Korean Immigrant Women and the Renegotiation of Identity : Class, Gender, and the Politics of Identity 9781593323240

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The New Americans Recent Immigration and American Society

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Edited by Steven J. Gold and Rubén G. Rumbaut

A Series from LFB Scholarly

Korean Immigrant Women and the Renegotiation of Identity : Class, Gender, and the Politics of Identity, LFB Scholarly

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Korean Immigrant Women and the Renegotiation of Identity Class, Gender, and the Politics of Identity

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Keumjae Park

LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC El Paso 2009 Korean Immigrant Women and the Renegotiation of Identity : Class, Gender, and the Politics of Identity, LFB Scholarly

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Park, Keumjae. Korean immigrant women and the renegotiation of identity : class, gender, and the politics of identity / Keumjae Park. p. cm. -- (The new Americans) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59332-324-0 (alk. paper) 1. Women immigrants--United States. 2. Koreans--United States. 3. Koreans--Ethnic identity. 4. Korean American women. I. Title. HQ1421.P37 2009 305.48'8957073--dc22 2008052586

ISBN 978-1-59332-324-0 Printed on acid-free 250-year-life paper. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Korean Immigrant Women and the Renegotiation of Identity : Class, Gender, and the Politics of Identity, LFB Scholarly

Contents Acknowledgments

…..……………………….…….…vii

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Introduction: Women, Migration, and the Question of Identity………………….……...1 Chapter 1

Migration, Gender, and Theories of Identity: A Structural Framework for Studying Immigrant Women………………...11

Chapter 2

Research Design..…….…………………….33

Chapter 3

Immigration and Disrupted Identities……...45

Chapter 4

Finding Continuity and Mobilizing New Identities………………………….…..81

Chapter 5

Gendered Identities: Negotiating Work, Family and Motherhood…………..109

Chapter 6

Shifting Reference Groups and Transnational Identity Negotiation…….....133

Chapter 7

Renegotiation of Identity after Migration: Class, Gender, and Politics of Identity…...173

Appendix

Demographic Characteristics of the Participants………………………..….187

Notes

…………………………………………...189

Bibliography ...………………………………………….195 Index

….…………………………………......…215 v

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Acknowledgements

This has been a long journey, and I am indebted to many people who have extended their emotional and intellectual support in various ways. My deepest gratitude goes to Karen Cerulo who has supported my intellectual career with unwavering trust, brilliant comments, and thoughtful advice. I also thank Vilna Bashi, Judith Gerson, Richard Williams, and Eviatar Zerubavel whose teachings and scholarly work have inspired me and shaped my sociological perspectives. My friends, Johanna Foster and Takiko Mori-Saunders, with whom I have had the fortune of sharing both personal and intellectual life have been the pillars of strength over the years. I especially thank Johanna Foster who read this manuscript on such short notice, and gave me many insightful comments. Since I started my journey as a professional scholar, support from my colleagues at William Paterson University has helped me to grow and mature. I want to express my special thanks to Peter Stein, Vincent Parrillo, and Gabe Wang for their advice on this project, and to Gennifer Furst, Katherine Chen, Howard Lune, Kathleen Korgen, James Mahon, Emily Mahon, and Sheetal Ranjan for their continuing support, friendship, and feedback on my work. I vii

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viii

Acknowledgements

am also grateful to the colleagues in my Professional Writing Group, especially to James Hauser, Stephen Betts, Ann Medinets, Carol Frierson-Campbell, and Rajunder Kaur who read parts of my work and offered helpful comments. I thank Keumsil Kim-Yoon and Heejung An for their mentoring and their inspiring efforts to strengthen the Korean Studies Program. I thank Leo Balk and the editors at LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. for their help and patience throughout the writing. I am most grateful to the women who participated in this study. I owe much to the interviewees who opened themselves up to a stranger and shared their stories with me. I’ve been entrusted with part of their life, and I hope that I have treated their stories here with utmost respect. The women’s resilience and strength have taught me lessons beyond sociology. I am thankful to people who helped me with field research, Yumi Hong, Gou Kim, and Meeho Maeng. I am very grateful to my family whose uncompromising love and trust humbles me. To my husband, Sunghoon Lee and my daughter Alexis Hweehyun Lee whose presence fulfills my everyday with precious treasures of life, I want to dedicate this book.

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INTRODUCTION

Women, Migration, and the

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Question of Identity

When I immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-five, I knew I needed a new name. Americans would not be able to pronounce my “difficult” name, I thought, and I should have an English name. “Julie” was the name I adopted, and the name by which my new neighbors began to call me. I worked at a store ran by my parents-in-law, and the customers would call my adopted name in that friendly American way which makes you think that they knew you for a while. Later, when I went to graduate school, however, I used my Korean name, as it was my “real” name which was on all my documents. To my surprise, people at school seemed to have little difficulty with my Korean name, even if they struggled to pronounce it at first. For the next few years, I lived in the two names I had. At my store and at my school, I had very different routines and perhaps was different persons. The two names seemed to represent my two identities which hardly overlapped. While “Julie” began to follow what may 1

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be a typical path for Korean immigrants, moving from one job to another in Korean ethnic economy eventually to a business ownership, “Keumjae” was traveling the road to American academia with a lot less certainty. Whereas my life as an immigrant had a somewhat predictable trajectory laid out by examples of fellow Korean immigrants before me, it was a completely new path for me personally. My life as a graduate student was more consistent with my life before immigration, having been known throughout my education as a student with serious academic interests; however, I knew few role models who were doing what I was doing, being a new immigrant, woman, married, and still pursuing a graduate degree. I had hard a time finding a community where I could experience camaraderie, or a sense of belonging, as the two sides of my life/identity occupied very different social spaces. For many years, I struggled to make sense of my various identities, and puzzled over who I was becoming in this society in which I made my new home. Looking back, I was learning first-hand that immigrants like myself very often have to go through an overhaul change of who they are, and the transition is complex, confusing, and sometimes painful. What was the disorientation about? Why did I feel so torn and confused about who I was? In retrospect, I realize that my feeling of disorientation came from several sources, but most notably from being forced to forfeit the class privileges that had largely defined me before migration. My new job at a retail store and my new surroundings in an urban working class neighborhood intensified the conflicting emotions about who I had been before migration and who I found myself becoming post-migration. At the same time, I was once again situated in two different class positions even in my new home; as a new immigrant worker with less than fluent English skills, I was squarely a part of my immigrant working class neighborhood. In the days when I was at school, however, I was among the aspiring academics who were unmistakably middle class Americans. My life

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Introduction: The Question of Identity

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experiences as a first generation immigrant woman thus have been shaped by a web of social relations and expectations along the lines of class, gender, and other social hierarchies. These were lines of categorization, which have delineated my multifaceted identities that were at times not only incongruent with one another, but also at odds with my pre-migration identities. Human societies have their unique ways of classifying their members into hierarchized categories. These categories, including class, gender, and race, work as social “grids” that map out different social locations for individuals to be situated within structures of social inequality. Immediately after migration, I had very little idea about what kinds of social grids were out there to define me anew in this society. Therefore, I felt that I had to relocate myself, and redesign and rebuild my life course from scratch, while grappling with the vexing question of who I was. In time, I have become more comfortable identifying myself as an academic, an identity which feels more consistent with the middle class lifestyle my family can now afford. I have also abandoned my English name and become more comfortable asserting my awkwardly pronounced Korean name to natives and other immigrants. This may mean that I have finally come to terms with the rupture between my pre and post-migration identities, or that I have anchored myself into a more coherent sense of location as an established middle class immigrant. However, the long and enduring struggle with my identities after migration left me with the simple, but perplexing question: What happens to people’s identities, especially to women’s identities, when they go through transnational/cultural relocation? It was when I began to listen to stories of other Korean women that I realized that many of them had experienced a similar period of disorientation as I did. Just as I did, many Korean immigrant women I interviewed for this study had English names such as “Sue,” “Tina,” and “Hannah.” Unlike me, many of the women I met have not abandoned their English names, but maintained their multi-

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faceted identity traversing between the worlds occupied by their American clientele and their Korean family and friends. To me, the two names in which many Korean immigrant women organized their identities seem to be perfect metaphors for the not-so-seamless juggling of different cultures, of inconsistent social positioning, and of advantageous and disadvantageous identity, by which immigrant women understand and come to terms with who they are in the U.S. society. Simply put, identities are something that these women have had to continually renegotiate and redefine in order to find a sense of place in the new social milieu of the U.S. society. Hence, the question this book asks is simple: “What happens to women’s sense of location in society or identity as they move from one society to another?” This study is about how immigrant women experience and cope with the question of who they are when they suddenly find themselves, often without being prepared, in a new social hierarchy which names them with unfamiliar vocabularies, such as “Orientals,” “Asian women,” or “immigrants,” that often signal underprivileged social locations. According to classical theories of identity by Cooley (1902) and Mead (1961(1934)), our self-identities are formed by internalizing the attributions made by others in society. When women migrate and are called by different social attributes, their social identities, hitherto taken for granted, are likely to be challenged. This requires adjustments. Immigration scholarship has debated about how the adjustments occur; do immigrants abandon much of what had defined them – family, cultural tradition, class position, work, and other relationships- in order to find new identities as Americans? Or do they adhere to their premigration identities, even as they try to adapt to the economic and cultural challenges presented to them in the U.S. society? How do immigrants interpret their pre and post migration class, gender, and ethnic identities and the larger social structures which guide their sense of place in the complex web of social grids? While a large volume of

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Introduction: The Question of Identity

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ethnographic studies and biographic data provide accounts of immigrants on the move, few sociological studies have taken upon the question of identity, let alone women’s identities, as their central research question. I hope my study begins to fill the void and enhance our understanding of immigrant women and how their identities are disrupted and renegotiated as a result of migration. WHY IS STUDYING IDENTITY IMPORTANT? As I try to show in this book, women’s immigration stories are directly linked to, and indicative of, various structural and cultural issues which define the two countries where their identities are anchored. It is not difficult to imagine that immigrant women experienced major changes in their lives as they move from a society with a particular set of social hierarchies, cultural ideologies, and economic dynamics to a new set of conditions that challenged their social locations. As I have grappled with the sudden disorientation with my identities, the immigrant women I met indicated that they had to find a sense of their place in the new contexts of American society. Sociological literature on identities posits that the sense of self hinges upon individuals’ understandings of how they are perceived by others in the society (Cooley 1902; Mead 1961(1934)). Thus, identity links individuals to society, and provides them with a sense of place in society (Herzberg 2000). Hence, identity is a key dimension in immigrant women’s post-migration adjustments. Yet, studies on immigrant identities in the past largely focused on identity dynamics in the context of host societies (e.g., Benson 2006; Bhalla 2006; Rumbaut 1996; Waters 1990) and only recently, researchers began to look at the relationships between identity categories in the sending and host communities (e.g., Abdelhady 2006; Collet 2007; Waters 1999). Still, few studies explore this issue from the perspective of immigrant women with a focus on the process of transition and renegotiation. This process involves first confronting, and, in time, redefining hitherto taken-for-granted

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definitions of gender, race, class, and nationality. In doing so, immigrant women need to cope with a reassignment into the identity classification systems and social hierarchies of the host societies. This sometimes means suffering downward mobility, or overall social demotion (Park 2007) because of labor market conditions and/or racism, while other times improving their statuses by becoming key breadwinners for the family (e.g., Pessar 1984; Repak 1995). For women, in particular, changes in family relations, cultural ideologies, and gender dynamics influence their identity renegotiation processes (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Pessar 1999). As Dorothy Smith argued, women’s experiences, by virtue of their disadvantaged location within multiple inequalities, provide excellent “entry points” to examine the complex working of different power relations (Smith 1987: 151-179). Hence, using Korean immigrant women’s identity narratives as “entry points,” I hope to expose the structural conditions and politics of identities in which these women are received and would renegotiate their new social locations. The participants’ accounts will show how they interpret and deal with changes in class positions and statuses after migration, and the conflicting sense of empowerment and disempowerment involved in the experience. In particular, I pay attention to the ways in which immigrant women actively construct their identities after migration by weaving complex and conflicting identity practices in reaction to oppressive forces they encounter in the U.S. society. While the myth of the American Dream continues to instill hopes and motivations for upward mobility among new immigrants, many Korean immigrant women talk about “shattered dreams” or disappointments they felt when they first arrived in the U.S. Many saw a stark contrast between the images of the American middle class which they had dreamed for themselves and the challenging realities immigrant families typically faced right after migration. Many former middle class women told me that

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Introduction: The Question of Identity

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they felt they lost their class privileges and overall social esteem. There was a sense of a chasm or disruption in their identities. However, what this chasm means sociologically, and how this chasm is handled by immigrants in their everyday realities have not been discussed often because most studies on first generation immigrants focus on measures of their economic and cultural incorporation, such as mobility and language acquisitions. (e.g., Bonacich 1987; Danenberg and Sanchez 2004; Portes and Rumbaut 1996; Zuninga and Hernandez-Leon 2005) What I am interested in analyzing in this book is how these external conditions of settlement impact women’s own subjective accounts of transitions as they relate to women’s sense of who they are in the U.S. society. In doing so, I add a crucial and often neglected piece to our understanding of immigrants’ settlement and their adaptive paths in the host countries. Chapters in this book are organized in the following manner. In Chapter 1, I have laid out the theoretical foundations of this study by reviewing existing literatures on identity, migration and women’s identities. I have also reviewed relevant scholarship on Korean immigrants in the United States, focusing on issues of family entrepreneurship, gender, and identity. I challenge the tendency to treat identity as an issue of culture, as opposed to structure, and instead conceptualize identity as linked to structural inequalities of class, race, and gender. In this study, identity is defined as the juncture of individual and society, and of micro and macro processes. In this conceptualization, I have theorized that complex identity renegotiation is likely to occur post-migration because of immigrant women’s transnational/transcultural relocation. In Chapter 2, I describe the processes of my field research and the demographic characteristics of the participants. I also discuss methodological issues I have encountered while carrying out qualitative research. Chapter 3 describes major changes Korean immigrant women experience after migration and how the changes

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may disrupt women’s taken-for-granted pre-migration identities. Women’s voices about abrupt and unexpected disruptions in life course, and, by extension, in their sense of self in general are documented. By examining empirical patterns which affect women’s understanding of who they are in the changing social milieu, I demonstrate how old identities and expectations clash with new realities. In Chapter 4, I pay closer attention to Korean women’s strategies for coming to terms with changing postmigration identities. I document how they try to maintain consistency, or continuity, in various dimensions of identities which were disrupted by post-migration changes. This chapter highlights crucial supports and resources Korean immigrant women mobilize to rebuild their life course and to actively construct their post-migration identities. I further explore how women simultaneously cope with and organize both changes and consistencies in statuses and identities in order to understand who they are in U.S. contexts. The process of repositioning and renegotiation within the social stratification systems of the host country produces complex and conflicting sense of empowerment and disempowerment for women. Hence, the chapter introduces the discussion of women’s agency in coming to terms with structural challenges. Chapter 5 focuses on gendered identities as presented through Korean immigrant women’s experiences as mothers and workers. The data presented in this chapter illustrate shifting definitions of work outside the home and motherhood. The analysis describes the process by which Korean women come to terms with their changing roles as working mothers and the ways in which they juggle conflicting senses of agency and disempowerment in different aspects of gendered identities. Hence, the chapter cautions against a simplistic view on migration as liberation for women, and labor force participation as empowerment. In Chapter 6, I document Korean women’s strategic uses of various cultural resources and identity constructs to organize their identities locally and transnationally. I

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review current frameworks on immigrants’ identities, and elaborate how Korean women’s experiences may suggest patterns of identity organizing across multiple social spaces in an absence of a high level of transnationalism. The chapter examines the ways in which Korean immigrant women engage in localized identity practices that organize multiple interpretive frames and reference groups so as to create multiple “imagined communities” beyond the boundaries of local social structures. The chapter suggests that Korean women’s experiences with post-migration identities may not be fully accounted for by either assimilation paradigms, or by transnational perspectives, and require a new theoretical framework which can address identity building in a cognitive space transgressing geographical boundaries. Chapter 7 summarizes the findings of this study, and proposes some directions for future studies on immigrant women and their identity construction.

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CHAPTER 1

Migration, Gender, and Theories of Identity: A Structural Framework

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for Studying Immigrant Women

THEORIZING IMMIGRANT IDENTITIES The question of identity among immigrants has been variously explored in sociological and anthropological studies of immigrants. The most common approach to immigrants’ identities is to focus on racial and ethnic identities as they have been considered as the primary boundaries along which immigrant groups come in contact with different groups in the host societies. Thus, racial and ethnic dimension of identities have been treated as a key “entry point” of new immigrants’ insertion into the politics of identities (Lessinger 1995) of the receiving countries. A number of studies have documented that racial and ethnic boundaries are shifting and negotiated (e.g., Brodkin 2002; Foner 1987; Itzigsohn, Gorguli, and Vazquez. 2005; Jones 2001; Paerregaard 2005; Rouse 1995; Rumbaut 2002; 11

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Waters 1990; 1999), and also historically changing (e.g., Oboler 1999). Various studies on migration have examined racial and ethnic identities of immigrants. While some of these studies (e.g., Hirschman 1996; Rumbaut 1996; Waters 1996) focus on what racial/ethnic attributions immigrants receive in the U.S. or how they self-represent in the new social contexts, they often do not consider what immigrants’ pre-migration identities were like. In these studies, primary research interests are the degree to which immigrants identify, or do not identify with memberships in American society, as well as what conditions cause the varying degree of identification with the U.S., often using ethnic and racial identity categories as its measures (e.g., Benson 2006; Rumbaut 2002; Woldemikael 1989). For example, survey research typically asks which ethnic and racial identity labels, such as “American,” “Haitian,” or “Asian-American,” which immigrants are likely to adopt to describe themselves. There are some limits of such an approach. One, the identity categories in the survey remain one-dimensional and are isolated from other dimensions of identities, such as class and gender. Hence, it is difficult to evaluate how ethnonational and racial identification may interplay with other identities such as gender, class, and sexualities. Moreover, the one-dimensional identity labels do not address the different meanings by which immigrants may interpret these terms. For instance, the label “Hispanic” can be variously interpreted as common use of the Spanish language, shared religion (Catholicism), or as a label attributed by outsiders (Doan and Stephan 2006). In short, the social construction of meaning is likely to be left out of analysis in studies using standardized ethnic labels as measures of immigrant identity. Other studies have taken a critical approach to the tendency to leave out pre-migration experiences and, instead, have considered the sociocultural “baggage” immigrants bring with them. In these studies, (e.g., Burns, 1999; Charles, 1992; Feldman-Bianco 1992; Waters, 1999) authors have examined the ways in which the culture and

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history of race relations in immigrants’ sending communities shape the way immigrants understand and interact with the racial and ethnic labeling they encounter in the United States. By doing so, they highlight identities in contexts and emphasize the interaction between individuals’ identity practices and structured frames of macro identity dynamics in both the sending and the receiving societies. This has been a positive development in my mind, since taking the concept of “identity in contexts” in studying immigrant population can offer several theoretical advantages. First, considering pre- and postmigration contexts of identity construction allows researchers to consider immigrants’ social locations in continuity with their pre-migration backgrounds. Immigrants do not start their lives in the host societies in a complete social vacuum but rather, they tend to enter new societies through well-articulated connections with their sending societies provided by social networks and ethnic enclaves (Bashi 2007; Levitt 2001; Min 1998; McLellan and White 2005; Wong 1998). Second, considering identities in contexts overcomes the problem of reducing immigrants’ complex identities into a simple question of ethnicity. The decoupling of identity and ethnicity is crucial for an examination of other dimensions of immigrant identities such as class and gender identities which may interact with racial and ethnic identity negotiation, and be problematized by migration. Furthermore, conceptualizing identity as a multi-dimensional construct redefines immigrant identities as a structural issue, rather than a cultural issue. Indeed, the structural dimensions of identity have been well-established by contemporary development in identity theories which I review below. IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES Linking identity with structures of social inequality has been the hallmark of theoretical developments around the concept “identity” in the past two decades or so. In various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, the

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term identity has become a major keyword, and a theoretical construct by which many of the traditional assumptions about human society and social life have been challenged. In the process, the term identity has evolved from a sociopsychological concept into a complex and layered theoretical construct overarching micro and macro social dynamics. In sociology, identity studies had long been rooted in the tradition of social psychology pioneered by Cooley (1902), Mead (1934), and Blumer (1969). In the classical conceptualization of the term, identity refers to a self-concept which emerges in human interactions, and by way of a constant interplay between one’s self-perception and social attributions made by members of society. In this interactionist model, sociological works on identity until 1970s by and large focused on the micro dimensions of identity formation by examining performances (e.g., Goffman 1959) and social scripts associated with particular roles and statuses individuals occupy in society (e.g. Becker 1953; 1960; Sabin 1954). However, this somewhat limited scope of identity research, which until then had been considered primarily an area of micro sociology, has since been significantly broadened by several important theoretical developments.1 One such development is informed by social constructionist debates on identity, with feminist theories and postmodernist scholarship sharing center stage in the interdisciplinary dialogues. Mobilized most notably by various schools within gender and race theories, social constructionist theories of identity (e.g., Connell 1987; Kessler and McKenna 1978; Omi and Winant 1986) argue that biologically “evident” identities such as gender and race are, in fact, socially created by individual and institutional practices. Social constructionist perspectives thus challenged “essentialist” assumptions on gender and race, namely the idea that gender and race identities are based on some biologically given “essence,” or core features.2 Critical of the assumption that certain biological characteristics generate gender and race identities social

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constructionist approach emphasizes the effects of social forces that inscribe individuals and collectivities into hierarchized systems of categorization. Thus, a social constructionist approach confronts the idea that gender and race represent some core biological traits, or an unchanging “sameness” shared by their members. Gender and racial identities, in this approach, refer to individuals’ locations within the power dynamics of society. The diverse debates around social constructionism and essentialism are too extensive to fully review here.3 But, most importantly, these theoretical developments have incorporated several critical issues into sociological studies of identity. As a result, the ideas that identities are processes rather than properties, that they are historical products with their own genealogies, and that they are multiple, fluid and often contradictory are all deeply embedded in identity research today. Of the issues contested, in particular, are the ideas of coherent, and monolithic identity, and the assumption of the congruent “generalized others” and uncontested “scripts” prescribed to particular social statuses (i.e., roles), both of which are embedded and unchallenged in most classical interactionist models of identity. Hence, identity research has, in a sense, gone through a “paradigm shift” from psychological and developmental literature into discussions of power and political struggles. Another important development in contemporary identity research is the theorizing of the multiplicity of identity and the intersectionality of power relations which circumscribe people’s multiple identities. This is an issue particularly highlighted by the scholarship on women of color. According to scholars (e.g., Collins 1991; Davis 1981), the lives of minority women in particular are subjected to several systems of power structures which simultaneously put them in particularly disadvantaged positions in society. Hence, women of color suffer from multiple oppressions which are based not only on gender, but also on sexuality, race, and/or class. Furthermore, these

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multiple power structures form an interlocking system which Patricia Hill Collins called a “matrix of domination” (Collins 1991) which simultaneously impacts the experiences of the most disadvantaged women. Feminist scholar Deborah King called this situation “multiple jeopardy” (King 1988) and argued that the effect of interlocking systems of power is multiplicative, rather than merely additive. Feminist postmodern scholarship’s debates on the concept of “difference among women” (e.g., Chow 1993; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Mohanty 1991a; 1991b; Sandoval 1991) similarly challenge the monolithic conceptualization of “woman” as a universal gender category. This school of thought also incorporates Foucault’s work on power (Foucault 1978; 1979) which conceptualizes power as a pervasive and malleable set of relations producing unequal leverage for different groups of people to mobilize knowledge and resources. These theoretical frameworks of power and identity maintain that individual subjectivity is not a blank yet autonomous entity on which social relations are written; rather, identities are understood to be produced and mobilized through practices of differentiation that create socially salient and unequal categories of people. In this understanding, identities are embedded in, and constructed within, not outside, social relations and discourses (Chow 1993; Gupta and Furguson 1992; Mohanty 1991a, 1991b). To put it differently, identities represent cumulative processes of creating, negotiating, merging, and border-crossing between socially salient and unequal differences. Hence, the boundaries that demarcate identity categories are precarious, fluctuate, and are to be negotiated. In addition to these conceptual developments, the outpouring of interdisciplinary work on identity has further enabled scholars to draw from a diverse literature that lay the theoretical groundwork for conceptualizing identity beyond the micro level identity processes. Identity is a sticky concept. In diverse literatures within humanities and

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social science disciplines, identity has been referred to simultaneously as discourses (e.g., Hall 1997; Trinh 1989), and/or as symbols and other cultural repertoires that mark group boundaries (e.g., Lamont 2000; Lamont el al. 2002), social practices (e.g., Butler 1993; Connell 1987; Gerson 2001; Jones 2001), or psychological processes (e.g., Freud 1991(1921)). While the various conceptualizations of the term demonstrate the layered dimensions of identity as social phenomena, I find that undistinguished usages of the term, “identity,” also become a source of vagueness. This is to say that studies often equate “identity” with the particular level they focus on-either micro or macro levelbut not both at the same time. Micro level and macro level identity processes undoubtedly are connected to, and intersect with one another. Therefore, it is inadequate to treat identity as if it has effects on only one dimension. Still, it is analytically productive to make a heuristic distinction between micro and macro identity processes and clarify relationships among them. Theories of “structure and agency” (Giddens 1976; 1977)4 can be useful here in order to situate identities within the dynamic interplay between micro level individual identity practices and the mobilization of identity categories at the macro level. For example, feminist gender theories (e.g., Butler 1990; 1993; Connell 1987; Kessler and McKenna 1978; West and Zimerman 1987) have conceptualized that gender identities are constructed by practices that individuals perform everyday at the micro level, yet at the same time, these micro social practices produce and reproduce gendered macro structures of inequality in different domains of life. Others have expressed a similar perspective using different theoretical vocabularies. For instance, Calhoun’s conceptualization of identity as the dynamic interaction between “self-identity and recognition” (Calhoun 1995: 193-224) also points to the interconnectedness of micro/individual level and macro/structural level identity processes. Similarly, research on social movements and collective identity

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mobilization shows the ways in which macro dimensions of identity are socially mobilized and constructed as recognized identity categories in society (e.g., Gamson 1996). Hence, through constant negotiation between structures of identity classification and micro practices that produce and express identity, individuals constantly appropriate and make claims to, and sometimes resist assignments into one or some of the identity categories defined by structures of inequality. To put it differently, people constantly make sense of their lives and themselves by identifying with socially salient group categories, such as social class, gender, race and ethnicity, nationalities, and culture which are at the same time constantly mobilized by macro social movements (Davidman 2000: 43). These identity categories are expressed in social hierarchies. As such, micro identity practices are always connected to, and interact with macro identity classification systems that are based on, and also become the basis of, social inequality. Identity then represents one’s conscious and subconscious awareness and understanding of his/her social locations within multiple systems of inequality, as well as the ways in which this awareness is expressed and deployed through everyday practices and interactions. These practices, by their cumulative effects, form structures of categories that frame further identity practices (Butler 1993). Taking this perspective and focusing on the connection and interplay between micro and macro identity processes can offer a useful analytic tool to study what happens with immigrants’ identities as a result of their transnational and transcultural moves. Such a conceptualization of identity removes identity from more subjective areas of the psyche and consciousness, and firmly locates identity as intersubjective social reality (Berger and Luckman 1967). Further, this framework points to the interconnectedness of migrants’ individual choices/practices and structural constraints, while allowing a heuristic separation between the micro and macro levels social interactions on which identity operates.

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In studying post-migration identity processes of immigrant women, I borrow from identity theories the conceptualization of identity produced by, as well as embedded in, structures of social inequality. While shared culture is a crucial resource for immigrants’ ethnic identities, it is my perspective that ethnic culture is not a power-neutral construct, nor are ethnic identity labels mere descriptors of ethnic cultures. Rather, the structural forces which inscribe ethnic groups as marked categories within a particular set of race and ethnic relations of a given society circumscribe ethnicity as stigmatized or privileged identity categories. In this dynamic, ethnicity can be an “option” for the privileged groups (Waters 1990), but, not a matter of choice for the marked groups. For example, for ItalianAmericans or Irish- Americans who are now considered as Whites, the ethnic labels are referents of their cultural heritages which do not challenge their identity as Americans (Waters 1990). However, for Korean-Americans, the ethnic label immediately invokes a sense of handicap, or a compromise for their American identity. Ethnicity in this case, can function as the marker for a minority status in power relations of race. As such, the rich tradition of the sociology of identity offers useful structural frameworks for an analysis of immigrants’ post-migration identities. Identity literature informs us to move beyond one-dimensional and taken-forgranted understanding of the terms such as “Koreans,” “African-Americans,” or “Latinos,” that are commonly used to describe immigrant identities. This opens up an area of study on post-migration identity construction, in which the complex and interactive dynamics among identity constructs may be explored. Taking a structural perspective on identity, I conceptualize migration as relocating oneself from one set of identity hierarchies into another. Therefore, when immigrants move into new cultures/societies, they are likely to be repositioned within the classification systems of the host societies. Hence, the “old” identities defined by migrants’ previous social locations are likely to be

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challenged and shift, since the same categorical structures are unlikely to apply in the new society. In my view, postmigration identity renegotiation is conceptualized as the process by which old identities and new identities clash and merge, and the process by which various dimensions of immigrants’ structural locations are redefined over time. Thus, to fully understand the identity dynamics which shape immigrant women’s post-migration identities, it is important to consider both the structural conditions in the communities of origin and those at immigrants’ destinations. Recent theoretical developments in transnational perspectives on migration are particularly useful to consider the way stratification systems of the sending and those of the host societies may shape each other. By linking the multiple contexts in which identities are embedded, transnational perspectives on identity construction offer a valuable tool to examine immigrant women’s multi-dimensional and multi-local locations in the globalizing social contexts. TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION While traditional assimilation theories viewed that immigrants tend to gradually abandon their ties to the countries of origin and become “Americanized” as time progresses, more recent perspectives on transnationalism argue that immigrants’ settlement patterns in the receiving countries are related to sustained ties to the sending communities (Glick Schiller et al 1992; Basch et al 1994; Levitt 2001). According to this new perspective, immigrants are far from completely severed from the communities of origin once they migrate. Rather, migrants maintain their daily lives in social spaces stretching several communities across borders, by way of sustained transnational exchanges of resources, culture, and reciprocal obligations which Levitt (1999) called “social remittances.”

