Korea

Ambiguous Signaling: Filtering through Race and Language

July 31, 2025 by Yanping Ni

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Patty Lan
July 1, 2025

On the hunt for mooncakes for the Mid Autumn Festival in Seoul’s Daelim. Credit: Patty Lan

One day while taking the train in Seoul, two young Chinese girls were chatting in Cantonese, much to my excitement. It had been so long since I heard my native language, and I was enjoying being able to understand everything they were saying. But then a young Korean man sitting nearby turned and shouted at them in Korean to be considerate and to be quiet. The joy I felt in that moment evaporated. Even though they were not the only ones talking on the train, the Chinese girls bore the sole responsibility of being “noisy.” The immediate transformation of their attitudes from lighthearted to ashamed burned itself into my memory. During my year in South Korea from 2023 to 2024, I began to be more wary of speaking Mandarin or Cantonese in public, unsure if I would be similarly chastised or judged.

This reminded me of a previous experience. I was chatting with two Eastern European alumni of the Global Korea Scholarship program (GKS) over beer and rotisserie chicken at a restaurant in Seoul, when they looked me straight in the eye and gave me some advice for my interactions with Koreans. “You should only say you are American and keep the Chinese part a secret.” It was mainly said in jest, as the statement was accompanied with some laughter. But looking back at it now, it served as a warning that the South Korea I was in now, was very different from the South Korea I had visited 10 years prior.

In recent years, sinophobia in South Korea has increased dramatically, arguably surpassing age-old anti-Japanese sentiment. Partially due to growing economic and military tensions , Covid-19, and South Korean conservative talking points, in South Korean society, even among the younger generations, there is a growing perception that China is an authoritarian communist threat that needs to be contained. China’s continued economic and geopolitical aggression seems to existentially jeopardize South Korea’s democratic sovereignty, with conservatives united in their accusations of Chinese interference in South Korean elections. These perceptions are bolstered by popular media depictions of Chinese migrant communities in South Korea, who are often portrayed as gangsters or criminals that threaten the civility and peace of South Korean society. In addition to sinophobia, xenophobia more generally has escalated in the country in response to the large numbers of migrant workers and brides from Southeast Asian countries who were initially welcomed into the country as solutions to South Korea’s growing low-fertility and labor problems. Research is increasingly demonstrating that despite government efforts to help these communities integrate into South Korea society, entrenched racism and cultural paternalism persist. This may be partially due to the possibility that government policies relying on western frameworks of xenophobia and racism alone do not account for the discrimination Asian non-Koreans experience in South Korea. Research into the experiences of various migrant communities in South Korea reflect diverse historical, economic, gendered, and religious intersections which contextualize these disparate experiences.

A banner titled “Daelim Central Market” in Korean welcoming visitors to various shops with banners in Chinese and Korean characters. I participated in a walking tour of Daelim Chinatown which included a lecture on the history and development of the neighborhood and key functions of local businesses. It ended with a delicious meal at a local restaurant. It is run by a South Korean nonprofit organization meant to better educate the South Korean public about multicultural communities. Credit: Patty Lan

Two hundred years of engagement with the West through trade, colonialism, imperialism, militarization, and aid has combined with the region’s history of Confucian patriarchy and geopolitical positioning between China and Japan to produce a dynamic practice of racialization. Racialization in Korea is largely tied to how a particular “race” signals the corresponding country’s economic status and their proximity to being a “western developed” country. This focus on “development” as a hierarchy juggling GDP, education, technological advancement, and cosmopolitan values expands upon typical western conceptions of race focused on skin color. While colorism is present in South Korean society, it is often in combination with discrimination against “developing countries.” As labor and marriage migrants have increased, the government has taken to branding them as “multicultural families” or” 다문화 가족” in order to integrate them into South Korean society. However, government-sponsored reality TV programming about these families reinforces the stereotype of the submissive wife from the Global South performing care work while migrants from the Global North are shown to be men working in more high-skilled jobs. Even different parts of the Korean diaspora are treated unequally. Korean Americans are granted visa privileges which allow for long-term work and residency permits whereas their counterparts in Northern China are only offered single five-year work visas despite both diasporas being sizable multigenerational Korean ethnic communities. The feelings of contempt and paternalism directed at “poor developing” countries reinforces a racializing hierarchy of who and how one gets to be a legitimate person in South Korean society.

