Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea: Reflections and Future Directions

South Korea is currently undergoing one of the most dramatic demographic transitions in world history. The transition is reflected across several social indicators, including declining fertility and marriage rates. The combination of the lowest total fertility rate in the world (0.72 in 2023) and greater longevity (Korean women are predicted to live longer than any population starting with the 2030 birth cohort) is fundamentally reshaping the age distribution of the population. The retreat from marriage and steady divorce rates have led to the rise of single-person households, which is now the modal household size in South Korea (more than 35 percent of all households). These trends are predictably driving unprecedented policy strategies such as the creation of new visa categories to facilitate immigration.Edited by Minjeong Kim and Hyeyoung Woo, Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea takes stock of one of the most important developments in the evolution of the Korean family. As the editors argue, the first phase of research on multicultural families in Korea has almost exclusively focused on government assimilation policies and the lives of “foreign brides.” This is understandable given that the popular designation of the “multicultural family” is compositionally limited to women from China and Southeast Asia who marry underprivileged Korean men. The current volume, however, demonstrates clearly that this categorization neglects a wider range of interethnic and interracial family arrangements in South Korea.Consisting of ten chapters divided into four substantive themes, Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea broadens and updates our understanding of family change in Korea in two important ways. First, the volume brings to our attention households that have been sidelined by the dominant conceptualization of multicultural families, including marriages between Korean women and Pakistani and Filipino husbands (chapters 3 and 8, respectively). The consequences of this neglect are made obvious in these chapters where different dynamics and social mechanisms govern these “invisible” families. The gendered “negotiations” shaping the public presentation of the family are unique for these households, where some children, in an effort to hide their multiethnicity, are unconventionally motivated to adopt their mother's surnames. These prudent calculations, importantly, reveal the contest between competing social categories—gender versus ethnonational identities—that in turn shape the power dynamics among family members. Evidently, in some instances ethnonational considerations trump gender politics, as one Filipino husband confessed in chapter 8: “I have to follow Sunyoung (wife) here, but she has to follow me when we go to the Philippines” (184).The second important goal of the volume is to update our understanding of the trajectory of multicultural families in Korea. Although perhaps self-evident, it is easy to forget that multicultural families, like all families, continue to change over the course of a life: children are born, some couples divorce, and individual members enter and exit the labor force at various stages in their lives. Different chapters throughout the volume chronicle this evolution. Divorce rates among multicultural families are high compared to the national rate, making it a particularly important mechanism affecting life chances. For example, because marriage and immigration laws continue to favor Korean citizens over marriage migrants (chapter 6), divorce fundamentally affects the well-being of noncitizen family members (chapter 7). And in the worst cases, marital dissolution can result in undocumented status rendering some marriage migrants legally, socially, and economically vulnerable (chapter 4).It is an open secret that the underlying motivation of the Korean government to “support” multicultural families is tied to the bachelor and fertility crises. On the one hand, it is probably encouraging to policymakers that the fertility rate among multicultural families is higher than the birth rate among “Korean” families. But as different chapters show, the increasing proportion of biracial and multiethnic children in Korea is related to the rise of new social challenges. Motherhood, for example, introduces pressures to adopt strategies tailored to the competitive educational environment in Korea, where “foreign mothers” attempt to raise “Korean children” (chapter 2). Perhaps most troubling, several indicators reveal that children of multicultural families are disadvantaged across a host of educational (chapter 9) and health (chapter 10) outcomes.Drawing on an eclectic set of methodological strategies and data sources, Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea does the important work of broadening and updating our understanding of family change in Korea. Whether the reader is versed in quantitative statistical methods or is more inclined toward qualitative narrative accounts, this volume marks an important programmatic shift in the study of multiculturalism in South Korea. The empirical analyses offered in the different chapters bring the field up to speed, reflecting a new research agenda that is surely likely to inform future studies of the Korean family.