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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Asian Studies Contemporary Collection eBook Package
• VerfasserIn: Lee, Helene K.,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2018]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Asian American Studies Today
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (192 p.) :; 2 tables

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.

Table of 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