Forgot password

On February 27th, the independent film K-POPS! began theatrical distribution in the United States. Though not a South Korean film itself, the feature fronted by American musician Anderson .Paak is an open love letter to a seldom seen idea, the mixed race South Korean child. With relatively low immigration rate, mixed race children are, in all fairness, rarer on the peninsula than they are in other places. But this isn't the first time the idea has appeared in film, though other appearances are often ignominious.

The starting point for the trend is Lee Jang-ho's Lee Jang-ho's Baseball Team (1986), although to call this a film trend is somewhat misleading. Lee Jang-ho's Baseball Team is itself based on the popular comic book Alien Baseball Team, a fairly elaborate story comprising 15 manga sized volumes. One of the many subplots in the comic involves Ha Guk-sang, a dark-skinned character, implied though never quite explicitly stated to be the son of an American soldier, who joins the titular baseball team out of resentment to the way he's been treated in South Korean society. Unfortunately, the nuances of his storyline, as well the similar Zainichi Korean content, had to be excised to fit into the two-hour running time. Consequently, Ha Guk-sang appears in Lee Jang-ho's Baseball Team as Kwon Yong-yoon in blackface, a somewhat inexplicable decision to anyone not familiar with the original comic on which the film is based.

Address Unknown (2001)

Time constraints weren't the only reasons necessitating such editing. What makes the subject of mixed-race identity awkward to discuss in South Korea in general is how for the latter half of the twentieth century, the main international interaction between South Koreans and people from other countries were a direct result of the continued presence of the United States military in the country. There's no way to broach that topic without becoming horribly bleak. An early Kim Ki-duk film, Address Unknown (2001), stars as its lead character Chang-gook, played by Yang Dong-geun, a resentful man who unsurprisingly lives on the outskirts of Paju resentful of his grim environment, which seems to be a metaphor for his tainted mixed-race blood.

America Town (2018)

Address Unknown is among the more controversial Kim Ki-duk films, somewhat counterintuitively, in that its subject matter is so directly misanthropically political that his artistic styling alternating between extended silence and brutal violent cruelty can't be disentangled from the very artificial design of his world. America Town (2018) is one of only a few other films to take place in this military camp sort of environment, and America Town was able to evade many of these unfortunate undertones by not featuring any mixed race characters, even if the very nature of the sex work industry around which the titular town derives implies that some surely must exist.

Punch (2011)

This idea of mixed-race children being the creation of oppressive fathers, more in the imperial sense than the disciplinarian sense, is mainly a product of mixed-race children being born to South Korean women in this context. By the 2010s, there's enough international engagement with South Korea that the dynamics flip considerably. The surprise hit film Punch (2011), based on the novel and stage play of the same title, made Yoo Ah-in's career as Wan-deuk, the teenage son of a hunchbacked clown. Though nominally a story about Wan-deuk becoming a boxer under the advice of a teacher skeptical of South Korea's university-at-any-cost educational policy, an important subplot is the return of Wan-deuk's mother into his life, with Wan-deuk abruptly learning that he was mixed-race all along, yet another strike against him as an at-risk youth.

While it's easy to praise the humanity of Punch in depicting a situation relevant not just to multiracial teenagers, but teenagers in South Korea writ large, it is noticeable at this point that none of the characters I'm mentioning were played by mixed race actors themselves. Sad as it is to say, whether because they're just too few in number or the ones that do exist are too disenfranchised to have a shot in South Korean film, this just isn't an option. Even Wan-deuk's mother, played by Jasmine Lee, had to have her race changed from the original story because the Filipina Jasmine Lee had an established reputation in the South Korean media sphere. A Vietnamese actress, which is what the role called for, simply wasn't available.

Granted, Thuy (2013) did feature Ninh Duong Lan Ngoc in a leading role as a Vietnamese woman living in South Korea, married to a Korean man in the rural boonies. But just the presence of a mail order bride doesn't necessarily imply children in the South Korean film context. If it did, I could count You Are My Sunshine (2005), which does indeed feature a mail order bride in exactly one scene...where she's left awkwardly working in the main character's household, because his mother had already brought her there to marry him, despite his having succeeded in marrying the local dabang girl against his mother's wishes.

Another reason for this casting issue is just the matter of younger, multiracial children not necessarily having much interest in South Korean film for the simple reason that kids these days are much more likely to be excited by K-Pop, as K-Pops! itself implies. A Wonderful Moment (2013) as one of the few examples of an appropriately cast multiracial child underscores this point, as the story of the film revolves around the cute kid Ji Dae-han trying to win a musical competition. His grumpy mentor, played by Kim Rae-won, eventually comes around to the little half-Filipino boy's enduring sense of optimism.

A Wonderful Moment (2013)

In general, the niche of South Korea as an internationally oriented culture tends to be better emphasized these days with actors and ideas themselves being transnational, as opposed to being multiracial in a purely South Korean context. Daniel Henney, for example, has built much of his career off of such an identity despite Henney himself being Korean American. We can also see how a project like K-Pop Demon Hunters is easily contextualized as if it were a South Korean film simply because of its subject matter, even if it was actually a Sony Pictures Animation production produced by admirers of South Korean culture.

For all these reasons multiracial identity just hasn't been that much of a recurring presence in South Korean film, which isn't to say that it doesn't exist in South Korean popular culture at all. You'll just have an easier time finding people with those identities in music adjacent circles or variety shows, because in those formats, the personal life story of a person is a lot more important when it comes to trying to engage with the audience. Actors, by definition, are trying to pretend to be someone else and the story of multiracial identity in South Korea is quite a bit more problematic in that context because of all the uncomfortable questions the grand narrative begs about how such people met.

Ode to My Father (2014)

Take, for example, Ode to My Father (2014) which featured among its many visits through modern South Korean history a trip through Vietnam during the Vietnam War, where the luckless Dal-goo, played by Oh Dal-soo, meets his future wife. Without getting into the full ethical ramifications of this, it suffices to say that it's much easier to present a positive vision of South Korean identity by focusing on topics like K-Pop, rather than asking questions about why South Korea was involved in the Vietnam War in the first place. K-Pop is a great unifier in part because it strongly implies that it doesn't matter where you were born. And for a South Korean film market which is selling a more exoticized rather than universalist Korean culture overseas, the mixed-race question just doesn't seem as relevant as it did fifteen years ago.

Written by William Schwartz

Edited by kofic