding of
biraciality/multiraciality in a global context by bringing non-white and
non-black racial mixing to the fore. Mixed-race studies have predominantly
focused on either part-white/part-black or black and white mixing in the
historical context of Western slavery and colonialism. While these studies
have rightfully demonstrated racial inequality, the politics of mixing in spe-
cific historical context, and power dynamics among different racial groups,
 Conclusion   197

they (unintentionally) privilege black or white biracial people, reinforcing a

black and white binary.
I acknowledge that my case studies of Amerasian celebrities concern
part-white and part-black mixed Koreans. Some readers might find that
these cases repeat the black and white dichotomy in studying mixed-race.
However, I argue that even though those cases pair part-black and part-
white figures, my analysis moves away from a black versus white relation
by placing part-Asians (as both Ward and Henney are biracial Koreans) at
the center of my analysis. In doing so, I explored the changing cultural
meaning of both whiteness and blackness not in a black versus white
racial relation but in a dialectics of transnationally consumed markers of
whiteness, blackness, and Asianness (or Koreanness).
Furthermore, beyond the Amerasian cases, my book also broadens
current scholarship on global mixed-race studies by examining non-
white and non-black racial mixing—Kosians or the children of multi-
cultural families—in an Asian context. This is particularly important
because racial mixing that is neither part-black nor part-white is largely
understudied in global mixed-race studies (King-O’Riain 2014; Mahtani
2014). This is true in the Western context (in the US context more spe-
cifically) because inter-Asian mixing is not considered racial mixing as
Asian is conceptualized as one race. However, my analysis of racial(ized)
discourses on the children of multicultural families challenges this
Western-centric cultural imagination of racial mixing by demonstrating
how inter-Asian mixing creates new racialized desires and threats in con-
temporary Asia, complicating the existing racial order.
The racial antagonism between general Koreans and increasing num-
bers of diverse ethnic groups in Korea is rapidly changing domestic poli-
tics. The rise of the anti-multiculturalism movement clearly shows that
the social integration of the immigrant population under the banner of
multiculturalism generates social conflicts. Because of this tension, it is
disappointing but not surprising that neither Jasmine Lee nor any other
“second Jasmine Lee” was elected for the Twentieth Congress in 2016.
Together with growing anti-multiculturalism sentiments in domestic pol-
itics, the rise of global terrorism and a fear of immigrants have hardened
national boundaries around the world, amplifying nationalistic jingoism
in each nation.
Under the current situation, it is hard to foresee whether Korean
multiculturalism as a national racial project will continue to operate as a
hegemonic form of the neoliberal restructuring of Korea’s immigration
198  Conclusion

system and racial order. It remains to be seen how Korean multicultural-

ism will transform its modality in the face of anti-immigrant sentiment.
In turn, we have yet to see how these emotions of fear and aversion
toward racial others (including the children of multicultural families) will
redirect Korean neoliberal multiculturalism. These matters require close
attention as Korea continues to pursue its yearning to be a global multi-
cultural nation.
 Notes

1. I use a slash here to indicate that the use of the terms “mixed-
race” and “mixed-blood” has not been clearly distinguished his-
torically and used interchangeably.
2. In its inaugural issue in 2014, the Journal of Critical Mixed Race
Studies included lists of publications (mostly books published in
English) that cover topics of race and multiraciality in the form
of an appendix. It is remarkable that book publication lists from
1989 to 2004 (Appendix A) is only six pages whereas the book
lists from 2005 to 2013 (Appendix B) increased to twelve pages,
almost double the number from less than a decade earlier.
3. Instead of honjong, the term japjong (잡종) or t'wigi was more
popularly used to describe mixed-race people. Yet it should
be noted that both are derogatory terms that generally refer to
mixed-bred stocks.
4. It is all the same in Japan in that konketsu (literally “mixed-
blood”) had been the most popular term referring biracial people
for a long time during and after the war in Japan.
5. For the similar reason, in a Western context, the terms “mixed-
race,” “multiracial,” or “biracial” are more frequently used.
6. For this reason, the use of the term in English articles is still con-
fusing: some use “mixed-race,” some use “mixed-blood,” some
still use honhyŏl.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