While on a walk in a busy university neighborhood in Seoul with a white French friend from Mauritania, we were stopped by an older Korean lady who walked straight out of a cafe to talk to my friend. As total strangers, the Korean woman tried to explain to my friend that she was writing an email and needed someone to help her edit her English. When we understood what was happening, my friend corrected the lady, telling her that she was French and her English was very poor, but that I, her Asian-looking friend, was from the US and would be much more helpful. The lady was a bit confused but was relieved to have some help as we walked back inside the cafe and I edited her email.

In South Korean society, language is a key process through which race becomes materialized, negotiated, and transformed. Raciolinguistics, while initially developed with a US and white settler context in mind, recognizes the socio-political relationship between race and language. Building on this approach, the South Korean context offers a useful case for thinking about how English’s relation to whiteness can expand and complicate processes of racialization. English in South Korea is a prestigious language, with South Korean parents spending up to $2,000 USD per month to have their children start learning English as early as four years old. Simply appearing white allows some foreigners to have an easier time getting hired as English tutors, in contrast to their darker skin or Asian counterparts who come from English-speaking countries. Even with English, there are hierarchies which place American English, spoken by white Americans at the top, affordable only to the most wealthy of South Korean parents, and at the bottom, other forms of accented English available at alternative locations like the Philippines and Singapore for aspiring middle-class families.

The Korean language also serves as an avenue of racialization. In experimental bilingual elementary schools for migrant children where Mandarin is offered as a language course, researchers noticed how use of Chinese outside of the classroom and creative hybrid experimentations often get labeled as linguistic deficiencies. The result is a language hierarchy which positions Korean as the only legitimate language of the classroom, despite claims of bilingual learning. How Korean is spoken is also racially marked. For North Korean refugees in South Korea, they experience discrimination for their accent, with some even being confused for Chinese. Ethnic Koreans born in China (Joseonjok) returning to South Korea as labor migrants and ethnic Chinese born in South Korea (Hwagyo) experience similar linguistic bias over their accented Korean, with South Koreans viewing their accents as signals of their inherent “Chineseness” or “backwardness”. Here, Sinophobia materializes and is transformed through the overlapping of Chinese racialization and “Chinese linguistics,” marking all who speak Chinese or speak “Chinese-accented” Korean.

A white booth tent for an outdoor festival with banners titled, “Environmental Preservation with Foreigners” and “Korean Scholarship Alumni Association”. This is a photo of the GKS Alumni booth at the Environmental Sustainability Festival in Busan. Our booth was called “Environmental Preservation with Foreigners.” We played Indian board games and passed out South Asian snacks to Korean elementary school students and their parents. Credit: Patty Lan

Coming back to South Korea in 2023 as a researcher on Fulbright, I often introduced myself as an American first, to give legitimacy to my status as a doctoral student from the US. However, as I met more GKS students and alumni, most of them coming from what Koreans consider the “developing world” such as Uganda, Pakistan, Peru, and Thailand, I realized how much my Americanness, English-use, and perceived “Koreanness” created a wall between us. All of them at our initial meeting thought I was Korean. After being in South Korea for so long, “Koreanness” to them had come to mean a dominant status quo that marginalized and othered them. Once I corrected people and told them that I was Chinese American, the conversation shifted.

Then I became “the American,” a rootless cosmopolitan from the Global North who existed as a privileged class in South Korea. But when I shared that I also spoke fluent Cantonese and Mandarin, the mood shifted again. “Hey, you are a real Chinese!”, they would say. After verifying my Chineseness, GKS recipients I talked to would immediately tell me about their affectionately close relationships with Chinese friends from school or work and show off all the things they learned about China through their friends. Being able to speak “Chinese,” the GKS community felt solidarity with me in a way I had not expected. In our conversations, they spoke more openly with me about their struggles in South Korean society, and their honest thoughts about their fellow classmates, colleagues, and superiors. “Koreans are toxic” was not an uncommon phrase. They also asked me a lot of questions about being Chinese in the US and what it was like to maintain my Chinese language skills, observe cultural practices, and survive as a low-income family. I served as a kind of portal into the future of what their lives and their children’s lives might look like if they continued to stay abroad. Being “Chinese” in these spaces meant identifying with collective struggles of migration, discrimination, and class.

