Making and Faking Kinship

Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea

Caren Freeman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801462825
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

In the years leading up to and directly following rapprochement with China in 1992, the South Korean government looked to ethnic Korean (Chos?njok) brides and laborers from northeastern China to restore productivity to its industries and countryside. South Korean officials and the media celebrated these overtures not only as a pragmatic solution to population problems but also as a patriotic project of reuniting ethnic Koreans after nearly fifty years of Cold War separation.

As Caren Freeman's fieldwork in China and South Korea shows, the attempt to bridge the geopolitical divide in the name of Korean kinship proved more difficult than any of the parties involved could have imagined. Discriminatory treatment, artificially suppressed wages, clashing gender logics, and the criminalization of so-called runaway brides and undocumented workers tarnished the myth of ethnic homogeneity and exposed the contradictions at the heart of South Korea's transnational kin-making project.

Unlike migrant brides who could acquire citizenship, migrant workers were denied the rights of long-term settlement, and stringent quotas restricted their entry. As a result, many Chos?njok migrants arranged paper marriages and fabricated familial ties to South Korean citizens to bypass the state apparatus of border control. Making and Faking Kinship depicts acts of "counterfeit kinship," false documents, and the leaving behind of spouses and children as strategies implemented by disenfranchised people to gain mobility within the region's changing political economy.

Part I

MIGRANT BRIDES AND THE PACT OF GENDER, KINSHIP, NATION

1

CHOSŎNJOK MAIDENS AND FARMER BACHELORS

It was nearly dark by the time my research assistant, Chiyŏng, and I reached our destination: the home of Kisŏn, a pineapple farmer in a far-flung region of South Kyŏngsang Province. In March 1991, Kisŏn had been selected by a local government office to participate in one of South Korea’s first “marriage tours” to northeastern China. Following a lead from the organization in Seoul that sponsored the tour, Chiyŏng had phoned him the week before to arrange an interview. “Are you the ones who phoned?” growled a voice as we exited the taxi. There was no one in sight but a gaunt, ruddy-faced man straddling a moped, his stern eyes trained on me. When I looked in his direction, his gaze did not soften. I turned to Chiyŏng to guide us through the awkwardness of the moment, but she appeared equally uncomfortable. The three of us stood in silence, the man unrelenting in his cold stare. I summoned the courage to stammer a greeting. Kisŏn expressed relief that I spoke Korean and apologized that he had been caught off guard to see a foreigner’s face.

Not yet sure whether I would be welcome in his home, Chiyŏng and I followed as he led the way through the courtyard of his L-shaped house, into the living room where he beckoned us to sit on the floor. His seven-year-old son and six-year-old daughter, wound up by the arrival of unusual houseguests, ran wildly about the room, whooping and giggling and wrestling each other to the ground. When Kisŏn commanded that they leave the room, his daughter curled up like a cat in his lap, while his son clambered on top of them. It was impossible to talk amid the whining and tumbling. Several times Kisŏn picked up a broom and bellowed at his son to leave the room. The boy ran out shrieking, but no sooner did his father put down the broomstick than he would stubbornly reappear. Kisŏn explained apologetically that his kids never listen to him. I took a small pound cake out of my backpack and offered it to the children, thinking this might help them settle down. The boy snatched it up. “Masi ŏpda!” (yuck) he exclaimed and pushed it away. My hopes for a productive interview session were rapidly fading. Kisŏn explained that he had had a quarrel with his wife just before our arrival and that we should await her return before attempting a formal interview.

Eventually Kisŏn’s wife, Sumin, came home with a big smile on her face, seemingly fully recovered from their domestic dispute. Her long hair was swept back and she wore large gold hoop earrings and red lipstick. Chiyŏng commented on her beautiful appearance, noting that she looked nothing like a “country woman.”

