Country and skin complexion -Hyun Min Han or Sam Okyere -Korea and African fandom

The flourishing of a multi-ethnic society? 

In 2007 the UN declared Korea an official receiving country.

The number of foreigners in South Korea grew from 400k in 1997 to 1m in 2007 to 2m in 2016. 

Among these are 630,000 temporary laborers, as well as 100,000 foreigners married to South Korean nationals (some of them Kosian - SouthAsians with Koreans). Furthermore, there are 230,000 illegal immigrants.

For a discussion, article from KOREAN Times

We see below a couple of examples from AFRICA:

Hyun Min Han and  Sam Okyere


 SECTION 1 

South Korea's first black model

A Korean-Nigerian model faces the legacy of discrimination against "mixed blood" Koreans amid shifting demographics.

Al-Jazeera's article -here

Hyun Min Han, the 6-foot-2 biracial Korean spotted on every other runway this season and breaking down the country's barriers. 

"People assume I'm a foreigner," says Han, who only speaks the Korean language. "I've gotten used to it."
Then he adds: "But I sometimes feel upset when Korean models backstage at a show don't talk to me because they think I don't understand Korean."
Since his first runway show last year, Han has appeared on Korean television and his Instagram followers have surged to more than 26,000. Fans sometimes approach him on the street and ask to take selfies with him.

   ------at   British Daily Mail -here

Instagram ___ 155.7k Followers,



SECTION 2 

Sam Okyere is the most famous black man in Korea. 

  Instagram ___ 159.1k Followers,  article - here

Within the last few years, Okyere’s built up quite the reputation as a T.V. personality in South Korea, where he is also known as Sam Ochiri. His fanbase is so strong that he often gets mobbed everywhere he goes in public.Most recently, he went viral for a video where he recounts all the racism he’s faced during his time in Korea.

However, it wasn’t always like this for Okyere. About eight years ago in 2009, Okyere had just set foot into South Korea after getting into the Korean Government Scholarship Program. Participants of the program must learn Korean within a year, followed by a five-year university program.

One year later, Okyere was accepted into the program with another fellow Ghanaian. To this day, he vividly remembers the first day he landed in South Korea for the first time on March 29, 2009.

1. “It was so cold,” Okyere told NextShark. “I’ve lived in a hot tropical region all my life, and in Korea, it was supposedly spring but it was really cold. I remember going, ‘Wow, this place is very cold.’”

During the one-hour bus ride to his dorm, the driver didn’t speak anything but Korean so it was quiet. This allowed Okyere to look out and observe the new world he would spend the next few years in.

•  “It was totally different from where I was coming from,” he said. “The roads were all paved, every single car had a GPS in it, something I had never seen in Ghana. Everything was really fast and everything was a very well organized system.”