Outside of the GKS community, I felt racially ambiguous in a way I had never felt in the US. Being surrounded by the hums of Korean being spoken everywhere, I felt my Chinese identity retreat the more I did not speak Cantonese or Mandarin. In my frustration, during one of my participant observations sessions at a local festival where GKS alumni were running an “Interact with a Foreigner” booth, I introduced myself as Chinese in Korean to two grade-school aged Korean girls. Both stared at me in shock when I said I was Chinese and immediately denied my claim. So I switched to Mandarin to prove to them who I was, and one of the little girls, who had actually lived in China briefly because of her dad’s job, was able to verify who I was and excitedly started to talk to me in Mandarin. I felt seen. Language continued to be a tool for me to negotiate and navigate these fluctuating racial identities of belonging and otherness.

I felt like I was living in two different worlds. One where I was Chinese, and another where I was Korean. As long as I paid attention to the right signals, I would be reminded of my potential for unsettling the sonic landscape, like when the two Cantonese-speaking women were scolded on the train. I often wondered what would have happened if it were me instead. How would I have reacted? I also wondered if my Chinese racialization would have been further complicated if I had been from Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Singapore instead. My research in South Korea, examining the racial politics of development and education, ended up leading me back to reflect deeply on my own racialized identity in the context of Asia. In the same place where I had the privilege to disappear into the crowd, I could also signal myself as cosmopolitan, or signify as an insidious Chinese authoritarian takeover. My experiences negotiating and transforming racial signaling through language in South Korea highlight the significance of (East) Asia’s regional and global histories, development aspirations, and geopolitics in understanding racialization beyond a western framework.

Alex Wolff and Yanping Ni are the section contributing editors for the Society for East Asian Anthropology.

Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster

July 10, 2022 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Sera Yeong Seo Park
July 5, 2022

For the bereaved of Sewol and activists in solidarity, the yellow ribbon is a powerful index of remembrance, political dissent, and community making.

A day before the seventh anniversary of the sinking of the Sewol ferry, I was sitting alongside a handful of activists in a snug children’s library in Yongsan District, with piles of yellow foam boards and silver chains stacked in front of us. The members of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective were determined to fashion as many yellow ribbons as possible to be circulated in the school district the following morning. This late-night ribbon crafting had become a ritual of sorts to memorialize the sinking of the Sewol ferry on April 16, 2014. April, for those who gathered there, was imbued with harrowing memories of the disaster and the weight of the guilt that they carried as helpless witnesses to the tragedy.

The Yongsan 4.16 Collective was just one among many local clusters of Sewol activism that I came to know during my fieldwork in Korea. Independently organized, these grassroots networks performed paramount work in sustaining the movement nationwide, in solidarity with bereaved family members calling for remembrance, truth, and accountability. What animated these spaces was the yellow ribbon—what was initially a token of condolence, and, later, of multiple affects such as grief, anger, and remembrance. Notably, many who took up the work of Sewol activism often deliberately avoided calling themselves “activists” (hwaldongga) because what they were doing, they told me, fell short of the single-minded, unfaltering commitment they associated with activist work. After all, they diverged from Namhee Lee’s account of the ideological, protest-oriented struggles of the anti-authoritarian, pro-democratization movement in the 1970s and 80s led by the Minjung—common people. Yet, as the Sewol movement illustrates, what it means to “act” was also changing with the historical and cultural currents of Korea. The yellow ribbons that I encountered on the field fashioned new, expansive modes of solidarity, opening up spaces for memorialization of the Sewol disaster and permeable connections within and beyond circles of activists.

The Sewol ferry disaster and the yellow ribbon

The Sewol disaster claimed the lives of 304 passengers, 250 of whom were high school students on a fieldtrip to Jeju Island on the southern coast of the peninsula. It quickly became clear that this was an utterly preventable tragedy. The MV Sewol ferry had been illegally modified to carry more cargo and passengers than originally designed; when the ferry took an abruptly sharp turn on the morning of the 16th, the captain and the crew members were among the first to escape, and passengers were told to “stay put.” Those who followed the instructions through the loudspeakers never made it out of the ill-fated ferry, while the dispatched coast guard forces merely circled around during the critical minutes of the rescue operation.