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In recent years, as transnational perspectives expand theoretically to examine various aspects of transnationalism and what it means to traditional conceptualization of social spaces, there have been growing efforts to document and elaborate identity construction in “transnational social fields” (Glick Schiller et al 1992). While studies on transnational identity construction are diverse in their theoretical and methodological approaches, they commonly point to bi (or multi)-local organizing, as well as multilayered and fluid interpretations of identities among many immigrants who had “their feet in two societies” (Chaney 1979: 209). For example, Gonzalez (1988) documented that many Garifunas who have become United States citizen, still think of themselves as members of two nations. Others (e.g., Bashi-Bobb 2001; Waters 1999) analyzed problematic meanings of racial and class identities of West Indian immigrants to the Untied States, complicated by different race classification systems of the sending countries and the United States. These studies suggest that the identities of immigrants, like all identities, cannot be captured by traditional definitions of identity constructs such as nation, and ethnicity as fixed and stable categories. This new perspective no doubt presents a critical challenge to the mainstream view on immigrants which hitherto has often assumed the United States as the primary context of immigrants’ identity formation (Sutton 1992: 231). Moreover, transnational identities have various dimensions and are organized diversely. Sometimes transnational identities are anchored in familial obligations and expectations within transnational families (e.g., Erel 2002: van Dijk 2002), while other times they are constructed in the contexts of multi-national production work and labor relations (e.g., Goldin 1999). Transnational identities also emerge in immigrants’ involvements in transnational projects to build institutions and develop communities. For instance, Dominican migrants who live as members of “transnational communities,” formed by mutually influencing exchanges of values, materials, and

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behaviors between the sending and the host communities, simultaneously take upon multiple “roles and identities that divided their attachments between their home an host countries” (Levitt 2001; 202). Similarly, Smith (1998) observed that Ticuanese immigrants in New York are involved in “transnational institutional building” connecting communities across borders, and claim their transnational memberships by participating in and contributing to public projects in their hometowns in Mexico. For these migrants, their lives and identities are continuously carried out and organized in “transnational social fields” as they are on a daily basis involved in decision-makings and transferring of economic and social remittances to their home communities. These migrants’ involvements in transnational families and communities as absentee citizens are often expected by those who remain back home, and the social remittances the migrants send on a sustained basis become an integral part of these communities’ developments as well as of the remaining family members’ survival (Levitt 2001; Sana 2005). Transnational identities may also be solidified by political mobilizations. For instance, Haitian immigrants not only engage in extensive transnational practices with their family and communities back home, but they are also mobilized politically by the Haitian government as part of their nation-state, and the migrant citizens of Haiti become an active constituency of the “deterritorialized state” (Glick Schiller and Fouron, 1998). Such patterns of transnational identity construction are documented increasingly by field research on immigrant groups from the Caribbean region, Mexicans, and Chinese immigrants (e.g., Louie 2004; Nonini and Ong 1997; Ong 1999), indicating that transnationalism is becoming a routine way of life for these groups whom some authors call “transmigrants,” (Glick Schiller et al. 1992) referring to their high mobility across borders. Several works have expanded theories of transnational identity construction by articulating, in particular, the

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linkage between transnationalism and the production of ethnic and class identities within settlement communities in the U.S. For instance, in his study of Kanjobal Mayan immigrants to California, Popkin (1999) documented the emergence of new forms of ethnic identity among Kanjobal Mayan immigrants that are the products of several institutional forces: transnational politics of the Guatemalan state, church, and Pan-Mayan movements, in addition to the conditions of U.S. society. Popkin suggested that the emergence of a “reactive ethnicity” (Portes and Rumbaut 1996) in settlements in California, grounded in specific Kanjobal Mayan cultural and religious traditions, is shaped by changing religious and cultural contexts in Kanjobal Mayan immigrants’ communities in Mexico as well as these immigrants’ on-going transnational linkages to home. Popkin’s analysis thus explores how institutional processes outside the United States can shape local identity dynamics, suggesting an extension of the concept, “transnational identity.” In a similar vein, Kearney (2000) discusses the question of power in transnational identity processes in his study of Oaxacan immigrants. In his analysis, Kearney distinguishes two different meanings embedded in the term “transnational.” One points to the simultaneous occupancy in multiple locations crossing national borders, while the second sense refers to the “political, social, and cultural practices whereby citizens of a nation-state…construct social forms and identities that in part escape from the cultural and political hegemony of their nation-states” (Kearney 2000: 174). Kearney thus argues that transnational identity represents a subversive space to resist the inscription into the hegemonic structures of nationstates. As such, migrants from the indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico to the U.S. occupy a unique space, according to Kearney, that are “different both from the national space of Mexico and the United States,” (Ibid 175) and form a strong sense of Oaxacan indigenous ethnic identity constructed through relations of power and

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difference with regard to both nations’ hegemonic contexts. Both Popkin’s and Kearney’s studies illustrate that transnational identity processes not only challenge the linkage between geographical space and social space, but also are involved in the dynamic production of power and difference in the contexts of several institutions and nations. As such, the study of transnational identity processes is also creating a theoretical space to reconceptualize and elaborate social groups, communities, geographical units, and identity dynamics in interpenetrating local and transnational processes. While diverse global processes and technological developments promote transnational practices in general, immigrant groups nonetheless maintain varying levels of transnational practices (Portes et al. 1999) that are worth examining more closely. While transmigrants organize their daily lives and communities by making on-going economic and social connections to their communities back home, others live in relatively localized contexts of the host society once they settle down. In other words, some immigrants’ financial, political, and social involvements in their communities of origin are limited, and their social networks in the sending communities are no longer strong and active, even if they maintain some communication with and emotional ties to their sending countries. The question I ask is what type of identity organizing immigrant women, in particular, engage in and in what ways, “transnational” dimension are also embedded in their identity construction. Hence, part of my project in this study is to examine the ways in which dynamics involved in Korean immigrant women’s multi-dimensional identity construction processes dislodge geographical space and social space in order to create “imagined communities” beyond their settlements in the United States. Hence, the structural dimensions of immigrant identity I consider in this study also include transnational space, and my inquiry explores the question of how class, gender, ethnic and national identities are renegotiated by immigrants locally and transnationally.

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GENDER, CLASS, AND RACE: THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRANT WOMEN’S IDENTITY Paying attention to women’s experiences in migration is a relatively recent development in migration studies. However, gender scholarship has clearly enhanced our understanding of migratory processes by introducing several critical insights. For example, gender scholarship has challenged the assumption of the family/household as a unified and harmonious unit and illuminated complex power dynamics within immigrant households/families (e.g., Kibria 1993). In addition, gender-centered studies have documented the role of gendered social networks (Grassmuck and Pessar 1991; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994) and uncovered that men’s and women’s decisions and behaviors may be affected differently by migration (Zamudio 1999). Indeed, the idea that migrants are not gender-neutral actors in a social void, but agents living in gendered, classed and racialized social contexts is a crucial contribution of gender scholarship to the study of migration. A substantial amount of research on women and migration (e.g., Conway, Bailey and Ellis 2001; Goerges 1992; Goldring 1996; Hagan 1994; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Pedraza 1991; Pessar 1987; 1999; Tienda and Booth 1991) has since contended that migration is not a gender-neutral phenomenon, and that women have different experiences through, and different relationships to immigration. Furthermore, authors (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Pessar 1999) argue that immigration is a “gendered transition” where gender operates as one of the major organizing principles and resources. This perspective has encouraged researchers to take gender as their central analytic focus, thereby bringing some valuable critiques to dominant theoretical frameworks in immigration literature. For example, the often unspoken assumption that families make decisions about migration as a unified entity5 has been challenged by gender-centered analyses (e.g., Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994) Instead, these studies reconceptualized immigrant households as sites of

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contestation wherein gender and generational hierarchies shape individual members’ interests and attitudes about migration (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Rouse 1989)6. At the same time, the need for immigrant family members to rely on the family as a survival unit encourages continuing negotiation and collaboration among family members (Zamudio 1999). Thus, gender scholarship introduces the insight that the immigrant family is an arena of on-going power relations fraught with conflicts as well as cooperation. By extension, it also challenges the assumption that a successful economic incorporation of immigrant households results in equal benefits for all members of the household (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). Gender scholarship on migration also highlights the role of gendered social networks. Social networks have long been recognized as a key shaping force of migration processes, since migration most often follows a chain of interpersonal connections. Kin and social networks provide immigrants with crucial resources and information as well as emotional and often financial support (Bashi 2007; Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Julca 2001; Portes and Rumbaut 1996; Zhou 1992). However, the access to and the effect of social network are not the same for men and women (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). Research on gendered social networks documents the active roles of “women’s networks” through the course of migration, which sometimes initiate migratory chains and/or provide resources and emotional support to women migrants (George 2005; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994: 72-97; E. Lee 2006; Park 1997:94-114). Finally, gender-centered analyses of immigrant culture and ethnicity also suggest a critical reconsideration of the notion of ethnicity conceived as monolithic and uncontested. As feminist scholars have argued, culture, itself, is a gendered notion (Alarcon 1994), and ethnic culture and ethnic identities are often expressed and negotiated around gender ideologies. For example, Das Gupta (1997) documents that in the South Asian Indian

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immigrant community, the sexual piety of women is often used as a core symbol of “authentic” Indian values. Thus, the contestation over women’s sexuality often lies at the heart of the battle to define and redefine Indian tradition and ethnic identity against the “corruptive” forces of American culture. Studies like this expose the workings of power relations in the reinvention of ethnic culture and womanhood among immigrants, and reformulate these concepts as contingent and constructed categories. While an outpouring of gender scholarships in immigration research in the past few decades has brought notable developments in our understanding of immigrant women whose experiences of migration are distinctive from immigrant men, some dimensions of immigrant women’s experiences still remain understudied. The question of identity is one of the understudied areas. There is a growing literature on immigrants’ identities7, however, the majority of the studies are done on both men and women, and many of them fail to fully elucidate women’s identities because either gender is not the central focus, or women make up only a small portion of the sample (e.g., Fouron and Glick Schiller 2001; Itzigsohn, Gorguli, and Vazquez 2005; Jamal 2005; Jones 2001; Waters 1999). On the other hand, there is critical work on women’s gender, race, and/or national identities, though they may not exclusively focus on immigrant women (e.g., Bar On 1994; Condo 1990; Frankenberg 1993). Anthropological studies on immigrant women, though not exclusively focusing on identities, also provide informative ethnographic accounts of women’s changing definitions of self, womanhood and culture, indicating that dynamic renegotiation processes of post-migration identities are taking place (e.g., Foner 1998b; Kibria 1993). Finally, more recent works on gendered transnational social fields (Gammage 2004; Itzigsohn, and Giorguli-Saucedo 2005; Mahler and Pessar 2006; Pessar 1999; Pessar and Mahler 2003; Sørensen 1999) elaborate the ways in which transnational social spaces are articulated through gendered practices,

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symbolism, and networks. This wide range of gender and feminist literature informs the study of immigrant women’s identities. While only a handful of more recent works have examined immigrant women’s identities as their main research focus (e.g., Garcia 2003; Herzberg 2000; Killian 2006; Salih 2003), the rich tradition of feminist scholarship on women’s identities and gendered migration provide broader theoretical frameworks to consider immigrant women’s identity renegotiation in gendered social fields embedded in interlocking structural relations. Korean immigrant women are no doubt among the group less often studied, and the study of this group’s experiences will add both empirically and theoretically to the on-going dialogues. South Korea has been one of the major immigrant-sending countries to the United States in the post 1965-era, and a rapidly growing body of literature examines the economic and cultural aspects of Korean immigrants’ settlement in the U.S. While studies in the past focused on Koreans’ economic incorporation, recent studies address more diversified topics, including how gender shapes Korean immigrant community. KOREAN IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES The first major wave of immigration from Korea came in the early 1900s with the migration of plantation laborers to Hawaii. However a full-scale influx of Korean immigrants, as that of other immigrants from Asia and Latin America, started after the reform of immigration laws in 1965, known as the Hart-Celler Act. The number of new Korean immigrants annually which had remained in the thousands until 1970 began to exceed 14,000 for the first time in 1971, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services’ Annual Report (1995). The number of Korean immigrants grew steadily throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, and peaked in 1987, at 35,849 new immigrants (INS Annual Report 1995). The number of new immigrants from South Korea decreased in the 1990s, and then began to rise again in the 2000s exceeding 20,000 annually. In 2005, the

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number of immigrants from Korea reached 26,562 (Statistical Abstract of the U.S. 2007). The 2000 U.S. Census reports approximately 1.2 million people of Korean decent in the United States, 120,000 of whom live in New York, and another 65,000 in New Jersey (The Korea Daily New York, 9/22/2002). Korean immigrants are generally educated, middle class people from urban areas, who used to work as professionals, administrators, or managers in South Korea (Min 1996; Park 1997). According to American Community Survey 2006 (U.S. Census Bureau), 35% of Korean-Americans who are 25 years or over have a bachelor’s degree and another 17.8% have a graduate or professional degree, which is a much higher rate than the general population (17.1% and 9.9% respectively). Perhaps the single most studied characteristic of Korean immigrants is their concentration in small businesses. Korean community experts generally estimate the self-employment rate in New York area to be over 50 percent, which far exceeds those of any other ethnic group (Min 1996: 46-65; Min 1997). The median household income was reported as $50,565 in 2006 American Community Survey. Several authors (Bonacich 1980; Light and Bonacich 1988; Min 1996; Bonacich) have explained Koreans’ propensity to small entrepreneurship in terms of the labor market disadvantages of immigrants. According to this theory, immigrants in general are disadvantaged in the primary labor market due to the language barrier, lack of networking, and the inability to transfer educational and occupational credentials. Many are forced therefore to enter the low paying, low status informal work. However, some immigrant groups turn to self-employment as an alternative to entering this secondary labor market (see Min 1996; Park 1997: 36-43). Koreans in the United States are the most recognized example of this pattern. Thus, first generation Korean immigrants, many of whom are college educated, perceive small business ownership as the speediest and most reliable route to upward mobility. For example, a study done on a sample of 298 Korean

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immigrant women in The New York metropolitan area documented that over 80 percent of Korean immigrants in the sample either owned a store, or worked for a Koreanowned business (Min 1997: 180-182). As such, a typical occupational path that Korean immigrants take after migration is to first find employment within the ethnic economy during the early years of settlement, and once they save enough money, open their own small businesses with their families. Indeed, this route has proven to be one effective for upward mobility for many Korean immigrants, as evidenced by the data, many who do so join the middle class by the first generation (J. Lee 2001). While the economic behaviors of first generation Korean immigrants have been at the center of research interest for the past two decades, the study of their identities has often been one of limited scope. When their identities were studied at all (e.g., Park 1997), they were often discussed briefly by a chapter in book-length studies. On the other hand, the question of identity has been explored in greater detail within the experiences of the second generation (e.g., Min and Kim 1999). This trend in the scholarship seems to reflect the “old” scholarship’s onedimensional emphasis on ethnic and/or national identity which is considered to be much more problematic for the second generation than for the first generation. I challenge this assumption on the ground that, as I have theorized in this chapter, new immigrants’ post-migration experiences involve complex processes of confronting and redefining many pre-migration identities and reinventing new ones in unfamiliar social contexts. In this framework, the first generation’s struggles with post-migration identities are considered as much problematic and complex as those experienced by the second generations. For instance, the challenges to Korean immigrants’ pre-migration class positions brought by the post-migration occupational downward mobility, as documented by previous studies, are likely to also problematize their class identities.

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The process of renegotiating identities after migration may be particularly problematic for Korean immigrant women, one that involves confronting both their class positions and gender identities. Korean women typically experience transitions in various dimensions of their lives as women, workers, and mothers. Some make occupational downward mobility as men do, from having been teachers and librarians to becoming unpaid workers in the family business, others make the transition from having been stayat-home mothers to working mothers. However, Korean immigrant women are simply the least studied group in the existing literature on Korean communities. In the abundance of economic analyses on this community, Korean women’s gendered experiences had been largely overlooked until recently. Recent outpouring of gendered analyses on Korean immigrant communities, however, has added to the literature much needed understanding of Korean women’s distinctive experiences of migration. In doing so, some studies (E. Lee 2006; Kang 2001; 2003) have challenged the assumption of gender-neutrality in small entrepreneurship, by bringing to the foreground the ways in which family business organizes gender in its operation, as well as women’s particular roles and disadvantages in the process, which had been concealed in a male-centered research tradition. In these studies, authors critically analyze the ways in which gender and race shape small entrepreneurships. Other studies on Korean women have examined gender relations within the patriarchal family (e.g., Lim 1997; Min 2001) and domestic violence (E. Lee 2007, Seo 2007). Korean women’s adjustments as mothers and immigrant workers have also been studied (e.g., Kim 2003; Kim et al 2006; Moon 2003; Park 2008). Whereas the question of Korean women’s post-migration identities is embedded in these studies and other case studies (e.g., Chai 1987; Park 1997; Um 1992), it has not received the analytic attention it duly deserves.

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As the theoretical framework I have laid out in this chapter indicates, Korean immigrant women’s relocation into the social stratification systems of the United States is likely to entail challenges to women’s various identities. My disorientation with identities when I first arrived in the U.S. and the way I juggled my various identities in my different names, now I understand, were both linked to underlying structural forces that constantly map and remap our places in a stratified society and give meanings to our social locations. The stories of other Korean women about their struggles with class and gender, which I will tell in the following chapters, illuminate the conflicting process by which Korean immigrant women reposition themselves within the power structures of U.S. society. As I will illustrate, the renegotiation of post-migration identity is shaped not only by inequalities of U.S. society but also by their pre-migration identities defined by social hierarchies in Korean society. This book will examine how Korean immigrant women’s identities are constructed by complex discourses and behaviors, by which these women understand and interpret who they are becoming in the U.S.

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CHAPTER 2

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Research Design

RESEARCH DESIGN In order to explore the ways in which Korean immigrant women experience identity changes after migration and renegotiate them in the U.S. context, I conducted in-depth interviews with the first generation Korean immigrant women. The following research questions were the focal points of my study: 1) How Korean immigrant women’s identities change after migration? 2) What are the ways in which Korean immigrant women understand and construct their postmigration identities in U.S. contexts? 3) How do power relations and different systems of inequalities shape Korean immigrant women’s post-migration identity construction and renegotiation processes? In order to investigate these questions, I conducted in-depth interviews with thirty-three Korean women living in the New York metropolitan area. Issues of identity have been 33

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studied using a variety of methods. Surveys are one of the common methods (e.g., Hirschman 1996; Rumbaut 1996; 2002), however they are inadequate to examine identities in context, since survey responses only allow respondents to focus on one dimension of identity at a time and do not capture multiple and fluid meanings associated with different identity labels. Ethnographic research (e.g., Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Levitt 2001) as participantobserver has several advantages, and yet, it may not be the best strategy to obtain much detailed personal narratives in a short amount of time. In-depth interviews have been successfully used by many sociologists to obtain rich biographical data about individuals’ identities and their perceptions of the world around them (e.g., Bashi 2007; Frankenberg 1993; Lamont 2000; Waters 1999). In this research tradition, I chose in-depth, face to-face interviews, as a way to learn about the nuanced meanings of identities beyond common usage of identity labels such as “Korean,” “Korean-American,” “woman,” or “mother.” THE SAMPLE Thirty-three Korean women were recruited through snowball sampling methods to participate in this study. Thirty women were immigrants, and three considered themselves sojourners rather than immigrants. By “immigrant,” I mean those who intend to continuously live and maintain jobs in the United States regardless of their current visa statuses. Hence, some of the interviewed women were without proper immigration visas, however they considered themselves “immigrants,” and shared the similar life experiences, though perhaps more challenging, as those who held green cards or U.S. citizenship. In addition to immigrant women, I interviewed three wives of students or employees of transnational firms referred by some of the interviewees. They came to stay in the United States only for a few years. While I had not targeted this population in my study, the three women’s narratives provided, at times, useful points of comparison with the

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immigrant women’s stories. Since the sample is not a nonprobability sample, I treat my data as vignettes, or illustrations, rather than as a “part-for-whole.” Nevertheless, it was important for my study to capture as many different issues and patterns as possible that are relevant to the research foci. In order to increase the heterogeneity of the sample, I considered a select demographic variables in recruiting participants, and strove to maximize heterogeneity in the sample. Respondent’s income, years in the United States, type of jobs, age, and education were the variables I took into consideration when recruiting participants. Sometimes, I specifically asked interviewees whether they knew a person with a particular biographical profile, for example, “a recent immigrant living in working to low-income area,” or “someone who works outside the Korean ethnic economy.” I also used the strategy to select participants from two established ethnic centers of Korean immigrants. The first enclave was Queens, New York, and the other was Bergen County, New Jersey. Queens is known to be the largest Korean-American ethnic enclave on the East Coast, the center of Korean ethnic businesses, as well as the residential concentration of more recent Korean immigrants. On the other hand, homeowners who are economically more established and typically have longer residency in the United States are dispersed in several suburban towns in Northern New Jersey where the Korean population has rapidly grown in the past ten years. Reaching out to these two locations helped me to increase diversity in my sample in terms of income and length of residency. Given my own access to the community, I started the snowball sampling from my personal network. I selected the first two interviewees among the people I knew in New York and New Jersey, and expanded the sample by getting references from the people I contacted. I often specifically asked my contacts to recommend particular demographic categories of people to increase the heterogeneity of the sample. Recruiting was slower and harder than I had

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anticipated. Although people generally agreed to the interview once having been introduced to me by participants, I ran into some reluctance to giving me an additional name I could approach for interviews once the interview was complete. I hit a dead end a few times in the chain of referrals, and scrambled to establish a new contact by going back to earlier contacts, or to the personal networks of my friends. One explanation an informant offered to me was that people do not want to burden someone else by asking them to participate in a long interview because immigrant women know very well that everyone works long hours and has limited time to spare. Thus, the lengthy interviews, and the commitment it requires from the participants appear to be a challenge in a qualitative study especially on women who typically have a hard time juggling work, mothering, and housework. DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SAMPLE1 The respondents’ ages were between 32 and 80 with a median age of 42. Length of residency in the United States at the time of interview was between one year and thirtytwo years with the median of eleven years for the immigrant participants. The sample was, overall, highly educated. Nineteen of the immigrant women in the sample (63%) had college degrees or above: two with a postgraduate education, and seventeen with a four-year college degree. Hence, the proportion of respondents with college education and beyond was much higher than that among all Korean women in the U.S. (46.5%, American Community Survey 2006). Eight women had a high school education. All except one of the eight women were “older” (over 40). Only one respondent had less than a high school education. Twenty respondents disclosed their family income. The median for self-reported annual income was $35,000. Nineteen women lived in New Jersey and eleven lived in New York. Thirteen women were small entrepreneurs, of whom four women had their own business without their

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husbands’ involvement. Seven women worked for wages, and six women were currently full-time homemakers. Three women were retirees at the time of the interviews; all three of them had once owned family businesses before retirement. Most women were married (25 women). Four women had been divorced, of whom one remarried. One retired elderly woman was a widow. DATA COLLECTION I conducted interviews for this research between February, 2003 and September, 2004. Initially, I developed a semistructured interview schedule covering a wide range of issues to obtain detailed information on various circumstances surrounding migration and settlement processes. However, as I proceeded with interviews, I found that prepared questionnaires tended to solicit simple and short answers, and were not the best method to get the rich details of their experiences and states of minds. Also, more often than not, the interview followed its own flow as people told stories in their own unique styles, and liberally sidetracked in ways that I did not try to stop. I also discovered some new issues to probe, while finding some of the initial questions redundant, and repetitive. Consequently, I gradually ended up abandoning much of the structured interview schedule and progressed to more open-ended life history interviews. By the tenth interview or so, I had almost completely followed the lead of the respondents. While I opened up with some of the prepared questions, I took cues from the responses and pursued relevant issues as the conversation unfolded. I was able to collect information about various aspects of people’s lives before and after the migration, including family, work, friendships, perception of U.S. society, perception of South Korean society, and transnational practices. The data thus came to take the form of life histories as the interview process proceeded, and the following basic areas became major themes of my interviews: immigration processes, work history, present

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life/daily routines, friends and family/support system, transnational practices. The initial interview schedule still served me well as a guideline/outline, or reminder, so that I will not lose track of the issues that were important for my research questions. In open-ended interviews, any demographic information that had not been narrated through the talk was collected at the end of the session. The demographic information was later used to facilitate comparisons. In earlier interviews, I asked verbally about demographic information such as age, levels of education, income and so on, but, as the interviews were repeated, I began to see some respondents become hesitant to give me verbally sensitive information such as income and level of education (when it was less than college education). I handled the predicament by using a brief self-administered survey to ask about these variables in later interviews. Using the survey format, I was able to obtain information on income and education from more interviewees than when I had asked them verbally. The interviews varied in length, from one and half hours to over five hours on two occasions. Most of the interviews lasted between two and three hours. The two lengthy interviews were done in two sessions. All except one woman agreed to tape-record the interview. The taperecorded interviews were later fully transcribed. During the one interview which was not tape-recorded, I recorded the conversation as much as possible while we talked, and later added in details when the interviewee left me several times to attend to customers. I also wrote more notes immediately after returning home from that interview. Taking notes without tape-recording was challenging, as it was very difficult to capture nuanced verbatim, and I was most thankful that I was able to use a tape-recorder in all other interviews. Most interviews were done at respondents’ stores and homes, and a few others were done at restaurants. Naturally, talking to the women in their workplaces and homes –i.e., the sites of their everyday living – had an added benefit of

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field observation. I was able to observe the interactions and surroundings, jotting down additional notes. This was a helpful way to compensate for some of the limits of my data which, by virtue of my research design, tended to yield more information on the way identities are reflected on, remembered, and narrated/represented, as opposed to identities in immediate actions. While we paused for my respondent to attend to her clients, answer phone calls, or bring out refreshments, I watched these interactions and took notes when necessary. I later inserted the notes into the transcripts to make them part of the data. As I listened to people’s stories in the manners in which they chose to tell me, I was able to get a sense of the unspoken assumptions about the women’s self-identities and their understanding of the United States society. Further, the way each person organized her own particular story later became a code itself, reflecting how these immigrants evaluated the significance of life events and how they made sense of them. The narrative data also provided me with information on how the women interpreted and gave subjective meanings to the economic and material conditions in which they lived post-migration. In addition, the narratives of memory allowed me to chronicle the process of transition over time, which was an important aspect of my study given my theoretical framework. LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION At the beginning of each interview, I told the respondents that they could use either Korean or English for the interview. All of them took it for granted that we would talk in Korean. This was not a surprise given the low level of fluency in English among Korean immigrants.2 The interviews were fully transcribed in Korean. After weighing the pros and cons of translating data (Weiss 1994), I decided that I would only translate the quotes to be used in my writing. Hence, all of the narratives quoted in English throughout this book are my translations of the original narratives. I tried to make the English translation close to

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the meaning carried in the original verbatim. Also, I tried to carry other nuances in the original verbatim, such as emotional undertones, the narrators’ educational level, hesitance or conviction about their stories. Thus, some of the translated quotes may appear awkward. They are the reflection of gaps in the original speech patterns, and incomplete sentences in the respondents’ verbatim. BEING AN INSIDER At the beginning of the interviews, I usually disclosed that I was also a first generation Korean immigrant. As a result, I was viewed by my interviewees as a peer as much as I was a researcher. This obviously was a huge advantage in gaining the trust of my respondents and having them more comfortable with me. In several occasions, I ended up sharing some of my own stories with them when it was appropriate to do so. Though I tried to keep my own story to minimum so that the focus would remain on my interviewees, sharing a little bit of my own experiences often initiated the conversation. Over the years, many critical field researchers have problematized the conventional dichotomy of researcher-as-the-authority and her informants-as-the-subject. As a result, contemporary ethnography acknowledges that field research is, itself, interactions between the researcher who holds a particular perspective, and the respondents whose stories are shaped by their own assumptions and experiences as they construct their own meanings in their own narratives (Behar 1993). I was conscious of these dynamics throughout my interactions with the respondents. While I tried not to infuse my own assessments of immigrant life in the interviews, I did talk about my life stories as an immigrant when being asked, and tried to be as honest and open as possible with my side of the story. When the respondent seemed nervous at the beginning, I occasionally volunteered to talk a little bit about my own immigration story, which often worked as an immediate ice-breaker. Talking to the women as an insider, or a peer, thus helped

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to establish myself as a more equal partner of conversation than an outsider-researcher. Though I believe that approaching the interviewees as a peer was an effective interview strategy overall, I also acknowledge that it had its downsides. For example, many assumed that I had intimate knowledge of immigrant experiences and skipped details of their stories sometimes by just saying “you know how it goes.” When the issue seemed really crucial, I probed further by asking in return, “how so?” or, “I would like to hear more about it, though.” Still, there were times when I sensed that it would be more prudent to go along with their assumptions to maintain the trust, or camaraderie between us, and I had to give up on probing further. The decision had to be made quickly, and on certain occasions, this left me with regrets. Obviously, “the stranger” (Simmel 1908), or an outsider of the culture may be able to catch problematic issues more readily by virtue of their unfamiliarity with these types of taken-forgranted assumptions. CODING AND ANALYSIS OF NARRATIVE DATA I coded and analyzed the narrative data following the procedures of “grounded theory” (Strauss 1987). Grounded theory is designed to develop theories inductively from qualitative data through multiple stages of coding. Thus, I followed the tradition of “thick description” (Geertz 1973) in which theoretical analysis reflects the realities as participants’ experience them. Following the coding procedures of grounded theory, my coding involved several steps. Before I started the first stage of formal coding, I had read through my transcripts several times to get a sense of overall themes. This step enabled me to refresh my theoretical foci, and guided my first level of coding. Second, I did an “open coding” which involved careful examination of every sentence in the transcripts. I highlighted and coded each “meaning block” which was the term I gave to a paragraph representing a small theme (e.g., trouble with in-laws, getting the first job, visa problem,

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conflict with children, discrimination). A “meaning block” was sometimes a few words, or sentences, other times it was as long as a page. The central theme of each block was noted on the margins. After the first stage of open coding, I carried out the next stage of coding by doing two tasks. First, I read through my initial codes assigned to each of the meaning blocks, while trying to identify any relationship among them. Through “progressive focusing,” I took notes on the conditions, interactions, strategies and consequences (Weiss 1994), if any, of these coded meaning blocks. I kept writing short memos, when needed, reflecting on my theoretical questions and concerns corresponding to each code. Through this process, I merged and ranked some of the codes accordingly as broader themes began to emerge. Third, I also wrote a narrative summary for each of the interviews and assessed the overall flow of the particular life story while paying attention to migration processes. In the final stage of coding, I organized categories and subcategories of codes and constructed a hierarchy of broader codes and categories, which eventually became my analytical outline. I continued with memo-writing whenever I had reactions to particular theoretical categories, and revisited and incorporated into my memos some of the notes I had taken while reading the literature. These memos were later cut and pasted under appropriate theoretical categories. LIMITS OF THE STUDY A researcher has to make conscious and informed decisions about his/her research design to achieve given objectives of the study. While I carefully chose my research methods, there are admittedly limits to my study. First, because my data were collected through interviews, they consist of “narrated” experiences, which mean that they are not behaviors and experiences themselves, but ones that are, as I suggested above, selected to be told from the perspective of the present. In other words, the narratives of identity

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which I collected represent identities that were interpreted, reflected upon, embellished, or exaggerated at times. I acknowledge that the respondents’ reflection and memories may not be consistent with actual actions and events which took place. Nevertheless, telling particular stories during the interview, itself, could also be “doing identity,” representing the interviewee’s understanding of who she was and what her main story of immigration was. Another disadvantage of interview methods would be that it was hard to assess the stories that were not told, which itself may be an indicator of the participants’ particular views of their lives. Field observation may offer an advantage in resolving this problem, however, ethnographic observations typically require a lot longer time and greater resources than the research strategy I took here. In comparison to ethnographic data collection, life history interviews gave me the advantage of obtaining condensed data in a relatively short amount of time. Second, I also acknowledge that my research shares some of the same limits of micro level studies, and needs to be balanced with an understanding of larger macro patterns which shape individual experiences. While this is an important shortcoming given the theoretical framework of this study, my analysis focused on situating individual identity narratives in relation to larger social forces which shape these experiences. Because my theoretical focus is on the structural shaping of immigrant identities experienced at the individual level, I fall short in examining how larger discourses on immigrant identities form and change. By design, my research cannot show much about the ways in which individuals transform the immigrant communities and the nations involved. In this regard, I agree with Mahler’s critique that further research attention should be oriented toward the role of immigrants’ in changing both their communities of origin and their settlements (Mahler 1998: 93-94).

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The more obvious limit is the small scope of this study, which characterizes my study here as exploratory, and serving primarily the purpose of laying out the theoretical grounds for more elaborate work. This withstanding, the patterns of identity experiences I have analyzed, and to which I now turn, enrich our understanding of the relationship between migration, identities, and structural inequalities. Consequently, while examining the specific experiences of Korean immigrant women, this study introduces a different theoretical perspective apart from the common emphasis on ethnicity, one that focuses on structural dimensions of immigrant identities shaped by intersecting power dynamics of gender, class, and race.