J.-H. Ahn, Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism 199
in South Korean Media, East Asian Popular Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65774-5
200  Notes

7. In explaining Korea’s racism, Han Gil-Soo (2016) coins the term
“nouveau-riche nationalism,” arguing that Korea’s ethnocentric
racism against immigrants today is largely based on the national
economic status of the immigrants’ origin of country.
8. Yet, whenever the blood matrix becomes an important compo-
nent of the discussion, I use the term “mixed-blood” to high-
light the discursive practice of the blood tie in shaping racialized
national identity.
9. South Korea’ presidential term is five years; thus, President Park
was supposed to officially finish her term in early 2018. However,
her presidential powers were suspended in December 2016 after
parliament’s impeachment vote, and the Constitution Court
unanimously ruled to formally end Park’s presidency over a cor-
ruption scandal in March 2017.
10. The first two regimes—Kim Taechung (1998–2003) and Noh
Muhyŏn (2003–2008)—were elected from the Democratic Party,
generally known as a progressive party and the last two regimes—
Lee Myŏngpak (2008–2013) and Park Kŭnhye (2013–2017)—
were elected from the Grand National Party (renamed as Saenuri
Party in 2012), generally known as a conservative one.
11. For a detailed discussion on this dynamic process of the develop-
ment of Korean multiculturalism, please refer to my recent publi-
cation (Ahn 2016, 25–28).
12. My earlier analysis of the characteristics of Korean multicultural-
ism appeared as a book chapter in Multiculturalism in East Asia
(see Ahn 2016). While my earlier discussion focused on the gen-
eral characteristics of Korean multiculturalism policy, this chapter
specifically concerns why and how Korean multiculturalism is a
national racial project in the era of neoliberal reform.
13. It is symbolic to note that it was Saenuri Party, not the
Democratic Party, that produced the first naturalized Korean con-
gressperson, Jasmine Lee, in 2012. Please refer to Chap. 5 and
Conclusion for further discussion.
14. I note that my discussion of multiculturalism as a gendered assim-
ilation policy was partially borrowed from my earlier publication
(see Ahn 2016, 30–31).
15. As of 2016, there are a total of 217 Centers across the nation.
16. This quote is from an interview with Hines Ward published in
Asian Week (“Hines Ward Visits the Motherland.” 2006).
 Notes   201

17. Honorary Seoul citizenship is only awarded to significant visitors

representing other nations or foreign residents who make signifi-
cant contributions to Seoul’s development.
18. I used the Korean newspaper search engine, KINDS (Korea
Integrated News Database System).
19. She once again gained national popularity as she participated in a
singing competition show I am a Singer (nanŭn 'gasuda; MBC
2011–2012, 2015). However, soon after she was on the show,
it emerged that she had been under suspicion for tax evasion.
Although she was not immediately dropped out from the show, her
overall popularity as well as TV appearance decreased since then.
20. Because of this harsh discrimination and social stigma on black
mixed-race individuals in Korea, she chose to give birth to her own
daughter in the USA so that her daughter could secure American
citizenship as she did not want her daughter to experience what she
had faced as a black biracial in Korea (Kim-Ko 2006).
21. The audio-visual clip of this television commercial can be watched
at http://blog.naver.com/hayean00?Redirect=Log&logNo=100
032960998&jumpingVid=DDEEF6C7657DFFFAA3649912A6
2993F4C41B.
22. In her study on Hines Ward in American media, Myra
Washington (2012) points out that Ward’s black masculinity was
highlighted in a manner that reinforces the stereotype of black
athletes as athletically superior while simultaneously recuperating
(emasculated) Asian masculinity in American popular culture.
23. To read the full interview, please refer to Woo (2009).
24. School assemblies were held every a week in all levels of com-
pulsory school, including elementary, middle, and high
school. During the assemblies, all students, teachers, and staff
were required to sing the national anthem and pledge alle-
giance to the flag. This requirement functioned as a mechanism to
discipline students and to inspire patriotism.
25. Ricky Kim is a white mixed-race, Korean-American actor and
model. He was born in the USA to an American father and a
Korean mother. Comparing Ricky Kim with Daniel Henney, Lo
and Kim (2011) explain: “While Daniel is racialized with high-
class Whiteness through his ‘British’ father and his construction
as an English expert, Ricky is instead racialized with low-class
Koreanness through his ‘slips’ into vulgar Korean, which are
202  Notes