Image Description: A color photograph shows a group of people wearing yellow vests and holding signs. They stand in single file behind a large white and yellow banner that shows a yellow ribbon. A yellow bus and corroded ferry stand behind them.
Caption: October 2020, Jeonnam province, Korea. Activists demand the truth of the Sewol Disaster, as part of the Truth Bus (jinsilbeoseu) campaign. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

The sinking of the ferry quickly incited a widespread social movement in South Korea, founded on condolence for the victims, guilt in having condoned power structures that failed citizens, and collective determination that “things must change.” The Sewol movement broadly drew on the repertoires and networks afforded by the simin (citizens’) movements, which emerged after the installation of democratic governance. These relatively recent movements foregrounded what Amy Levine describes as “liberal, identity-based, non-violent approaches” to political change, relying on the language of hu m an rights and legal action. Yet the Sewol movement also maintained distinct effects and affects of its own. The yellow ribbon first emerged as a symbol of hope for safe return of the missing passengers: social media users embellished their profile photos with yellow ribbons and the slogan, “May one small movement bring a great miracle.” As the chance of victims returning grew fainter with each passing day, the yellow ribbon morphed into a symbol for remembering the victims and expressing solidarity with their families’ demand for truth and justice.

Refusing to remain idle in the aftermath of this shattering loss, citizens turned to the yellow ribbon to cope with, and make something out of, their grief. A collective that came to be known as the Gwanghwamun noran ribon gongjakso (Gwanghwamun yellow ribbon studio) took up a small corner across the memorial altar set up for the victims in Gwanghwamun plaza in Seoul’s city center. While some showed up daily, any passer-by could join in as they wished. After the physical studio was disbanded and the altar was taken down, other yellow ribbon studios emerged nationwide, most of which are run by volunteers who create and distribute ribbons to the wider public.

At the height of the mass protest denouncing the corruption of the Park Geun-hye administration and demanding the president’s impeachment, the yellow ribbons came to adopt another layer of meaning. The bereaved of Sewol took to the streets to demand truth and accountability, mobilizing a post-disaster campaign of unprecedented scale in Korea. Grievances against the administration were already simmering to the brim when Park’s flagrant abuse of power came to light at the end of 2016. In the weeks leading up to March 2017, Seoul witnessed 20 consecutive weekends of mass mobilizations demanding that Park step down from office―protests unparalleled in scale and reach, writes Nan Kim, since the democratic uprising in 1987. Yellow ribbons were among the most pervasive motifs in these anti-Park rallies, donned not only by the bereaved but by innumerable other citizens who took to the streets, testifying to the inextricable tie the disaster shared with the wider denunciation of the Park administration.

Image Description: Two sets of silver keys and keychains, each including a twist of yellow ribbon dangling on a keychain. The ribbon on the right is visibly worn.
Caption: The owner of the thin and frayed yellow ribbon on the right had been carrying it with him since 2014, soon after the sinking of the Sewol Ferry. Sera Yeong Seo Park

As the Sewol movement expanded, Liora Sarfati and Bora Chung argue that yellow ribbons served as an “affective symbol” that “tie[d] together the personal grief and shock from the disaster with broader public concerns such as personal safety and corruption,” while also being incorporated “into other social injustice debates and demonstrations.” Nan Kim now dubs the yellow ribbon “the most prevalent and durable material metaphor of progressive dissent” in Korea. According to Kim, it was precisely the diverse significations of the yellow ribbon––not just militancy and dissidence, but also hope and the ribbon’s moral register––that gave the symbol such a wide reach.

Materiality, sociality, and the yellow ribbon

My ethnographic work suggests that yellow ribbons were powerful because they fostered a sociality in which people forged ethical and affective attachments to the Sewol cause. In the case of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective, for instance, the crafting sessions kindled conversations about what the disaster meant for each person in the room. On the eve of the seventh anniversary, Eunhee, a seasoned activist who led the Sewol movement in the district, invited everyone to share what had brought them there. Eunhee’s invitation sparked a string of reflections as we went around the room, from a 20-year-old first-timer who had put together events in memoriam for the victims throughout middle and high school to a woman in her forties with children of her own around the age of the deceased students and for whom the tragedy hit too close to home. As the night drifted along and yellow ribbons piled up before us, a chorus of stories emerged. The simple, manual labor of crafting ribbons had woven us together into a collective bound by a common commitment to remembrance.

