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The American NFL hero Hines Ward has come to Korea, his mother's home country, fulfilling what is being seen as a promise to his mother. He comes with his mother Kim Young-hee, who went to an unknown country 30 years ago carrying a one-year-old child and raised Hines there in defiance of great hardship. Nonetheless, Korea is Hines' home as well. The athlete told a press conference on Tuesday he was grateful to be welcomed as a Korean. In the past, he admitted, I was ashamed of being Korean, ¡°but now I'm proud of it." Named ¡°most valuable player¡± at the Super Bowl last month, Ward is turning out much more modest and affable than some reports have suggested.
We welcome the Wards' return, but we are also ashamed. It was us who drove them out 30 years ago. The perseverance of mother and son partly obscures that their country teased and ridiculed children of mixed race. Ward has repaid the slights with patriotism. "We were made a laughing stock because of our different color, but we are all brothers and sisters," he said. "Love has no color."
Korea has 35,000 people of mixed race. International marriages are sharply increasing, from 8.4 in every 100 couples in 2003 to 13.6 in 2005. The number of people of mixed ethnicity is projected to grow to 1.67 million in 2020. Yet the social perceptions and treatment of these people here remain unchanged: 22 percent of them are unemployed, and only 2 percent of have administrative jobs. The rest are laborers. Some statistics suggest that 9.8 percent of mixed-race children leave primary school and 17.5 percent middle school. Their average dropout rate at middle school is 1.1 percent.
The world is getting smaller, and racial and national barriers are crumbling rapidly. We, too, must change to embrace a multi-racial and multi-cultural era. Ideas about maintaining the purity of the bloodline are false and useless. The state must realign its institutions, businesses must open employment and society must teach the diversity of race and culture starting in childhood to change perceptions of Koreans of mixed race. The opportunity to transform these perceptions is the most valuable gift Hines Ward has brought with him.
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