Between Foreign and Family

Helene K. Lee

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813586144
• eBook ISBN: 9780813586151
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Etnopsicologia

Between Foreign and Family explores the impact of inconsistent rules of ethnic inclusion and exclusion on the economic and social lives of Korean Americans and Korean Chinese living in Seoul. These actors are part of a growing number of return migrants, members of an ethnic diaspora who migrate “back” to the ancestral homeland from which their families emigrated. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interview data, Helene K. Lee highlights the “logics of transnationalism” that shape the relationships between these return migrants and their employers, co-workers, friends, family, and the South Korean state.  While Koreanness marks these return migrants as outsiders who never truly feel at home in the United States and China, it simultaneously traps them into a liminal space in which they are neither fully family, nor fully foreign in South Korea. Return migration reveals how ethnic identity construction is not an indisputable and universal fact defined by blood and ancestry, but a contested and uneven process informed by the interplay of ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, gender, and history.  
 

1

The Premigration Condition

My grandfather—my father too—they never talked to me about South Korea. I never thought about South Korea and what things are like there. I grew up in China; my citizenship is Chinese. But after living here [in Seoul] for eight years, I have come to learn things that I didn’t know before. . . . I realize that my blood is Korean. I heard Korean inside my house, my grandparents are Korean [italics indicate her emphasis]. Here [South Korea] is where my roots are. I realize now that my birth country is not where my roots are.

With these words, Hee Sook, a Korean Chinese graduate student, describes the changes in her relationship to her Korean and Chinese identities because of her return to South Korea. She begins with the language of citizenship and the fact that she has lived in China her whole life. But Koreanness is framed as something encoded in her DNA and a fundamental part of who she is despite her Chinese citizenship. Her Koreanness—as signified by her blood, ancestry, and cultural knowledge—becomes more salient the longer she is in South Korea. Even as a third-generation Korean Chinese, she comes to see her true roots as originating from somewhere in the Korean peninsula rather than the country where she was born.

Her experience is evidence that ethnic attachments to an ancestral homeland remain significant past the immigrant generation and can intensify as a result of “returns.” As “perpetual foreigners,” in their countries of citizenship, individuals like Hee Sook are reminded that their ethnic identities are a fundamental, unchangeable aspect of who they are and how they are perceived. Narratives of emigration passed down by parents and grandparents sustain connections between diasporic communities and the homeland over generations, even if they are rooted in romanticized or idealized memories rather than direct contact.

In this chapter, I highlight the competing logics of citizenship and blood within the “premigration condition” that marks South Korea as a “homeland” for return migrants and through which “Koreanness” permeates the everyday lives of second- and later-generation Korean Americans and Korean Chinese. Beginning with the context of their differing emigration histories, I trace how Koreanness is created and controlled by national policies of diversity and multiculturalism in the United States and China, respectively. These institutional factors structure the entry, incorporation, and marginalization of immigrants and shape the ways Koreanness becomes the source of second-class citizenship marked by discrimination and racism. Finally, I show how “returns” become a way to reclaim South Korea as a “true” home.

Theories of Ethnicity

Returns run counter to prevailing theories of ethnicity, which hypothesize that, over time, second and later generations will gradually assimilate to the dominant culture in their countries of settlement.1 Social science research on ethnicity within immigrant groups, particularly in the US context, has been highly influenced by “straight line” paradigms such as the “race relation cycle” advanced by Robert Park, a sociologist associated with the Chicago school.2 These assimilation frameworks assume a one-directional migration flow in which immigrants cut ties to their nations of origin and gradually become absorbed into the “melting pot” of American society. However, these theories have largely been critiqued for their focus on the experiences of early European immigrants. Furthermore, early African migrants were brought explicitly under an economic and political system of slavery that erased their humanity, leaving no possibility for full incorporation or assimilation in American society. Assimilation theories also inadequately address the experiences of the growing numbers of migrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa after 1965 that fundamentally transformed mainstream “American” culture.

Traditional frameworks fail to account for the ways racism and discrimination at both the institutional and interpersonal levels can make ethnic actors feel like they are not “authentic” national subjects in home countries with official policies that espouse cultural pluralism. Newer theories of segmented assimilation argue for more “bumpy than straight” frameworks that consider the different range of challenges ethnic groups might encounter due to US racial logics, class status, and religious identities. Some argue that even as housing, social networks, marriage, and dating patterns become more integrated, ethnic identities remain salient even into the third and fourth generation.3 This is facilitated through what Philip Kasinitz calls “ethnic replenishment,” which is provided by later-generation ethnics who sustain ties to both their “home” countries of citizenship and ancestral ethnic “homeland” countries.4

However, meanings of ethnicity are dynamic and change over time. One reason for this might be that individuals beyond the initial immigrant generation can voluntarily “opt into” an ethnic identity using specific markers as meaningful symbols of ethnic affiliation in ways that do not require sustained amounts of time and energy and can be adapted to fit easily within one’s existing lifestyle.5 These invented traditions and cultures might be unrecognizable to newer immigrants or contemporary residents in homeland countries but retain significance among later-generation ethnic Americans who have little to no substantive direct ties to the “old country.”