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CHAPTER 3

Immigration and Disrupted

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Identities

IMMIGRATION AND DISRUPTED IDENTITIES Hee Yoon1 was once a business consultant in South Korea. Being a hard-working and ambitious career woman, Hee had made it to the executive level in a transnational firm in her 30s. She enjoyed her job and her success greatly, however, she always wished her husband was able to advance his own career. So, when an opportunity opened up for him to come to the United States for graduate study, Hee did not hesitate to resign from her job and move to the U.S. She thought she would be able to improve her English skills while staying in the U.S. The Yoons planned to stay for two years and return. However, only a few months after they arrived in 1997, South Korea abruptly fell into economic crisis. The Korean currency depreciated by 50 percent in a matter of weeks; all of a sudden, the Yoons watched in horror as the value of their assets in Korea reduced to nearly half in dollar terms. At the same time, massive lay-offs and forced early retirements as a result of 45

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rapid restructuring of the Korean economy began to cast much uncertainty on their chances of reentering the job market. Hee and her husband decided that they had better remain in the United States. The next year and half was very difficult financially. Luckily, Hee’s husband found a local job which would sponsor his immigration visa and also allow him to attend night classes. Hee had less luck in finding a suitable job for her. Without a green card, nor the fluency of a native speaker, she was only able to find clerical work in small businesses within the Korean ethnic community. She was dispirited by the stark contrast the jobs presented with her former high-profile career. After jumping from one odd job to another, Hee started an online business at her home. But the business, which she operated by herself while doing housework, was generating less revenues than the cost of her own labor. After several years in the U.S., her husband was able to earn enough to support the family who lived in a middle class suburb. Nevertheless, Hee felt deprived of her own sense of fulfillment. At the time of the interview, she was caught between the images of her successful pre-migration career, and her dead-end business operation. Hee’s story tells several things about what happens to many middle-class South Koreans who migrate to the United States. Just as she experienced, middle class immigrants typically experience occupational downward mobility as their credentials and experiences from Korea cannot be transferred to the U.S. job market. The sudden downward mobility caused a sense of chasm between Hee’s pre and post-migration identities. In Korea, her primary identity was as a professional woman. She was able to focus on her work while leaving housework and childcare to parttime housekeepers and female relatives. In the U.S., however, she could not afford a housekeeper. Her need to juggle housework and her business essentially made the latter a secondary aspect of her identity. Her expectations about her life course were disrupted as well. She had to plan a different trajectory, one that was not centered around her

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professional career path. She knew that it would take years of investment in retraining for her to be able to compete in the primary job market; she did not see it as financial feasible. Rather, she was much more interested in her son’s future career choices than her own. Her primary identity now seemed to be being a supportive mother. Like Hee Yoon, the participants of this study variously expressed feelings of social demotion or downward mobility as well as a disruption in their expectations about what their lives would be like in America. Immigration also caused changes in basic everyday practices and social relationships, and brought a general sense of discontinuity between pre and post migration statuses and identities. The data indicate that the challenges and changes which became sources of discontinuity were deeply shaped by class, gender, and race. THE AMERICAN DREAM AND DISILLUNSIONMENT AFTER MIGRATION Though in different kinds and magnitudes, the majority of the women’s narratives (57.7%) I collected contained the theme of disruption and disillusionment after immigrating to the United States. Similar to Hee’s experiences, many women talked about “very different realities” from what they had anticipated and planned for. In a sense, the data I collected indicated that migration can result in a “biographical disruption” (Davidman 2000). Davidman defines biographical disruption as “those particular, major disruptions that shatter people’s culturally derived expectations about their life course, requiring them to reframe their biographic narratives” (Davidman 2000:7). In her work, Davidman studied how childhood motherloss causes disruptions to individuals’ taken-for-granted expectations about life course. I found a parallel between the experiences of Davidman’s subjects and the disrupted expectations about the future which my informants felt after migration. The difference is perhaps that my informants experienced the chasm as adults, which reduces the trauma.

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When I asked Korean women what their migration processes had been like, many talked about things that were different from what they had expected and hoped for. They mentioned shattered dreams and disillusionment which required them to reorient their expectations about life course in the new society. The disillusions and disappointment came from various sources: the language barrier; difficulty in finding suitable jobs; higher-thanexpected living costs; disappointment about urban neighborhoods in which the new immigrants settled; cost of healthcare; and discriminatory treatments. Unexpected injuries or accidents which were surprisingly common among these women aggravated the feeling of disruption. For example, a relatively recent immigrant woman explained how she felt about New York when she first arrived: When I came to New York, I was surprised by how dirty the streets were. Before coming here, I had imagined that Americans were educated and civilized people. People told me that America was the country of opportunity and that we would do well if we worked hard. But I saw that many people around here were not as educated as we were. People in my neighborhood didn’t seem to care much about their children’s education. The society seemed disorderly, and I felt the living standards were lower than in Korea. People had no cultural sophistication (Jungsun, a sales clerk, 4 years in the U.S.). Another woman expressed her surprise with the racially diverse society: The Americans I had imagined, or the Americans I had met in Korea, missionaries for example, were all very clean, kind, and polite, and had beautiful blond hair and blue eyes. The United States to

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which I came was a mosaic of races at its best, but mostly felt like a market place for the worst kinds of people in the world. The town in which I first settled was particularly so. I didn’t like it (Sora, an office worker, 15 years in the U.S). As is apparent in these accounts, the frustration and disorientation, in part, have their roots in the misconceptions about America these women had held premigration. As some scholars have acknowledged, there is a widespread fascination about the United States among many South Koreans, a product of a history of intimate political and economic relationships between the two countries (Park 1997: 29-33). The images of the American middle class in mass media and the success stories of earlier Korean immigrants have reinforced the myth of the American Dream among aspiring immigrants. For instance, nearly half of the interviewed women expressed that they simply had thought they would instantly live as they had seen on television-a beautifully decorated home with lush green lawns, kids running around in parks and bicycling on sidewalks, shopping at spacious modern malls. The majority of them had not visualized themselves in urban enclaves working at the lower rungs of the economic ladder. According to my informants’ experiences, the embellished images of American life were soon to be shattered by the sudden economic downward mobility they had to face. The majority of women in my sample either had held professional jobs themselves or had been housewives of professional men before migration. Many believed that they used to be part of the mainstream Korean society. After coming to the United States, however, the participants’ families were typically confronted with high living costs, including the money needed for housing. Women were immediately faced with an urgency to work and bring a second income to afford the high-cost living. Despite their high levels of education, most ended up working in Korean-owned small businesses as cashiers,

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manicurists, or receptionists since their Korean credentials were not marketable human capital in the U.S. labor market. The language barrier also prevented them from finding jobs outside the Korean ethnic economy. Whereas existing research find that some immigrant women experience improvement in their statuses by becoming income producers for the first time after migration (e.g., Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Guarnizo et al. 2003; Lamphere 1987), the immigrant women in my sample often considered work as a necessity and a sign of social demotion (Park 2008). It was evident that the immigrant women I interviewed felt a sense of social demotion and a disruption in their class identities, despite that they maintained much of the Korean culture and their ethnic identity. In traditional theoretical framework of immigrant assimilation, the identity of first generation immigrants has often been treated as unproblematic (Gordon 1964; Parks and Burgess 1924), since scholars in this tradition assumed that first generation immigrants are likely to adhere to their culture and tradition and sustain their ethnic identities. In this framework, identity was treated as more problematic for the second generation who would be caught between their ethnic culture and the larger American culture. However, this approach to immigrants’ identities is quite simplistic and one-dimensional. By equating identity with essentially ethnic and/or national identity, assimilation perspectives tend to ignore the complex relations of social structures involved in the post-migration identity construction. For instance, the challenges to Korean women’s class identity which were significant enough to cause a “biographical disruption” among my sample had little to do with cultural continuity, but rather with their inconsistent positioning in the class systems of the two societies. This point indicates that challenges to identities are linked to structural inequalities and power relations along the lines of class, gender, and race. Social relations may also cause a sense of discontinuity and rupture in women’s identities. For example, loss of

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many meaningful social ties and changing family dynamics often required the interviewed women to reposition themselves within family and kin structures. Unlike the popular assumption that first generation immigrants are always thinking of returning home, women in this study perceived that migration was irreversible and their relationships to home would weaken over the years. As such changes and disruptions, such as downward class mobility and loss of social ties, shape women’s post-migration identities by challenging their taken-for-granted understanding of their class positions, roles within family and kin, and gender identities. In my interviews, the most poignant post-migration challenges that created a feeling of discontinuity among Korean immigrant women were social demotion, disrupted social ties, and the irreversibility of migration. SOCIAL DEMOTION AND CLASS IDENTITY A popular belief about immigrants in American media seems to be that immigrants from poorer countries would consider their lives in America better than what they had had before. However, the Korean immigrant women I interviewed saw themselves as having been “downgraded” after migrating to the United States. This feeling was narrated in various way using such terms as “a downfall,” “downgraded,” “shrunken,” “limited,” or “humiliating.” Not surprisingly, the feeling seemed to have been stronger in the first few years in the United States than later, but for some women, it continued for a long period of time. For example: I have two reasons to long for Korea. First is my family, but second is the thought that I was better off then. Oh, those days! Here, my life is ugly because of [my inability to speak] the language. I have to think twelve times before uttering a word if I don’t want to humiliate myself. In Korea, I spoke very well. I presented myself as cool and

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sophisticated. Although I acknowledge that schooling may not be the only measure of prestige, I was highly respected in Korea because I was a graduate of a prestigious women’s college… I miss Korea because my status was higher there; not because it was my own country, but the social and structural situations were better for me. I sometimes overreact when people mistreat me. It is probably because I think of the way I used to be treated in Korea (Yoonmee, a stay-at-home mother, 11 years in the U.S).

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Like this woman, many women told me that they felt their statuses had been better in Korea and that they had received higher social esteem. A closer examination of the narratives revealed that the perceived demotion came from various sources, most notably language, socioeconomic status change, and immigration status. Language For most people in my sample, language seemed to epitomize all of the social and economic obstacles they faced post-migration. The majority of the interviewees mentioned language as the biggest challenge, and the biggest source of intimidation (17 women). Even though some did not directly cite language as the most significant struggle, all but three younger women in my sample lacked confidence in their English skills. This was not a surprise given that recent the American Community Survey (2006) reports that 47.2% of the population of Korean descent “speak English less than very well.” It is important to understand that their inability to speak fluent English was not only a matter of inconvenience, but also one that undermined women’s self-worth. Many women considered themselves as “second rate citizens” because they could not speak fluent English. Most participants were very selfconscious of their lack of fluency in the language and culture of the United States, an awareness which often

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restricted their social involvements and prevented them from reaching out for inter-ethnic friendships. For instance, Ayoung, a woman who spoke English relatively well because she had attended college after migration, explained why Korean mothers might receive lower levels of social prestige: I think Koreans are generally looked down upon, because, first of all, there are too many Koreans who cannot speak English. White people are disrespectful toward us because of that. I know some people [in our community] emphasize political participation and argue that we need to send Koreans to the city council and stuff like that. But so many Korean parents cannot even have a conversation with their own children’s teachers. For example, some moms don’t even understand simple things like a school supply list. When their children have to bring a “marble” note, they don’t understand what it is. I feel that Korean parents are not respected by teachers around here2 even though they were very passionate about their children’s education. I think Koreans tend to be intimidated because they have difficulty speaking [in English]. (Small business owner, 13 years in the U.S.) Consistent with Ayoung’s accounts, several women in the sample believed that their lack of English skills was the reason for the unfair treatment they experienced. When I asked Imsook about any experiences of maltreatment, she immediately linked them to her English skills: Imsook: Yes, I have been discriminated against. I worked at a fish store right after I came to U.S. and one day someone told me to go back to school to learn English. There was an incident. I think that my customer wouldn’t have walked out so unpleasantly, if I had communicated with him

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fluently. I felt a lot of subtle disrespect [from the customers] when I could not help them properly. There were numerous occasions. So, it was hard.

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KP: Do you think things would have been different, had you spoken English fluently? Imsook: Yes. If I had no problems with communication, I would’ve been able to explain myself well and be understood. But I regret those times when I would just stand there silent, and the customer would just walk out of the store very annoyed. KP: How did you feel then? Imsook: I thought, “What am I doing here? If my parents saw this, they’d be so saddened about their daughter’s humiliation.” After work, my legs would hurt so much that I couldn’t stand waiting for my bus. I would just sit on the corner of the street, weeping, I remember. (A homemaker, 4 years in the U.S.) As such, the respondents by and large appeared very selfconscious and self-blaming about the language barrier. For this reason, some even took the “second rate” status in this society for granted: Oh, I think it is only natural for me to be discriminated against since I don’t speak English. Even if people want to help me, they can only do so when I am capable of accepting the help. So, I thought that it was not that people wanted to discriminate against me, but I didn’t deserve to be helped. In fact, I was more often angry at other Koreans’ unfairness than at foreigners (Kooyeon, stay-at-home mother 10 years in the U.S.). I had thought that I could automatically learn English once I came to live in the United States.

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But it was not so at all. I think I am beyond the issue of identity. Identity is an issue when we are in contact with the American society. However, my life is completely tied to the Korean ethnic community. So, my identity is simply defined as someone’s mother. I now have little complaints about it [just being a mother] since I became used to it. Language is a matter of inconvenience. For example, when I go to the teacher-parent conferences at my children’s school, I can say little more than “ok,” “they say this…[sic]” I know I can talk fluently about sophisticated issues if I speak in Korean. This pains me. My identity struggle is this: I might achieve equal social success only if I spoke fluent English (Yoonmee). As these narratives illustrate, the majority of women in the sample attributed their marginal statuses in the U.S. to their inability to engage in social interactions with an English speaking population. Simply put, Korean women considered language skills were as a key element of “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1984) which had the potential to grant them access to the larger society outside the Korean community. Interestingly, the struggles with the language barrier and perceived marginality did not vary much by the length of residency. A lack of confidence in English and intimidation vis-à-vis other Americans were common across the demographic spectrum. As such, the language barrier was more than just a “matter of inconvenience” but an issue which underscored the social demotion immigration had brought to them. As illustrated by the above accounts, the preoccupation with the language misled these women about the racism in U.S. society and kept them from seeing the exclusionary hurdles that blockade better opportunities for immigrants and minorities. Thus, Korean immigrant women often failed to understand that their identity as “the marginal man” (Stonequist 1961(1934)) may be the product of structures of inequality.

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Subjective and objective dimensions of class identity As illustrated by Hee Yoon’s story which opened the chapter, occupational changes and economic downward mobility are crucial dimensions of the overall feeling of demoted status. Immigrants from South Korea largely come from middle class background and have high levels of education (Min 1996; Estherchild and McDanel 1998). Over sixty percent of my sample had a four year college education or beyond (19 women). These women, typically married to men with professional jobs, had enjoyed stable middle class lifestyles, regardless of their own labor market participation before migration. Once they arrived in the United States, however, they settled down in low income urban ethnic enclaves and began to struggle with the high living costs of city life. Most families immediately needed a dual income, and two entry-level wages were typically not sufficient to maintain the kind of lifestyles that they used to enjoy in Korea, such as health club memberships, travel, and house cleaning services. As a result, the downward mobility was an objective reality which then affected subjective class identity. The challenges to class identity were variously expressed by the respondents. When I asked Kooyeon about the biggest challenge she had felt right after migration, she talked about the financial changes which affected her self-esteem: The most difficult thing for me was economic issues. I had grown up in a rich family in South Korea. I used to live a somewhat abundant life. When I got married and immigrated to America, I felt very much constrained because money was so tight. It was not that I wanted to spend freely, but I felt stingy and petty. Let’s say my life in Korea had been a full pie; my life in New York was one twentieth of the pie, or one thirtieth of the pie. I felt shrunken. It was difficult.

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After a few years of struggle, she decided to end the psychological turmoil with class identity and began to receive financial help from her wealthy parents in Korea. They bought a house for her in a middle class suburb. At the time of the interview, she was enjoying her middle class life as a stay-at-home mother of two children while receiving occasional lump-sum remittances from her parents. For families with no financial help from relatives, the objective conditions of economic struggles had to continue until the family owned businesses of their own. The feeling of downward mobility and the disruption it caused in women’s class identity were particularly poignant during their early days in the United States, but began to gradually diminish as women talked about their improving economic conditions over the years. A typical occupational path for Korean immigrants is to start with wage work in Korean-owned small businesses until they accumulate enough start-up capital to eventually buy a store of their own (E. Lee 2006; J. Lee 2001). As it is the common pattern among Korean immigrants, small business ownership was the lifeline for my informants; most of my respondents (81.3%) owned, or had owned businesses at one point in their lives, following this pattern. Business ownership is typically associated with economic stability, or “anjung” (Park 1997) as immigrant families have the opportunities to greatly improve their income by becoming the owneroperators. Hence, Korean women’s class identity often changed as a function of time. As the women’s families began to move upwardly through business ownership, women seemed to feel that they began to recover somewhat of the middle class position which they had lost. Sora explained her changed socioeconomic status as follows: Not long after I immigrated, my son had some problems at school. You know, kids can get into a fight or something. I had to argue with the other kid’s parent, but I couldn’t speak logically to that ignorant, uneducated… excuse my language, the

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kind whom I wouldn’t even be speaking to in Korea. Also, if I were in Korea, I would be able to help my children with their homework. But here, I couldn’t do that because my children didn’t know Korean and I was not fluent in English. Those are the times when I felt that my status was very low in this society. But now time has passed, my children have grown and now I live in Y town [a suburban middle class town]. People in my current neighborhood treat all Orientals like Japanese, as opposed to treating us like Chinese which was the way people in D city [lower class, urban town] considered us. The [socioeconomic] levels of people here are high and these people like us. Parents at my sons’ school want their children to play with them. Whites here respect us. Another thing I have learned while socializing with my American church friends is that even though these Americans speak fluent English, there aren’t too many people with college degrees. Not many even among middle class homeowners. So, they respect me knowing that I speak very good English even though I am a newcomer. They also consider Koreans rich and hard working people. They know that Koreans make good money, even if they work in nail salons and tend cash registers. So, I now think that I am more than middle class, compared to the time when I had lived in D city (An office worker 15 years in the U.S.). Sora’s accounts illustrate that as established Korean immigrant families were somewhat integrated into white middle class suburbs, women began to consider themselves advancing their class position both subjectively and objectively. Nevertheless, improvements in income and homeownership were usually not sufficient conditions for middle class identity. Because Korean immigrants typically

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achieve financial security by extended work, their lifestyles are often far from those of the “leisure class” (Veblen 1899). Thornstein Veblen defines leisure as the hallmark of class privileges and, in American culture, it is understood that middle class lifestyle includes the leisure of weekend dining outs, vacations and travels.3 The structural conditions underlying Korean immigrants’ economic success, however, do not warrant such leisurely lifestyles even after achieving middle class income. In the global economic system, immigrants to the First World countries are typically channeled into lower status jobs in the host countries. Saskia Sassen (1988; 1999) and other authors (e.g., Bakker 1994; Hossfeld 1990; Tiano 1990) have identified patterns in the U.S. job market where new immigrants, immigrant women in particular, are concentrated in low wage service jobs. Though Korean immigrants took the path to small entrepreneurship to avoid being low wage workers (Bonacich 1980; Min 1996), their work in retail businesses still involves long and physical labor. For those who had enjoyed white-collar middle class life before migration, the hard work required in most jobs Korean immigrants occupy is a significant downgrade in quality of life. The long and arduous labor required for small business operations is often a reminder of their occupational demotion. Small businesses are typically considered as “blue-collar” labor in Korean culture, regardless of the levels of income they generate. These jobs are also less prestigious than white-collar managerial jobs at larger corporations. Furthermore, most of these jobs in small businesses require ten or more hours of work each day, typically for six days a week, and sometimes even seven days a week. Hence, many Korean immigrants feel that they do not have enough leisure time, and have very few activities other than work and weekly church attendance. Under this condition, Korean immigrant entrepreneurs often perceive their quality of life as unsatisfactory, as the following statement describes: The past eleven years were a very precious period in my life course. But I have only worked and

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nothing else. Like I said before, I live without leisure. “Work and work only” is not a good life, I think. We need to relax, but we have lived without such luxury (Hyun, operating a business seven days a week). Hyun’s perception of her socioeconomic status was unfavorable, despite, in fact, that she owned a large house in an upper-middle class suburb and had two kids in college. Her evaluation of the past years as an immigrant was largely negative precisely because of the tiresome work schedule she had to endure to maintain a stable business. More recently immigrated women also seemed to compare the modern consumption they had enjoyed in Korea and the reduced level of consumption they could afford in the U.S. Due to significant improvement in the standard of living in South Korea in the past two decades, many women in my sample who immigrated after 1990 had been accustomed to comfortable consumption patterns and modern housing. In contrast, the first neighborhoods these women lived and worked were racially integrated, working to lower-middle income areas. Newly arriving Korean immigrants typically find housing nearby Korean ethnic enclaves. These areas are relatively safe, but middle class immigrants are often unfamiliar with the old buildings and graffiti-written city streets of these neighborhoods. These conditions were most often remembered by the women in my study as an unpleasant contrast to the freshly painted, newer condominium complexes where many Korean immigrants typically had lived before migration. Thus, a sense of deteriorated quality of life was especially strong among women who migrated after 1990 during the South Korean economic boom. The following quotes are illustrative of this point: I was disappointed in so many ways [laughs]. I had imaged lush green lawns, pretty two-story houses, and children riding school buses to go to school. This neighborhood which I moved into

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recently is a little better than the other town I first lived in. But, I don’t know if I can say this is America. When we were in South Korea, we had a nice, spacious condominium with two baths. My two children each had a room. It wasn’t very large, but was just right for my family. By contrast, the first apartment we had in the United States had only two bedrooms with a small living room and a tiny bathroom. Still, the rent was very high…. And the neighborhood was a lot worse than Korea, even though it cost much more. We came in May and had no car until November. So, it was very hard. We would have to walk to the supermarket. Since I couldn’t leave my children home alone, I had to take them with me often. In order to get there, we would pass through a dirty warehouse area and under a railroad overpass where pigeon drops were everywhere. I was so afraid that something dirty would get on my children. As soon as we got home, I washed all my children’s clothes and shoes and bathed them (Kyungjoo, 18 months in the U.S.). It seems to me that the “mainstream” of Korean immigrant community, I mean, people who take central roles in this community are old timers. They are the generation who did not witness Korea’s rapid changes in the 80s and the 90s. Many things have changed, including people, and the economy. IT [information technology] was highly developed during this period. Since the leadership of the Korean community is in the hands of people who had come before these changes, many things [in the Korean immigrant community] look like Korea in the long gone past. I was very much surprised by the streets of the Korean enclave which reminded me of Korea’s 50s. New York is a little better. The Korea town of LA [Los Angeles] was, oh, my gosh! (Meejung, three months in the United States).

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This clear chasm in consumption levels, and the sense of backwardness, ironically, after moving into the First World country particularly stood out among most recent immigrants who came at a “high point” in the South Korean economy and were just beginning at the lowest rungs of ethnic economic ladder. By contrast, those who had come in the 1970s and early 1980s (seven women) when the living standards in South Korea had been clearly far worse off generally acknowledged that the overall quality of American life was significantly higher than what they had experienced before migration. However, even this cohort pointed out that their living conditions as immigrants were less than average, and often did not measure up to the upper-middle to middle class lifestyle they had enjoyed in South Korea. For example: We had asked him [a friend] to find an apartment before we came. That was in Brooklyn. It felt like a heaven at first because we were from Korea which had been so crowded. The street [where I settled] was a dead-end street, and right in front of the subway. And you know, there are many mature trees in any neighborhood, right? So, it felt really good. Our apartment was on Z Avenue. It was a three bedroom apartment, and the rent was $375 per month. But it must have never been cleaned. It was so dirty that the rags with which I washed the floor came out black…America was not as good as we had expected. I came in 1971. I became friends with a woman who already had lived here for 8 years. At that time in Korea, goods made in the United States were very popular because people brought them from Vietnam. So, when I immigrated, I brought a made-in-America parasol which was considered a fashion item in Korea. My new friend could not believe that such a pretty thing was used in the rain [She did not know that it was not meant for rain]. She had no idea [how

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people lived in Korea] because her life here was difficult (Sookhee, a retiree who immigrated in early 1970s). In other words, even women who immigrated before the South Korean economic boom experienced a relative deprivation as new immigrants even if they found the U.S. to be a land of abundance as they had expected. Gender also affected women’s sense of social demotion by adding increased burden of unpaid and paid work to their daily routine. Over half of Korean women 16 years or older in the U.S. participate in paid labor (American Community Survey 2006). As has been widely documented in social science and feminist literature, the added labor of the “second shift” (Hochschilds 1989) significantly deteriorates women’s quality of life.4 The patterns and magnitude of the second shift also vary by class (Blair-Loy 2003; Collins 2001; Glenn 1994; Dill 1988). In South Korea, the majority of middle class married women remain full-time homemakers (Min 1997). Part-time domestic help is relatively inexpensive in South Korea, which allows many middle class homemakers to hire part-time help with more difficult chores such as house cleaning and laundry. Commercialized childcare for preschool age children is also less expensive, which allows middle class housewives the time to get a break from round-the-clock childcare. After immigrating to the United States, many former middle class women realized that not only do they have to work outside to earn paychecks, but they also have to take up the housework without much help after they return from paid labor. For example, Hee, who used to have a demanding job as a business consultant before migration, had various sources of help with housework and childcare before she immigrated. Domestic labor is not only an issue of quality of life for her, but also a class issue which is connected to the family’s downward mobility:

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If I were still in Korea…I would be a successful career woman. In Korea, women don’t have to do so much of women’s work [i.e., housework]. It’s very convenient because there are many part-time housekeepers. Also I don’t have to drive my child around to school and to other activities. Here, I have to clean the house myself. There is nobody to help if I get sick. My parents are not available; there is nobody. This added burden of work often makes women feel like a “work machine.” Imsook is a now stay-at-home mother of two young children. She remembered that she used to work nine hours at her job mostly standing, and did not have enough time to go to the bathroom often. She would take a bus home and immediately began to cook dinner for her husband. She also got up early in the morning to cook a full Korean style breakfast, and pack her husband’s lunch before she went to work. Ayoung’s routine of paid and unpaid labor was even tougher. She managed a gift store which opened six days a week, eleven hours daily. She did virtually all the housework, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and running errands. On Sundays, she would go to church at 12:30 pm, and come home at 6 pm. She also took responsibility for various church functions, including giving rides to a few elderly members of her church, and preparing and cleaning food for reception after the worship service. She considered herself without a day off. Not surprisingly, she picked overwork as the most challenging reality for working women. KP: What do you do on your off days? Ayoung: There is no day off really, but I get to sleep a little more than usual on Sundays. But some Sundays, I also have to get up early to prepare food for the social gathering at the church. Sometimes I prepare food on Saturday night. I do it about once a month. But I also volunteered to bring kimchi [an

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essential ethnic food] every Sunday, and that’s my responsibility…. So, those are also all work, and it’s stressful. Sundays is a continuation of work, but I just do a different kind of work…I guess it varies by individual, but in my case, I do a lot of housework. I do a lot, and it’s hard on me, both physically and mentally. It is the source of stress because my husband doesn’t help…. Housework is added work. Moreover, since my work is not office work [meaning, her responsibility is not limited as it would be in office work in a firm], it very often extends into the home. I bring home my work often when I can’t finish it here. That also adds stress…And my duty as daughter-in-law, that’s hard too. I had to make courtesy phone calls [to the in-laws] on a regular basis. When I am unable to make routine calls, I feel guilty. I worry about being blamed for not calling them [not doing her duty]. I would then think about ways to make it up to them, cooking dinner or visiting them with gifts on Sunday after church, for instance. These things are repeated, and it’s hard. Especially for many women who had to make the shift from a stay-home-mother to a working mother, overwork can be more directly linked to their identities as mothers. Many of my informants felt that their identity as mothers was undermined by being unable to give full attention to their children due to work. Sungok described the challenges as a working mother during her early years in the United States as following: At first, I worked at a nail salon. It was hard physically because I had never done paid work before. I got married right after college…. It [the paid work after immigration] was hard on my body. It was very difficult. I had to do all the housework

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after coming home. My husband was still Korean style, and didn’t help much. He was a relatively considerate, helping man, but it was just hard to do housework after a day at work. I was not used to it. Moreover, my children who missed mom all day wouldn’t leave me alone. Especially my daughter wouldn’t be separated from me in the evening. I would have to carry her on my back where she would fall asleep while I was doing dishes (A small business owner, 15 years in the U.S).

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This was echoed by another respondent, Sookhee, who had to leave her sons home along to go to work as a seamstress while they were still in elementary school: KP: What was the hardest thing about living in America? Sookhee: Leaving my kids home alone to go to work. When I came back late from work, they would be already sleeping without dinner. My heart was broken [to see that]. It was tough (Retired from wholesale business, 30 years in the U.S). As such, long work hours and the burden of the second shift intensified the demotion in class positions and compromised women’s role as mothers. This required women to renegotiate their identities by redefining them as working mothers and providing mothers.5 Undocumented immigrants While interviewees with longer residency in the United States had a green card or citizenship, eleven women with less than five years of residency did not have immigration visas.6 The majority of them had legitimate non-immigrant visas and were in the processes of applying for green cards, but a number of others outstayed their visas or violated the conditions of their visas which put them into an undocumented status. Several who now hold green cards,

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also had had a period of being undocumented immigrants. Hence, concerns for immigration statuses were common and the issue often emerged as a salient identity marker during our conversations. For the women without immigration visas, their undocumented status appeared to be the biggest source of threat and the most serious impairment as a member of society. Undocumented statuses put immigrants into the most marginal location of the society, and when it happens, the person is instantly downgraded from being full-fledged citizens of a nation to being unprotected, “underground” residents. Hee described: Those who have lived here long enough, and who now live in nice towns may think otherwise. But if you ask people who have been here 5 years or less, their stories are different. Their priority is immigration status. People are envious of us because we are here legally. We only have to sit and wait for the green card to come through. My husband’s employer is an established American firm. But if you work for a small firm, your green card application may be denied. I think immigration status is crucial. It is hard to develop an identity because you are trying to live in someone else’s country. I think the number one issue is whether your immigration status is legitimate. Kooyeon first came with a visitor’s visa after marrying her husband who at the time was a green card holder. At first, she went back and forth to South Korea every few months with her visitor’s visa, but eventually outstayed her visa and lived as an “illegal” immigrant for a couple of years until her immigration papers went through. She spoke of how she became a new person once she received her green card: The scope of my daily activities was broadened. I was able to go wherever I wanted. Before, I had

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felt as if someone was going to catch me from behind any time. I felt I shouldn’t go out far away from home. So, I pretty much stayed in the neighborhood. Intimidated, I had worries about getting into trouble of any kind. I was afraid of driving. I didn’t like to have any liability. I was extra cautious. I couldn’t stretch my arms as I wanted, so to speak. Once I received my green card, I thought, “Now, I can live in this country.” I started to put on my wings. The first door I knocked on was school. The vulnerability of immigrants “without papers” has been well-documented in immigration studies (e.g., Mahler 1995). It is common for undocumented workers to be exploited by employers, typically by co-ethnics, and to live in fear of being exposed. Moreover, the vulnerable location of immigrants without green cards also shapes their identities and feelings of belonging. Immigration status thus lead to marginalization and social isolation even within immigrant communities. Language, class status changes, and immigration status contributed most frequently to a downgrade in various aspects of women’s lives, which was understood as a social demotion. This downward mobility led Korean immigrant women to perceive that there had been an abrupt chasm between pre and post-migration identities. I continue below to discuss other factors which also created a sense of changes and disruptions that shape Korean immigrant women’s identities. LOSS OF SOCIAL TIES Women’s lives and identities are often closely connected to family and community. Given this, it is easy to imagine how women’s sense of place in community will be disrupted when women are transplanted from their circle of friends and relatives to far-away places. Through my interviews, I found that Korean immigrant women experienced a loss of many important social ties due to migration, which caused a

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sense of discontinuity in their identities. Furthermore, most women in the sample considered their migration a permanent and irreversible move, which required them to reconsider their life course in the new context of U.S. society. Immigrant women tend to lose a sense of community when they migrate long distance and be separated from friends and neighbors who were once close to them. Thus, loss of social bonds with circles of friends and relatives was another source of disrupted biographies for Korean women. This finding is somewhat surprising given the technologies which allow long distance communication fast and affordable.7 Furthermore, that the majority of women in my sample did not maintain close ties to the sending communities was inconsistent with some recent works on other immigrant groups (e.g., Glick Schiller et al 1992; Basch et all 1994; Levitt 2001; Matthei and Smith 1998). For instance, recent studies on transnationalism, especially among immigrants from the Caribbean region, have documented an active flow of “social remittances” (Levitt 1999) between immigrants and the sending communities which sustains enduring relationships and networking across borders. However, despite easy access to internet and cell phones, the participants in my study claimed to have lost a significant part of their social relationships after moving to the U.S. Aside from parents and siblings, women rarely maintained communication with friends and other relatives in Korea after a few years. Most of them told me that they began to share less and less of their daily lives with people back home. When I asked for the reasons, women mentioned various issues, such as fatigue from exhausting work, and the fear that people in Korea won’t understand what life was like in the U.S. This created a sense of isolation, and encouraged the women to center their emotional energies around their own immediate family. It was a common pattern among women in my sample for the number of phone calls to be reduced significantly after only a few months, typically when women began to

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work outside the home. Even if they called or wrote, they began to withhold details of their daily lives and emotions. They believed that friends in Korea would be unable to understand their struggles as immigrants and how their lives were different from the images seen on American television. Hence, there was, first, a disruption in women’s sense of belonging and a loss of social bonds, and then a gradual shift in community and group membership as women began to turn their attention to the local immigrant community. In the process, church communities became important new focal points for many women’s identities. The causes of the shift ranged from simple lack of time and exhaustion to a feeling of shame about their social demotion. I had lengthy conversations with several women regarding this issue. For example: KP: Do you keep in touch with your friends and relatives? Jayoung: No. Not really. I do but I don’t have a lot to talk about. It doesn’t really make sense to call just to say “hi” [so, I don’t call]. Even when I call, I say little more than “I am doing well.”… I probably call my very old friends twice a year. KP: Was it the same at first? Jayoung: Oh, I call much less often now. I would rather want to visit and see them in person someday. Phone calls are of little use (An office worker, 4 years in the U.S.). KP: Did you call or send letters a lot at the beginning? Hee: I did a lot; to my mom, to my friends, and to my former co-workers. The things I talked about changed as time went by. My parents always asked me how we were doing, and if we were healthy, and I would tell them about everyday life here. At the beginning, I told my friends that I was very lonely and it’s hard to live here. I talked about my

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newly found faith too. I told them that I met God, and I would write passages from the Bible… but, friends can remain friends when you share some common things. In the first year, I would ask what they were doing, and they would tell me stories about who changed jobs and stuff like that. Then in the second, third year, stories we shared diminished. I started to make friends here with whom I could share more common concerns, like our children’s grades, their sports activities, and so on. KP: Tell me about how you kept in touch with your friends in Korea after coming here. Wonjung: At that time, I would call all my friends in Korea. I called this friend and that friend spending over two hours on the phone sometimes. But as the calls repeated, I found that their lives and my life were very different. So, I began to feel that I was showing mostly negative things about my life. I had to stop it. When you all marry and have families, you want to show your friends that you have as a good life as they do, right? So, I didn’t want to tell them that I wasn’t as well off as they were. KP: Did you think you were worse off than them? Wonjung: Well, not really, if I had to think about it. But, for example, I knew my friends lived in very clean and nice condos and had stable lives. I knew this from visiting a couple of friends’ homes in Korea before... When I heard about the kind of things they do now, I didn’t really want to tell them about my life here. If they asked me what I was doing, I honestly didn’t want to tell them that I had no job and just stayed in my apartment. They were very much interested in learning about America and would ask me many questions. As I answered, I felt like I was only exposing my weaknesses. I wasn’t really interested in hearing much about how they

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lived, since my life was here. So, I started not to call them too often. Now, I only contact a few very close friends with whom I don’t have to compete.

