Full Description
Winner of the 2019 ASA Book Award - Asia/Asian-American Section
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
Introduction 1
1. The Premigration Condition 14
2. Return Migrants in the South Korean
Immigration System and Labor Market 39
3. Of "Kings" and "Lepers": The Gendered
Logics of Koreanness in the Social
Lives of Korean Americans 67
4. "Aren't We All the People of Joseon?":
Claiming Ethnic Inclusion through
History and Culture 97
5. The Logics of Cosmopolitan Koreanness
and Global Citizenship 114
Conclusion: Finding Family among Foreigners 134
Acknowledgments 143
Appendix A: Research Methods 147
Appendix B: Characteristics of Respondents 149
Notes 155
References 167
Index 175