linked to his low-class Korean relatives” (453). In other words,

though both Henney and Kim are white mixed-race males, their
cultural articulation differs due to their fathers’ countries of origin
and their cultural backgrounds.
26. My Lovely Samsoon was hugely popular in Korea and in other Asian
countries. The show’s national rating in Korea was over 50%. The
show was sold to Japan for the highest price ever awarded to a
Korean drama. The drama was also successful in many other coun-
tries in Asia, including China and Vietnam. The show’s national
rating in Vietnam was over 40%, and the drama was remade in
Vietnam with the title Ako si Kim Samsoon in 2008.
27. Henney’s ‘Odyssey Sunrise’ commercial can be viewed at http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bySCzlvl9T0.
28. Please refer to the video links for Henney’s television com-
mercials for Biotherm Homme: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Lj669oD-7lc&feature=player_embedded (skin care)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTGYguqyL4Q&feature=pl
ayer_embedded (whitening).
29. The television commercial for Bean Pole International has four
versions featuring Daniel Henney and Gwyneth Paltrow. To
watch them, please visit
a. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ8DPeOvNYQ&featur
e=player_embedded
b. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded
&v=XppnUB_dHaI
c. http://www.youtube.comwatch?feature=player_embedded
&v=mlG2KPlzH-4
d. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3bDsDJvv0I
30. There are a handful of foreign-born Asian mixed entertainers such
as Nichkhun (an American born Thai-Chinese who is a member
of a famous Korean boy band, 2PM) and GangNam (a Japanese
born Korean-Japanese who is a member of a Korean hip-hop
group, M.I.B). Yet there is no Korean-born biracial entertainer
of Asian descent who could be comparable to those foreign-born
Asian mixed entertainers. While Hwang Minu, a Vietnamese-
Korean boy nicknamed as “little Psy” for his being on Psy’s
Gangnam Style music video, could be an interesting exception,
his televisual presence has not been steady and quickly faded away
(see Chap. 6 for further discussion).
 Notes   203

31. In the early stages of the show, the production team visited the
female marriage migrants’ homeland on their behalf with gifts and
ready-made video clips to show their families because the financial
budget was not enough at that time.
32. Kwon Keum Sang (2013) further explains that Chinese and
Japanese were less likely to be cast as main protagonists on Love in
Asia because their phenotype is similar to Koreans, so their (eth-
nic) difference is less appealing (203).
33. Together Day is a national anniversary celebrating cultural diver-
sity and promoting social awareness toward people of different
cultures and background. It was first established in 2007 and its
first celebration event was held in 2008.
34. According to the Canada-based Korean media scholar Jin Dal Yong
(2016), “Super Star K began its first season on July 24, 2009, and
it attained great success, as the viewing rate reached 8 percent (1
percent is a standard for the success of programs on cable chan-
nels). Season 2 gained more success, as the viewing rate reached
more than 18%—the highest among all cable channels” (60).
35. Nearly two decades since cable channels were introduced in the
mid-1990s, 1% of national audience rating was generally consid-
ered as a “success” among industry persons and media critics.
However, starting from late 2000s and early 2010s, there have
been a handful programs produced by cable channels, including
Super Star K, that reached over a 10%, which demonstrates an
exceptional success in cable TV history.
36. While non-biracial kids were also popular (Toyun in particular),
their general popularity did not match the popularity that biracial
kids enjoyed throughout the show.
37. Some did it individually and some paired up as a group (two to
four). Yet all except for Chinkyu and Gabriel conducted their
mission in a private space such as home or hospital. Thus, there
was no chance to show the other members’ popularity in a public
space like Chinkyu and Gabriel.
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 Index

