Ten-year-old Lee Ha-young speaks Korean with a Daegu accent and loves the Wondergirls. Her name and dialect belie her Indonesian ancestry. Born to illegal migrant worker parents married to others, she was adopted as an infant by Pastor Lee Young-mo and Ha Kyeong-ae, who already had two biological children when they fell in love with Ha-young at first sight. Read about the family’s struggle for acceptance in this JoongAng Ilbo story. Some may question why a Korean couple would adopt a foreign child when there are Korean children languishing in orphanages. A child is a child, and all children need families and homes.
-
English Books on Korea... and More!
-
Visit My Brother's Film Review Site
13 Comments
That’s a sweet story for such a sweet and nice young lady! The JoongAng Ilbo does have some nice features once and a while and this is one of them.
Great story. I wish them well.
I’m a sucker for human interest stories.
If only more Koreans think like this…but things change fast in Korea.
I once read, something like 95% of Korean babies born with a disability are adopted overseas.
Unfortunately, this really makes me not want to raise kids here. And how does the church elder get off calling himself a Christian?
Any M’holers out there with experience raising multi-racial kids in Korea?
Under Islamic law, if two people commit adultery, they face the death penalty,¡± Lee added…
Not in Indonesia they don’t. What a load of bollox.
@6 - That’s because Indonesia, despite its large Muslim population is not under Islamic (i.e. Sharia) law. What Lee said is true.
@myself - Though, admittedly, since the girl’s parents were Indonesian, it isn’t exactly germane to the discussion at hand.
Sonagi, that’s a great story. The stories - and accompanying comments - here can sometimes be real downers, but not this one.
“Any M’holers out there with experience raising multi-racial kids in Korea?”
Yep. My son was born here and is now around 5. He’s a happy boy who looks forward to going to school most mornings, playing with other kids in the park, etc. He seems fine with the concept of being both Canadian and Korean, even if it is a hard one for some Koreans to get their heads around. He gets a lot more attention from strangers than he cares for, but rarely is it even remotely malicious. (I suspect it would be a lot tougher for kids with a black or east Asian parent than it is for kids like my son. I think some Koreans see some multiracial combinations as being better than other ones.) He probably runs into some stuff at kindergarten from time to time (sometimes kids aren’t all that big on talking about those kind of experiences when they get home, so one can’t be completely certain) but there don’t seem to have been any serious episodes. Might things change for the worse in elementary school? Perhaps.
Speaking of elementary school, we’ll be moving to Canada next year, but that is really about me missing the place as the years go by, and my wife and I wanting our son to have access to better education, cleaner air and water, free health care, etc.
She is a beautiful young lady who will find strength in the adversity she faces from the ignorant few.
@ #5: He is not Christian. He is just a common jackass racist who got involved with the church to further his business interests and social position. But there is nothing unusual about that.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the ‘Wonder Girls” where to visit her and make a plea for tolerance?
#9…“Any M’holers out there with experience raising multi-racial kids in Korea?”
Yeah, me too. And since his mum is Indonesian (and nominally Muslim), we voted with our feet and got the fuck out before he was old enough to realize, that despite being born in the country, he would never be accepted as one of Das Volk. Celebrated his first birthday in Jakarta last weekend with his Indonesian cousins and a bunch of beautiful mixed race kids from similar mixed marriages as ours. I wouldn’t wish a school life in Korea on my son even if offered all the money in the world, and that’s only after I heard some of the shite that came out of the mouths of the kids of the so-called ‘educated class’.
#7, you’d best update your encyclopedia Indonesianica from the Sukarno/Suharto era because new political devolution laws allow for limited Sharia law to be imposed by local governments. So far a number (mostly in Sumatra) have implemented this, but no provision exists (or is likely to) for capital punishment for adultery. Outside Iran, some Gulf States and Sudan, this is patently not the case. Islamic law, like it or not (and I most certainly do not) is a bit broader than the throw-away quote that Pastor Lee has chipped in.