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As the last women’s comments indicate, the perception of socioeconomic demotion may play a role in the shifting patterns of social bonds after migration. This point is also supported by stories of a few other women who had suspended their contact with friends during more a difficult time in the United States, but resumed the connection after they achieved economic stability. Sungok’s story was a good example. KP: During those difficult years, did you rely on friendships from Korea for emotional support? Sungok: No, I didn’t call them. KP: Why? Were you too busy? Sungok: No, it was not a matter of time. Rather, I didn’t want to show my feelings to them because I was so tired, overworked, and financially tight. I didn’t want to talk about it. On the other hand, now that I am happy, and stable, I call more. But I didn’t want to let them know my hardships then. When I called, I just told them that everything was good…. So, at first, I stopped contacting people. KP: For how long? Sungok: For nearly 10 years, I think [laughs]. KP: In general, a lot of women lose contact with friends when they are busy with small kids. Do you think it was the case, or migration had something to do with it? Sungok: The latter. Because my life was so-so. KP: Now, have you found all your old friends again? Sungok: Yes, I keep contact with them, send letters, and visit Korea pretty often. Now, that my kids have grown, my friend told me that we need friends at our age (my emphasis).

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As this passage indicates, the economic downward mobility and social demotion discussed in the previous sections intensified other forces of disruption such as loss of friendships, and also promoted a shift in the communities with which immigrant women identify. In this regard, other authors have presented similar findings that suggest a link between economic stability and increase in transnational social networking. For example, Guranizo et al. (2003) have documented patterns of increased transnationalism among economically established immigrants. Similarly, Levitt (2001) found that increased transnational practices are often associated with greater assimilation. These authors’ findings indicate that immigrants’ economic integration to the United States shape the ways in which they organize and maintain transnational social ties. The case of Korean immigrant women was consistent with this pattern. IRREVERSIBLE MIGRATION When immigrants perceive their transnational move as a permanent one, they are likely to lay out their life plans accordingly and reassess who they are, or rather, who they want to become in the new social context. Hence, whether women considered their migration as permanent or not was often linked to the ways in which they defined their identities and the communities which they identified with. Interestingly, almost all of the women I interviewed perceived their migration as a permanent move. They thought re-migrating was impossible, despite their strong yearnings for home. This understanding often necessitated a remapping of their plans and their identities, and it also affected their sense of belonging within the host society. As documented by many ethnographers, contemporary migrants often live “transnationally” by engaging in extensive bi-directional travels, as well as exchange of materials, ideas and cultures between host and home societies (Glick Schiller et al 1992). However, my respondents’ narratives suggest that an increased frequency in trips back and forth do not necessarily mean that

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immigrants consider both places as equal contexts of their lives. In contrast to some other ethnic groups for whom travel back and forth is integrated into their on-going life strategies (for example, seasonal migrant workers), migration was an irreversible move which impacted the future of the whole family for my informants. As a result, the interviewees had multi-stranded emotional and cognitive allegiances to both Korea and the United States while making subtle but clear distinctions between their relationships to the two countries. For instance, they generally claimed that they belonged to both Korea and the United States, however, they described each nation in slightly different terms. For example, Korea was variously referred to as “home (kohyang, or kokuk8),” “my root (naui-ppuri),” “my nation (joguk),” or “mother nation (mokuk).” On the other hand, the United States and their local communities were called, “the site of my life (salmuiteojun),” or “the place where I will live (nae-gasalkot).”7With this differentiation, they expressed different emotional reactions and ties to the two places. While my respondents appeared more emphatic about South Korea, they also had an understanding that the United States was the more immediate and perhaps more important context of their daily lives. Hence, many respondents answered that what happens in the United States matters more to them than affairs in South Korea, even if they maintained passionate interests in events in South Korea. Kooyeon said: Because America is where I live, I am more interested in news about America. Because this is where my life is… If I move back to Korea tomorrow, then I will probably consider Korea more important. Similarly, Sunjoo said about the United States: I can’t think of it [the U.S.] as my country. Still, I feel that this is the land where my life belongs.

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While acknowledging the irreversibility of their move was common, the process by which these women came to accept the permanency of migration varied. Some came to the United States with no intention to ever go back, while others have gradually changed their perspectives because of jobs or, more often, because of their children’s future. Ayoung is one of the women whose idea about her “place” changed over time. Ayoung: I think I will live here. My family is here. People told me to get the citizenship after five years, and so I did. They told me that citizens receive more social benefits. Now that I have lived here over ten years, I don’t think I will ever go back. I have no house to stay [in Korea]. My mom is here. We will all stay here. KP: Is it because your family and your job are here? Ayoung: Yes… Besides, I don’t know where I would fit in if I return now. I don’t know my place in that society. I am almost 33 now. If I go back now, even with my English skills, I don’t know where I could go in terms of jobs. Should I remain a homemaker, or teach English? I don’t think I can take advantage of my degree [She has an associate’s degree in design]… Well, my friends tell me that the school I went to here is well-known in Korea. They tell me that I will be able to receive a high salary, but I think it will be different there because the culture is different, I mean in terms of creative aspects… Anyway, I don’t think I will be able to settle down well. Ayoung was talking about a crucial barrier which makes many Korean immigrants give up on the idea of going back. The perceived difficulty in reentering the extremely competitive Korean labor market appeared to be an issue many of the women picked as a hindrance to remigration. She also mentioned feeling “out of place” in the Korean

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society. In Korean society, there is a social expectation that people would make social and economic advancement (e.g., ranks in job, homeownership) in a relatively predictable pattern along the progression of age. This expectation constructs an image of a life-long race whereby each birth cohort is ascending in ranks in the social ladder presumably in unison. When someone is “fallen out of” this race, it can cause significant discouragement and self-doubt. There is also a fear that a person who is once “out of place” will have a hard time catching up to the average achievement of his/her cohort, since labor market is highly competitive in Korea. Hence, the fear of “falling out of place” was a significant factor discouraging the thought of returning home for many of the interviewees. It was a common perception among the participant that it would be very difficult to be reintroduced to the job market after years of living in the U.S. To illustrate this point, Yoonmee talked about the time when her family tried to move back to Korea. She and her husband stayed in Korea for a few months, but when he had hard time breaking through the job market, they decided to return to the U.S.: I had followed my husband to the United States, but it wasn’t so great. I cried everyday asking him to make a promise in writing to move back to Korea. After a few years, we did go back indeed. But it wasn’t easy. My husband had been in medical school before coming to the U. S. to study business. So, four years had been already wasted [compared to his peers in business]. Moreover, he took a year off before transferring to a college in the United States as a junior. So, by the time he graduated, a lot of time was lost. As soon as we went back to Korea, he realized that all of his peers were already in managerial positions, while he was only a new college graduate with virtually no experience. We thought we should come back here and build up his career for two or three years, and then try again.

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Yoonmee’s husband was never able to go back to try the market again, but instead found a satisfying job in a transnational firm in New Jersey. Now, she considers the United States her permanent home. It is also important to note here that Yoonmee’s decision was equally influenced by her concerns about her children. In fact, children were the other dominant reason why immigrant women accepted the irreversibility of migration. Yoonmee described how she began to think her children’s home was here: We went to Korea last year. My son is now eight. When we went there, I thought that he would be all right if we returned at that point. At that age, being raised in American culture wouldn’t affect him negatively. However, I realized that he would not be able to make a smooth transition if another year passed. So, even though I miss my mom dearly, [I stay here because] it won’t be easy for him to follow school work if we go back. I noticed that his thought process was totally different [from other South Korean kids]. They already have their own thinking structure at that age. Similarly, another respondent, Wonjung, mentioned “job and children” as the biggest reasons for giving up the idea of going back to Korea: KP: Are you going to live here for good? Wonjung: My husband says so. He thinks that there is no job for him in Korea after having lived here for so long. I told him that he could learn skills for a year in someone else’s business, and might start something on his own. But he didn’t think he could work for someone else at his age. Otherwise, he has to open his own business, which will be difficult to do right after returning. We won’t know the trend. If we had enough money to start something in large

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scale, selling recognized brand names and so on, then it might be possible. But we don’t have that kind of money yet. Also, [it’s impossible] because of my children. My daughter [who is in fourth grade] will have to start from the Korean alphabet at her age. My son cannot even speak Korean. They will struggle for quite sometime. What can I do? The understanding that they will not “go back” is important since it shaped women’s perspectives on their future, their life course, and indeed their sense of belonging. Once women realized that they were here for good, they began to renegotiate their sense of place rooted in the local communities. These shifts also affected women’s understanding of who they are, by strengthening certain aspects of their identities (e.g., religion-based identities) and by changing the way women organize reference groups and various identity markers. Korean immigrant women’s immigration stories illustrate that migration can cause major shifts and reorientation in women’s life course and their identities. My data demonstrate that disruptions occur in women’s class identities and their sense of memberships to communities. The patterns of disruptions I have documented in this chapter were precisely the kind of identity dynamics which cannot be accounted for by an approach solely focusing on the question of ethnicity. Rather, according to my data, ethnic identification and allegiance to the “home country” interplayed with class and gender identities of the participants to shape the renegotiation of post-migration identity of these women. While the disrupted identities highlight structural inconsistency that circumscribes women’s experiences in migratory processes, I do not intend to suggest that the disruptions lead to a complete rupture, or truncation in immigrant women’s biographies. On the contrary, most women in my sample succeeded in building a sense of consistency, or continuity throughout their often traumatic

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and confusing early settlement processes. These efforts to restore continuity and normalcy in their lives were critical part of reassessing and renegotiating their sense of place in the U.S. society. As I will present in the following chapter, women’s efforts to search for continuities with their premigration identities was in a dynamic tension with the discontinuities and disruptions caused being transplanted into the different structural systems of U.S. society. In short, the two concomitantly occurring forces formed a reflexive and on-going process by which women came to reconstruct their own sense of place post-migration. In the following chapter, I discuss women’s identity practices to restore a sense of continuity and normalcy in their identities and show how women exercise agency in coping with the structural challenges of post-migration period.

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CHAPTER 4

Finding Continuity and

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Mobilizing New Identities

RESTORING A DISRUPTED LIFE COURSE Okkyung Cha immigrated to the United States in the early 1970s. Her family settled in a small town in Pennsylvania where few Asians lived. Her husband had an engineering degree from Korea, but in the U.S. he began to work as an auto mechanic. Only a few weeks after immigrating, Okkyung’s husband was seriously injured and could not work. The family soon ran out of money. When she had only one hundred dollars left in her pocket, Okkyung called her brother in Korea for help. While the family lived on the money Okkyung’s brother gave them, she looked for a job and started to work at a factory. She was desperate. She not only had to support her injured husband and her son, but also had to send money to her two older children who had remained in South Korea to attend college. In the next few years, she worked as much as she could to support her transnational family, volunteering for any overtime work available. 81

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For about a year or so, Okkyung’s family lived in complete isolation without friends. All she cared about was earning enough money for the family. Then, they met a Korean minister who moved into the town. He introduced her family to a Korean church in New York. Though it took at least two hours to travel to New York to attend weekly service at the church, she was happy to have found a Korean community. Routine trips to church became an important weekly routine for her. After they moved to a state in the South where her husband had a few friends, she continued to work, first as a building cleaner and, finally, as the owner-operator of a grocery store. The business was prosperous. When they sold the business after seven years, they bought another business and a home in New Jersey and settled down. Okkyung’s life story exemplifies the resilience and strength of immigrant women who, despite life-altering changes, build their lives back with determination. As Okkyung did, immigrant women often reach out to coethnic communities for support. In the previous chapter, I reviewed forces of disruption/discontinuity occurring through the migration and early settlement processes, which challenged Korean women’s understanding of who they were. Though the challenges were enormous, they only tell one side of the “immigration stories” of these women. The story would only be complete when we understand how immigrant women mobilized various strategies and resources to recreate a sense of continuity in their life course. The interviewed women responded to the trials of their “new life” and to their devalued identities in the host society in different ways. Making connections to premigration communities and invoking their pre-migration education and class identities were a crucial part of their strategies to resist the overall social demotion and assert more advantageous identities. Hence, far from being passive victims of downward mobility, these women actively resisted the identity disruptions that occurred as a result of their shifting class, national, and gender identities.

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The tension between discontinuity and continuity has captured the attention of many immigration scholars and has been theorized various by different schools of thought. For example, earlier literature on immigrants’ assimilation focused on a pattern of gradual disconnection and the abandoning of immigrants’ relationships to the home countries. The theory ultimately predicted that most immigrants would lose their ethnic culture and language and become Americans in a few generations (e.g., Gordon 1964). More recently, there has been a contrasting theoretical movement in immigration scholarship. Contemporary perspectives on transnationalism/ty focus on various practices linking the sending and receiving societies, which help immigrants to make continuous connections to the cultures and people in the communities of origin (Glick Schiller et al. 1992). This latter literature tends to give more weight to the way immigrants organize their lives in a sense of continuity even after migration. The two theoretical interests need not contradict each other. However, as Peggy Levitt critiqued, there has been a tendency to perceive assimilation and transnationalism as a zero-sum game (Levitt 2001: 5-6). Following Levitt’s critique, I discuss now how disruption/changes and the pressure of assimilation on one hand, and an adherence to Korean culture and transnational supports on the other hand, are linked together and occur in relation. As Mrs. Cha did, many Korean immigrant women turn to co-ethnic communities and churches to maintain their ethnic culture and identities. There were several everyday life strategies and identity practices critical to maintaining continuity in their biographies. Korean ethnic community also played a practical and symbolic role in this endeavor. SUPPORT FROM THE FAMILY Eleven of the interviewed women had at one point received some type of transnational support from their close family in Korea. These were relatively younger women whose parents were living in South Korea. My informants told me

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that they relied on the love and moral support of parents, siblings, and very close friends in the beginning. They generally considered these supports to be essential in overcoming the hardships of life as new immigrants. While reliance on these transnational support systems gradually weakened as the settlement process unfolded, transnational support from the women’s immediate family, especially from the parents, remained strong for a longer period of time. Undoubtedly, emotional and/or material support appeared to be the strongest source of consistency for the first few years, one that gave them a sense of continuity in their family-based identities. My informants told me that, at the beginning, they closely followed events happening in Korea, and kept more active contacts to a larger group of people, which allowed them to overcome the challenges of isolation, intimidation, and inconvenience in an unfamiliar society. For instance, connecting with friends in South Korea was especially important and emotional for Ayoung, who was young (19) when she migrated: Ayoung: I have few positive memories about the first year. Things were too difficult. I had no Korean friend for nearly a year. There were just a few elderly people in the neighborhood, co-workers, and the couple who lived in the same building. Everyone was older. I found nobody my age. I was lonely and wrote many letters to Korea. My dad would supply me postage. I remember writing many letters. I would use lightweight stationery to save postage…. I was able to make phone calls sometimes. Because phone calls were expensive then, I tried to talk as fast as I could, but my friend wouldn’t reply as quick, I remember. I had to make the calls short because they were costly. KP: How would things be different if you hadn’t been able to make those calls?

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Ayoung: Very difficult. I worked, and went to school at night. I was always alone with my younger brother. KP: Did you feel more like “yourself” when communicating with your friends in Korea? Ayoung: Yes. Yes, that’s right! Similarly, advice and consolation from family and close friends were important pillars of strength for Moonyoung, a former teacher who turned herself into a business owner:

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KP: Did you call Korea at the beginning? Moonyoung: My younger sister lived in Los Angeles. So, I talked to her a lot. She has since come to the East Coast to do business with me. Back then, family was the people I could open my heart to, no matter what. I still keep contact with some of my friends in Korea. We e-mail one another these days. My school friends have made a web site and exchange e-mails, although I don’t use it often. I am friends with former colleagues. Not surprisingly, reliance on transnational support (as opposed to local support) was more significant among those who had no relatives already living in the United States. On the other hand, those who had their migration sponsored or mediated by family and relatives in the U.S. did not have to depend on transnational social ties. The settlement process in this case was described as “smooth” or “uneventful,” with not too much disruption since they received on-going help and advice from the hosting families throughout the early settlement process. Bashi (2007) described this relationship using the phrase, “hub and spokes.” The persons who play the role of “hub” most often “invite” new immigrants to the U.S. and help them with necessary steps for settlement, such as finding a housing, securing a job, children’s school registration, and introducing them to local communities. The patterns of

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settlement and occupational paths of the “spokes” are often shaped by the “hubs.” A relatively recent immigrant in my sample, Young, acknowledged the role her hub family played:

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In our case, a minister from my church in Korea had been living in New York already, and he helped us with everything. So, I don’t remember anything difficult. He found us an apartment, and introduced us to his church. Things were smooth. Not surprisingly, Young’s family was living in the same apartment building as the hub family, belonged to the same church, and her husband was attending a school the minister had recommended. The transition was perceived to be the least traumatic when many close family members were settled nearby. For instance, Kanghee’s five siblings, with their spouses and children, migrated almost at the same time through the invitation of one sister, a nurse, who had lived in the United States as a naturalized citizen for many years. While remembering what it was like at the beginning, Kanghee described few difficulties despite that there were language barriers and some other changes. Having her mother and other siblings close-by, she did not feel that her life was disrupted. It wasn’t inconvenient at all. My sister had been here for a while already, and my mother was with us. I didn’t think anything was particularly difficult. We would gather at my mom’s house every weekend. My mom would give us home-made kimchi [pickled Korean cabbage] to take home. My mother lived in America until her death. While she was with us, the whole family would get together very often and had a lot of fun.

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As such, having most family members around seems to have given Kanghee the emotional security and a coherent sense of self which was anchored in the family. Her experiences contrasted with other women’s narratives of discontinuities. New immigrants are in need of many resources to begin a new life, and most often, material help from a local and transnational network is crucial to getting them off the ground. Most of my respondents received some forms of material support from family and relatives who were settled earlier. This pattern is common in immigrant communities. For example, free room and board and personal loans are common practices between the hub and the spokes (Bashi 2007: 76-110). While small in number, a few of my informants also have received financial assistance from their immediate family in South Korea. For instance, Okkyung’s husband was seriously injured at his job only weeks after arriving to the United States. Upon the crisis, she turned to her brother in South Korea for help. Her brother gave her $3,000 (a large sum in the late 1960s), which was crucial for the survival of the family for the next few months until she secured a job. Likewise, Kooyeon, after eleven years in the United States, was still receiving routine help from her parents in South Korea: We mostly receive things from Korea; gifts, but also money. My parents would send me the things that they thought we needed, and the things that cost a lot of money. If they think my life is inconvenient because of [a lack of] certain things, then they would give me those. They bought me a house, for example. I am thankful. While it was rare that immigrant women received continuous remittances from Korea after so many years, this support from Kooyeon’s family was crucial in maintaining her class identity which had been disrupted by migration.

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In addition to emotional and material support from a transnational family network, ethnic food and other consumer products helped to reduce potential disruptions in daily family life, such as running out of essential ethnic groceries, familiar brands of consumer products, an electrical part for appliances brought with them, and so on. Consumption of cultural products, such as television shows, films, and magazines, were also an important part of Korean immigrant families’ daily routine. The scene in Kyungjoo’s home, for example, is an illustration of Korean style consumption, which created a feeling of an extension of her pre-migration lifestyle. Her family was relatively new to the United States, having lived in New York for less than two years. The consumer products in her apartment were nearly all brought from Korea: People here would tell us [before we came] not to bring anything from Korea. They told me that I should buy everything here, since Korean products were not high quality and “made-in-U.S.A.” is better. But I thought otherwise. These people, who had come 10 or 20 years ago, were only thinking of those days. Instead, I brought everything with me. The only things I bought in the United States are my TV and sofa. Everything else is from Korea. My plates and bowls, my rice cooker, and right down to spoons [laughs]. Being a relatively recent immigrant, she still kept contact with a relatively broader network of people in Korea, including her own side of the family, in-law family members, and many friends. While she did not receive monetary remittance, she received necessities from South Korea, such as Korean food and children’s clothes. Family support sometimes came in the form of labor. Some of the women’s parents would routinely come, and stay for several months to help out with housework and childcare so that immigrant women would make smooth

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transitions from stay-at-home mothers to working mothers. For example, at the time of the interview, Sungok’s mother was visiting for six months to provide help with housework. Sungok told me with a smile that she was “free” from housework while her mother stayed. A more extreme case was Young, who worked full-time with three children. Since the birth of her third child, her mother and mother-in-law have taken turns coming from South Korea to stay for six months at a time to provide continuous care for the children. Young acknowledged that she was only able to work and earn money because they took care of the kids and the home.1 At first, I thought that the diverse patterns of transnational support were somehow inconsistent with the weakening of transitional social ties which the women expressed happening quickly after migrating. However, this seeming inconsistency, in fact, demonstrated an underlying pattern where immigrant women strategically let go of certain ties while holding strongly onto a small number of selected kin and family members. To recall, most of the women in my sample (74%) indicated that there had been a loss of social ties and weakening of emotional support as they began to lose touch with people in Korea. However, for my respondents, social ties did not simply go through a wholesale interruption. At the same time that some relationships were severed, the remaining ties, typically to few very close family members in Korea, became even more strengthened. Indeed, this emotional reliance on immediate family members provided my informants an axis of continuity in the midst of many changes in their lives. As such, while immigrant women tend to lose a large part of their social network outside of their family, they took advantage of their ties to their immediate family members, especially to their parents, in order to sustain a sense of consistency in who they were. This finding confirms the pattern of “relativizing” documented by other authors, in which immigrants selectively choose to pursue more active relationships with particular members within their networks

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while losing ties to others in a relative neglect (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002). I interpret this “relativizing” of personal networks as a strategic identity practice by immigrant women in order to mobilize resources and reference groups to their own advantage. Using this strategy, Korean immigrant women let themselves disconnect from the reference group to whom they were reluctant to reveal their experiences of social demotion, and at the same time, they simultaneously relied on the remaining familial ties to galvanize a sense of community. This community these women held onto, by extension, served as reminders of their pre-migration identities in spite of disruptive changes migration brought to their lives. As such, “the family” was a key word in most women’s immigration stories. In particular, the participants demonstrated strong bonds with their own nuclear family. Not surprisingly, the majority of the women answered “the family,” and/or “children,” when I asked what gave them the strength to go on. The nuclear family was also the part that the participants described as “stable/unchanged” among the various aspects of their lives after migration. I was curious about what elements in the nuclear family affected them to feel that there was no change in their family dynamics. From a close review of women’s descriptions of their daily routines, I have concluded that age and gender-based hierarchies were perceived to be consistent and unchanged after the migration. The Korean family is characterized by age and gender based hierarchies, with elders and men in the position of authority, and women and children in positions of subordination. Few of the women I interviewed reported any significant challenges to these hierarchies, or serious conflicts deriving from disruptions in the family relations. Role expectations and the gender division of labor remained fairly the same, aside from modest adjustments due to women’s participation in the paid labor. Hence, despite the adjustments to daily life such as scheduling and consumption patterns, most women expressed that their relationship with their husbands and children, and the

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family bond went on continuously without drastic a change after immigration. This theme was repeated further when I asked, “what is ‘Korean’ about your household?” To this question, several women answered, “relationships within family (gajok-kwankye),” along with their continuous use of Korean language and Korean food. Simply put, women kept their roles within the nuclear family and maintained the responsibilities as mothers and wives despite their changed status as working women. As I discussed in the previous chapter, this undoubtedly added stress and burden to their lives and worsened their quality of life. However, ironically, the stability of family dynamics promoted a sense of continuity and normalcy in immigrant women’s lives, whose identities were primarily defined by their roles within the family. CONNECTING TO THE LOCAL KOREAN ETHNIC COMMUNITY In addition to the continuity of the nuclear family, geographical and/or mental proximity to Korean ethnic community was important to immigrant women’s identities. It is a common pattern for new immigrants to begin their lives within an ethnic enclave by either residing and/or working there. The Korean immigrant community in the larger New York Metropolitan area where I researched has approximately three ethnic “centers.” The largest enclave is Queens, New York. The second one is the eastern areas of Bergen County, New Jersey, and the other is Central New Jersey, around two towns, Edison and New Brunswick. Korean immigrants who achieve economic stability and buy a home usually move out of the enclaves to more affluent suburbs, however their sentimental ties to the ethnic community typical remained unchanged. Korean enclaves undoubtedly provided the interviewed women with a flare of “home” and many convenient shopping facilities. But their gravitation toward ethnic enclaves can also be explained by another reason, which was their marginal status in their residential communities.

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For instance, the vast majority of my informants were not active in their residential towns and did not have close ties with non-Korean neighbors; the women perceived that the social marginalization stemmed from the language barrier and the overall feeling that they were culturally (perhaps racially) different in largely white suburban communities. This led their social interactions to be limited to a co-ethnic circle of friends and family. Thus, only a handful of women in my sample acknowledged that they had any significant social relationships with people who were not co-ethnics. Most women had some interactions with business clients, and/or with mothers of other ethnicities in the neighborhood, yet they attached little significance to those contacts, treating them as “small talks,” or “just ‘hi’ and bye’.” Rather, Korean women’s friendships were largely formed within the Korean community, including co-ethnic church communities, and personal networks of Korean mothers. Ethnic enclaves were often the sites of such contacts. For this reason, even the women who lived geographically far away from Korean ethnic concentrations remained in sentimental proximity to the “imagined community” of Korean immigrants. For instance, Eunseo, who did piece-work at home for the first seven years in the United States, had no interaction during that time with anyone outside her family and a couple of Korean friends she found in her neighborhood. Another woman stated that her “whole world” was the Korean community, including her all-Korean church until her son entered public school. This isolation from other ethnics was quite common among the mothers I interviewed. They explained that it was not because they preferred co-ethnic relationships, but because they could not communicate well with the English speaking population. On the positive side, exclusive co-ethnic interactions helped Korean women to produce a sense of sustained ethnic identity as “Koreans.” Living in proximity to a Korean ethnic enclave allowed Korean women to maintain much of the traditional values and beliefs, and prevent their

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consumption style from being interrupted. All of my respondents made regular shopping trips to Korean business districts for groceries and other necessities. All of them also highly preferred to go to Korean-speaking professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, accountants, and bankers. Hence, several of my informants joked that they did not need to speak a word of English if they lived in Flushing, New York City or in Palisades Park, N.J., which are the two largest Korean business districts in the region. The Korean ethnic community was thus an important pool of resources for my informants to cope with diverse post-migration challenges and to maintain some level of consistency in lifestyles. Whereas the proximity to an ethnic community allowed Korean women to sustain their ethnic identity and cultural continuity, being “enclosed” in an ethnic community could also become a handicap. Living in an ethnic enclave, for instance, reduced the chance for women to learn English and develop the knowledge about the larger U.S. society. For example, Wonjung had mostly stayed home taking care of children except for when she occasionally helped her husband at his store. She considered herself as having very little English skills and had no friends of other ethnicities. While she had no intention to return to Korea, she was unsure if she would be able to survive on her own in this society, if something happened to her husband: If something happens to my husband and I am left alone, I cannot live here because I don’t speak the language. My husband has told me to go back to Korea right away, if something happens to him. This is maybe my biggest anxiety, the thought of being widowed or something in this country. After having lived over ten years in the United States, Wonjung perceived that she did not have the ability to live independently in this society. As such, her lack of interactions with the society outside of the Korean community sometimes delimited opportunities for

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acculturation. It is a common understanding among Korean immigrants that the reason many Koreans do not learn English fast, despite their high levels of education, is precisely because they hardly speak to, nor strike up friendships with, English speakers.

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It was evident that the impact of the local Korean community was significant in the women’s continued identity as Koreans. Diverse cultural and consumerist practices facilitated a sense of continuity in women’s daily lives and co-ethnic relationships provided necessary emotional support to cope with the disruptions women felt in their biographies. In short, familial supports, consistency in the nuclear family, and proximity to the “imagined community” of co-ethnics were all important to sustain Korean immigrant women’s identities as Koreans, wives, mothers, and daughters. “STILL KOREAN BUT NOT OF COLOR”: CONFLICTING UNDERSTANDING OF RACIAL IDENTITY From their experiences with class identities, my informants showed their implicit understanding that some identities are more valued in the U.S. while others are devalued. In their narratives, the women in this study often displayed their reluctance and resistance to devalued identities. For example, I described in Chapter Three how the women perceived middle-class identity as a crucial status marker and displayed struggles in coping with their downgraded class identity in the U.S. contexts. As strategic resistance to their reassignment to the working class identity, they emphasized their college education so as to buttress their downward mobility and asserted instead their middle-class roots. They also engaged in other practices to assert identities that were more advantageous to them in the new racialized contetxt of U.S. society. The respondents’ understanding of race was very interesting in this light. They talked about

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race in two different, yet related patterns. First, there was a common perception that Koreans were located at a higher rung than African-Americans and Latinos in the racial hierarchy of the United States. A few women also mentioned that there was a hierarchy of ethnic groups among Asians, with Japanese and Koreans in the higher rungs, and Southeast Asians in the lower rungs. At the same time, several women seemed to have little consciousness of their own racial minority status; they reacted to my question about race as if race was not an issue at all and had no effect on their lives. As the excerpts from the interviews suggest below, many women expressed complex attitudes about race and even an internalized racism:

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I think Koreans are treated better than them [other minorities]. For example, Koreans are owners of businesses while they work as employees under Korean ownerships. Koreans are also treated better than some other Asians such as Indians, Chinese, and Vietnamese. We came to a rural town in Pennsylvania. It was a nice town. It was conservative. I had a co-worker who was Black. Once, she came to my home, and my landlord kicked us out. Orientals were okay, but they [Whites] didn’t accept Blacks. Never. That tells how conservative that place was. KP: Would you feel better about your children’s marriage to a White than to a Black? Kooyeon: Yes, because they [Whites] have lived in better environments. We cannot ignore people’s upbringing. Let’s set aside the question of wealth or poverty; the values and mental attitudes are still different, depending on the environments in which they were raised. A sense of responsibility, for example… Simply, those who grew up very poor are more likely to be difficult compared to people

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raised in comfortable environments, don’t you think?