A Blood metaphor, 90, 91

Amerasian, 5, 13, 15, 17, 18, 25, 26, blood apparatus, 16, 90
28, 37, 39, 43, 44, 56, 65, 81, blood matrix, 195–196
83, 88, 103, 124, 132, 181, 196,
197
American GI, 39, 42, 44, 75, 85, 105 C
American imperialism (or US militant Cackling Class, 27, 63, 160, 164, 165,
imperialism), 10, 12, 15, 106 170, 171, 173–177, 181–186
Americanness, 15, 26, 86–88, 92, 114, Camp town, 37, 39, 42–44, 81, 85,
118, 125 86
Anti-multiculturalism, 28, 197 Children of multicultural families,
Anti-racism, 8 3, 14, 16, 18, 25, 46, 56, 57,
Asianized (Western) cosmopolitanism, 63–65, 88, 131, 132, 143–150,
104, 109, 110, 194 152, 153, 159, 165, 170, 171,
Asian neoliberalism, 6 175, 184
Asianness, 15, 27, 65, 150, 152, 154, Citizenship, 38, 42, 49, 51, 76, 90,
197 111, 149
Assimilation, 8, 52, 53, 60, 139, 145, flexible citizenship, 4, 104, 111, 118
176, 184 Conjunctural analysis, 22, 23
Cultural bridge, 27, 142, 146–148,
153
B Cultural difference, 136–139, 153,
Blackness, 5, 9, 26, 77, 78, 81, 83, 177, 182, 183, 195
85–88, 91–93, 124, 197 Cultural diversity, 20, 46, 49, 50, 63,
Bloodline, 12, 13, 17, 38, 90, 176, 191 64, 134, 164
blood tie, 111, 112, 121, 123
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
J.-H. Ahn, Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism 227
in South Korean Media, East Asian Popular Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65774-5
228  Index

D Human documentary, 27, 61, 63,

Developmentalism (or 132–134, 153, 159, 168, 171
developmentalist) Hybridity, 114
developmental nationalism, 45, 132, hybrid identity, 11, 90, 104
136, 141 racial hybridity, 11, 104, 112, 114,
developmental neoliberalism, 45 123, 143, 170
retrospective developmental nation-
alism, 45
I
Immigration policy, 50–52
E Insooni, 44, 83, 85–87, 107
English, 9, 55, 87, 117–119, 122, International marriage, 2, 3, 14, 16,
123, 175–177, 181, 196 27, 50, 52, 120, 160, 164, 173
Ethnic Koreans, 3, 4, 8, 14, 35, 51, International Monetary Fund (IMF),
63, 142 45, 55, 140, 141