Sumin instantly reestablished order in her household. The kids were fed and put to bed, and the general mood shifted to a more cheerful register. The atmosphere grew more festive still when Kisŏn picked up the phone and invited his neighbors to join us, a Chosŏnjok–South Korean couple (one of three living in the village at that time) who had married two years ago and were expecting their first child. We crowded around a small table on which Sumin had placed a plate of sliced fruit, shot glasses for me and the men (the women demurely abstained), and a bottle of soju. I placed a small tape recorder in the middle of the group, and each person, at my prompting, spoke of their personal experiences of marrying across borders.

I open with my entry into the home of one particular farm family—one of nine home visits in five different provinces over the course of my first year of fieldwork—to provide a sense of my itinerant research methods. Including week-long stints away from my home base in Seoul, treks from one village to the next by a combination of plane, train, boat, bus, and/or taxi to remote rural locations where I had prearranged interviews, the process itself resembled a kind of “marriage tour.” To stretch the metaphor a little further, similar to the “lightning quick” (pongae sik) style of courtship that moved couples from first meeting to marriage proposal to wedding in just one week’s time, I too was pressured to move from foreign anthropologist to intimate confidante, often in just a matter of hours. Without fail my hosts rewarded me with the “rural hospitality” they were so proud of—they fed me, offered me a sleeping mat for the night, and, most important, regaled me with the intimate details of their hasty courtships and their experiences of married life in the remote villages they inhabited.

I asked every farmer a blunt, and to them probably naive, question as an entry point to our conversation: “Why did you go all the way to China to find a bride?” And each time I received the same straightforward response: “No agashi [unmarried woman] wants to marry a rural bachelor.” Kisŏn elaborated slightly, pointing to age as a factor. “If you’re thirty-four [years old], that’s it. You’re too old. After trying and trying, if a man absolutely can’t get married, he goes to China.” Kisŏn made it seem like a logical progression, part of the natural order of things.

That a man whose local marriage prospects are dim would expand his search overseas is not usual. The mass media in the United States, despite its distortions and sensationalized imagery, has familiarized the American public with what are commonly referred to as “mail-order marriages.” In these marriages, men and women from different parts of the world typically meet through the assistance of introduction agencies and agree to marry often after meeting face-to-face for only the first time. Marriages between Korean men and Chosŏnjok women tend to unfold along these lines, but one important aspect that makes them unique is the official sanction they receive from the Korean government. Why would the Korean government back something akin to a “mail-order marriage” program for its unwed farmers? What culturally specific understandings of family and nation in Korea allow transnational marriages to be placed in the realm of public policy? What larger social and political forces made Chosŏnjok women appear to be a logical, and even patriotic choice, for the nation’s farmers?

This chapter explores these questions and considers how the issue of Chosŏnjok brides became a political one, with implications not just for the individual farmers but for the nation as a whole. It stretches back before my time in the field to the beginning of the 1990s when diplomatic ties between China and South Korea were first established and unions between Chosŏnjok brides and South Korean farmers were celebrated in discourses of ethnic reunification and rural revival. As I show, uneven regional and global development, political economic changes between mainland China and South Korea, and Korean ethnonationalist sentiment combined to make Chosŏnjok brides the most politically expedient and patriotic choice for the nation’s farmers throughout the 1990s.

The second part of this chapter presents the stories of a number of Chosŏnjok women who married Korean farmers through the assistance of the Research Association for the Welfare of Korean Farm and Fishing Villages located in Seoul. When Mr. Na Chongkŭn, the director of the agency, referred me to these couples, he emphasized that these were people who “lived well” (chal sanŭn saram) and that the brides had been “innocent and “pure maidens” at the time of their marriages. This image of the “good Chosŏnjok bride” held sway during an already-bygone era, just ten years before the ethnographic present of this book in the late 1990s. It stood in stark contrast to the then-prevailing imagery of the cunning Chosŏnjok woman who opportunistically discarded marital partners, both at home and in South Korea, in the interests of obtaining South Korean citizenship.

