hankyoreh

Children with migrant backgrounds look at a picture book in the offices of the Immigrant Citizens’ Solidarity Social Co-operative in Ansan on Oct. 29, 2026. (Lee Jun-hee/Hankyoreh)

Malika has lost her grip on the written word.

The 13-year-old, who attends middle school in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, was 3 when she came to Korea from Russia with her mother, who had found work here. (Malika is a pseudonym.)

Her family speaks Russian at home, but she never learned to read or write in either Russian or Korean. Her parents were always busy, and she has never read a single picture book. In effect, she never learned to wrap her head around reading at all.

Now in her first year of middle school, Malika says she slept through her classes for most of elementary school. Today, she can’t fully express herself in either Russian or Korean, leaving her effectively without a language of her own.

For children like Malika who come to Korea with their parents, even reading a book can be a challenge. When parents move for work, their children’s linguistic world changes overnight. Children who lose access to books in their native tongue while they are still learning Korean risk never developing literacy at all.

Yet finding books in a language they know is hard, largely because of the cost.

“Books in Russian and other languages cost several times more than Korean books when you buy them here,” said Choi Hyeok-su, the director of external strategy at Immigrant Citizens’ Solidarity Social Co-operative.

Borrowing books isn’t easy, either. Suvd, a 38-year-old woman from Mongolia, is raising two daughters, ages 4 and 2, in Ansan. She wants to read picture books to her children, who she says “only care about their smartphones,” but she has trouble finding books for them at the library.

When the Hankyoreh visited public libraries in Ansan’s Wongok and Seonbu neighborhoods, both home to large migrant populations, it found almost no children’s books in the children’s home languages.

“Practically the only multicultural books the government provides are ones with messages about social integration,” said a librarian who works in an area of Gyeonggi Province with a large migrant population. “They have no interest in the fun and meaning children should get to enjoy at that age. They see these kids only as people to be managed.”

Children with migrant backgrounds play a board game at a daycare center in Anseong, Gyeonggi Province, on Sept. 22, 2025. (Lee Jun-hee/Hankyoreh)

The problem is worse in isolated areas.

The village of Naeri in Anseong’s Daedeok Township is one such place. The area was once a neighborhood of student rentals for Chung-Ang University’s Da Vinci Campus, formerly known as the Anseong Campus. After the students left, foreign residents moved in, drawn by low rents.

More than 90 percent of the roughly 200 students at the village’s only elementary school are foreign children. Because the neighborhood was built as a cluster of studio apartments, there is virtually no space where children can read freely. With wages low, families of three to five people often share a single studio, which puts buying books even further out of reach.

Korea has long treated migrant-background children’s Korean ability as the problem. But at the age when they should be building language skills by reading age-appropriate books, many of these children are losing the written word altogether. More and more of them are growing up without mastering either their native language or Korean.

Some librarians are working to build collections in other languages, but they are limited by how hard it is to reach those languages and the publishing markets of the children’s home countries.

“Migrant-background children aren’t getting support for even the most basic things they need to adapt to our society,” said the Rev. Kim Dal-seong, who heads the Pocheon Migrant Workers Center. “It’s time to look more carefully at what support they should be receiving as a vulnerable group.”

By Lee Jun-hee, Gyeonggi correspondent

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