F J
Foucault, Michel, 5, 6, 36, 38, 39, 48, Japanese colonialism, 12, 37
54, 151
Full-blood, 9, 13, 39, 87, 88, 91, 92,
152, 178, 194, 195 K
Kim, Nadia, 12, 14, 18, 86, 106
Kim, Yŏnghŭi, 75, 81, 88, 94
G Kim, Yŏngsam, 45
Global families, 164, 165 Korean Broadcasting System (KBS),
Globalism, 87, 104, 107, 108, 123, 27, 40, 41, 46, 59–61, 63, 77,
124 105, 106, 109, 133, 134, 161,
Globalization, 4, 10, 20, 26, 27, 36, 162, 171
45, 46, 49, 57–59, 64, 76, 81, Korean Dream, 88
82, 103, 110, 117, 121, 146, Koreanness or Korean(ness), 4, 5, 13,
148, 193, 196 19, 26, 28, 46, 65, 81, 90–95,
Globalness, 62, 116 112, 119, 123, 124, 132, 148,
Glocalization, 160 149, 151, 192–195
Governmentality, 6, 54, 57 global Korea, 46, 57, 64, 111, 119,
121, 124, 193
global Koreanness, 26
H monoracial Korea, 36, 46, 121, 124
Hall, Stuart, 22, 23, 80 neoliberal Korea, 2, 4, 7
Henney, Daniel, 26, 103, 104, Korean Obama, 27, 142–144, 148,
106–108, 110–112, 116, 117, 153
119, 121, 124, 131, 194
Homo sacer, 44, 56
 Index   229

Korean War, 14, 37, 38, 42, 81, 85, Mixed-race, 2–5, 8–19, 22, 24–28,
105, 194 36–44, 47, 56, 61, 63–65,
Korean Wave, 20, 46, 58, 59, 109, 75–78, 81–83, 85–89, 91, 92,
110, 119, 120 97, 98, 106–108, 111, 112, 114,
Kosian, 13–15, 17, 18 131–133, 142–148, 176, 193,
mixed-race children of Asian 195–197. See also Biracial
descent, 14 biracial(ity), 4, 5, 9, 13, 17, 27, 37,
mixed-race children with an Asian 47, 63, 65, 83, 85, 87, 104,
parent, 18 108, 111, 112, 143, 147, 152,
164, 193
mixed-race/blood, 2, 4, 16, 18, 37,
L 38, 76, 131, 150, 153
Lee, Jasmine, 142–144, 149, 191, mixed-race celebrity, 83, 105, 118,
192, 197, 200 123
Lee, Myŏngpak, 49, 51, 76, 200 mixed-raciality, 3, 10, 14, 77, 105,
Lookism, 179, 180 114, 118, 124, 196
Love in Asia, 27, 61, 62, 131, 132, Mixed-race as method, 11, 14, 15, 17,
134–138, 141–148, 153, 159, 196
171, 174, 182, 183, 194–196 Monoracial(ity), 9, 25, 26, 35–37,
39, 42, 44, 46, 48, 64, 65, 78,
104, 106, 120, 124, 133. See
M also Monoracial Korea; Racially
Mahtani, Minelle, 7, 8, 18, 63, 107, homogenous
148, 196, 197 Multicultural family(ies), 27, 49, 52,
Mail-order brides, 2, 55, 173 55, 56, 135, 136, 141, 149, 153,
Marriage migrant(s), 2, 134, 135, 173, 174, 195
142, 153, 173, 192, 195 Multicultural Family Support
Media event, 23, 26, 28, 75, 76, 78, Center(s), 53
80, 97, 143 Multiculturalism, 3, 4, 7, 8, 16, 17,
Meek entertainment, 161–164, 172, 26, 27, 35, 36, 45–49, 51–53, 60,
177, 185 63–65, 78, 79, 89, 91, 94, 97,
Melamed, Jodi, 7, 8 98, 104, 124, 125, 132, 134–
Metrosexuality, 114, 115, 124 136, 142, 143, 153, 159, 160,
metrosexual masculinity, 114 169, 175, 184, 192, 193, 198
Migrants, 2, 51–53, 56, 62, 104, 144, multicultural reality, 4, 27, 48, 134,
145, 162, 171, 173, 174, 184 153
female marriage migrants, 3, 17, 52, multicultural society, 35, 48, 49, 57,
53, 56, 57, 61, 62, 132, 133, 63, 76, 79, 81
135, 138, 142, 144, 153, 162, Multiraciality, 8, 82, 89, 107, 196
173, 174 Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation
migrant workers, 17, 47, 51, 52, 60, (MBC), 60, 63, 77, 103, 123,
78, 132, 142, 192 161, 162, 168
Mixedness, 44, 56, 86, 107, 146, 196 My Lovely Samsoon, 103, 108–110
230  Index