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Koreans tend to think that they are higher status than them [African-Americans and Latinos]. But I disagree. I don’t know how Blacks and Latinos think… but I think, if I can honestly tell you how I feel, that other minorities at least consider the U.S. as their own country. But, Koreans are uprooted drifters… who just slip in through the back door and make their living here… These accounts imply several different ideas about the respondents’ implicit beliefs about race: first, Koreans occupy higher positions than African-Americans and Latinos in racial hierarchy; second, race is linked to economic power; third, Koreans are perpetual “foreigners.” These ideas are no doubt reflections of racism embedded in mainstream media, and popular discourses in the United States. These ideas were also not different from stereotyped ideas about race circulating in South Korean society. Korean immigrants seem to having brought with them an internalized racism which has not changed much by living in the U.S. society. Interestingly enough, there were contradictions in women’s talk about race. While the respondents were keenly aware of the hierarchical structures of race, they often did not consider race as a serious shaping force of their own overall socioeconomic status. I was surprised by the fact that many (sixteen) interviewed women did not consider their racial minority status as important as their class statuses. That there was no strong bitterness about their downgraded racial statuses somewhat deviated from my expectations. No one in my sample, for instance, conveyed the thought that they were women of color and that they would remain women of color even if they achieve middle class status. In general, the respondents presented few complaints about experiencing racism. For example:

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I didn’t feel it [racism] much. When I began the work at nail salons, I worked in a Spanish [Latino] neighborhood. They share some common things with us, don’t they? So, we [Koreans and Latinos] have no disrespect for each other. Then I opened a nail salon in a Black community. I felt rather closer to them. Once you get to know them, they become good friends…. There was no particular incident… This town I work in now is mostly White. Their levels [of education] are very high. They are educated. I like them very much. Educated people do not discriminate against [us] (Sungok). I argue that several factors are involved in this perception that race was not a salient part of Korean women’s identities. First, many respondents seem to be subscribing to the ideology that race is only about African-Americans and Latinos, whom Korean women considered lower than Koreans in the U.S. racial ranking system. A number of participants perceived that Asians were located at a higher rung than these two groups, and therefore, believed that “money whitens” Koreans. Embedded in some of the narratives I collected was the idea that once Koreans achieve middle class income levels and move into middle class suburbs, they would be treated with respect and they be equal footing with other middle class Whites. A lack of racial awareness may also be linked to the almost exclusive co-ethnic interactions. Despite their routine interactions with other ethnics through businesses and children’s schools, the respondents rarely claimed that they formed meaningful social relationships outside the Korean community. Thus, “Americans” were far less likely to be considered as their “significant others” than Korean co-ethnics. Since many of these women’s self-evaluation was based on co-ethnic communities, class seems to rise as the more salient measure of status than race.2 South Korean society has been considered as mono-ethnic society, and therefore race has never been a salient measure of social demarcation in Korea.

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Rather, relative social standings are most often measured by class in Korean society. The conflation of race and class among the respondents was further reinforced by a conflation of race and culture. Thus, several women seemed to believe that the only barrier to a complete integration was language skills:

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When I first came, I went to the town library. There was a little Black kid who asked me whether I could read English. That little brat! I usually don’t go to PTO conferences. If I spoke English a little better, I would want to speak out [in those conferences]. I have many good ideas, but I can’t say them. My pride is very much hurt when I cannot understand what they say. And when I explain something with great efforts, but the other person say, “I don’t get it,” oh, really [my pride is hurt]… (Hee) Thus, many of the participants appeared to perceive that their underprivileged status in the U.S. was attributable to their lack of language skills, rather than their being treated as a racial minority. When my informants confronted race as an identity shaping issue, it was through the second generation’s experiences. Several women told me that the only times they were reminded of their racial minority status were when they observed their children’s experiences with racial issues: I felt it [being racial minority] through my children. I did not go to school often because of my English….but my children were very active at school. They did many extracurricular activities. My younger daughter especially liked being part of school plays. When they had a show, she would practice two hours everyday. The first part she took in a school play was the role of a Hawaiian girl

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selling flowers. It was in the musical, South Pacific. She really had wanted to do the leading role. She wanted to do a central role. But she was an Asian, and the setting of the play was… So, they didn’t give her the main role. I guess they couldn’t. I am not going to make an issue of that. Anyway, her part had no line. But she diligently went to practice, and helped with the set. She was in ninth grade. She went to the practice all week, staying for the entire two-hour rehearsal, but never had a chance to rehearse her part. So, she complained about it to the director who was a teacher. In my opinion, the teacher should have consoled her and talked to her nicely. But, instead, the teacher told her that she should quit the play if she was going to complain about this insignificant part, a no-name flower girl. My daughter was very upset and cried. I understand that there probably were more flower girls, and some of them might have been American kids. But still I had a feeling that my daughter was ignored because she was Korean (Hyun, a business owner and mother of two). Perceiving race as a more salient matter to the second generation seems to reflect the women’s understanding that the second generation’s reference group was not exclusively Koreans, unlike the first generation for whom co-ethnic community was more important.3 As such, there was an internalized racism on one hand, and a dismissal of race as irrelevant to their identities on the other. These two patterns point to a consistent strategy whereby Korean immigrant women distanced themselves from other racial minorities, in particular, AfricanAmericans and Latinos.4 They are the groups these women deem the least valued groups in the racial hierarchy of the U.S. society. This practice of distancing from racially disadvantaged groups is also a method historically used by other groups to assert their “whiteness.” For instance, Mexican-Americans fought to be acknowledged as white

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under the segregation laws in the 1930s, precisely by distancing themselves from “blacks” (Foley 2002). Similarly, Waters document how West Indian immigrants develop an oppositional ethnic identity to resist an assignment into the category of black in the black-white racial dichotomy (Waters 1999). As such, the particular ways in which middle class Korea immigrant women construct race (or lack there of) represent a strategy to assert their advantageous class positions which otherwise may be undermined by their status as women of color. FAITH AND RELIGION AS A GALVANIZING FORCE FOR POST-MIGRATION IDENTITY The various practices I have reviewed above allow immigrant women to make connections to their premigration identities and sustain a sense of continuity. In addition, as the integration into a local community progressed, new aspects of identity were also mobilized to make sense of their lives in the U.S. One of the most salient new identities emerging in the process was an identity based on religion. Most of my respondents (90%) were members of some denomination of Christianity. While some (five) of them had been already very religious prior to migration, the majority of them either converted to Christianity, or had their faith significantly strengthened after migration. Indeed, many expressed that their faith, or religious identity, became central to them after immigration. The reasons for this development included the hardship of life as immigrants, and the significance of churches as key ethnic communities. The role of immigrant churches, and the notable presence of Christian churches in Korean immigrant communities have been studied elsewhere (e.g., Hurh and Kim 1990; Min 2002; Park 1989). According to the research, Korean immigrants are exceptionally “churched” people; not only do a significant majority of Korean immigrants identify with some form of Christian religion, but also over 70 percent of Korean immigrant families are reported to attend church on a regular basis

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(Kim 2002). As Jung Ha Kim (2002) pointed out, in her analysis of Korean “faith communities,” religion, culture, and politics of ethnic and national identity are inseparably woven together in Korean church communities. Similar to many other ethnic churches, Korean churches have provided immigrants with survival resources and ethnic networks in addition to spiritual guidance. Undoubtedly, for the majority of Koreans, church communities overlap with ethnic communities. The significance of church communities as ethnic institutions notwithstanding, I was still astounded by the ways in which so many of my respondents narrated their life stories in religious terms. Many women in my sample expressed a newly-found identity as Christians, or a renewal of religious identity. Dukhee is a divorced woman with grown children. She talked about how religion was the central and most consistent aspect of her life. KP: You seem to be very religious. Dukhee: Church is the joy of my life. Some people like to study, others enjoy making money. Someone may want to be a singer because she likes to sing. I have always liked church. When I was in Korea, I wasn’t a church-goer, even though I attended a middle school run by a Christian church. When I came to America, I felt that there was nothing much else to do on Sundays. I had all my family here, but we had nowhere to go. My mom and my sisters went to church, too. Looking back, I realize that church was my favorite place. So I think this is what I am born to do. If I liked money, then I would make money. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do. My favorite thing was to go to church, listen to God’s words, and talk about faith. I didn’t have a lot of interest in other things. KP: Would it be the same if you lived in Korea? Dukhee: I think I would still be religious. But I guess God sent me here like this through my family

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connection, because I might not be as faithful if I stayed in Korea. I diligently have attended church ever since I arrived. Every single week! Even after the birth of my children, I only stayed home for four Sundays, and attended worship with my babies.

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Similarly, Taeran, a human resource worker who has lived in the United States for 15 years, tried to explain her immigration in terms of a “divine calling”: I personally think like this: Those who come to America have some special relation with faith. Perhaps the way we [immigrants] live here makes us grow deeper in faith, or there may be other reasons. But, for instance, my husband and I seem to have received a different type of calling, compared to when we had lived in Korea. If I stayed in Korea, we would be too busy. Now that I am about 40 years old, I begin to realize that there are only a few central things we need in life. If I lived in Korea, I would be surrounded by complicated relationships which might not be really important, not really central to life. Life in the United States means living in simplicity, in simple environments, and in simple social relations, and having social limitations. I think those issues became the basis for my faith. Religion was a very important part of life for the women I interviewed, in part because church communities were as much ethnic communities as they were religious communities. Just as Kim’s (2002) institutional history predicted, I found that my interviewees made little distinction between the Korean ethnic community and their religious community. Very often, women’s understanding of the “imagined community” of Korean ethnic society was largely based on interactions and experiences these women had in their all-Korean churches. In addition, religious

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organizations such as Christian churches and Buddist temples, along with the nuclear family, were where the ethnic culture was defined, continued, and/or transmitted to younger generations. Hence, religion and ethnicity were a lot more confounded among Korean immigrants than in the larger U.S. society. Hee summarized as follows:

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What characterizes our lives in the United States is that church is where everyone is…. In other words, we have to go to church to find our identity. So, identity is church, and then…. [sic] So, going to church is not necessarily a matter of faith only. I can find Korean people at church. I feel less foreign there. With these varying reasons, the majority of my interviewees strongly claimed their Christian faith, and some more so than others. In some informants’ narratives, Christian faith even shaped the way they viewed their own national identity. For example, Sanghee’s narratives stood out in terms of the way she related every single detail of her life story to the Christian God. What caught my attention most in her accounts, however, was the way her sense of belonging to the United States was mediated by nothing else but her religion: I feel secure about [the United States] since the president is praying to God. This makes me very happy. I have no worries. Why wouldn’t God bless this land which hosts people from around the world and provides them with opportunity to make a living, with or without papers. I remember the passage about how God will bless those who blessed you, and curse those who cursed you…. I had a revelation by coming to America. I understood why America is the most blessed among all the nations…. I realize these days that I am protected as a citizen of the United States. I am

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very thankful that this country has a wellestablished system [of justice] (Sanghee, business owner, 5 years in the U.S.).

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Although separation of religion and the state is central to mainstream American understanding of nationhood, several of the Korean women (seven women) I met for this research perceived the United States as fundamentally “a Christian nation.” For these women, their faith in Christianity often encouraged favorable views on the U.S. nation-state, and promoted a sense of connection. The vision of the United States as the “chosen land” or “land of milk and honey” has existed since the earlier communities of Korean immigrants (Kim 2002), this particular part of Korean-American faith discourse seems to be still widespread. In a similar vein, religion sometimes promoted cosmopolitan perspectives. For example, Sora talked about her changed perception on Korean national identity in more religious terms: I used to be such a patriot. I loved Korea, and baedal-minjok [Korean ethnics] dearly. I used to imagine Korea as a tiny nation in the midst of deep mountains. In fact, the nation is a peninsula, but perhaps because I never saw rivers and oceans in my childhood, I don’t know. I really liked my Korean people. I still like my people and am proud of them. However, although I am Korean, I rather want to be remembered as a person who loved God and lived at a particular time in this world. I mean, I want to live not just as a Korean woman, but, a bit differently, as a cosmopolitan, or a resident of earth. My scope has broadened like that…. Like I said, I began to think beyond nations. It’s not because I now live in the United States, but because I start to look at history from God’s perspectives-without biased thoughts, nor cultural preferences.

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As the passage illustrates, not only did women mobilize religious identities to explain and to make sense of their unique social locations as immigrants, but they deployed religious perspectives to shape the way they thought about national identity. Given that most Korean church communities overlap with ethnic communities, it is a puzzling phenomenon that religion tends to promote more cosmopolitan worldviews, rather than more ethnocentric views. An interesting question arises here. Does Christianity make Korean women feel more American? Curiously enough, Christian women’s sense of sisterhood with the United States through religion does not necessarily lead to an “Americanization” of these women in spite of their favorable views on the nation. Women who consider America as a Christian nation were not any more “Americanized” than other women in my study (except for one intermarried woman) in terms of social ties and fluency in language and culture, nor did they have any lesser identification with Korean national identity. A few issues were at work in this phenomenon, most centrally the fact that these immigrant women’s Christian faith was practiced and materialized through all-Korean churches which were also ethnic communities embodying immigrant ethnic culture. Hence, identifying with an informal citizenship of the U.S. by virtue of their Christian faith did not signal Korean immigrant women’s cultural assimilation. Further, a favorable view on the U.S. did not change Korean immigrant women’s perception of their marginal and outsider status to mainstream America, a perception working as barriers to these women’s identification with the U.S. Thus, at least in my data, a feeling of affiliation with the U.S. via religion did not lead to changes in national identity. Nevertheless, the relationship between religion and national identity construction is a question which deserves further research efforts. In this chapter, I reviewed women’s strategies to construct and rebuild advantageous post-migration identities by finding continuities with their pre-migration

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identities and creating consistency in life patterns during the early settlement period. These efforts are responses to the disruption in life course incurred during the migration processes. I argue that the disruptive forces and women’s resistance to the disintegrating forces occur simultaneously, and in relation to each other. My data suggest that Korean immigrant women attempt to cope with the trauma of social demotion by redefining old identities, reaching out to premigration social ties, negating disadvantageous identities, and embracing religious identity which is newly gaining saliency. These assertive moves are closely linked to their desire to rediscover a sense of self-worth. More specifically, my data indicate that support from the family was an important source of strength, and a key to Korean immigrant women to reaffirm sustained identity. Hence, in the arena of women’s social ties and kin-keeping, transnationalism appeared to be somewhat compensatory to the trauma of losses incurred by migration. Structures of the nuclear family as well as a proximity to the “imagined community” of Korean immigrant communities also helped to sustain the salience of women’s identities as Korean women and mothers. In addition, Korean women strategically downplayed their status as racial minorities at the same time that they claimed their superior location visà-vis African-Americans and Latinos in the racial hierarchies of the United States. In doing so, they asserted their middle class identities in order to position themselves in an advantageous social location. These findings shed light on the complex interactions between post-migration changes and women’s strategies to construct and affirm their identities and self-worth in the changing economic and social contexts. In short, Korean immigrant women continuously make efforts to galvanize communities and resources to produce new identities and renegotiate old ones. A dynamic tension between disruptive forces and women’s resistance defines this process of post-migration identity construction. As such, women’s identity practices of class, race, and gender were linked to the structural

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systems of U.S. society which assign Korean immigrant women to identity categories which they perceived as devalued. In the next chapter, I pay particular attention to the ways in which gender and class intersect by examining more closely the gendered aspects of post-migration identity renegotiation.

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CHAPTER 5

Gendered Identities: Negotiating

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Work, Family, and Motherhood1

WORK AND MOTHERHOOD Jina Han is a cheerful and lively woman in her 40s. She came to the United States when she was twenty-one. Not having a college degree, she had worked as an office assistant before migration. The first thing she realized after arriving in the U.S., was that she needed a job (any kind of job) to survive. She started to work as a cashier at a green grocer. Through match-making, she met her husband, a college graduate who was driving a Taxi in New York, and got married. Jina and her husband worked hard at to save enough money to start their own business. Ten years after Jina had migrated, the Hans bought their first business, a drycleaner. They have operated drycleaners since then. Although she really loved working outside the home and the sense of autonomy that came with work, she has had conflicted feelings about the challenges that work presents to her role as a mother. 109

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The Hans have four children. Two were in high school and two were under the age of ten. For almost the entire time that her first two children were young, Jina worked from 7am to 7pm alongside her husband. She reported that she “completely left the care of house and children” to a Korean housekeeper and her mother-in-law who came from Korea to help. But when she had her third child much later, she decided to stay home. She stayed home for her two younger children until they were school age, and afterwards has worked only during the school hours, between 9am and 2pm. That she stayed home for the younger siblings troubled her two older children, Jina confessed, and led her to reflect on her mothering. In retrospect, Jina regretted that her older children might not have received the attention they deserved from their mother. While she did not give a second thought, at the time, about having to work full time, she feels guilty, in retrospect, about the differential mothering experienced by her now almost grown two children. Under the circumstances, she finds her present work arrangement to be ideal, which allows her to be fully engaged in her younger children’s school and extracurricular activities. As the discussions in the previous chapters suggested, women’s identity construction processes in the postmigration period are characterized by complex and conflicting dynamics. This chapter continues to explore the theme of conflicting experiences by examining different arenas of women’s gendered identity construction. I begin this chapter with Jina Han’s story because different phases of Jina’s life illustrate several issues which shape immigrant women’s multi-layered identity construction as workers and mothers. As other authors (e.g., Min 1998; Park 1997: 113138) have acknowledged, increased labor participation serves as one of the most significant contexts for Korean immigrant women’s identities as wives and mothers. Labor participation creates a tremendous tension between their roles as mothers and workers, since their work in ethnic economy typically requires very long work hours. Jina’s story demonstrates a few aspects of the tension. First, her

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enjoyment and pride in work exemplifies what Park (1997: 138) called a “growing sense of human dignity,” a sense of empowerment and self-fulfillment among working immigrant women, which I also observed in several of my informants’ narratives. This was not a uniform view on work though, even within my small sample. Other women, especially women with college and post-college degrees, perceived work in family businesses as “manual labor,” which clashed with their class identity. Second, long hours at paid work often undermined women’s identity as mothers. The different relationships Jina has had with her four children were illustrative of the conflicting views on mothering the participants had. WOMEN, MIGRATION, AND THE CONFLICTING EXPERIENCES OF DIS/EMPOWERMENT Scholars of identity (e.g., Fanon 1967(1952); Hall 1997) have established that power relations are involved in the dynamic process of identity construction and negotiation. Feminist scholars define that identity construction is of necessity a political process and that identity categories are fundamentally hierarchical (Mohanty 1991a; 1991b; Chow 1993). Hence, for immigrant women, identity renegotiation after migration is against the grain of the political economy of racialized and gendered U.S. society, even if women themselves may not be fully conscious of it. I demonstrated in the previous chapters that Korean immigrant women’s encounter with the social stratification systems at the host society resulted in a disruption in their life courses and identities. The continuities and discontinuities in women’s identities described in the previous chapters are precisely the products of the disjuncture between the identity classification systems of the U.S. society and those of the Korean society which had been the contexts of these women’s identities before migration. My analysis showed a strong theme of disempowerment in Korean women’s identity narratives, stemming from the downward class mobility. Did migration, then, only intensify oppression for

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Korean immigrant women who otherwise were able to enjoy class privileges in South Korea? Did migration bring any advantages to these women? How do different advantages and disadvantages shape the ways in which Korean immigrant women understand who they are? How do the circumstances of work and motherhood shaped women’s identities? This chapter further explores these questions in by focusing on women’s narratives of work, family, and motherhood. There are two different schools of thought about what happens to women after migration. Some studies emphasize women’s agency by citing increased labor participation and control over resources and decision-making in the household (e.g., Fernandez-Kelly and Garcia 1990; Foner 1986; Pedraza 1991). These studies highlight the changes in women’s status for the better. On the other hand, other authors focus on immigrant women’s disadvantaged labor market location (Hossfeld 1990; Parrenas 2001), and/or continuing patriarchal family ideology (Lamphere 1987) despite women’s paid work, henceforth on women’s loss of status. Hence, a sizable volume of research has debated in the past decades or so whether or not paid labor empowers immigrant women with greater autonomy. At the same time, there is a growing critique that the two processes may not be as antithetical as they appear, and that gains and losses in different aspects of life are to be analyzed simultaneously, and in relation to each other (Foner 1998; Pessar 1998). What has come out of the discussion is a growing recognition about simultaneous operation of disempowering and empowering forces that shape immigrant women’s lives. According to this new way of thinking, many of the changes immigrant women face after migration entail both empowering and disempowering elements (Parrado and Flippen 2005; Pessar and Mahler 2003; Pessar 1999; Foner 1998; Ferree, 1985; Morokvasic 1984). For instance, while paid work may allow immigrant women to gain greater economic independence from men,

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the needs for income simultaneously make women more dependent on their paid work and therefore prevent them from protesting unsafe and unlawful working conditions in their jobs (Morokvasic 1984). Foner (1998) argued that while wage labor may give immigrant women better bargaining power in decision-making and housework sharing, it fails to change much in traditional gender ideologies and role patterns which still lock immigrant women into subordinate domestic responsibilities. In these studies, the seeming contradiction between empowering and disempowering forces is conceptualized as a fundamental reality for women. In line with this view is Feree’s caution (1985) against imposing monolithic frameworks that assume consistency in working women’s lives which may be, in reality, fundamentally inconsistent. Indeed, the cultural and structural changes immigrant women experience through their daily lives during settlement processes are often paradoxical and simultaneously disempowering and empowering. Dis/empowering circumstances also mediate women’s shifting identities from full-time mothers to working mothers. As the above authors (i.e., Foner 1998; Morokvasic 1984; Feree 1985) argued, complex elements of empowerment and disempowerment are not mutually exclusive, but concomitantly integrated into immigrant women’s multi-faceted post-migration experiences. The challenge then is how to theorize and analyze the dynamics of dis/empowerment as lived realities, and move beyond merely juxtaposing conflicting conditions befalling on immigrant women. The method of analytic separation has been suggested by some scholars (e.g., Parrado and Flipen 2005). In this analytic strategy, different domains of women’s lives were separated and the gains and losses of power and statuses in each domain were measured, and weighed. While this strategy may be useful in highlighting immigrant women’s multi-dimensional realities, the

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findings in separatist analyses often do not go much beyond what have been already known in existing literature. For instance, Parrado and Flipen’s large scale study of Mexican women (2005) found that aside from increased employment opportunities and economic autonomy, migration tends to reinforce women’s subordinate status in most other areas, as evidenced by a higher compliance with traditional gender roles among Mexican immigrant women. What is missing in this type of analysis is how dis/empowerment in different dimensions of life interplay with each other, and how women experience such interplay as lived realities. I propose that one way to address this challenge is to recognize that the dis/empowering dualism is a lived reality, and focus on women own interpretations of dis/empowering conditions. As lived realities, incomeproducing work and women’s roles in the family are unlikely to be perceived by women as disparate realities. Rather, these facets are likely to be experienced as repeated and somewhat continuous everyday practices which constantly shape and reshape women’s identities as workers and mothers. For example, income from work outside the home is most often conceptualized as an improvement or empowerment by scholars; however, newly immigrant women who are adhering to traditional ideals of mother as full-time caregiver may not interpret that their income offsets their compromised roles or decreased autonomy as mothers. Hence, their attitudes about their paid work are likely to be ambivalent, and cannot be clearly separated from their reduced presence in and influence on their children’s lives and on the family dynamics. Hence, simultaneous dis/empowerment is not an external force that entraps women, but is negotiated reality contingent upon women’s relations to their changing locations within social structures. Thus, the paradox of dis/empowering postmigration realities exposes how women produce and negotiate identities as women, workers, and mothers under changing structural circumstances of post-migration period.

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KOREAN WOMEN’S WORK IN THE ETHNIC ECONOMY The context of Korean ethnic economy is important here, since Korean immigrant women most often work within Korean ethnic economy. South Korea has been one of the major immigrant-sending countries to the United States since the 1965 Immigration Act. According to American Community Survey (2006), 52.8% of Koreans who are 25 years and older have college education and beyond (U.S. Census Bureau). In order to overcome their labor market disadvantages in the U.S., these educated Korean immigrants have turned to small entrepreneurships, and have made a visible economic success as a group through this venue (Light and Bonacich 1988). The economic aspect of Korean immigrants’ settlement has been at the center of research interests for the past two decades. Studies (E. Lee 2006; Min 1997; Park 1997; Kim 1981) have identified women as important contributors to the ethnic economy. Korean businesses are mostly family-run small retail businesses2 where women’s work as unpaid workers is crucial. Moreover, in the unique setting of family business, the separation between work and family is often blurry, and gender relations and division of labor tend to seamlessly overflow from one domain to another. However, it is only in recent years that the gendered nature of Korean entrepreneurships and women’s roles within it began to receive closer attention by scholars. Some ethnographic studies (e.g., E. Lee 2003; 2006; Kang 2001) have highlighted different aspects of Korean women’s work such as women’s claims of business ownership and experiences of gender and race in service work, while others have focused on Korean women’s mothering practices (e.g., Kim et al. 2006; Moon 2003). However, few studies have explicitly examined the interpretive mechanisms by which these women perceive their challenging experiences in different domains and piece together polarizing forces into inter-connected realities that shape their identities. In addition, relatively little attention

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has been paid to women’s changing definitions of, and relationships to, work and motherhood, as they make their ways to an economic stability and acculturation. Thus, my discussions below build on and extend existing literature on Korean women’s work and motherhood. NEGOTIATING DEFINITIONS OF WORK Studies on immigrant women often associate positive meanings to women’s income-generating ability through employment outside the home, however, the ways in which Korean immigrant women in this study interpreted their work were far from monolithic. For the women in this study, work was neither empowering nor disempowering by definition, but rather had malleable meanings which hinged upon several issues including economic downward mobility, cultural perception of service work, and childcare. Depending upon how women perceive the connections between work and these issues, their attitudes about work fluctuated. In my sample, about half of the twenty respondents who had been married with children at the time of migration begun to participate in work outside the home for the first time after coming to the United States. Most of these women have had continuous work history since immigrating. At the time of the interview, these respondents generally expressed that they have come to appreciate the opportunities to work and developed positive identities as working women, however, this appreciation only came in time for the majority of the respondents. Many women instead admitted that they had reacted to work with varying degree of reluctance and ambivalence at least in the first years in the United States. They cited a few reasons for this perception. First, for those with children, work was a necessity, and not a choice; mothers would rather stay home with children who needed great support in making transitions into a new culture, but they were forced to work for income. Thus, many women viewed work as a direct sign of economic downward mobility as well as a demotion

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in status relative to their pre-migration statuses as middle class, stay-at-home mothers. Second, all of the respondents’ first jobs in the U.S. were low status jobs such as cashier, entry-level office work, and manicurist; these jobs are not associated with high education and women with college education would only reluctantly take these jobs. The struggle with this apparent downward occupational mobility was more pronounced among the seven women who had held professional jobs pre-migration. However, there was also a gradual change in women’s perspectives throughout the immigration stories. Reflecting the changes, there were fluctuations in their interpretations of work over time. Miran’s changing attitudes about work outside the home illustrate a typical shift in women’s perspectives. She is a woman in her late 50s, who has made the transition from middle class staying-at-home mother to a small entrepreneur after migration. When she first arrived in the United States, she was very much reluctant to go to work leaving her young daughter with a babysitter, however in her 30 years in the United States, she has experienced a change in her perspective on women’s work. She now finds her work fulfilling and productive. At first, I did not work, because I strongly believed that kids should be taken care of by their own mother. My husband originally had come with a plan to go to graduate school, but what can you do? He had to feed his family. He worked at a company [at first] and I was able to stay home… but in 1974, we came to New York and started a wig business in a Black neighborhood. So, I started to work with him. I left my kids to a babysitter. I had no choice. Luckily, I had a great babysitter, and my older daughter took good care of her younger brother…

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[Looking back] I think I had been somewhat ignorant and naive before. I had known very little of the world outside my home. But now, I want to make my own living. I would like to continue to work until I get very old. I feel a great joy when I realize, “oh, I was capable of doing this kind of work!” These days, when I visit Korea, I know that I am not crazy about Korean society. I would not have liked it there [had I stayed]. My friends in Korea do nothing. When I meet them, all they talk about is how they enjoy going to gyms, and saunas. That’s their lifestyles. But I cannot identify with them. Even if that kind of lifestyle symbolizes their wealthy statuses, oh, I could not live like that. After a few days, I find myself really wanting to come back home. I want to work as long as I can. I don’t think about an early retirement. Like this woman, many women’s narratives illustrated shifting perceptions on paid work over time, with varying degree of dis/empowerment associated with their identity as working mothers. The meaning of work was, then, something that women in my sample had to renegotiate over time. Issues such as downward mobility, status of work, and role as mothers interplayed with each other to frame the ambivalent definition of work. Downward Mobility and Work As it is the case with many other groups of immigrant women, the majority of Korean immigrant women engage in paid work for the first time after migration. A typical married Korean immigrant woman is likely to have at least high school education and former stay-at-home mothers of middle class families (Min 1998). Studies (Min 1992; Kim, Hurh, and Kim 1993) have linked married women’s labor force participation to Korean immigrant men’s occupational downward mobility due to immigration. According to these

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studies, Korean men’s reduced earning power forces married women to seek employment outside the home for the first time after migration. This was the case with ten women in my study. Because they began to work in order to compensate the husbands’ reduced income, the family’s economic downward mobility directly impacted these women’s interpretation of paid work. As a result, many of the women, even those who eventually came to appreciate the opportunity to become income producers, had been often ambivalent about their work, and even reluctant at the beginning of their settlement processes. For example Kooyeon refused to work at first: I didn’t work [at first]. I refused to work. It hurts my pride to tell you this story. I was told that, in America, women had to help out [economically]. They say women also have to pitch in. But I thought, based on my Korean values, men were supposed to be the breadwinners, and women were supposed to take care of the home by spending the money wisely. I thought only the professional women who want self-accomplishment would hold onto their jobs after marriage. That was how I thought. But when I came [to the United States], my in-law family pressured me to work. I felt that they did it for financial reasons. I began to wonder if they only view me as an additional income source. It hurt my pride a lot. I had a strong feeling of repulsion about working just because I needed money. Kooyeon, however, eventually decided to work to show her in-laws that she was capable of bringing in income. She began to work as a waitress at a Korean restaurant since she had heard that the pay was relatively good due to generous tips. She felt the work was physically hard and often humiliating, and moreover there was a tension among waitresses over splitting tips. She reluctantly kept working for a few months, but quit the job because her infant son

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became injured by a small accident while being taken care of by a babysitter. While the money was substantial for her, she decided that it was not worthwhile if she could not properly care for her child. Instead of working, she opted for receiving financial help from her affluent parents in Korea, allowing her to maintain the traditional role of stayat-home mother. For this respondent, paid labor was a symbol of her downward mobility and her husband’s inability to support his family, rather than an opportunity. While women generally understood that their income was essential in sustaining the family, bringing income was not immediately and readily perceived as empowerment as illustrated in the case above. There are additional reasons why earning income was not readily and uniformly received as empowerment by women. In general, immigrant women’s income is most often directly used to cover basic living expenses such as food, housing, and car payment for the family, allowing little extra buying power beyond necessities. It is simply hard to feel empowered when your paychecks are instantly used to barely keep the family afloat above poverty. In addition, in Korean ethnic economy, men are typically paid with the consideration of “family wage” while women are not, and therefore a married woman’s wage is likely to remain lower than her husband’s, allowing him to be still perceived as the primary breadwinner. In case a woman manages a family business with her husband, the business is mostly likely to be under his name, turning the wife into an unpaid family worker and diminishing her claims of economic contribution (E. Lee 2003). In another example, Hyun, a mother of then two daughters aged 9 and 10, resisted to work for nearly three years. Because her husband’s income was not enough to cover living expenses during this period, they had to dip into their savings. When the savings were nearly depleted, the Lees decided that they needed to go into a small business. Her husband purchased a newly starting business. Hyun had to help him. She remembered how difficult it was to engage in sales in order to make money.