While most second- and later-generation individuals do not choose to uproot their lives to return to their family’s country of origin, those who do physically return for medium- to long-term migration projects provide insight into the economic, social, and emotional factors that contribute to this particular transnational practice. A close examination of the premigration condition broadens our understandings of how Koreanness becomes imbedded within everyday practices and decision-making processes. It also helps prevent “ethnic drift” in the face of assimilation pressures, long-term separation from the homeland, and the gradual loss of language skills and cultural traditions.6 A nuanced understanding of the ways Koreanness is constructed by Korean Americans in the United States and Korean Chinese in China provides an essential foundation to contextualize their experiences in South Korea.

Creating Koreanness through Emigration Histories

Meanings of Koreanness for Korean Americans and Korean Chinese in my study begin with the emigration histories of their parents and grandparents. The stories of why their families left mention a range of external factors including famine, military conflict, occupation by foreign powers, underdevelopment, general lack of economic opportunities and political repression. Once these emigrants settled abroad, their Koreanness had to be reconstructed within a new national framework in which ethnicity and nationality were no longer tightly intertwined. In the next section, I provide a brief discussion of the historical contexts for the establishment of ethnic Korean immigrant communities in China and the United States to highlight the key differences and similarities between the two.

The Qing government loosened restrictions for China’s northeast border with the Korean peninsula in 1881. Many ethnic Koreans took advantage of this new pathway to flee deteriorating economic conditions and a severe famine. A second wave of migrants was spurred by the annexation of the Korean peninsula by Japan in 1910 and the political repression that followed. As a result, the number of Koreans in the area known as Manchuria (near present-day North Korea and Russia) rose from ten thousand to over one million.7 Using historical claims that parts of Manchuria originally belonged to the Korean kingdom under the Koguryo Dynasty and were now part of the Japanese empire, Japanese troops began an aggressive advance in northeastern China. This further increased tensions in the region. Historians note that Koreans in China during this period played pivotal roles in the resistance movement against the Japanese during the Chinese People’s Liberation War, were highly active in the Chinese Communist Party, and were instrumental in the founding of the new socialist People’s Republic of China in 1949.8

With the establishment of formal North and South Korean governments in 1948, most ethnic Koreans in China became exiled, no longer able to return “home” to the dismantled kingdom of Joseon. With few new immigrants from North and South Korea to China, Korean Chinese communities stabilized under generally favorable state policies toward minorities in China, maintaining “dual identities” as Chinese citizens with a strong sense of Korean identity.9 Based on Chinese national census data, an estimated 1.8 million Koreans currently live in China, making them the eleventh-largest minority group and one of the largest Korean diasporic communities living outside of the peninsula.10 Korean Chinese remain concentrated in three provinces in Northeast China: Jilin, Heilongjiang, and Liaoning.11 Presently, approximately 40 percent of the Korean Chinese population resides in Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin Province, which was formally established in 1955. This concentration was reflected among the Korean Chinese respondents in this study, over half of whom came from hometowns in Yanbian.

While much of the migrant flow from the Korean peninsula to China occurred between 1880 and 1948, emigration to the United States occurred much later, through three channels: migrant labor, military families, and international adoptions. A small number of Korean immigrants arrived in Hawaiʻi as plantation laborers in the early twentieth century. In addition, some Korean women arrived in the United States following the Korean War as part of the War Brides Act of 1945 alongside their American GI husbands. Over the past seventy years, since the end of the Second World War and the Korean War, the US military has stationed nearly 30,000 troops in fifteen bases across South Korea. As a result, military families have always played a key role in the demographics of contemporary Korean American communities. Early military wives sponsored family members in South Korea, triggering a small wave of early Korean immigration. International adoptions from South Korea also rose exponentially following the end of the Korean War. Based on annual reports/yearbooks of immigration, South Korea was the largest “source country” for international adoptions between 1976 and 1985.12 Anthropologist Eleana Kim estimates organizations such as Holt International Children’s Services facilitated the international adoptions of more than one hundred thousand Korean children between 1953 and 2008.13 However, the overall numbers of Korean immigrants were relatively low until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Cellar Act.

After 1965, US immigration policies prioritized skilled-labor recruitment and family reunification, which opened new avenues for Korean immigrants. In what has been referred to as the “brain drain,” core countries like the United States actively sought professional, highly educated individuals from newly industrialized countries like South Korea to fill gaps in the domestic labor market. Edward Park and John Park point to the creation of H-1B visas, designed for college-educated professionals with highly skilled degrees, as an example of how US policies explicitly molded the makeup of contemporary Asian American communities.14 Immigrants from Asia—including South Korea, the Philippines, India, Japan, and China—were, and continue to be, heavily recruited in the fields of information technology, engineering, education, and health care and constitute nearly 75 percent of the beneficiaries of these H-1B visas. Asian immigrant H-1B holders who came to the United States as part of this initiative were highly educated, urban, middle-class citizens in their home countries with the resources and skills to immigrate. Many parents of the Korean American respondents in this study arrived after 1965 as highly skilled professionals or educational migrants seeking advanced degrees.

