Back then, in fact, most people assumed Han wasn’t Korean at all—rather, one of the international models, flown in to walk shows—and would speak to him in English backstage (he can’t speak a word of it), or not at all. “At first it was bad, but nowadays, people know me,” he says, happily. “Now, they talk to me a lot.” Still, he faces trouble here. “Because my skin is different, some designers and brands won’t really use me,” he says. “But rather than leaving, I want to work harder—being Han Hyun Min and building my own unique charm is important to me.”

He had to learn that perseverance early on, as growing up in Seoul was not easy. The country remains largely homogenous and fiercely nationalist, a trait one can trace back to the Japanese occupation in World War II. Yet that need to preserve Korean pride and culture left many with certain attitudes toward “outsiders.” It’s painful to hear him speak plainly of it—“They would say bad things about me. If I was with a friend, their mom would come and say don’t play with that kid.” Yet Han found refuge in Itaewon, where most of the city’s biracial children grew up. “In Itaewon, I had a lot of [half-Korean] friends like me, so that was good,” he says. “Even now, there are more and more.”

Photographed by Alex Finch

Thankfully, the face of Seoul is changing bit by bit—with a younger generation more exposed to the rest of the world, that old mindset is starting to die out. Navigating Itaewon’s hills with Han, one sees it firsthand. “A long time ago, they looked at us very badly, but these days, it’s not like that, it’s like we can all be together,” he says. When asked if he’d ever leave it all behind to move abroad, he gives it a bit of thought. “It may be hard, but even so, I was born in Korea, I’m doing well in Korea,” he says. “I do want to go overseas for a while, but coming back to Korea and living here . . . I want to stay here. I am Korean, after all.” That he is.