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His income was cut deep and it was a hard reality. I agonized over it. I understood that we couldn’t make it just with his income, but at the same time, I wanted him to be able to take care of everything, like he used to. But I knew he couldn’t… Money was important then, because we were broke. The new business we had started did not generate any profit. So, money was very tight. The fact that I was selling this item to make money, not as some kind of promotion, but to do the sales with the urgency to make living…it was so humiliating. Hyun’s memories about her first work in the United States are thus framed mostly by economic difficulties, guilt for her children, and her sympathy for her husband who experienced a significant status loss. This was hardly an empowering experience for her. In time, she and her husband were able to recover from the initial setbacks, and eventually achieve economic stability, owning a retail business and a home in a New Jersey suburb. She now accepts her work as given; she would not want to stay home, although she would like less hours of work. Her family operates a retail store which opens 7 days a week. As Hyun’s case illustrates, one of the important factors which affect women’s interpretation of work appeared to be its economic rewards. Being forced to work for pay, many Korean women initially associated their work with the family’s financial difficulties. However, as work became a taken-for-granted reality, immigrant women tend to develop more positive and accepting perspectives on their employment. Furthermore, economic rewards increased as Korean families typically moved up to owning small businesses after saving initial start-up capital. Clearly, business ownership, which allowed the women greater income and autonomy, paralleled the respondents’ changing perspectives on work. Not surprisingly, I found that there were overwhelmingly more positive accounts of current work, despite long hours and physical fatigue, among the

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women whose family owned a business and who typically had a longer residency in the United States. Perception of Service Jobs Another issue which shaped Korean immigrant women’s relation to work identity was their perception of work in service industry. Korean women typically work within Korean ethnic economy either as employees or as coowners of retail businesses. For instance, Min’s study (1998) found that 75% of Korean immigrants worked in small business settings within Korean ethnic economy. Likewise, most respondents in this study started their first jobs at retail businesses such as fruit and vegetable stores, drycleaners, and nail salons. The jobs in these settings are perceived as physical and unskilled labor by Koreans, which negatively affected women’s perception of their work. Korean culture traditionally gives higher values to white-collar jobs which are associated with college education. Blue collar and service work are generally devalued regardless of the pay levels, because they do not require advanced education. Small scale retail businesses, the lifeline of predominant majority of Korean immigrants in the United States, are also not highly regarded in Korean culture. Hence, the jobs available for newly immigrant Korean women would be the type of jobs which educated women would have been ashamed of taking in Korea. Thus, work in Korean ethnic business was not readily considered as an empowerment by many of the respondents, and instead was often described with a somewhat selfdenigrating term, “mak-il,” which meant unskilled or low status physical labor that did not require education. For example: It [working for the first time] was physically hard…. I was not used to work. I got married right after college. I never had had a job before marriage. After immigrating, I had to work under someone else’s management. This also bothered me. The work was merely mak-il [physical labor]. In

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addition, I did not like being bossed around by someone else….(Sungok, business owner, 15 years in the U.S.)

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I know a few women who work at nail salons. I’ve heard them saying how degrading it is to work at a job which involved washing foreign women’s feet and so on. You know, those who come to the U.S. are usually educated women and have middle class backgrounds. But because of the language barrier, they had to work at nail salons washing someone else’s feet…I know that some of them feel extremely humiliated by it. (Young, retail worker, 3 years in the U.S.) This negative perception of service work was influenced by both traditional Korean values and the women’s premigration class identities. Thus, newer immigrants and women who had held professional jobs in Korea were most likely to struggle with the devalued work statuses after migration. Some women dealt with this sense of social demotion by treating their jobs as “temporary” even though they had worked in the same job for years. Others told me that their work did not represent who they were and instead emphasized other aspects of their identities such as being a Christian, being a mother (of academically successful children), or a graduate of a prestigious college in Korea. Business ownerships were also perceived to offset somewhat, though not entirely, the lower statuses of retail work; even though women would engage in the same sales and service work as the owners/operators of their businesses, they were likely to be conscious of their elevated statuses as owners.3 Thus, these various issues simultaneously framed the interviewed women’s attitudes about their work and income, producing ambivalent and fluid interpretations. Most importantly, downward mobility, income, job statuses, and relative earning power are all inseparable from women’s

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interpretation of work as empowering or disempowering. This, points to the needs to understand dis/empowerment as complex processes linking, rather than separating, different aspects of women’s pre-migration and post-migration experiences. In the case of Korean women in this study, income producing work in what were perceived as low status jobs was interpreted as the flip side of their downward class mobility. However, at the same time, most the respondents considered their lower income statuses as temporary and necessary part of settlement processes, while dreaming that, one day, they will be one of the Korean immigration success stories through small entrepreneurships. In this sense, women’s income production, albeit insignificant and far from empowering at first, was still viewed as a deposit toward upwardly mobile trajectory which later becomes a crucial framework for empowering interpretation of their work. Shifting Definitions of Motherhood and Identity as Working Mothers The trajectory of upward mobility is a key organizing framework for Korean immigrants’ understanding of their life in the United States (Park 1997). This was also a key mediator in linking work and motherhood in my data. The respondents’ emotions to and interpretations of paid work were intimately connected to their definition of ideal mothers. Being a mother was the single most important identity among the majority of my sample; 61% of the respondents picked “mother” as the most important identity label they associated with themselves. Given this, the ways in which women viewed work as empowering or disempowering was closely related to how these women defined motherhood, and how they perceived their work as contributing to or distracting them from fulfilling their versions of the ideal mother. In Korean culture, women’s roles as mothers are highly valued and sanctified, as the culture considers children, rather than the couple, as the center of marriage and the family (Lee and Keith 1999). In

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addition, the extremely competitive educational environments of contemporary South Korean society demand mothers’ extensive involvement in children’s academic progress. For this reason, a mother’s role as round-the-clock supporter, education coach, and supervisor is strongly emphasized. Hence, women’s employment, unless they have professional career, is often considered as not beneficial for children’s upbringing (Park and Liao, 2000). As a result, many middle class women whose husbands earn enough income to sustain the family opt not to work but dedicate themselves to child-rearing. This was largely the mindset with which the interviewed women arrived in the United States. The new demands of work after migration, therefore, initially were perceived to be in conflict with their devotion to mother roles. Not surprisingly, many respondents felt torn between these two forces, seeing their work as undermining their motherly dedication to children. Thus, the reluctance to work outside-the-home discussed above also was closely connected to their perception of mother role as round-the-clock caretaker. When facing the need to leave children for work, the respondents made careful decisions on whether the economic returns outweighed what would be compromised in benefits for the children. Thus, women with female relatives who could take care of children were overwhelmingly more likely to embrace work and perceive work as opportunities, while women without in-family childcare arrangements frequently experienced work as a compromise in mothering and recalled more negative emotions toward work. Sungok’s experiences illustrate typical struggles and negotiations many mothers in the sample went through. She had been a happilystaying-at-home mother before migration. But only weeks after she arrived in the U.S., she had to go to work at a nail salon. She described how difficult it was for her to go to work leaving her children behind.

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It was really hard to go to work leaving my child behind. I would bring them to a babysitter who was an old Korean lady living across the apartment building. My four year old son was a bit mature, but my daughter was only one. In Korea, all she knew was mommy. She used to be with me all day long. Being separated from me was very difficult for her. She would cry, and I struggled to turn my back to go to work. Every single day was like that. It was very tough on me. I cried too.

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This was a heart-breaking experience of disempowerment as a mother for Sungok. She confessed that she did not like the work for this reason, and did not seem to remember if she appreciated at all the income she was bringing home. Similarly, Injung, who had immigrated for “children’s education,” reflected on how heart-broken she felt when she was unable to be there for her kids in the first four years in the United States. As soon as her financial situation improved, she cut back her work hours; she was only working during the school hours at the time of the interview. Even though my kids don’t say it in so many words these days, it is very important that I can help them, and I can be there for them when they come home. I have wanted to do this for a long time. Now, after four years [of full-time work], I am able to do this. In America, we are told not to send kids to school if they don’t seem well, and if they get sick at school, the school would call to tell me to take them home. Before [I cut my work hours], I was completely torn when one of my children got sick. I couldn’t leave my sick child home alone, nor send her/him to school knowing the illness. We used to have only one car and my husband and I worked at two different places. At that time, neither of us was easily excused from work in the middle of the day to pick up a sick child at school. It was so difficult

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to endure. I would tell my children not to call home even if they get sick at school. It was so hard. These two women’s accounts and others in the data epitomize how disempowering immigrant women can feel as mothers4 when they are separated from their children by long work hours.5 Interestingly, for most of the interviewed women, this conflicting feeling about work did not last forever. Rather, many reoriented their cultural values and adapted to their new circumstances as working mothers. This shift was obviously supported by the local subculture of Korean community where women’s labor participation is most often taken for granted to expedite economic stability. As newly immigrant women are assimilated to the ethnic community where mothers’ employment is the norm, their perspectives on work outside the home and their definition of what it means to be good parents in the context of immigration also shifted. According to my data, the key issue which mediated the changing perspectives was the imperative of upward mobility. In my study, the majority of the respondents expressed overall status loss or downward mobility as the defining event of their immigration experiences. They, however, believed that what they had lost by immigrating would be compensated by children’s access to better opportunities in the United States. In other words, the respondents’ own disempowerment and sacrifices were believed to be the necessary soil for the children whose life would be better off, being raised in America. Hence, the family’s upward mobility to afford children’s top notch education soon became the logical imperative, and the responsibilities as mother/parent would soon overlap working for the family’s financial stability. As such, a theme of “vicarious achievement” through the second generation’s accomplishments was evident in many of the narratives I collected. Illustrating this point was Kyungjoo, a relatively recent immigrant:

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I have several friends who envy me and want to come to the United States. But I would tell them that there are good things and bad things. I tell them coming to the United States might be good for children, but parents would have to give up their ways of life…My American dream is for my kids to go to good schools, good high schools and good colleges, good ones, even if they may not be the best of the bests, and to have professional careers which they will enjoy and be happy with. I don’t have a big dream. But people tell me that it is a big dream [laughs].

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Likewise, another woman, Yoonmee, expressed her “dreams” about her son’s future: I would swear that I won’t bet everything on my kids, however I subconsciously wish that my children would live differently than I did. I think networking through schools and communities is very important in this country just as it is in Korea. I tell my son, and also say in my prayer, to become a leader. By this, I mean going into the mainstream, rather than simply making lots of money. Thus, the interviewed women often projected their children’s future success onto their current disempowerment as immigrants and mothers; the ultimate empowerment for the parents, then, none other than achieving their “American Dream” by the second generation. From this perspective, the mothers were determined to push themselves to provide for their children’s better life in the best ways they could, most often through their dedication to work and financial stability. Many perceived that acquiring financial stability and being able to raise children in good school systems were crucial for children’s upward mobility in the United States. Here, their disempowerment as the traditional mother-i.e., the stay-at-home caretaker-and-academic supervisor-, is being

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replaced by the new parental imperative of financial support which is perceived to be essential for improving children’s life chances in the United States. Thus, several women in my study explicitly expressed conscious awareness of their contribution to provide for their children, whether they earned separate paychecks or co-operated a family business. Ironically, these women found empowerment as mothers through their work by redefining themselves as providing mothers. Okkyung’s life story which was presented in the previous chapter poignantly illustrates this shift. When she came to the U.S. after having been part-time teacher and mostly full-time homemaker in Korea, Okkyung did not have a plan to work. However, her husband’s debilitating injury forced her to become the breadwinner, and changed her identity forever. She told me that the biggest change migration brought to her life was the mental and physical strength she developed by becoming the provider for her family. Thus, “providing” for the family replaced her long-held ideals of nurturing traditional mother, and work became a crucial part of her identity as mother. Similarly, many of the homemakerturned-to working-mothers expressed in various ways that working hard to achieve economic stability was a central responsibility of immigrant parents. In this context, many of the respondents found empowerment, ironically, in otherwise exhausting work. Work outside the home was thus accepted by the women as an alternative to the traditional mothering such as being there to greet children from school, helping with school work, and making home-made snacks and so on. Hence, by linking their work to their renegotiated roles as mothers and to “vicarious empowerment” through children, the respondents displayed agency in creating new positive meanings for work within the contexts of immigrant family.

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WOMEN’S AGENCY AND NEGOTIATION OF MEANINGS Korean immigrant women’s interpretations of paid work supports the idea that income producing work, changing class statuses, mothering, and children’s future are all experienced by these women as connected and contingent upon one another. Thus, interpretation of one aspect shaped and was shaped by the others. Korean women’s complex relationships to work revealed that work involved multilayered, dis/empowering meanings for Korean immigrant women, but in time, it has come to be viewed as generally positive. This was an important site of women’s gendered identity renegotiation. The shift from reluctance and disempowerment to general acceptance and positive meanings of work was mediated by women’s redefinition of paid work, class statuses, and motherhood. Acculturation into ethnic subculture and the particular economic needs of Korean immigrant communities expedited the shift in perspectives. As such, the definition of work was not simply empowering nor disempowering in and of itself, but constructed and reconstructed through women’s endeavors to create meanings of their lives in the contexts of immigration. My data show that Korean immigrant women’s attitudes on work and motherhood were directed by their redefined life goals in the U.S. contexts, especially in relation to their “American Dream” which was more closely tied to the second generations’ projected integration, rather than their own, into the mainstream U.S. society. The shifting definitions of work and ideal motherhood also indicate that women are active agents of change, rather than victims, in post-migration adaptations. I argue that interpretation was an important mechanism through which women grappled with, and made sense of their new realities and their new identities as immigrant mothers. The transition from more negative perceptions of work into positive and more empowering ones also reflect the reconciliation of women’s new identities as workers and their traditional roles as mothers. Through interpretive mechanism, the two identities which had been perceived as

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antithetical to each other at the beginning of the settlement process later became understood as inseparable. This merging of the two aspects of women’s identity is also consistent with a pattern which feminist scholarships have identified in the lives of poor women and women of color (e.g., Collins 2001; Glenn 1994; Dill 1988). While theories based on middle class women’s experiences often conceptualize work and family as competing frameworks that divide women’s time, energy, and priority (e.g., BlairLoy 2003), the struggle for the survival of the family has been central element of women’s devotion as mothers among working class and women of color. Likewise, Korean women in time reconciled their devotion to work and to family, and this was mediated by the imperative of upward mobility. The findings caution against onedimensional interpretations of women’s experiences in paid work and family. For immigrant women whose work is essential not only for the family’s survival, but also for the better future of children, their devotion to work is likely to be perceived as compensating, rather than competing, with their identity as mothers. As such, gender and class are intimately linked in Korean immigrant women’s redefinition of their various gendered identities. In the following chapter, I will examine a different type of agency linking pre- and post-migration identities, by which Korean women fluidly construct their post-migration identities

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CHAPTER 6

Shifting Reference Groups and

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Transnational Identity Negotiation1

NEGOTIATING IDENTITIES WITHIN AND ACROSS BORDERS Jungsun Kim came to the United States in 1999, after her husband had lost his job at a major corporation in Korea. Devoted mother of two children, Jungsun had had the life of a typical middle class wife in Korea, taking diligent care of the family and pursuing her passion in music in her leisure time. Upon arriving to the U.S., her husband took a job as a construction worker, training himself to become a contractor. She remained a homemaker for the first few months, while giving music lessons to a few neighborhood kids. However, the need for additional income eventually forced her to become a working mother. She has since worked as a secretary and a clerk at a retail store. Though work was a new challenge, she was happy to “make sacrifices” for her children who she hopes to establish their roots in the U.S. 133

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Hence, her primary concern was her children’s education. At the time of the interview, her family was living on a monthly income of $4,000, of which approximately $1,500 was being spent on the children’s tutoring and extra curricular activities. She considered the financial burden substantial but necessary. In times of struggle, she relied on her renewed Christian faith and a close circle of family and friends both in South Korea and within the Korean immigrant communities. Life in the United States was a lot tougher than Jungsun had imagined, and the family could not afford the same lifestyles as they had enjoyed in Korea. However, she still considered herself “middle-class,” compared to other Americans in her working class neighborhood because she was more educated than the neighbors. At the same time, she held a distinctive identity as a “newcomer” among Korean immigrants, who might be financially vulnerable, yet preserved much of the “good values” of the Korean culture. Four years after immigrating to the United States, Jungsun still faced uncertainties. Her husband’s contracting business was struggling, and the family did not have savings. But her children were more comfortable speaking English and did well at school. Jungsun relied on the hopes for the future of her children whom, she considered, were growing up as “Korean-American.” As Jungsun’s case illustrates, immigrant women’s life stories often reveal complex elements of disruption in individual biographies and resilient strategies to cope with them. Like Jungsun, Korean immigrant women and their families typically face occupational changes and financial challenges which lead to downward class mobility. As they try to bounce back from these setbacks and build new careers and new lifestyles, they needed to mobilize information and resources from the networks of kin and friends within the host communities as well as in the sending communities. I have, so far, examined several conflicting forces which shape Korean immigrant women’s identity construction and renegotiation processes post-

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migration. Specifically, the first generation Korean immigrant women in this study pieced together an understanding of who they were by confronting some of their pre-migration identities and, at the same time, finding continuities with some of their pre-migration identities. They also began to assert newly emerging identities within the unique contexts of immigrant communities, such as church-based identities. In the process, Korean women experienced both empowerment and disempowerment as workers, wives and/or mothers. One of the interesting aspects of immigrants’ experiences is their affiliation with more than one nation/culture. This allowed Korean immigrant women to organize their post-migration identities by mobilizing identity markers and reference groups from both Korean and American contexts. As this chapter will discuss, the routine practices by which they pulled together different identity constructs from both cultures in order to emphasize or downplay certain aspects of their identities set Korean immigrant women apart from “natives.” Furthermore, these identity practices indicate a unique pattern of incorporation into the U.S. society, one that simultaneously signals an adaptation into localized life patterns and a resistance to an assignment into underprivileged social categories in the U.S. society. Korean women’s post-migration identity renegotiation processes thus reveal interesting dynamics that are neither streamlined assimilation nor blinded adherence to their ethnic and culture roots. Rather, the women in my sample routinely practiced fluid strategies to imagine themselves as belonging to multiple communities including co-ethnic communities, peers in South Korea, and, perhaps less often, the larger U.S. society. TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL FIELDS AND IMMIGRANTS’ BORDER-CROSSING IDENTITY PRACTICES Unlike the traditional perspectives of immigrant assimilation, more recent “transnational perspectives” view

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that immigrants engage in life patterns and social relationships which continually link their settlements in the U.S. and their communities of origin through routine economic, social, and cultural connections (Basch et al. 1994; Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Guarnizo and Smith, 1998; Levitt, 2001). In this new perspective, immigrant communities are thought to form social fields crisscrossing national borders and foster an emergence of post-migration identities that are anchored in cross-border relationships and transnational social groups. Thus, studies in this perspective have argued and documented that many immigrants construct their multi-local and multi-cultural identities in such transnational social fields by simultaneously taking upon roles and obligations in the host and the sending communities (e.g., Fouron and Glick Schiller, 2001; Glick Schiller and Fouron, 1998). They can also mobilize various discursive resources from the social and cultural contexts of both societies (Lamont et al. 2002). Hence, many immigrants to the U.S. reportedly live in extensive flows of economic and cultural remittances which not only shape the immigrants’ lives but also bring changes to the sending communities (Levitt 1999). Immigrants from Caribbean regions and Mexican immigrants have been the groups more extensively studied with regard to their transnational identity and community building. My sample of Korean women, on the other hand, showed somewhat different patterns of identity organizing in multiple contexts. No research to date has indicated that a high level of transnationalism is a crucial component of Korean immigrants’ identity and community building. Korean immigrants’ travels back and forth to South Korea are likely to be limited because of the geographical distance, relatively high costs of travel, and their concentration in small businesses that require long and demanding work schedules. While the majority of participants of this study maintained some type of routine transnational connections, these connections were most

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likely to remain non-fundamental to their daily lives once they settled. Phone calls, and on-line contacts such as emails were common, yet, most of the respondents in my sample made trips back home no more than once every few years, and some visited only once in over a decade of residency in the U.S. None of the participants sent routine monetary remittances to South Korea to support remaining family members, though some would occasionally send small amounts of money as birthday or holiday gifts. None in my sample participated in political activities in Korea, nor contributed to community developments in Korea. Hence, the participants in my study were not involved in daily exchanges of remittances, social obligations, values, and cultural patterns with their communities in South Korea in the ways immigrants from Central and South America reportedly are. The most recognizable transnational practices among the interviewees were subscriptions to Korean mass media, as most of them routinely spent hours per week watching Korean TV shows, and internet news. Most importantly, my informants generally viewed the United States as the primary context of their lives, and considered moving back to Korea unfeasible. Hence, the contexts of their post-migration identity building appeared, at first, to be more local than transnational. Despite their localized life patterns, however, the routine practices by which the respondents pulled together different identity constructs multi-culturally to assert or downplay certain aspects of their identities were far from being locally confined. Rather, the participants in this study displayed a set of identity practices that allowed them to construct a sense of membership in multiple “imagined communities” without high levels of material and monetary exchanges with the home country. These imagined communities included variously the South Korean society back home, the larger U.S. society, Korean immigrant communities in the U.S., and the Korean Diasporas outside the U.S. In narrating who they were, the women in the sample transgressed geographical boundaries of the

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settlement communities not by way of their travels and social activities, but through identity practices that enabled them to construct multiple “communities of the mind” (Chayko, 2002: 39-41) organized in a sociomental space (Chayko, 2002: Zerubavel, 1993: 397-398). Chayko uses the term “sociomental space” to conceptualize a space in our minds where interpersonal social bonds are formed sometimes without face-to-face contacts. The term thus captures the idea that human activities occurring in the mind are not individual, but social (Chayko, 2002:2). These types of cognitive bonds are crucial in imagining oneself as belonging to groups that are not necessarily one’s immediate social networks. Using such cognitive bordercrossing, my respondents were able to situate their class, gender, and national identities in malleable and fluid communities stretching beyond national and cultural boundaries. A close examination of their narratives revealed several specific practices that allowed these women to perceive themselves as members of these multiple groups. Juggling multiple and transnational group memberships also provided a crucial tool for these women to resist their “downgraded” post-migration identities and assert more advantageous identities. FLEXIBLE IDENTITY STRATEGIES AND ASSERTION OF ADVANTAGEOUS IDENTITIES It is not peculiar to Korean women that they considered themselves as belonging to several groups cross-border. Transnational group memberships are indeed becoming more common as communication technology makes it faster and more affordable to keep connected with people who are geographically distant. This allows immigrants to hold several group memberships across borders and hold multiple cultural frames of reference (Das Gupta 1997; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997). What was interesting about the patterns in my sample was the way they used the fluid memberships and flexible frame of reference to construct their class identities. As I argued previously, the

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demotion in class statuses was a pivotal event in Korean immigrant women’s experiences of migration. This challenged what many middle class women considered as their core identities. Chapter four described various resources women pulled together to recover their sense of loss. In addition, a set of strategic uses of multiple group memberships helped women to downplay the status loss and assert more positive aspects of their identities. The strategies involved several related practices including flexible use of various identity markers, switching back and forth between different reference groups, and flexible definitions of their national and ethnic identities. Flexible Use of Identity Markers During the interviews, I asked the respondents about how they perceived their statuses pre- and post-migration. The respondents used several standards to evaluate their social standings. I found that the standards often shifted, and furthermore they were closely linked to the way the interviewed women reflected upon particular reference groups. The participants variously called upon different lines of social demarcation and identity to express their perceived social locations in different contexts. In doing so, women invoked different status markers to perceive and express their identities, and they often mobilized identity markers that would connect them to more privileged social groups in society. For instance, when asked about how they felt about their class identities and overall social standing after migration, several women gave rather complicated answers. Jayoung who holds two masters degrees from Korea spoke of her status in the United States as follows: I am probably lower class, economically speaking. But intellectually, I am as good as any American. I am lower class economically, and also, as I have mentioned before, based on the fact that I can never become part of the mainstream. I mean, because we are outsiders (Office worker, four years in the U.S).

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Here, Jayoung mentioned a few different issues which circumscribed her perceived class identities: “economically” which seemed to refer to income, “intellectually” indicating level of education, and finally her marginalized status in the U.S. society. As such, her narratives expressed multi-dimensional identities that were more complex than can be captured by a simplistic understanding that class refers to economic resources one possesses. While she conceded that her current income and social marginalization put her in the lower social strata, she clearly cited her education as independent status marker that would put her on equal footing with “Americans,” most likely, referring to white middle class Americans. Like Jayoung, most of the interviewees with college education emphasized their education to assert their middle class status regardless of current income levels. In fact, they were more likely to mobilize their college education as the status marker when their current income was perceived to be lower than middle class standards. Obviously, this approach is linked to the saliency of education and the social prestige associated with college education in Korean culture. Korean culture has a long tradition of valuing education. College education has been considered as an important source of social esteem independent of the job paths it may lead. Furthermore, college ranking is somewhat clearly defined in South Korea and the acceptance to top colleges requires surviving through fierce competition. For this reason, the rank of college a person graduates from has a direct relationship to his/her life chances. Hence, in South Korean society, one’s college credential (“hakul”) has long been inseparable from his/her socioeconomic statuses. Even if someone fails to achieve an occupational success despite a top college credential, s/he is still likely to receive high social esteem for the educational achievement. As such, college education especially a credential from the most competitive colleges has been treated as identity/status markers in and of itself.

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Thus, in Korean culture, not only whether one has a college degree but also where the person received the degree is a key biographical information which affects one’s selfwroth. In this context, downward economic mobility after migration was particularly problematic for collegeeducated women’s class identities. Moreover, as the respondents expressed variously, a lack of English proficiency often made them feel infantile, a feeling that strongly contradicted their pre-migration middle class identity. Numerous discussions on education were found in the data. Sora: Koreans, even those who have completed just a high school education, are still smarter than ordinary Americans because the curriculum is harder [in Korea]. And Koreans are generally smart. So, Koreans are at least middle class when they come here. It’s just that they don’t speak the language, but language is not that important, is it? KP: But new immigrants think language is important, don’t they? Sora: That’s true. But the standard of living in Korea is pretty high. Anyone who comes here should be middle class or above, considering their education and so on. Koreans are good (40 year old mortgage broker, 15 years in the U.S). I think Koreans are mostly middle class. For example, most of us send kids to college, and very few Korean people are on welfare… Koreans, except for a few in very difficult situations, can earn their living if they don’t mind the hard labor. For this reason, Koreans can be considered middle class. Well, people who work for wages may think they are lower class, and there may be some people who are unemployed for personal reasons. But, considering education and so on, wouldn’t they still be middle class? These things make us a higher

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class. But we [Koreans] underrate ourselves because of English (48 years old nail salon worker, 23 years in the U.S.).

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As evidenced in these narratives, various issues such as education, income, and fluency in culture (especially in language) affected the ways in which Korean immigrant women defined their class identities. While it is also the case in the United States that class identification involves more than income, my respondents had the tendency to more forcefully mobilize education as an independent status marker, clearly separated from income and language fluency. Give the trauma of economic and occupational downward mobility, the mobilization of college education as key class marker, independent of income, appeared as a strategic move to overcome an assignment into lower class in the U.S. contexts. In other words, emphasizing college education to assert middle class identities was a critical identity practice to form positive self-perceptions in the host society. Shifting Reference Groups This complex interpretation of class identities by my respondents was also closely linked to the multiple and shifting reference groups that they had. During my interviews, I deliberately suggested no particular reference group when I asked the women about how they perceived their overall statuses, or place in this society. Most informants did not ask back whom they were supposed to compare themselves with, but spoke on the basis of an assumed reference group, or groups. Three different contexts surfaced as salient reference groups. These were the groups in comparison to whom my respondents continuously evaluated their relative ranks: other Korean immigrants, “Americans” in general, and/or their peers in South Korea. For some people, one of these reference groups appeared to be a lot more important than others. For instance, nine of the eighteen women (50%) to whom I

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asked about their ranks in society, or statuses (“jiwee”) gave an answer exclusively in comparison with other Korean immigrants. For instance: KP: What do you think is your rank or status [jiwee] in U.S.? Ayoung: Middle. KP: Do you think that based on your income? Ayoung: No, not just income. I consider that I am relatively fluent in English among Koreans, and my economic status is not too bad, compared to [Korean] people of my age… for these various reasons (32 year old store owner, 13 years in the U.S.).

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Here, my question indicated the larger U.S. society, but the respondent immediately compared herself with her peers among Korean immigrants. Several other women also instantly referred to the Korean immigrant community, when I asked about their relative standing. I envy people with secure jobs. I mean, people who achieved business ownerships within a short amount of time. It takes about ten years [to be able to buy a business], doesn’t it? That is not too long. I see people who have homes, own businesses, and spend money more freely. Then, I wonder if I would be able to have all that. If we had come much younger, we may have been able make it. People ask us what we think we can do, immigrating at this age (Jinsook, homemaker, 1 year in the U.S.) KP: Have you ever thought about your status, and if you have, how would you rank yourself in this society? Young: Among Americans? Not among Americans? Among Koreans?

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KP: Whom do you consider? Young: We don’t have relationships with Americans, do we? I want to [compare myself with them], but I can’t because I don’t socialize with them. (37 year old office worker, 3 years in the U.S.).

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Clearly these women assumed that their socioeconomic status should be evaluated against the achievement of fellow Korean immigrants. Their sense of class identity was also assumed based on their relative standing among co-ethnics. On the other hand, another group of women (33%) referred to their ranks in general U.S. society when being asked of their place in the social hierarchy. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, these women made the clearest distinctions between their income-based class, and educational attainment. For example: We are close to being the lower class. But I had a talk with some other [Korean] moms the other day about how we should be considered as being higher level than other American mothers in this school district. The only problem is that we can’t speak the language. The levels of education and intellect among these people are very low. School curriculum is easy. I think Koreans are higher statuses. So, I don’t feel that my rank is low in this sense, but I am lower class, money wise (33 year old stay-at-home mother, 18 months in the U.S.). I don’t think we are any lower than them [Americans]. I think we are middle to upper-middle class among Americans, based on our intellectual level, culture, and knowledge. We are not any lower than average Americans, but we are just not fluent in their language (39 year old store clerk, 4 years in the U.S.).

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Thus, when the larger United States society was considered, the participants were likely to emphasize their college education and use it as a key identity marker. As shown in the excerpt, many of them routinely claimed middle-class status based on college education. In short, this was a strategic practice to construct more empowered postmigration class identities. Though smaller in numbers (10%), some considered their peers in South Korea as the most salient reference group, despite an understanding that migration was now irreversible. For these people, a comparison of their prosperity (or sometimes lack thereof) with those of their friends/relatives in South Korea sometimes assured them of the benefits of migration, however, in other times, reaffirmed their overall social demotion due to migration. For example, Taeran explained how her husband thought of his peers in Korea: My husband has seven or eight friends with whom he used to hang out. Among them, my husband was the first one to find a job in advertising. Two or three friends followed into the field him afterwards. Of these people, one very successful friend is now in charge of a division in a very large advertising firm. Other friends in smaller firms more heads of their departments. My husband has friends in Korea who now own their own firms. I can see my husband think of these people in Korea, and imagine what he might have achieved by now, had he stayed in Seoul. He doesn’t say anything, but I can make a guess (40 year old human resources worker, 12 years in the U.S.). As illustrated in these excerpts, projecting oneself against an imagined timeline, along which one’s own generation/cohort in Korea is presumably making socioeconomic advances constituted a crucial part of these immigrants’ transnational identity construction. In this

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dynamics, the peers in Korea were imagined to be continuously making upward mobility with progression of age, and immigrants interpreted and evaluated their relative social standing in the U.S. in comparison with that of reference groups in Korea. However, it is also worthwhile to note that the majority of participants did not think exclusively about one group at all times. Rather, different reference groups appeared at different points in the narratives, indicating fluid shifts in these women’s “significant others.”

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KP: Your rank is a relative thing. With whom are you comparing yourself ? Hyun: I am nothing, compared to wealthy Korean immigrants here, and also nothing compared to wealthy people in Korea. While many respondents seamlessly switched back and forth between reference groups as they attempted to articulate their class identities and social ranks, others were more clearly conscious of the co-existing multiple reference groups. For example, when I asked about her overall status, Hee asked back what reference group I had in mind: KP: What do you think is your overall status is in the United States? Hee: Do I use American people as the standards, or Koreans? KP: Whom do you consider more important to you? Hee: I don’t know many American people. Within the U.S., among Korean immigrants, within this County, I think I am at least middle class. Higher may be? I am about three on scale of one to five. KP: What are the measures of class? Income? Hee: I consider economic issues, and education. KP: Do you mean your college education?