In the following chapter, I address the larger social and political context in which this fall from grace took place. My concern here is to introduce a cast of Chosŏnjok wives who, by simple virtue of staying put in their rural marriages, bearing children, and caring for aging in-laws, conform to the family-making expectations imposed by the state and their marital family members. It is my hope, however, that a closer look at the texture of their lives, their disappointments, and their varied outlooks on marriage and mobility will begin to complicate the idealized images that have legitimized, and continue to legitimate, the reliance on foreign women in South Korea to rehabilitate unwed, underprivileged men and, by extension, the patriarchal family as the basis of the nation’s social order.

Understanding the Rural Boycott

To appreciate how the search for rural brides came to be viewed as a political issue with ramifications beyond the welfare of individual farmers, we must consider the broader social forces that engendered the “marriage crisis.” The rural exodus of young people to the cities can be traced back to the 1960s when the South Korean state first implemented its export-led, labor-intensive strategy of development. As in the case of other rapidly industrializing nations, the South Korean state depended on the relatively inexpensive and flexible labor of unmarried rural women to fill the ranks of its industrial labor force. By neglecting the development of the rural sector and siphoning off its population of unmarried women (and young men, to a slightly lesser extent) to work in urban industries, the state accelerated the pace of rural-urban migration to a devastating degree.1 By the mid-1980s the Korean government was faced with a bride shortage in the countryside so severe it could no longer be ignored.

While young rural women have been targeted as an inexpensive, easily controlled urban labor force in nations across the global economy, these gendered patterns of labor recruitment do not, in and of themselves, inevitably culminate in a marriage squeeze among rural bachelors. Mills (1999), for example, describes the labor migration experiences of young, rural Thai women who return to their native villages more often than not, to marry and resettle after a stint of factory work in Bangkok. A number of factors account for this pattern of return migration, including perceptions of city men as “unreliable providers,” uxorilocal patterns of marriage, and widely held Buddhist beliefs about a daughter’s ongoing obligations to obey and materially support her parents after marriage (1999, 76–80).

South Korean women, unlike their Thai counterparts, rarely return to their rural roots. One important factor explaining the ubiquity of the “rural boycott”2 among young women in South Korea is that, unlike Thai parents, South Korean parents do not discourage their daughters from settling in the city. In fact, rural parents, especially mothers, are said to urge their daughters to find husbands with jobs in the city. A middle-aged female farmer interviewed by Sorensen in the late 1970s captured the disdain with which rural existence was already regarded at that time when she avowed, “I’d even tell a dog not to farm” (1988, 202). At the turn of the millennium, Korean mothers continue to counsel their daughters to forsake the farm and marry men who live in Seoul.

The path that rural Korean sons are expected to take as they approach marriage also differs sharply from the Thai case. Eldest sons in Korea are bound to the countryside by obligations to take care of aging parents and help maintain ancestral farmland acquired over generations. These cultural expectations, combined with patrilocal marriage customs and the near impossibility of securing a good job in the city without skills or education, pressure eldest sons to stay in the village or return there after a stint of migrant labor. Younger sons, while less bound by ties of filial obligation, face the same difficulties succeeding in urban occupations. Women’s work in rural areas, by contrast, is considered harder and lower status than even the lowest-paying jobs available to women in the cities. Their best hope, as their mothers often see it, is to remain in the city by marrying into an urban household, a distinctly female option given the customary emphasis placed on hypergamous and patrilocal marriage patterns. A married-out daughter’s parents might also benefit (practically and symbolically) from establishing connections with affines in urban locations.

Farmers I met as well as activists advocating on their behalf noted the irony of the situation in which farm families universally send their daughters off to Seoul to marry while simultaneously complaining that they are unable to recruit a daughter-in...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Migrant Brides and the Pact of Gender, Kinship, Nation
• Part II Migrant Workers, Counterfeit Kinship, and Split Families
• References