N Racial formation, 4, 135

Nation(al) building, 4, 47, 49, 193 Racial homogeneity, 20, 35, 44
Nationalism, 4, 6, 12, 13, 20, 27, 36, Racially homogenous, 2, 13, 35, 47,
37, 41, 42, 45, 47, 62–64, 91, 64, 194
121, 139–141, 153, 194 Racial mixing, 9, 27, 43, 63, 65, 107,
ethnic nationalism, 4, 12, 13, 27, 160, 165, 167, 169, 176, 181,
36, 37, 41, 42, 45, 64, 91, 194 185, 195–197
Neoliberal ethics, 4, 163 Racial project, 3, 7, 8, 11, 14, 28, 46,
Neoliberalism, 3, 5–8, 15, 45, 51, 54, 66, 176, 192, 193, 197
57, 64, 125, 196 Racial purity (racial/ethnic purity), 20,
neoliberal restructuring, 2, 65 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46
Neoliberal multiculturalism, 3, 4, 7, Racism, 7, 9, 16, 23, 26, 28, 44, 46,
8, 14–16, 23, 25, 28, 36, 47, 66, 56, 65, 77, 78, 81, 82, 87, 89,
76, 91, 94, 98, 132, 133, 153, 105, 151, 169, 185
154, 185, 193, 195, 196, 198 Rainbow Kindergarten, 27, 63, 160,
Nishime, LeiLani, 19 164–171, 175–181, 185, 186,
Noh, Muhyŏn, 47 195, 196
Nostalgia, 139–141, 153 Reality TV, 4, 5, 27, 28, 60, 63, 132,
159–164, 170, 185, 194, 195
observational reality TV, 159,
O 161–163, 177, 179, 181, 185
Orientalism, 27, 138
Otherness, 13, 28, 42, 77, 105, 112,
123, 152 S
Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS), 60,
63, 83, 134, 161, 162, 168
P Shin, Gi-Wook, 2, 12
Park, Chŏnghŭi, 40, 42, 45 Skin color, 16, 19, 20, 44, 86, 90, 91, 115,
Park, Kŭnhye, 45, 49, 51, 200 116, 118, 149–152, 154, 167, 178
Phenotype, 93, 152, 154, 175, 195 Southeast Asian, 14, 139, 147, 151,
Plan for Promoting the Social 152, 164, 171, 173, 175, 186
Integration of Mixed-Race and Stereotype, 28, 146, 169, 173, 174
Immigrants, 78, 79 Super Star K, 161, 203
Post-racial society, 63, 144, 179
Pure blood, 4, 15, 151
T
Tamunhwa, 3, 14, 18, 49, 61, 149,
R 150, 162
Race-nation-media articulation, 36, Televised racial moment(s), 4, 23, 26, 132
194 Transnational celebrity, 108, 110, 118,
Racial diversity, 87, 170, 194 119, 122
Transnational mobility, 26, 103, 104,
108, 110–112, 116, 124
 Index   231

V cosmopolitan whiteness, 116, 118,

Visibility, 15, 19, 20, 65, 92, 122, 122
131, 142, 164, 170 White supremacy, 8, 10, 107
racial visibility, 17, 18, 20, 160, World War II, 10, 12, 13, 37
164, 181

Y
W Yun, Suil, 44, 105
Ward, Hines, 75–83, 86–93, 95, 97,
107, 111, 121, 131, 149
Hines Ward moment, 77, 79–83,
86–88, 90–93, 97, 98, 103,
104, 124
Whiteness, 5, 26, 103–106, 108, 111,
112, 114–118, 123–125, 179,
181