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Hee: Yes. I have no inferiority complex whatsoever with regard to education. In fact, in terms of education, I feel that I am above middle class. But now I see that credential itself may not be the most important thing. I also value practical abilities. My husband’s boss, for example, went to N university [a second tier university in South Korea], but he is very capable and very smart. KP: Some people tell me that Koreans are less than middle class because we are minority here… Hee: I disagree. I talk to a lot of Americans because I speak relatively better English [than other Korean immigrants]. When I talk to my neighbors, I realize that even economically we are not doing bad at all. I know the average income of this neighborhood. I think I am middle-middle class at least. Perhaps, on a scale of 10, [I am] about six? Among Korean immigrants only, I may be about seven on a scale of 10. In terms of education, I may be eight (37 year old on-line business owner, 6 years in the U.S.). This respondent’s accounts demonstrate how relative social standing was measured in a great complexity against precisely defined, multiple reference groups. Thus, simultaneously confronted with shifting reference groups, she was unable to define in one simple term her location within the social hierarchy. Because the interviewed women’s particular class identity was formed vis-à-vis varying reference groups, sometimes the way they self-evaluated their class location was incongruent with their objective economic standings based on income. For example, I met a woman who ran a laundromat with her husband. According to my judgment, she was an upper-middle class, owning a home, a business, and an income producing building with several apartment units. Her self-identification, however, was that of a lowermiddle class because her primary reference group was wealthier members of her all-Korean church. She told me

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that she belonged to a congregation where many members were very rich and/or held professional occupations. These members appeared to be important reference group to her as she answered my question about her class identity:

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Based on our lifestyle right now, I would say we are a little above the lower class, maybe. I don’t think we have even made the middle class. I feel like this perhaps because I see so many wealthy people in my church. There are maybe more than twenty doctors attending our church. There are a lot of women doctors too. Sometimes the husband and wife are both doctors… They come to church welldressed and in fancy cars… When I go to Palisades Park, I see so many women in fancy clothing and jewelry. But I am not interested in things like jewelry. My house is modest…We only bought a small three-bedroom house, because we thought my son and daughter-in-law would move out and get a place of their own (my emphasis). While this woman lived with no worries about money, it was clear that her measures of middle class identity were other than economic security. Having only high school education, she seemed to value the social esteem which the professionals at her church enjoyed. Consumption and lifestyles also affected her evaluation of class. Despite her financial stability, she underrated her class position by comparing herself with her primary reference group in these measures. Throughout my interviews, the majority of the respondents switched between groups, and emphasized or deemphasized various measures of class identity accordingly. Simply put, post-migration class identity was not defined by income and occupation only, but negotiated and renegotiated situationally and with regard to shifting reference groups.

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Reference Groups Within: Grouping Among Co-ethnic Immigrants In addition, when identities were discussed in the context of Korean immigrant community, a unique social boundary between “longer-residents” and “newcomers” emerged. “Longer-residents” referred to people who have lived in the United States for relatively longer period of time, exceeding ten years or so according to a popular definition among Korean immigrants. “Newcomers” referred to relatively recent immigrants. While these definitions are self-explanatory, this demarcation was more than a simple measure of length of residency, and had a connotation of class and ethnic identity. According to the perception of my respondents, “longer-residents” were considered to be financially established and own businesses and homes. They were often equated with an upward mobility into middle class statuses in the U.S. On the other hand, the label “newcomers” referred to a lack of middle class privileges. Furthermore, different degree of cultural assimilation was also implied in the distinction. For instance, when someone was referring to herself as a newcomer, there was the connotation that she was not “Americanized” and was likely to preserve the good Korean value of reciprocity and communal caring. Thus, those who emphasized this social demarcation were more likely to be “newcomers” who critiqued “longer-residents” as relatively rich but individualistic people. Respondents with five years or less of residency in the United States most often demonstrated this unique oppositional identity as “newcomers” who were perceived to be economically vulnerable, however, more authentically Korean than the longer residents. This demarcation was perhaps linked to the fact that more experienced immigrants were often suspected by newcomers as potential exploiters, a pattern also found studies on other immigrant groups (e.g., Mahler, 1995). Hence, this labeling within the Korean community indicated an in-group distinction based on class and cultural

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assimilation. For example, Moonyoung who considered herself as a newcomer emphasized cultural authenticity when spoke of this demarcation: KP: Do you feel that you now belong to the “Korean Diaspora” who live outside the country? Moonyoung: No, I feel as if I am still living in South Korea, because I have not been here long enough. KP: Who do you think the term “Korean Diaspora” refer to? Does it refer to someone else? Moonyoung: I think so. Those are the ones who have lived here for a long time and have much experience as immigrants. I am different. KP: How are those people different from you? Moonyoung: They are more Americanized, perhaps. People who have lived here longer, they think differently. I am new. Old-timers have different ways of thinking. KP: How? Tell me more. Moonyoung: Life here is simple, as I have said, which, I suppose, can be considered as a positive thing. Old-timers live a very simple life here. In Korean culture, if we received a favor or gift from someone, we ought to return the favor. There is the norm of reciprocity. But those who are here for long time…dare I say that they are more individualistic? They care very little for others. It’s so simple, isn’t it? They are different [from people like me]. I don’t mean that they are bad, but they just don’t think beyond themselves. So, there is no touching exchange of friendship. Life itself is too busy here, also… (48 year old store owner, 5 years in the U.S.) For others, this grouping had important class implication, since newcomers were perceived to be potential victims of exploitation by established co-ethnics. Kooyeon who believed that she was swindled by fellow Koreans spoke of her suspicion:

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Kooyeon: I have been upset with other Koreans, those who were members of the same immigrant community. I felt they took advantage of me… My situation wasn’t optimal then and I was in need [of a job and money]. Perhaps, they would claim that they helped me. I guess they could say that. But, they were the ones who got more out of the deal. They helped me a little in the process, but they weren’t really helping me. KP: Who were those people? Kooyeon: Well… I don’t really know. Perhaps they were the people who had lived here for a while... But no doubt, they were much more familiar with the American system than I was, and knew how life works in the U.S.

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Another woman who immigrated four years ago directly expressed her oppositional identity to the longer residents: I don’t want to associate with those who have lived in the U.S. for long time. I try to avoid them because I feel that I always become taken advantage of, whenever I deal with them. I end up regretting it. I end up thinking I shouldn’t have met them. This is not right…I should feel good about meeting new people, and not be left with a feeling of being used…. People who have lived here long are not sincere in their friendships. I am not that way. I am heartbroken when I see that kind of people. Perhaps, I need to change myself, like those people, into the American way [smile]. But, then, it would mean that I am becoming one of them. I don’t want that. I would rather live my way, and hope that, someday, they will notice my sincerity. Americanized people [Korean immigrants] take advantage of people like me. They don’t give me the information I need, and

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they don’t give me advice when I really need one (Injung, a business owner, 5 years in the U.S.). Interestingly, the longer-residents did not hold strong oppositional identity vis-à-vis the newcomers. The most common complaints old-timers in my sample had against some newcomers was that the newcomers these days were not ready to endure the hardships of early settlement the way they had. In other words, the veteran immigrants considered that the economic and cultural struggles of the first few years were rites of passage to American life and a necessary condition for an upward mobility. While they were aware of the class distinction between established immigrants and newcomers, longer-residents did not see the two groups as in exploitative relationships. Hence, while experienced immigrants were perceived by newcomers as a distinct group and an oppositional reference group, newcomers did not serve the same function as a reference group to old-timers. The existence of multiple reference groups and shifting reference to different social groups to whom Korean immigrants simultaneously belong were important part of Korean women’s identity practices. Strategic uses of identity markers such as levels of education were often linked to the different reference groups the respondents invoked, as they tried to reconstruct their class identity. These practices illustrate how Korean women produced class and ethnic identities by anchoring themselves in several “communities in mind” (Chayko, 2002).2 I would like to call these communities “strategic imagined communities,” in the sense that immigrant women would call upon these different significant others in order to assert or downplay certain identities and status markers situationally. Here, strategic imagined communities refer to the multi-dimensional reference communities that my interviewees constructed in a cognitive space to mobilize more advantageous post-migration identities. These communities point to a sociomental space, transgressing

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geographical and cultural boundaries of the settlement communities. In this sociomental space, Korean immigrants, albeit with limited transnational practices, can organize their multi-national/multi-cultural identities fluidly by shifting and moving in and out of the several reference groups to which they perceive themselves as simultaneously belonging. I interpret that this practice was a strategy of resistance which allowed the participants to cope with the unfamiliar forces of race and class identity classification systems in the U.S. which they were thrust upon after migration. These women’s “cognitive bordercrossing” enabled them to selectively and gradually ease their ways into the identity classification systems of the United States. Hence, rather than having to completely forfeit their middle class identities, and form working class identities, the women in my sample fluidly preserved and related to their pre-migration class identities by way of invoking education as class markers and focusing on fellow Korean immigrants as a key reference group. Flexible Definitions of Citizenship and National Identities Flexible and malleable nature of post-migration identity renegotiation in transnational social fields is also wellillustrated by immigrant women’s understanding of national identities. Immigrants are often referred to as people who are anchored in two nations (Chaney 1979). While it was clear that all of the women in this study considered themselves belonging to both the U.S. and South Korea, the respondents’ narratives also suggested that belonging to a nation had layered definitions. In the conversations I had with my interviewees, I found an unspoken understanding that they were affiliated with these nations in different ways, and that citizenship and national identities could mean different things in different situations. For instance, the interviewees often displayed a subtle differentiation in describing their identification with the two nations. They would call Korea “my own country,” or “mother country”

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while the U.S. was typically referred to as “where I will live my life,” or as “the site of my life.”3 Though both expressions in the Korean language commonly carry a sense of bond with the nations, the first set of words signal more emphatic identification to the nation. The latter two expressions do not connote national identification per se, however, they implicate no less significance than the emotional allegiance of the first set of words. While both significant, the different nuances of these words indicated that my respondents’ relationships to the two nations were defined differently with varying degree of passion and utilitarian concerns. The following excerpts from various interviews can illustrate this differentiation: I read Korean newspapers. I learn about U.S. news through Korean media. I am very much interested in Korean news. I also follow U.S. news, but I confirm them through Korean media since I am not sure [of my English] [laughs]. I think I am interested in reports on Korean politics. About the U.S., I am most interested in news about current economy. Even when I look at reports about war and politics, it is because they are related to economy. Economy is related to my business and my life. I don’t consider this country as “my country,” but I am interested in how to make a living here [laughs] (Store owner, 5 years in the U.S.). Both things in the U.S. and situations in Korea matter to me. I think things in the U.S. are more important to me, but I don’t know more about them [than I know about Korean current affairs] (Store owner, 13 years in the U.S.). I follow Korean news closely through TV. There is a news segment in the Korean broadcast…I pay attention to economic news, big accidents, and

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things like that….When I watch the Korean channel, there are reports about the U.S. society, too…. Otherwise, I ask my children…I feel the U.S. society matters to me mostly because of I have business here. I get a feel for current state of the society by looking at how busy or slow my business is. Mostly so. Economy is related to my living, and my daily life. Otherwise, it would not be a big deal (Store owner, 15 years in the U.S.).

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These accounts suggest that my interviewees had an understanding that they had higher stakes in the U.S. society than in Korea even if they maintain emotional identification with the home country. This made them to pay closer attention to the U.S. society, especially to economic issues that had more direct impacts on their jobs. Thus, belonging to a nation had layered meanings which may not overlap with which citizenship they held. For instance, Sungok was already a naturalized citizen of the U.S. at the time of the interview. However, she instantly identified with Korean national identity: KP: Do you consider yourself Korean? Sungok: Me? Of course Korean! KP: What if South Korea and the U.S. are in some kind of competition, in sports, for example? Sungok: I would root for Korea. No doubt about it. KP: Do you think of the U.S as perhaps your second homeland? Sungok: Yes. I cannot ignore this country. I always wish things to be prosperous in this country. I hope things are always peaceful, and economy is good, so that I can live a good life here. I hope everything to be well and smooth in this country. In this excerpt, Sungok’s sense of belonging to the two nations was not exactly equivalent. Her allegiance to Korea was more passionate, while her belonging to the United

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States seemed to be guided by somewhat utilitarian concerns, though it was not any less significant than her emotional identification. In addition, her ties to the United States were perceived to be more immediate to her everyday life. Hence, Sungok deeply understood her stake in the United States society, and the direct impact of its economy on her survival. As evidenced by the participants’ concerns for economic issues in the host society, many of them held somewhat utilitarian approach to their belonging to the U.S. This attitude was more clearly demonstrated when we discussed the issue of naturalization. Especially after the reform of immigration laws in 1996 which restricted social security benefits given to green card holders, many permanent residents have been encouraged to be naturalized. Utilitarian interests in citizenship were evident in several respondents’ narratives. People around me say that there used to be no inconvenience even if you only have a green card. However, things are now different; we need citizenships. I’ve seen people who once were content with a green card apply for citizenships nowadays. I intend to do so, too. There are several concerns…. For example, I myself never drive after drinking, but if a green card holder, not a U.S. citizen, gets caught on drunk driving, s/he can get deported. If we travel overseas, citizens get through airports in no time, but green card holders have to wait in line. It’s inconvenient. Some people don’t like the idea of giving up Korean citizenship, but I am not a patriot [laugh]. So, if it is a necessity here, I will do so (33 year old stay-at-home mother, 18 months in the U.S.). Upon being naturalized, Korean immigrants must relinquish their South Korean citizenship because South Korean government does not allow dual citizenships.

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However, the emotional loyalty to Korea among naturalized Korean immigrants often remained unchanged after they had become formally “Americans.” Thus, those who had obtained, or were considering naturalization for utilitarian reasons did not change their national identification with Korea, calling themselves “Korean,” and South Korea “my country.” Because Korea has been considered as mono-ethnic country throughout its history, Korean ethnicity and Korean nationality4 are often understood to be one among South Koreans. Hence, identification with Korean ethnicity is conflated with Korean national identity, contributing to the continuing identification with Korean nationality among naturalized Korean immigrants to the United States. Thus, the ethnic/national identification, “Korean,” also had layered meanings. My respondents almost univocally understood themselves as “Korean.” All women in this study, except for one woman who migrated at the age of sixteen, identified themselves simply as “Korean.” Fourteen of these women have lived in the U.S. for over ten years and had an understanding that the United States was their home and that they would not return to South Korea. Among them, eight women were naturalized citizens. However, regardless of their decision to stay in the United States for the rest of their lives, they defined themselves by the Korean nationality. I am Korean. I don’t think myself as immigrant. I am not an American yet [laugh]. I think my child may be 70 percent Korean and about 30 percent American. But I am just Korean [laugh] (Hee, 6 years in the U.S.). The labels “Korean” and “Korean-American” casually refer to one’s ethnic, cultural and/or national identities in the United States. For “native” white population, the term often remains unproblematic, and “optional” (Waters, 1996). For immigrants and people of color, these terms may imply

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more complex meanings. According to Park’s analysis (1999) of this ethnic labeling, there are at least three dimensions at work in these terms. There is the ethnic dimension in which blood ties and/or places of birth take precedence in its definition. Then there is the dimension of cultural identification, which is related to familiarity to a particular culture. The terms also indicate national identification. What becomes problematic for immigrants is that the three layers of meanings are sometimes incongruent with one another, and not a perfect fit to describe their identities. Hence, being “Korean” for these women had layered meanings that simultaneously pointed to several issues, including ethnic roots, cultural in/fluency, ambivalent national allegiance, along with a feeling of belonging to the ethnic communities. At the same time, identifying with Korean ethnicity, and not with a hyphenated identity, reflected an awareness of their marginal statuses in the U.S. society as well as their perceived cultural incompetence. Thus, imagining to belong to the home country where they social ranks were perceived to have been higher served as a method of resistance for the respondents to becoming marginalized members of the U.S. society. Interestingly, most of the interviewed women used a different ethnic label, “Korean-American” when they referred to the second generation Koreans. This was the case, regardless of the children’s citizenship statuses, as illustrated in the following quotes: I am Korean. I don’t think myself as immigrant. I am not an American yet [laugh]. I think my child may be 70 percent Korean and about 30 percent American. But I am just Korean [laugh]. I am Korean, but I tell my children that they are Korean-Americans. I am doing this because I am afraid that my children may mistakenly think themselves as Americans. They may not think

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themselves as Korean, that’s fine, but they are not African-Americans, right? I am Korean. My basis is being Korean. My root is Korean, no matter how long I have lived here... There is an annual international fair in this town. If you don’t have the Korean roots, what would you do then? So, even kids who grow up here still need to know where they came from. But I am Korean, even if I become fluent in English. The first excerpt is particularly interesting since it was from an interview with a respondent whose family had nonimmigrant visas. The family was in the process of applying for green cards. Notice here that only her child who, like his parents, had been born in South Korea and was staying in the U.S. under the same non-immigrant visa, was referred to as somewhat “American.” In this respondent’s definition, acculturation was considered as the key to the distinction between “Korean” and “Korean-American.” That the interviewed mothers insisted on identifying themselves as “Korean” while understanding their children to be “Korean-American” also implied several things about ethnicity and its relation to social marginalization. First, the first generation women’s self-identification as “Korean” not only pointed to ethnic roots, cultural in/fluency, and national allegiance, but also a strong feeling of belonging to the ethnic communities. At this same time, this identification no less reflected an awareness of their marginal statuses and cultural incompetence in the U.S. society, which was expressed repeatedly by the majority of the participants. As many of the narrative throughout the chapter indicated, continuing identification with Korea, even after being naturalized, was in part caused by their marginal statuses in the U.S. Hence, the mothers believed that their children’s competence in English and American culture would enable them to have different relationships to U.S. society. My data also pointed to the mothers’ conviction that, with cultural fluency and perhaps with the

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same education as “natives,” the children might become Korean-American, meaning, they would have equal footing as (white) Americans and were entitled to join the mainstream U.S. society. For these children then, the mothers expected, the “Korean” part of the hyphenated identity might indeed signal ethnic and/or cultural heritage without being the marker of marginalization and outsider statuses, as it did for the mothers themselves. This perspective was clearly expressed by Yoonmee who described how she expected for things to work out for her son.

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I tell my son that he is a Korean-American. I tell him that by this I mean that he has to equip himself with all the merits of being Korean while enjoying the rights as an American, and fulfilling his obligations as an American. I tell him that he shouldn’t be limited to Korean characteristics, but be an American who knows his heritage. As such, for Korean immigrant mothers, their children’s ability to be truly identified as “Korean-Americans” really referred to the second generation’s integration into the mainstream of the U.S. society, without being negatively affected by their identities as a racial minority. Korean immigrant women’s strong desire for their children’s integration into the United States society was also embedded in some mothers’ move to be naturalized for the children’s sake. Thus, a strategic and utilitarian approach to U.S. citizenship was also taken on behalf of the second generation’s interests too. In this regard, it was notable that a number of my informants had obtained or were planning to apply for citizenships so that their children would be easily naturalized in one group process. In these cases, changing nationality rather signaled the children’s integration to the United States, than the women’s own incorporation into the country.

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“TRANSLATION”: USE OF MULTIPLE FRAMES OF REFERENCE As shown in the above analysis of identity markers, reference groups, and complex definitions of national identity, the practices and processes of Korean immigrant women’s post-migration identity construction reflect their exposures to multiple cultures and to different systems of social hierarchy. By way of living in transnational contexts, immigrant women developed an ability to pull together resources and cultural repertoires from multiple societies so as to use them as a “tool-kit” (Swidler 1986) in “doing” their identities flexibly and situationally. Their knowledge of multiple cultures and social systems thus provided them with tools to reconstruct and renegotiate their multi-layered identities after migration. One interesting pattern I found in my study was that immigrant women tried to make sense of their new surroundings after migration by comparing them to what things had been like “back home.” For instance, many of the recent immigrants did not have a clear concept of race having lived in a mono-racial society. On the other hand, they had a conscious understanding of class, since class is the primary axis of social hierarchy in Korean society. I observed that many of my interviewees used their understanding of class stratification to make sense of racial hierarchy of the U.S. society. Hence, being Black was often equated by my respondents as being lower class or poor, and being middle class was somewhat equated with being White. In this simplistic transposition of class with race, Hispanics and Asians were often overlooked as distinct groups, and Black middle class and White lower class tend to elide the respondents’ imagination. As discussed in earlier chapters, the interviewees showed a tendency to perceive their social ranks in class terms, while being somewhat oblivious to their racial minority status in the U.S. society. As such, I found that many of my interviewees interpreted and understood many other aspects of the U.S.

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society through a practice I would call “translation.” What I am referring to is a translation of the host society’s social systems into comparable aspects of immigrants’ societies of origin, using the frames of reference which these immigrants are familiar with. Borrowing Ruth Behar’s (1993: 275) conceptualization of the term, defined as dialectic interactions resulting from women’s positioning in different social and cultural contexts, I use “translation” to refer to the various ways in which my informants tried to understand the systems and cultures of the U.S. by constantly comparing and weighing them against those of Korean society. Thus, practices of translation included comparison, selective interpretation and cross-critiquing between the two countries’ social structures and cultural traditions. A simple illustration of translation would be the routine practices of currency conversion travelers and new immigrants do in order to assess value of everyday goods. Those who are unfamiliar with local currency can only make judgments on values by comparing them with what the same things would cost in their native currency. Similarly, Korean women sometimes reacted to the unfamiliar social hierarchies of the United States, by comparing how things had been in their countries of origin. There were several different ways of practicing translation. First, the interviewed women often assessed their life in the United States in comparison with how things had been before migration, or how they would have been if they had stayed there. If they consider their current overall standards of living and/or class statuses as better than their pre-migration statuses, they expressed satisfaction with their lives in the U.S. In other words, how their lives fared in U.S. society was often understood in relative terms, and in comparison with how things have been, or would be elsewhere. Those reference points appeared frequently in my data. For example: I feel that it is a good thing that we came here, when I think of my children. If we were in Korea,

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we would have to pay for the expensive tutoring for my children. There are too many extracurricular things to do, don’t you think? How would I be able to afford all those lessons with our tight budget? But here, my children were able to receive financial aids and grants for low income families. Here, if you want an education and are willing to study, you can get education. Isn’t it great? We didn’t have to suffer through the competition for college. Had we lived in Korea, I would have been forced to stay up all night side by side with my daughters. But I never experienced “go-sam”5 while all my three daughters completed college (my emphasis). My friend, Mrs. G, her family is an immigration success story. They would be just ordinary people [working class], if they stayed in Korea. But now [because she raised her children in the U.S.], her son and daughter-in-law are both doctors. She is an ophthalmologist, and he is a cardiologist in Long Island. They make good money. She told me told that her son would give her and her husband $40,000-$50,000 a year to save on income tax. So, Mrs. G now has a housekeeper and a cleaning lady. In her case, immigration was worthwhile (my emphasis). These accounts illustrate that the women not only measured themselves against their shifting reference groups, but also against their own projected statuses in a different context. An interesting pattern observed among some remigrants from Brazil further confirmed such crossreference and cross-comparison of multiple societies. There were three women who had first migrated from Korea to Brazil and then re-migrated to the U.S. In contrast to the direct migrants from Korea, these women also interpreted their lives in the United States relative to their experiences in Brazil. The comparison was most poignantly narrated in terms of racial structures. As noted in Park’s analysis on

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Korean re-migrants from Brazil (1999), racial taxonomy in Brazil is not as clearly defined, nor as bi-polar as that of the United States.6 Within the Brazilian classification systems, Asians are generally treated with respect and are assigned to higher statuses than other immigrants (Park 1999). Nayoung who lived more than half of her life in Brazil confirmed that Asians could seamlessly be integrated in to upper class Brazilian society.

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There was little racial discrimination in Brazil. The Japanese had a long history of settlement in that society. Because they have earned a reputation as clean and credible people, Asians have very good credit. Japanese was number one in that country. Since their credit was so good, we [Koreans] were treated as the same kind, and were perceived positively among Brazilians. It also was a big help that my father spoke Japanese. In Brazil, Koreans are integrated into the upper class; not like here. In Brazil, Koreans go into upper class neighborhoods and blend in well. But it is not like that here. In Brazil, we mingled fine. Brazilians like Koreans in general. They like Orientals. It’s different from this country. As such, the narratives of all of the re-migrants from Brazil in this study included a theme of different racial structures between the U.S. and Brazil. By the same token, these women stood out of my sample as more aware of racial minority status of Koreans in the U.S. society than direct migrants from South Korea. Sunjoo’s narratives illustrate her understanding of disadvantaged location as well as her acceptance of her marginal status as an immigrant: I haven’t really felt it [being discriminated against]. This country was built by immigrants. Also, I had already experienced it [living as an immigrant] in

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Brazil. Brazil was also built by immigrants. They liked us [Koreans] because they had a long history of favoring Japanese…. You are asking about racism…well, there are good customers and bad customers here, but I think, overall, things are reasonable [in the U.S.]. I don’t see much absurdity. This town [a racially diverse, lower to working class town] is in a convenient location and things are inexpensive here. Long time ago, we had lived in a lower class neighborhood in Korea. Then we went to Brazil and lived among working class people. I never had had a first class life in Korea. I have always lived somewhere in the middle. So, I like it here. Although my sample is too small to make generalization about this pattern, it appeared that re-migrants from a third country used their experiences in the country as a frame of reference and made sense of what they encountered in the U.S. Hence, their perspectives were somewhat contrasting to those of direct migrants in the sample. To recall, the majority of women who directly migrated from monoracial South Korea expressed little awareness of the relevance of racial hierarchy which could immediately impact their identities in the U.S. contexts (Chapter five). At the same time, many direct migrants also held stereotypical views on African-Americans and displayed an internalized racism. The racial taxonomies were something they had internalized before migration through American media. Hence, direct migrants had the tendency to accept racism as “natural” due to their pre-exposure to the U.S.style racism back from Korea. On the other hand, remigrants from Brazil, who had been exposed to more nuanced racial classification systems of South America, had more critical perspectives on the U.S. systems because they evaluated the U.S. structures based on the South American frame of reference that they had brought with them.

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Translation is also observed in the way Korean immigrants criticized South Korean society from the “American” perspectives, and vice versa. Many of the women in the sample expressed critical thoughts about many aspects of Korean society, which, they also confessed, have become more poignantly felt ever since they lived outside South Korea. Such cross-critiquing of both the sending and the host countries was routine, which, I interpret, was possible by taking an outsider’s perspective. I didn’t feel this about Korea before. I am not sure if things have just changed in Korea. Maybe it used to be like that too, when we were there. Maybe I am more critical now because I am outside the society. I think about the lack of moral values [in Korea]. I’ve seen some young kids, high school students, do not follow basic behavioral ethics. Now that I live outside the country, I worry about the future of the country. What it would be like when those kids, skilled in academics but not knowing moral values, become leaders of the nation. I am already seeing a little bit of it. For example, materialistic values; everything is centered around materialism, isn’t it? KP: Do you think it’s not like that in the United States? Moonyoung: America is more materialistic. Korea used to be different. Now, it has become even more materialistic and selfish. People just follow materialistic trends without considering their financial situation. I can see these things clearly since I am outside. America is materialistic, but not so obsessed with conspicuous consumption. People here dress according to their class. In Korea, people buy coveted brand names, no questions asked, just to follow what other people are buying, even if they really cannot afford them (my emphasis).

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She was not alone in having her perspectives changed. When Sanghee reflected upon Korean society, family values and class inequality in particular, she also acknowledged that living in the U.S. shaped her thoughts on Korean society.

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When I first visited the United States, I saw a whole family take a day trip to a beauty salon to get group haircuts. The father, the mother, and the grandmother all came in the same car with children. I was impressed to see how the whole family was together. Everything was orderly, and everybody respected each other. But, in Korea, hairstylists like me are looked down upon because hairdresser is a low rank job. Here, people are on equal terms with each other, calling each other by names like, Mrs. Lee or Mrs. Park. Even if someone has a doctorate degree, it’s the same. People are equal. I couldn’t understand it at first. Now, I have begun to look at my mother country from a broader perspective. I think about the characteristics of my people that need to be changed, for example, what are the role of mothers and fathers and our views on children. Ideas about family need to be changed. Some people immigrate with a big American Dream and get disappointed. But I realized wholeheartedly, only after coming here, what’s important in life. So, I want to tell my people in Korea what I have learned in America. Another participant admitted that she began to view Korean society using American values as her frame of reference: I get the feeling that the society [Korea] is getting worse, whenever I visit Korea. Not that I want to look at Korea negatively, but I seem to have assimilated to this country. I am concerned about

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environments, economy, and materialism in Korea. Before I immigrated, I remember being “allergic” to those emigrants who would come for a visit and publicly criticize Korea. Although I still don’t like those people, I begin to find myself silently agreeing with them. I think it is because I have been assimilated and my values have changed, not because Korea is indeed getting worse (My emphasis). As these narratives demonstrate, acculturation shaped several women’s perspectives on their “mother country.” As years go by, they began to draw upon their “Americanized” frames of reference to judge Korean society. Just as they practiced translation to understand American society upon immigration, they also began to interpret the changing South Korean society from the American perspectives. As such, comparative interpretive practices which I call translation were integral part of immigrants’ integration into the host society’s structure and culture. At the same time, it is worth noting that the Korean frames of reference which functioned as translation mechanism to understand American society were not uniform for all immigrants. Rather, the multiple frames of reference Korean immigrants drew upon in order to make sense of their new and old surroundings were historically specific. I encountered many instances where Korean immigrant community in the U.S. was described as simultaneously “Americanized,” and “more backward than contemporary South Korean society.” Several interviewees told me that Korean immigrants in the U.S. were more old fashioned than South Koreans since the immigrants maintained a frame of reference that was “frozen in time”; that is to say, the traditions and values Korean immigrants hold were often locked in at the times of their departure from South Korea. For example, the interviewees often complained that those who had left Korea in the 1970s still live according to values and lifestyles of the 1970s, and

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those who migrated in the 1980s consider the norms of 80s as the definition of Korean tradition. Hence, the Korean frames of reference held by the participants were specific to the times when each of these immigrants left Korea. Thus, veteran immigrants were often accused of guarding “outdated values” and oblivious to the rapid economic and cultural changes of South Korean society. For newer immigrants, the old-fashioned ways of old-timers were at times shocking, as Kyungjoo described: If you came in the 1970s, or 1980s, [your understanding of] things dwell in those era. [When you immigrate] You learn things in the new society, by following the examples of people who had come before you. You are told to follow exactly the same way previous Korean immigrants had conducted business here. But in Korea today, people respect individual opinions. The year 2000 would probably be again different from the 1990s which I am more familiar with. People in Korea think even more fluidly now. But I feel as if I live here in the 70s. People in immigrant community are still holding onto 1980s’ lifestyles, or 1970s’ ways of life. Even people with prestigious education are the same rigid way. For this reason, several newcomer immigrants would call old-timers “backward” and more conservative than Koreans back home. This seemed to have been a surprising realization for the newcomers, given that most South Koreans perceive the U.S. as a more “advanced” and “modernized” country, and deem American culture more liberal than Korean culture. Practices of translation thus occurred between historically specific frames of reference. That is to say that, instead of forming a seamless amalgamation, bits of historically specific, and era-specific ways of interpretation and points of comparison from both countries sustain an

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uneasy, yet flexible co-existence, which is sometimes contradictory. Hence, Korean immigrant women juggle different values and outlooks from the places/cultures they have been exposed to, and apply them situationally to come up with a unique understanding of their surroundings and their identities. The patterns documented in this chapter suggest that Korean immigrant women actively organize identity markers and multiple reference groups to mobilize their identities locally and transnationally. They also displayed flexible and situational definitions of national identities. The assertion of specific status markers such as education challenged and resisted Korean immigrant women’s assignment into a lower class identity based on income and occupational prestige. Also, a strategic organizing of shifting reference groups and interpretive frames helped immigrant women to develop an unspoken understanding of malleable identity constructs. Thus, Korean immigrant women constructed post-migration identities by pulling together cultural repertoires, identity constructs and reference groups from more than one culture, community and nation. While they do not live in “transnational social fields,” the respondents engaged in identity practices which involved interesting cognitive dynamics other than streamlined pathways to assimilation to the U.S. society. The strategic assertion of advantageous pre-migration identities (e.g., college education), mobilizing multiple reference groups within and without the U.S. contexts, multi-layered understanding of citizenship and national identity, all exemplify Korean women’s boundary-crossing practices that are occurring in a sociomental space in the absence of sustained exchanges of social and economic remittances with the sending communities. I have used the term, “strategic imagined communities” to refer to the construction of a cognitive space within which transnational and multi-cultural identities are fluidly organized. The patterns identified here also suggest that the different identity strategies which sustained and

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coordinated multiple frames of reference were not naturally occurring, nor coincidental. In fact, these behaviors appeared to be strategic and effective, even if not so obviously conscious and calculative, in coping with the downward mobility and abrupt discontinuities in life patterns and social ties experienced by former middle-class Korean immigrants. Hence, the identity practices documented in this chapter represent Korean immigrant women’s agency in coming to terms with an assignment into new class, ethnic and national identity categories postmigration. To put it differently, these identity practices are part of women’s survival strategies to “keep their options open” (Glick Schiller et al. 1992: 12) in the multiple communities which have become the new contexts of their lives. My data suggest that post-migration identity construction did not occur in a seamless amalgamation, nor in hybridization, of multiple identities. Rather, identities were constructed by way of strategic organizing and selective use of identity discourses and reference groups. Thus, Korean women’s identity practices suggest that immigrant women’s post-migration identities are organized and constructed through dialectic interplay between structural forces of class, race, and gender, and women’s agency to resist an assignment into disadvantaged identity categories.

