Post-26: Little Psy, 50% Saigon Style

It seems there was a small boy dancer in the popular “Gangnam Style” video of last year, who in 2013 is starting to see his own career take off. His stage-name has become “Little Psy“.

Little Psy and Big Psy

One fact, and one fact alone, interests me about this:
“Little Psy” (Hwang Min-Woo, b.2005) has a Vietnamese mother and a Korean father.

The number of Vietnamese mail-order brides has soared since the mid-2000s. [Chosun Ilbo]

South Korea is still an overwhelmingly mono-ethnic society, but in the 2010s this may be changing: I see that near 5% (22,000/471,000) of babies born in 2011 in South Korea had a foreign-born parent.

Most of the mixed-couples involve a Southeast-Asian “mail-order bride” and a rural Korean man. (There is a shortage of marriage-age women in rural South Korea).

I’ve seen signs on buses and on the subway for mail-order brides from Vietnam, Philippines, Cambodia, and (mysteriously) Kyrgyzstan. Those businesses are doing well, I guess:

One in every three babies born to multicultural families had a Vietnamese mother in 2011, according to Statistics Korea. Out of 22,000 mixed-race newborns, the largest proportion or 35.8 percent (7,880) were born to Vietnamese mothers last year. Chinese mothers came second at 26.4 percent, followed by Filipina (8.1 percent), Cambodian (5.3 percent), Japanese (3.7 percent) and Mongolian (1.3 percent.)

Overall, a total of 471,000 babies were born in Korea last year […]

They’re now saying that 50% of rural births could be to foreign women by the 2020s.

This all sounds alarming to the typical Korean, who cherishes the “one blood” myth.

On the other hand, this 5% figure is padded: a large portion of the “Chinese” mothers must be Korean-Chinese, and some others may be of Korean ethnicity, e.g. Korean-Americans. These factors would reduce the true “mixed” figure down to 3-3.5% of all the babies born in South-Korea in 2011. And those mixed babies are half Korean. Thus, the cohort born in 2011 has only around 1.5-2% “foreign blood” [which is almost entirely other-East-Asian anyway].

If Little-Psy were not known to have a Vietnamese mother, would anyone have known it from his appereance? I’m certain that most Koreans would claim they could spot such a thing, but I wonder.

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