Between Foreign and Family: Return Migration and Identity Construction among Korean Americans and Korean Chinese (Asian American Studies Today)

Lee, Helene K.

ISBN 10: 0813586135 / ISBN 13: 9780813586137

Published by Rutgers University Press, 2018

About this Item

pp. 192.

Seller Inventory # 385540986

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Between Foreign and Family: Return Migration and Identity Construction among Korean Americans and Korean Chinese (Asian American Studies Today)
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813586135
• ISBN 13: 9780813586137
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.  

About the Author

HELENE K. LEE is an assistant professor of sociology at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.