A Society Full of Multicultural Individuals

How do we create an inclusive and egalitarian society in which diversity is not merely tolerated or managed but fully harnessed as a thriving lived experience for enrichment of everyone involved and benefit of the society as a whole? Despite progress made over the last decades, MULTICULTURALISM remains an enduring challenge, all the more urgent as we stand at the junction of retrogressing to the homogeneous and hierarchical past rather than progressing towards egalitarian, inclusive and plural ideals. JAYON YOU, in this collection of 24 personal and critical essays, uses her own experience of immigration to America from South Korea at the age of 13 and what gave her a resolution on the questions of belonging, identity and relationship between cultures as a critical frame for setting out a new vision of a multicultural society beyond where we stand now. She frames three contrasting 'ethos' of societies, allowing the reader to see - with a critical distance - WHY where we stand now is still a problem and HOW we can move beyond where we stand now towards creating a truly multicultural society in which diversity is not merely tolerated or managed but fully harnessed as a thriving lived experience for enrichment of everyone involved and benefit of the society as a whole. Along the process, she clarifies some of the most pressing questions of our time: HOW immigrants come to be integrated into a society and what we mean by 'integration' anyway; HOW a society could embrace diversity without losing culture, identity and solidarity of the nation; HOW the comparative context between an immigrant nation from its inception and an ethnic nation with a growing diversity can help inform each other.