Dark film ‘Yellow Sea’ becomes reality

"Yellow Sea" is a hyper realism movie that depicts dark side of the community of ethnic Koreans living in China. Movie fans were amazed by excellent acting of actor Kim Yoon-seok, who played Korean Chinese Mr. Myeon, and actor Ha Jeong-woo, who played Gu-nam, and by actors’ perfect pronunciation of Korean Chinese dialect in the movie. It is a quite impressive scene where Mr. Myeon killed and hit people indiscriminately with a big leg bone. But I can’t forget these impressive lines of Mr. Myeon talking to his subordinate after killing an assassin who tried to kill him: “Throw away the head and give the rest of body to dogs.”

A murder like a scene from brutal the movie occurred in reality. Police arrested a Korean Chinese surnamed Park aged mid-50s as a suspect of the mutilation murder case found in Mt. Paldal in Suwon City, Gyeonggi Province. The victim is suspected as killing Park’s live-in girlfriend Kim, also a Korean Chinese. The cruel crime that Park committed, in which he killed a live-in girlfriend, mutilated the corpse and threw pieces of mutilated body here and there in the mountain where many local residents climb, seems like a psychopath movie. Especially, as the murder suspect turns out as a Korean Chinese, it is concerned that other good Korean Chinese people may be blamed as a whole.

The place where mutilated body was found is only 1.3 kilometers away from the residential area in Jib-dong, Paldal District of Suwon City, where convicted criminal Oh Won-chun killed and chopped into pieces a woman after kidnapping. The recent mutilation murder case is called "the 2nd murder by Oh Won-chun" as the pattern and methods of crime were similar. In April 2012, a woman in her late 20s was kidnapped by Korean Chinese Oh Won-chun while walking in a small alley of residential area in Ji-dong. Oh tried to rape her several times until around 2-3 a.m. in the next day but failed. Oh brutally killed her and cut her corpse into around 300 pieces with a knife.

More than 500,000 Korean Chinese population is living in Korea. They are now working in Korea not just as manual laborers, assistants at restaurants, domestic servants or chauffer-service drivers but also as office workers, making more contact points with general Koreans. Some view that Korean Chinese people are taking jobs from Koreans, but most Korean Chinese are working in low-wage manual labor industries, which Koreans avoid. If crimes committed by foreigners become rampant, xenophobia becomes serious and its repercussion will reach other good and benign foreigners living in Korea. No matter how brutal this crime is, Korean Chinese are our compatriots. It is natural to have some rotten apples, or criminals, among such a big population of 500,000.