This study aims to understand the implications of conflicts in a paternal-intermarriage family.
For this purpose, I selected a paternal-intermarriage family whose marital-immigrant man was
from Canada with Korean wife and three children and conducted a qualitative case-study. The
results of this study are as follows: First, there was some social conflicts among the family
members. The marital-immigrant man was still legally a foreigner, so that he was forced to face
with some institutional restrictions for employment, social-welfare and residence in Korea. He
not only wanted to continue his study abroad except Korea, but also hardly any social
relationships with native Koreans around himself, which prevented him from considering Korea
as a permanent residential place. However, his wife and children were born and raised up in
Korea which had made them Korean both legally and socially. Compared to their husband and
farther, with abundant intimate social networks, they have no formal barriers to live and enjoy
legal rights as citizens in Korea.
Next, there was found linguistic cultural conflicts among the family members. The
marital-immigrant man, although having resided beyond ten years, hardly learned to speak
Korean and sticked to his own homeland culture and value system. For example, he highly
appreciated the idea of privacy, so that he demanded other family who have been accustomed
to the Korean way of relationship-making with friends and neighbours follow his standard on
privacy. Furthermore, he could not understand and accept customary practices of Korean schools
such as students-cleaning, excessive study and frequent tests, which repeatedly made his wife
explain on those issues. The other family also felt so uncomfortable with the difficulty of
communication of their father that they sometimes made their own interactional space by talking
to each other in Korean. However, when they fail to do this successfully, there were some
arguments and disagreement among the family members.
Finally, there was an disciplinal or educational conflicts among family members. The
marital-immigrant man tried to rear his kids based on his religious and western way of
thinking. For instance, he not only managed to check every movements of his kids and keep a
watch on them, but also made an effort to restrict their social activities and group lives related
with their friends or schools. The kids, however, opposed to his rigid way of bringing-up and
tried to escape from his sphere of influence. In addition, the spouse of the marital-immigrant
man did not agree with the attitude of her husband who could not accept habitual practices of
Korean parents such as corporal punishment, preference for private education and curriculum
acceleration. On the contrary, she felt unsatisfaction with his attitude and tried to raise her
children based on her own cultural, educational ideas beyond eyeshot of her husband,
sometimes using physical punishment for her kids, which resulted casual dispute or quarrel
between her and her husband.