 Hyun is only the third player of Korean heritage to play in the highest league, the previous two being Jim Paek and Richard Park of the USA.After just one season, Hyun retired from professional ice hockey to move to South Korea, where he worked with the National Assembly and the Ministry of Health and Welfare to promote Korean-German friendship.Though Hyun sometimes faced racism and exclusion in Germany, he stated that he felt even more like a stranger in South Korea; he returned to Germany to enroll in a doctoral programme at the University of Bonn, where he is writing his thesis on the experiences of the second-generation Korean youth in Germany.