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| Chong Won-o, center, head of Seongdong-gu Office, poses in the office building, April 17, with members of the operation committee for a new multilingual children's library, including eight foreign mothers from multicultural families. / Courtesy of Seongdong-gu Office |
By Lee Suh-yoon
Seongdong-gu, eastern Seoul, will open a multilingual library for young citizens from multiracial families in June.
The small library will hold some 2,500 children's books in foreign languages to be organized by country. Foreign parents will be able to visit the library with their children to let them play with their peers and read them storybooks in their mother tongues.
The library's operation and book purchases will be overseen by eight foreign mothers from China, Vietnam, the Philippines and Mongolia, all residents of the district.
"We're very happy with the plan," Davaanyam Mart, 35, a Mongolian woman with a son in elementary school, said in a phone interview. "At schools, only English is taught as a second language. As we foreign mothers are now better accustomed to living in Korea, it would be nice to teach our own languages to our children."
The majority of multiracial families in Korea are comprised of a foreign wife and a Korean husband. Raising bilingual children will also help foreign mothers better bond with their children, Mart says.
"We foreign mothers may throw out Korean words in conversations but the words don't carry real emotions for us," Mart said. "If the child can speak the foreign mother's language, mothers can forge a deeper bond with their child."
There were around 1,050 children of multiracial families living in Seongdong-gu as of 2017, according to Seoul City data.
"Foreign books (at existing libraries in Seongdong-gu) are catered to adult foreign residents, making it difficult for their children to develop bilingual skills," Chong Won-o, head of Seongdong-gu Office, said in a press statement, Sunday. "This new library is part of a specially tailored policy to provide language recognition and development for multiracial children in a necessary time frame. The fact the design for the library was developed by multiracial families themselves makes it even more meaningful."
The library will be open every weekday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Located near Wangsimni Station on Seoul Metro lines 2 and 5, as well as the Gyeongui-Jungang and Bundang lines, the library will also host literary and multilingual classes.
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