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CHAPTER 7

Renegotiating Identities after Migration: Class, Gender, and the

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Politics of Identity

KOREAN WOMEN’S POST-MIGRATION IDENTITIES What happened to Korean women’s identities after they migrated to the United States? What were the aspects of their identities that were confronted and adjusted? How did the class, race, and gender stratification systems of the U.S. society shaped Korean women’s identities in the new social context? This book has addressed these questions by analyzing life histories of first generation Korean immigrant women. Patterns of Identity Disruption One of the clear changes immigration brought to Korean women was a disruption in their identities. Transplanted into a new society, immigrant women encountered 173

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incidents where new and unfamiliar class and racial labels were attributed to them. Migration brought many changes in everyday life and in their social network that challenged women’s taken-for-granted understanding of their place in society. Korean women also experienced a disruption in their expectations about their life course. Many of them came with high expectations about “America,” but instead found themselves beginning at the lower rungs of the economic stratification system. This disruption in class identity was an issue remembered by many of my interviewees as the paramount concern during the early period of settlement in the U.S. Educated Korean immigrant women who used to enjoy middle class lifestyles and considered themselves part of the mainstream of South Korea experienced a gap between their pre and postmigration identities. The disruptions were felt in several different ways. First, Korean immigrant women experienced a general feeling of social demotion which challenged Korean women’s sense of self-worth. A variety of factors, such as an inability to speak English fluently, a deteriorated quality of life, downgraded class positions, and not having proper immigration visas contributed to this feeling of social demotion. Expressing the feeling of social demotion was a key by which Korean immigrant women described a chasm between their pre and post-migration identities. There were additional disruptive forces found in Korean immigrant women’s identity narratives. For example, the participants lost some important social ties they had before migration. Although they did not lose their social networks entirely, many relationships had weakened, especially outside the family. This indicates that migration was accompanied by shifts in communities and reference groups as women reassessed their priorities and engaged in “relativizing” of their personal network after migration. In addition, reorienting attention toward the U.S. society was necessary, especially when women perceived their migration as irreversible. Because of the difficulty of re-

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entering the labor market in South Korea, as well as for the future of acculturated children, most Korean immigrant families in my study considered re-migration as unfeasible. Instead, Korean immigrant women understood that they had to find a way to anchor themselves in the U.S. society and rebuild their disrupted identities in new contexts. Constructing Continuity through Identity Practices However, disruptions were not the only forces which defined Korean immigrant women’s post-migration experiences. My data have shown that immigrant women met the challenges and disruptions with resilient strategies to rebuild and renegotiate their deserved places in the U.S. society. In the process, various practices connecting to their pre-migration identities and relations were crucial in enabling the women to sustain a sense of coherent selves. As transnational literature predicted, transnational family supports and the presence of ethnic communities played significant roles in organizing Korean women’s ethnic and familial identities. As such, my research suggests that post-migration identity construction is organized by forming a dynamic stasis between discontinuity and continuity in identities and social relations. While many Korean immigrant women experienced a significant downgrade in status and a disruption of network, which challenged the hitherto takenfor-granted class, race and national identities, they relied on social ties to kin back home, the local Korean immigrant community, and nuclear family-based identities in order to sustain a sense of continuity and normalcy in their lives. These strategies allowed them to maintain a sense of biographical integrity and a feeling of coherent self-identity despite many life-altering changes. Furthermore, they mobilized resources and networks in a way that allowed them to emphasize identities that they deemed more privileged, and to resist an assignment into more disadvantaged identity categories. In the process, identity classification systems of South Korea, which emphasize

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class identities, shaped the way immigrant women imagined their places in the hierarchical social structures of the U.S. Specifically, some Korean immigrant women downplayed their racial minority status by adopting a racist view to place themselves above other people of color. Others focused on achieving middle-class status in order to resist the stigma of being new immigrants. The majority of my informants also developed a strong religious identity (Christian identity in particular) to make sense of the challenges they faced in the new contexts in which they found themselves. Moreover, organizing their post-migration identity around religion facilitated Korean women in reaching out for new support networks. By identifying with Christian identity, Korean immigrant women rapidly integrated themselves into the local ethnic communities that were predominantly Christian. These were keen examples of how Korean immigrant women used various strategies in order to come to terms with the disruptive forces that challenged their assumptions about class and racial identity. This process was not a seamless and speedy one; the women in my sample reconstructed their post-migration identities through a long and dynamic process of renegotiation. The process of renegotiation was not linear, though; rather, these women had to constantly move back and forth between change and consistency. The Korean women I studied displayed resilience and agency in mobilizing their multiple identities and constructing a perception of socially valued locations for themselves in the host society. Women’s Gendered Identities as Working Mothers Migration also created new contexts that problematized many women’s understanding of work, family and motherhood. Korean immigrant women typically began to participate in work outside the home in the U.S., which challenged many of the assumptions upon which these women had previously constructed their identities as women and mothers. Korean women experienced many

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conflicting forces of disempowerment and empowerment through interactions and relations in the arenas of family and family entrepreneurship. I found that the women’s experiences were somewhat paradoxical, in that most identity renegotiation processes entailed both elements of subordination and empowerment, vis-à-vis oppressive social structures. More specifically, Korean immigrant women experienced limited power through work because of their predominant concentration in the family-run businesses where patriarchal family gender norms were largely reproduced. Thus, traditional gender ideologies of male and female roles affected the work organization in the Korean family entrepreneurship in such a way as to make women’s work secondary, supportive, and unpaid. This situation hampered women’s abilities to mobilize their identities as authentic co-owners of their businesses, despite their comprehensive participation in the overall operation of the businesses. However, many women discovered new abilities which they had not been aware of before migration. This awareness gave them a sense of empowerment in the form of self-worth and human dignity. In addition, as women’s labor contributed to the families’ expedited social mobility, they also felt empowered through their improved class positions. Moreover, women who took the path to entrepreneurship independently of their husbands (most often nail salon owners) were able to increase bargaining power vis-à-vis their husbands. Similar to the situation at work, which resulted in complex patterns of subordination and agency, Korean immigrant women’s mother identities also had to be renegotiated. Many first generation Korean immigrant women made the transition from stay-at-home mothers to working mothers. The long and extensive work required in small businesses was often perceived to undermine their role as mothers because by working outside the home women became unable to fulfill the ideal of devoted fulltime caretaker. This often led Korean immigrant women to feel disempowered as mothers, and many former stay-at-

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home mothers resisted to paid work for that reason. As the settlement process unfolded, however, many Korean immigrant women found agency as working mothers by redefining their roles as providing mothers. By providing for the children, these women came to believe that they could offer, to the best of their ability, a better chance for the children to join the mainstream U.S. society. Ultimately, the findings from my analysis suggest that we need to reconsider some taken-for-granted assumptions about immigrant women and their post-migration experiences. For example, labor participation may not necessarily be perceived as empowering. Rather, the data in this study suggested that Korean women’s perspectives on paid work changed over time from being a source of added oppression to becoming an empowering tool for upward mobility. Such findings caution us against monolithic interpretation of women’s life experiences. Simply put, Korean immigrant women’s post-migration experiences observed in this study highlighted women’s precarious social location which could not be defined in simple terms. Rather, the women in this study organized fluid interpretations of their various identities in order to cope with the multi-layered paradoxes of subordination and agency. In the stories of Korean women I collected, this paradox appeared to be a fundamental force shaping their post- migration identity construction processes. Organizing Identities across Multiple Imagined Communities One of the common characteristics of immigrant women in this study was their strategic use of identity markers and reference groups. Korean women demonstrated fluid use of multiple identity markers and also took advantage of shifting reference groups in order to give positive meanings to who they were in the new environments. Specifically, my analysis documented that Korean immigrant women tacitly invoked identity markers useful to elevate their perceived statuses and give them empowerment to resist an

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ascription into underprivileged statuses in the U.S. society. Thus, college education was most often asserted in Korean immigrant women’s definitions of their class statuses when their income and/or cultural capital were considered to be insufficient. Moreover, use of identity markers was linked to shifting reference groups. This study identified at least three different reference groups, namely, the Korean immigrant community, the larger U.S. society, and Korean peers at “home.” By imagining themselves as simultaneous members of these communities and fluidly identifying with certain groups, Korean women in this study kept their options open to maximize their advantage. My data also indicate that Korean immigrant women often made comparative assessments of who they were based on their experiences in societies that they had known before. Just as people need to have a foreign language translated into their native tongue, the participants often made sense of a new phenomenon they observed or encountered in the host country by referring to similar aspects of the society of origin. In other words, they evaluated the systems of the U.S. society relative to their experiences elsewhere prior to their migration. In this practice which I have termed “translation,” Korean women in my sample often confounded racial classification with class hierarchy, superimposing the latter to the former. Constant comparisons between different countries’ social systems further allowed immigrant women to maintain critical stances toward the societies that had been the contexts of their lives. While a critical outlook enabled Korean immigrant women to assess and weigh their options in different societies, it also intensified a feeling of being outsiders in both societies. Thus, while contributing to the transnational nature of immigrant women’s post-migration identities, translation also intensified their continuing identity as “the marginal man” (Stonequist 1961(1934)) in the U.S. society. In addition, Korean immigrant women’s identifications with South Korea and the United States illustrated flexible

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and layered definitions of citizenship and belonging to a nation. Legal citizenship and national identity were often treated as independent of one another in my sample, as many naturalized citizens of the United States still maintained their Korean national identity. Hence, even though they did not hold dual citizenships, Korean immigrant women strategically shifted allegiance to either nation according to their political and economic needs and interests. Negotiation of national identity was also shaped by social marginalization. For instance, women’s use of identity labels such as “Korean,” or “Korean-American,” not only expressed their ethnic roots and cultural identities, but also signaled the degree of social integration into the U.S. society. In doing so, Korean immigrant women were aware of their marginal statuses in the U.S. identity classification systems, but simultaneously held a perspective that the second generation would be more acculturated, and have better life chances in the U.S. society. One notable findings of my analysis was that identity practices among the participants most occurred in localized contexts and in the absence of high level of transnational connections to the sending communities. Yet, the diverse and strategic identity practices discussed above reflect Korean immigrant women’s experiential understanding that their identities were not fixated to the geographically bounded territories of their everyday life. My informants practiced “border-crossings” in the sense they did not exclusively perceive and present their identities in the contexts of communities, but of multiple societies using multi-cultural identity constructs. The identity dynamics occurred in a cognitive space without physical bordercrossing activities. This may suggest that there is a unique pattern of incorporation among less mobile immigrants, which deserves more theoretical attention in the future. To my mind, Korean immigrants’ strategic organizing of reference groups and the fluid use of multiple identity markers drawn from several cultures and stratification

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systems of different nations represented their efforts to lay out a path of selective and gradual adaptation to the U.S. society. This shows immigrant women’s agency in negotiating their integration into the host society, and their resistance to an assignment into underprivileged identity categories in the U.S social hierarchies. MIGRATION, WOMEN, AND POLITICS OF IDENTITY The question of women’s identity changes through migration is still an understudied area both empirically and theoretically. While the study of identity is often embedded in research on immigrant families and communities, only a small number of studies have taken upon identity of first generation immigrants as their central research question. The most notable scholarships on identities of immigrants are perhaps studies on ethnic and racial identities (e.g., Benson 2006; Doan and Stephan 2006; Oboler 1999; Waters 1996; 1999). These studies problematize common perceptions of racial and ethnic identities as ascribed traits, and instead highlight social construction of these identities by examining shifting definitions of various racial and ethnic labels immigrants encounter and adopt in the host societies. However, research on ethnic and racial identities often come short of examining the interaction between various dimensions of identities such as class, race, national identity, and gender. Such shortfall runs the risk of reducing identity to an one-dimensional question of culture and assimilation. The common perception that identity is a problem for the second generation immigrants, but not for the first generation, represents this implicit reductionism. What I have presented in this book is instead to show how identity negotiation is a problematic process for the first generation immigrants. In doing so, I have taken a conceptualization of identity as a structural construct, as opposed to a cultural construct. Indeed, identity may present more challenges to first generation immigrants precisely because they made a movement between different

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structural positions. What will happen to their sense of place in society when immigrants leave their structural location in the sending societies and transplant themselves into the stratification systems of the host societies? While there have been socioeconomic analyses delineating trajectories of economic incorporation of immigrants with different levels of human capital (e.g., Sassen 1991; 1999), few studies until now have addressed the implication of this structural relocation on immigrants’ identities. My analysis of Korean immigrant women’s experiences exposes the structural dimension of immigrant identities, and the intersection of various inequalities such as class, race, and gender that circumscribe immigrants’ renegotiation of their social location in post-migration social contexts. While immigration studies in the past studies were primarily concerned with how immigrants were received in the United States, more recent studies (Collet 2007; Kim 2008) are beginning to pay attention to how the dynamics in the sending communities may shape immigrants’ paths to and their adaptation in the receiving communities. My study adds to this effort to understand migratory processes more holistically from a broader perspective linking the sending and receiving communities. This theoretical move remedies an imbalance in the traditional assimilation scholarships which considered the U.S. as the only contexts of immigrants’ lives, and situates immigrants in the larger contexts of global inequality and its consequences on people’s geographical and social mobility. Simply put, immigrants move from particular structural locations in the sending countries’ socioeconomic stratification systems to particular structural locations in the host countries. Not all migrants come from the same low economic strata, nor would they move uniformly into an upwardly mobile track after coming to the United States (Portes 1995; Portes and Zhou 1993; Zhou 1999). Where do they come from structurally is likely to have a bearing on how they are incorporated in to the structures of the host society. Since identities link individuals to structural locations of the

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society (Davidman 2000; Herzberg 2000), this structural relocation involves renegotiation of identities. Hence, identity of first generation immigrants is the site where the struggle and negotiation occur not only between different cultures, but also between inconsistent structural positioning. Thus, I argue that identity negotiation is a key dimension in immigrants’ settlement linked to structural inequality of class, race, and gender. The patterns I have documented in this study imply much complexity and paradox in this process. The dynamics by which Korean women’s post-migration identities were constructed and renegotiated were variously found in the tension between discontinuities and continuities, disempowerment and empowerment, as well as in shifting reference groups. My argument here is that these conflicting experiences are the product of power relations which circumscribe and inscribe immigrant women’s identities in hierarchized classification systems specific to each culture and social system. The chasm my informants experienced after migration and their efforts to “patch up” the chasm through various identity practices were the reflections of immigrant women’s shifting structural locations through migration and settlement processes. However, it is also important to note that the women in my study were not passive subjects onto whom power relations and identities were written. They were active agents who accommodated, took advantage of, appropriated, succumbed to, and resisted various macro forces of identity category formations by engaging in micro exchanges of identity expressions and interpretations. My analysis has illustrated these dynamic interactions embedded in the identity narratives of Korean immigrant women. Simply put, identity narratives of Korean immigrant women indicated identity formation and negotiation by the dynamic interplay of social structures and human agency. In this light, the point that the identity construction occurs in gendered social fields (Itzigsohn and Giorguli-

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Saucedo 2005; Sørensen 1999) should not be neglected. As Sørensen argues, “geographic shifts in locus are more often than not communicated and enacted in terms of gender” (Sørensen 1999: 243). The data I have presented in this book demonstrate that gender is an important shaping force of immigrant women’s experiences with identities as they renegotiate their life course as immigrant women and mothers. The ways in which participants of this study renegotiated their discontinued class and gender identities highlight their identities practices linking their various gendered roles as family workers, mothers, and kin-keepers. This is an area in need of more empirical studies among various groups of immigrant women different class and ethnic backgrounds. Just as I once adopted an English name, the majority of the Korean immigrant women I interviewed for this study lived in the two names they had. Having an English name is perhaps an effort for these women to reach out and relate to the English-speaking population who are their customers and neighbors, and also a signal that they have made the U.S. the location, or the site of their lives. From this understanding that the U.S. is the immediate context of their everyday living and their acculturating children’s future, Korean immigrant women actively produce and renegotiate post-migration identities in the midst of the many economic and familial challenges migration processes have presented to them. Hence, the two names in which many Korean immigrant women represent their identities reflect the not-so-seamless juggling of different cultures, of inconsistent social positioning, and of advantageous and disadvantageous identities, by which immigrant women understand and come to terms with who they are in the contexts of U.S. society. In the process, immigrant women, like the Korean women I interviewed, engage in daily identity practices that sometimes challenge the oppressive forces of power structures, but other times reproduce and reinforce existing social hierarchies. Thus, the conflicting experiences of post-migration identity

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construction of Korean immigrant women highlight the complexity embedded in the lived experiences of migrants. Post-migration identity construction and renegotiation is a key aspect of immigrants’ incorporation processes. Hence, I hope to have added this study to the continuing scholarly endeavors to understand gendered, racialized and classed nature of migratory processes.

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APPENDIX

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Demographic Characteristics of the Participants PSEUDONIMS

AGE

OCCUPATION

EDUCATION

YEARS IN THE U.S.

Ayoung

32

Small Business

2-year College

13 years

Dukhee

48

Manicurist

High School

23 years

Eunseo

48

Manicurist

College

21 years

Hee

37

Small Business

College

6 years

Hyun

51

Small Business

MA

11 years

Imsook

33

Homemaker

College

4 years

Injung

43

Small Business

College

5 years

Jayoung

51

Office Manager

MA

4 years

Jina

44

Small Business

High School

23 years

Jinsook

38

Homemaker

College

1 year

Joohee

48

Small Business

College

4 years

Jungsun

39

Store Clerk

College

4 years

Kooyeon

38

Homemaker

Some College

11 years

Kyungjoo

33

Homemaker

College

18 months

Minjae

62

Small Business

Middle School

24 years

Miran

58

Small Business

College

30 years

Moonyoung

48

Small Business

College

5 years

Nayoung

42

Small Business

High School

10 years

Okkyung

80

Retired

College

30 years

Sanghee

51

Small Business

High School

5 years

Shinja

67

Retiree

High School

22 years

Sookhee

65

Retiree

High School

32 years

Sora

40

Office worker

College

15 years

Sun

34

Realtor

College

16 years

Sungok

43

Small Business

College

15 years

Sunjoo

63

Small Business

High School

15 years

Taeran

40

Office worker

College

12 years

Wonjung

35

Homemaker

High School

10 years

Yoonmee

38

Homemaker

College

11 years

Young 37 Store Clerk College Non-immigrant Participants Meejung 37 College Dentist

3 years 3 months

Nora

32

MA

Tutor

2 months

Yunjin

45

College

Homemaker

2 years

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NOTES Chapter One 1. For an extensive review of contemporary theories of identity, see Cerulo 1997. 2. According to Diana Fuss (1989), essentialism is a widespread philosophical assumption in Western tradition, rooted in Aristotle’s metaphysics. While it is difficult to categorize particular feminist theorists or race theorists as “essentialists,” such assumptions of essence run deep in traditional notion of sex and race as ascribed biological traits. For a history of the philosophical concept of essentialism, see Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press). 3. See Foster 2004, and Fuss 1989, for more comprehensive reviews. 4. Also see Cohen (1989) for a comprehensive review of Giddens’ works on structuration theory. 5. Hondagneu-Sotelo presents a comprehensive overview of the “household strategy model” in Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, Pp.5456. 6. Also, though perhaps less explicitly focusing on conflicts, Park (1997:113-138) discusses Korean immigrant women’s gender consciousness which grew critical of their patriarchal family structure. 7. Scholars have used various terms to refer the subjective dimension of migration processes. Some use the term, “consciousness” (e.g., Zamundio 1999), while others variously study “subjectivity” (Yamamoto 1999), “immigrant identity” (e.g., Ogbu, 1990 cited in Waters, 1999: 142), or “transnational identity” (Fouron and Glick Schiller 2001; Goldin 1999). In spite of their varying usage of the terms, the studies consistently have explored immigrants’ efforts to make sense of the self, cultures and the new environments in which they found themselves. Hence, I treat this broad range of studies as research on immigrants’ identities.

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190

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Chapter Two 1. See Appendix for selected demographic variables of the sample. 2. In the American Community Survey of 2006, 47.2% of Koreans responded that they “speak English less than ‘very well’” (http://factfinder.census.gov) Chapter Three 1. I use pseudonyms for all participants in this study. 2. She was referring to a Korean ethnic enclave where she owned a business. 3. I thank Johanna Foster for her insight about the issue of class and leisure. With a growing number of professionals working extra hours, having no time for leisure is increasingly becoming a mart of high class status (Personal communication with Foster on June 9th, 2008). 4. Women’s added burden of housework, according to Hochschild, is intimately related to complex dynamics of gender ideologies, definitions of masculinities and femininities, the gender wage gap, and power relations in the family. 5. This point will be fully discussed in Chapter five. 6. Since my sample is a small non-probability sample, this statistic may not be representative of the population. In fact, it appears that undocumented immigrants were overrepresented in my sample. The number of undocumented Koreans in the U.S. is estimated to be 250,000 in 2006 (Korea Daily News September 1, 2007). The population of Korean descent in Census 2000 was 1.2 million. 7. Writing this book in 2008, I feel that this finding may be different, if the data were collected today. The spread of inexpensive technologies to connect people internationally has been significant between the time of my research and my writing. I expect a significant increase in transnational contacts. However, whether the more frequent contacts have indeed led to closer social ties between people separated geographically requires an empirical examination. As my data show, frequent yet episodic communication may not be a direct sign of deeper relationships. This point will be further discussed in Chapter six.

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8. The Roman transcription of Korean words used throughout this book follows the guidelines by South Korea’s National Language Research Institute (2000) Chapter Four 1. The arrangement for in-home childcare by kin women in Korean immigrant families is an interesting contrast to some Latina and Southeast Asian immigrant women who have to leave children in their home country under relatives’ care to migrate for work (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Parrenas 2005). Based on my research and casual knowledge of Korean immigrants, “transnational mothering” is not a common pattern among Korean immigrant women. In contrast, “transnational fathering,” whereby fathers remain in South Korea to work and provide for an overseas education for the children who migrate with their mothers, is becoming increasingly popular among the upper-middle class Koreans. 2. The conflation of class and race was a significant and interesting pattern in my sample. There could be various reasons for this pattern, including the immediacy of class status loss which masks the significance of race, Korean women’s reliance on co-ethnic reference group, and the primacy of class as axis of stratification in Korean society. In Chapter Six, I engage in more elaborate discussion of the primacy of class in Korean culture and how that may affect Korean women’s understanding (or lack thereof) race. 3. A similar pattern of different reference groups for the

first and the second generation immigrants has been also documented by Lessinger (2001) in her study of South Asian Indian community. 4. I thank Johanna Foster for this insight.

Chapter Five 1. Excerpts from this chapter have been published as an article in Gender Issues, Vol. 25 No. 1. March, 2008. Pp. 26-42. 2. Authors (E. Lee 2003; Yoon 1997) have argued that marriage is often the prerequisite for business ownership among Korean immigrants.

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Notes

3. At the same time, there is a gendered pattern in Korean business ownership that forfeits women’s empowerment as owners. In Korean businesses, the husband is usually considered as the owner while the wife’s work is perceived as supplementary or “helping” no matter how extensive her labor (Min 1997; Yoon 1997; E. Lee 2003). The most notable exception is the nail salon business where women often claim ownership and take full control over management. 4. The centrality of a mother identity was an interesting contrast to men’s perception of fatherhood. Although my study did not include interviews with men, I was able to somewhat assess the extent of fathers’ involvement with children by listening to women’s stories about their family life, and further examining women’s daily routines. The mothers I interviewed often claimed that they were nearly 100% responsible for childcare. Not only did mothers profess that their husbands’ role in childrearing was secondary, but also the mothers’ routine practices showed that they handled most daily childcare issues such as arranging for school pick-ups, and aftercare, monitoring children’s school work and other activities, and shopping for children’s necessities. Even in the families where husbands participated in some housework, such as dishes, laundry, and grocery shopping, childcare appeared to be done almost entirely by mothers. This pattern is consistent with the traditional gender ideologies that define a father role, as first and foremost, being breadwinners. To put it differently, because men can take full claim of the income produced by family businesses, immigrant men can fulfill their roles as fathers by bringing home middleclass income. 5. A study done on Korean women in New York documented that over 50% of the respondents worked 6 or 7 days a week, and most of them worked 60 plus hours in a typical week, which was much longer than the average work hours among the general U.S. population (Min 1997).

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Chapter Six 1. An earlier version of this chapter has been published as an article in Sociological Forum. Vol. 22. No. 1 June 2007. Pp. 200219. 2. Chayko uses the term “sociomental space” to conceptualize a space in our minds where interpersonal social bonds are formed sometimes without face-to-face contacts. The terms capture the idea that the mind is not individual, but social. For further conceptual discussions on this issue, see Chayko 2002 and Zerubavel 1993. 3. The respective expressions in Korean were “wuri-nara,” “moguk, ”“naega- salkot,”and “salmeui-tujun.” 4. The term Korean/Korea is largely understood to be generic terms for South Korea among South Koreans. In other words, South Koreans consider “Korea” to refer to South Korea. To be precise, South Korean nationality is marked by political ideology that separates the democratic, capitalist South Korea from the communist regime of North Korea. Therefore, in the strictest sense, Korean ethnicity refers to Korean ethnics in both South and North Korea, while nationality has to be distinguished between South and North. However, from South Korean perspectives, South Koreans generally treat Korean nationality as equivalent to South Korean nationality. Hence, in most cases, South Koreans use the generic term “Korean” to refer to both their ethnic and South Korean national identification. North Koreans are generally referred to as “North Koreans” among South Koreans. 5. This is translated in English as “third grade in high school,” which is the senior year in the Korean educational system. Because the competition for college admission is fierce in South Korea, high school years, especially the senior year, are intense and excruciating study periods to prepare for the college entrance exams. The expression, “go-sam,” represents the strenuous burden of study for the students as well as that of the supportive works taken by the mothers of those students.

6. For more detailed discussion of racial structures in Brazil, see also Lesser 1999.

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INDEX

essentialism, 15 ethnic church, 101 ethnic community, 92 Korean, 91 ethnic culture, 26 ethnic enclaves, 56, 91, 92 ethnic identity, 93 ethnicity, 78 as an option, 19 ethnographic studies, 5 family wage, 120 feminist gender theories, 17 Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia, 112 Ferree, Myra Marx, 112-113 first generation immigrants, 7 Foner, Nancy, 112, 113 Foucault, Michel, 16 frame of reference, 138, 167, 168 future of children, 131 gender division of labor, 90 gender identities, 17 gender ideologies, 177 gendered social networks, 26 gendered transition, 25 Glick Schiller, Nina, 20, 136 Goffman, Erving, 14 Gordon, Milton, 50, 83 grounded theory, 41 Hall, Stuart, 17 Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette,

acculturation, 130, 159 agency, 112, 178 American Community Survey, 29, 52 American Dream, the 6, 19, 128 Americanization, 105 assimilation, 20, 50, 73, 83, 105, 135 theories, 20 Basch, Linda, 69 Bashi, Vilna Francine, 13, 85 biographical disruption, 47, 50 Bourdieu, Pierre, 55 Chinese immigrants, 22 Christian churches, 100 citizenship, 156, 160 class identity, 50, 56, 57 class, gender, and race, 3 Collins, Patricia Hill, 15, 131 communities of the mind, 138 Connell, Robert, 14, 17 Cooley, Charles Horton, 4, 14 cultural capital, 55 Dominicans, 21 downward mobility, 6, 46, 56, 73, 94, 117, 120 dual citizenship, 156 economic crisis South Korean, 45 215

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216

Index

25 host societies, 5 hub and spokes, 85, 87 hyphenated identity, 160 identities in contexts, 13 identity, 5, 13, 17 identity categories, 5 identity classification systems, 6, 18 identity markers, 67, 152 identity practices, 138, 152 identity renegotiation, 6 illegal immigrants, 67 imagined communities, 24, 92, 94, 137 immigrant identities, 13 immigrant women, 5, 27, 112-130 immigration visas, 67 interactionist models of identity, 15 intersectionality, 15 King, Deborah, 16 Korean community, 31, 94 Korean ethnic economy, 120, 122 Korean faith communities, 101 Korean family, the, 90 Korean immigrant community, 91 Korean immigrant women, 30, 31, 51, 68, 111, 130, 170 Korean immigrants, 28, 57, 75 occupational paths, 30 small business, 57

Korean labor market, 75 Korean mothers, 53, 160 Korean-American, 159 labor market disadvantages of immigrants, 29 labor participation, 110 leisure class, 59 Levitt, Peggy, 13, 20, 22, 69, 83 marginal man, the, 55 matrix of domination, 16 Mead, George Herbert, 4, 14 Mexican-Americans, 99 Min, Pyong Gap, 13, 30, 63, 118 motherhood, 130 multiple jeopardy, 16 national identity, 105, 153 newcomers, 149, 152 number of new Korean immigrants, 28 occupational downward mobility, 46 oppositional identity, 151 paid work, 63, 131 Park, Kyeyoung, 30, 111 patriarchal family, 31 Pessar, Patricia, 25, 50, 112 Portes, Alejandro, 182 post-migration identities, 19, 27, 30, 31, 46, 50, 138, 170 post-migration identity renegotiation, 153 pre-migration identities, 4, 12 racial and ethnic identities, 12-13 racial hierarchies of the

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Index United States, 95, 165 racism, 96 internalized, 99, 165 reactive ethnicity, 23 reference groups, 139, 142, 145 relativizing, 89, 90 religion, 102, 105 re-migrants from Brazil, 163, 164 resistance, women's, 158 Rumbaut, Ruben, 11, 23, 34 second shift, the, 63 sending communities, 69 service work, 122, 123 significant others, 146 small entrepreneurship, 29, 59, 115 Smith, Dorothy, 6 snowball sampling, 34 Social constructionism, 14 social demarcation, 139 social demotion, 6, 50, 63 social hierarchies, 5, 6, 18, 144 social marginalization, 92 social networks gendered, 25 social remittances, 69, 136 social ties, 51 transnational, 73, 89 socioeconomic status, 57, 60 sociomental space, 138, 152 Sørensen, Nina Nyberg, 184 status markers, 140 Stonequist, Everret V., 55

217 strategic imagined communities, 152 structure and agency, 17 Swidler, Ann, 161 the host society, 111, 156 the language barrier, 29, 54, 55, 92 the racial hierarchies of the United States, 106 the second generation, 50, 99, 127, 158 tool-kit, 161 translation, 39, 162 transmigrants, 22, 24 transnational communities, 21 transnational identities, 21-22 transnational perspectives, 135 transnational practices, 24 transnational social fields, 21, 136, 153 transnationalism, 21-22, 23, 83, 69, 136 undocumented status, 66 upward mobility, 30, 124, 146 children's, 128 the imperative of, 131 Veblen, Thornstein, 59 vicarious achievement, 127 Waters, Mary, 12, 21, 157 West Indian immigrants, 21, 100 women’s identities, 5 Zhou, Min, 182

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