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    Between Foreign and Family
    Return Migration and Identity Construction Among Korean Americans and Korean Chinese

    Helene K. Lee (Author)

    9780813586137

    Paperback / softback, published 31 January 2018

    192 pages, 2 tables
    21.6 x 14 x 1.5 cm, 0.254 kg

    "In this distinct contribution to the field of transnational studies, Helene K. Lee shows how ethnic identity comes to take on a very different significance depending on one's nationality and class position."
    - Joshua Roth (author of Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan)
    "Lee examines the expectations and experiences of two groups, whose members think of themselves as Korean."
    (Asian Affairs)
    "The book merits reading to encourage reflection on the current social situation and pondering of the possible transformation of Koreanness in the future." 
    (The Review of Korean Studies)
    "Lee’s study is a crisply written and cogently argued analysis that makes an original contribution to a range of interrelated subjects that have preoccupied social scientists for decades, including diasporic nationalism, return migration, and (im)migrant incorporation."
    (China Review International)
    "Lee’s book aptly suggests that we should try to imagine the concept of homeland beyond the simple binary between family and foreign, us and them, and in and out."
    (The Journal of Asian Studies)

    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.  

    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

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