Between Foreign and Family : Return Migration and Identity Construction among Korean Americans and Korean Chinese / Helene K. Lee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lee, Helene K., Author.

Series:

Asian American studies today.

Asian American Studies Today

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Return migration--Korea (South).

Return migration.

Koreans--Ethnic identity.

Koreans.

Korean Americans--Ethnic identity.

Korean Americans.

Koreans--China--Ethnic identity.

Korea (South)--Emigration and immigration--Social aspects.

Korea (South).

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1. The Premigration Condition

2. Return Migrants in the South Korean Immigration System and Labor Market

3. Of "Kings" and "Lepers": The Gendered Logics of Koreanness in the Social Lives of Korean Americans

4. "Aren't We All the People of Joseon?": Claiming Ethnic Inclusion through History and Culture

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

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 21. Dez 2019)

ISBN:

9780813586151

0813586151

9780813586168

081358616X

OCLC:

1017758034