Korean immigration to the United States increased steadily, and South Korea became the third-largest sending country behind Mexico and the Philippines in the period between 1976 and 1990.15 Many Koreans were motivated by “push” factors such as economic underdevelopment, few employment options, political instability under successive military dictatorships between 1960 and 1987, and the threat of war between North and South Korea.16 “Pull” factors such as improved economic and educational opportunities as part of the “American Dream”—along with increased economic, military, and political ties between South Korea and the United States—contributed to the steady flow of South Korean immigrants. Unlike Koreans in China, Koreans in the United States are not concentrated in one geographic area. Sociologists Pyong Gap Min and Chigon Kim estimate that roughly half a million Korean Americans reside in California, which is nearly 30 percent of the total Korean population in the United States, and almost half of all Korean Americans live in seven major metropolitan areas: Los Angeles; New York City; Washington, DC; San Francisco; Chicago; Philadelphia; and Honolulu.17 This concentration is mirrored within the Korean American sample in this study, as nearly three-fourths of the respondents are from the Los Angeles–Orange County region, the New York City–New Jersey–Connecticut region, or the northern Virginia area near Washington, DC.

Creating Koreanness in China and the United States

The differing emigration histories of Korean Americans and Korean Chinese have a significant impact on their orientations to the Korean peninsula. As second- and third-generation immigrants, Korean Chinese in the study are aware their parents or grandparents left before the establishment of North and South Korea. They generally frame their ancestors’ decision to immigrate to China as a “forced” rather than voluntary decision. Their “exiled” status in China after WWII and the Korean War and their historical involvement in the Korean independence movement in Manchuria was evidence of their strong orientation to the Korean peninsula and a unified “Korean” nation. Most Korean Chinese in this study have had sustained contact with relatives in North Korea rather than South Korea. In fact, Chul Mu, a Korean Chinese man, believes most Korean Chinese have a “bigger sense of affinity with North Korea.” Korean Chinese use “hanguk” to refer to South Korea, “bukhan” or “eebuk” for North Korea, and “Joseon” for their homeland, which encompasses the entirety of the Korean peninsula.

In contrast, Korean emigrants to the United States after the Korean War left an already divided peninsula. Korean Americans use “Korean” and “Korea” almost exclusively to refer to South Korea, linguistically aligning their identities with their parents’ former South Korean citizenship. This is perhaps unsurprising given that few Korean Americans retained ties to North Korean relatives and were largely raised in households that were staunchly anticommunist and highly critical of the North Korean regime. Furthermore, in 2002, President Bush’s inclusion of North Korea in the “axis of evil” (along with Iran and Iraq) in his State of the Union Address made any sympathies with North Korea akin to an unequivocal support for antidemocratic, rogue nations. Ideas about Koreanness among 1.5- and second-generation Korean American respondents are largely created from the memories of their parents of an underdeveloped South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. They stress the voluntary nature of their family’s decision to emigrate, citing the “American Dream” and the greater economic and educational opportunities in the United States as compared to South Korea.

Levels of language fluency are more varied for Korean Americans than Korean Chinese. Korean Americans often use the term “Konglish,” a mixture of English and Korean, in reference to the primary language in their homes. Commonly in the case of Korean Americans with very low verbal abilities, their parents speak to them in Korean while they respond in English. Even with relatively low levels of Korean reading, writing, and speaking proficiency, most Korean Americans nevertheless retain medium to high levels of oral comprehension. In contrast, the particular context of Yanbian, with its unique national minority educational systems and geographic concentration of ethnic Koreans, means that most Korean Chinese up through the third generation are equally fluent in both Korean and Chinese. They speak of linguistic switching depending on the context—using Korean in school and within the home and Chinese in other public areas.

Despite these clear differences, most Korean Americans and Korean Chinese in the study express strong emotional and cultural ties to a Koreanness that is complicated by geopolitics but not bound to it. Much of this is attributed to the rete...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Premigration Condition
• Chapter 2. Return Migrants in the South Korean Immigration System and Labor Market
• Chapter 3. Of “Kings” and “Lepers”: The Gendered Logics of Koreanness in the Social Lives of Korean Americans
• Chapter 4. “Aren’t We All the People of Joseon?”: Claiming Ethnic Inclusion through History and Culture
• Chapter 5. The Logics of Cosmopolitan Koreanness and Global Citizenship
• Conclusion: Finding Family among Foreigners
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Research Methods
• Appendix B: Characteristics of Respondents
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author