Image Description: Two children and a woman stand in a busy street in front of a white table, on which stand two trays and two piles of small yellow ribbons. A man on the other end of the table hands them yellow ribbons.
Caption: A family collects ribbons during a street campaign held in the Yongsan district, on the 7th anniversary of the Sewol Disaster. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

Distributing the ribbons on busy streets was also an important part of the project of remembrance. Most pedestrians would carry on without giving a second look at the yellow ribbon campaigns, a bitter testament to the waning presence of the Sewol disaster in the public memory. But there were always a few memorable encounters that reminded me and my fellow campaigners of the power of this symbol as it travels. The owner of a small restaurant across the street from where we held our campaign for the 6th anniversary, for instance, approached us to ask whether he could chip in with a donation; an elderly man inquired if he could take five more for his friends. Several people retracted their steps once they heard the word “Sewol” to skim through the bundle of ribbons laid out on the table. Each of these encounters, albeit ephemeral, facilitated a continual circulation of the yellow ribbons, kindling diffuse, far-reaching networks of solidarity through everyday material encounters.

Towards a wide movement

The yellow ribbon became a versatile symbol standing for, yet also exceeding, the critique of systemic failures and corruption that the Sewol Disaster had brought to the surface. For the bereaved of Sewol, a chance encounter with a yellow ribbon dangling on a stranger’s backpack could be a poignant reminder that theirs is not a solitary fight. For activists across the peninsula, the crafting and distributing of the yellow ribbon is a small yet crucial means to keep the memory of the Sewol disaster alive.

The Sewol movement, according to an activist I met in the field, would be viable insofar as it is a “wide” movement, one with blurred boundaries between its locus and the margins, and between sporadic and sustained engagements. In this formulation, the loosely organized ribbon-crafting sessions and the fleeting encounters with the recipients of the yellow ribbon were as crucial as events of more pronounced political energy and impact, such as protests. The yellow ribbons were crucial for achieving this width, their crafting and circulation inviting diverse repertoires of solidarity without circumscribing what solidarity is or ought to look like.

Sera Yeong Seo Park is a PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral dissertation examines the social movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea. Her research interests include activism, emotions, affect, and the anthropology of ethics and morality.

Cite as: Park, Sera Yeong Seo. 2022. “Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster.” Anthropology News website, July 5, 2022.

Japan’s Diminishing Korean Minority

December 14, 2016 by Heidi K. Lam

Markus Bell

Editors’s note: This is the second piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.”

The gate to Koreatown. Tsuruhashi, Osaka. Photo Courtesy Markus Bell

From the end of the war until 2007, Koreans represented Japan’s largest ethnic minority group. There are currently around half a million individuals in Japan who identify as Korean. This is only surpassed by the number of Chinese.

The number of Koreans in Japan, however, has been shrinking over the last 20 years.Turbulent international relations have played a part in the diminishing number of Koreans arriving in Japan and the number of Zainichi Koreans (ethnic Koreans in Japan) identifying as Korean. During the administration of Park Geun-hye, relations between South Korea and Japan reached a low not seen in many years. This is due to the deepening “comfort woman issue,” the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute, South Korean fears of a remilitarised Japan, and the effect of the 2011 “Triple disaster” in eroding trust between the two neighbors.

North Korea also factors into issues of identity and belonging for Koreans in Japan. Following ten years of nuclear tests and sporadic missile launches, North Korea, from a Japanese perspective, is considered a significant threat. The catalyst for the low point in North Korea–Japan relations was Kim Jong-il’s admission that North Korea had been kidnapping Japanese citizens. Reflecting the broader Japanese public opinion, during an interview with a Japanese policymaker in Tokyo he told me that North Korea had sent spies to Japan via the Zainichi community. All the bouncy K-pop in Seoul does not compensate for North Korean military posturing and state abduction projects. The specter of North Korea