Search Results

This chapter demonstrates how Korean American camp counselors locally construct ethnic identity through the practice of self‐categorization in discourse. Self‐categorization, or the identification of oneself in terms of ethnic identity, serves to position counselors in terms of Korean ethnicity and to associate that identity with one's personal goals in participating in the Korean camp. Counselors discuss and debate whether the teaching of Korean heritage or the mentorship of the campers should be the primary objective of the camp. This opposition between ‘heritage’ and ‘mentorship’ is cast as a source of tensions that map onto ideologies of identity, whereby ‘Korean American’ identity acquires the local meaning of being linked to the importance of mentorship over Korean heritage.

This chapter explores Korean‐American children's language socialization into Korean address terms and their creative uses of these terms in a Korean‐English bilingual context. The data revealed that, while children's acquisition and use of Korean address terms were mostly mediated by language socialization practices with their parents, their bilingual practices were not directly imposed by these practices. That is, children created their own ways of addressing other Koreans, ways which were novel to adult members of the community. For example, children in this study (1) “anglicized” a social superior's name in Korean utterances and therefore established its bivalency and (2) code‐switched from Korean into English in order to avoid terms that index hierarchy and in‐group intimacy. Such improvised linguistic practices illuminate their ongoing negotiation and construction of the self and the creative potential of children's active participation in their language socialization processes.

This chapter examines the legacy of high modernism in the work of avant‐garde Asian American artists at the end of the 20th century. Returning to a history of transpacific alliances in their work, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim explore the costs of such ties in formal terms by newly invoking modernist forms. This chapter argues that their experimental poetry dissects modernist aesthetics in order to interrogate U.S.‐East Asian alliances.

Soon after the U.S. entry into World War II, Korean nationalist organizations once again took to lobbying intensively for the official recognition of the exiled Korean Provisional Government in China, which is detailed in this chapter. Seeing themselves as part of a common international struggle against Japan, Korean nationalist leaders expected the Allied powers, particularly the United States, to play a more active role in the liberation of their homeland. For many Koreans, recognition from the U.S. state rather than immediate independence became a focal point of nationalist activities. By the mid-1940s, this reliance on U.S. sovereignty as the guarantor of Korean national interests became firmly ensconced in the strategic visions of many nationalist leaders, including the activities of the United Korean Committee in America (UKC). This reliance on U.S. state power reflected an ethnic orientation among Korean immigrants that defined and understood their political interests and goals in relation to U.S. state structures and society rather than a national Korean state. Their quest for statehood ended as they became ethnic subjects of the U.S. liberal state.

This article examines Margaret Cho's use of Mock Asian, a parodic language style that indexes a stereotypical Asian identity. Although this Korean American comedian's use of Mock Asian necessarily marks Asian racial otherness and reproduces simplistic ideological links among race, nation, and language, the analysis suggests that audiences generally understand her practices as culturally legitimate in public space because of particular ideologies of race, community membership, and humor. In particular, Cho's successful authentication as an Asian American comedian who is critical of Asian marginalization in the United States yields an interpretation of her practices primarily as a critique of racist mainstream ideologies.

This chapter sets the context for our study, including highlights from a study conducted on the campus of the University of Illinois that served as the impetus for the study of Korean American teens and parents in Chicagoland. The chapter presents the findings—as well as new questions sparked by the findings—of that campus study in light of the prevailing narrative about Korean American (and Asian American) families from previous scholarly works about the nature of intergenerational relationships in immigrant families. The Chicagoland Korean American families featured in our study are also placed in the context of the local, national, and transnational conversations that were ongoing among, and about, Korean American and Korean families and teens at the time of the study.

This chapter describes the research process, from survey data collection to family ethnography. It details the ethnic geography of the Chicagoland Korean American community through ethnographic observations of the churches, neighborhoods, social service agencies, and schools that mattered in the lives of the Korean Americans in the book. The survey included 204 Korean American teens and 102 parents, from whom five families were selected and followed. The chapter briefly discusses what the survey revealed about how the Chicagoland Korean American parents and teens viewed individual and family well-being. Among Korean American teen, their perception of how well their family was functioning correlated highly with their individual psychological distress and wellness. However, although the survey responses did reveal glimpses of parent-child acculturation gaps and individual distress, the survey findings did not conform very well to the familiar story of a generational gap in acculturation between parents and teens as the primary driver of family or individual difficulties. Whereas the survey gives a broad brushstroke picture of Korean American families with teens, it also left many intriguing questions to be answered. The chapter ends with a description of how the families were selected for intensive and long-term follow-up.

This chapter examines the clergy of minority groups in the United States. It suggests that while the majority of churches are hardly multicultural, minority congregations may still be the most homogeneous, with all the racial, ethnic, and cultural implications this homogeneity has for the work of their clergy. This situation is exemplified by the three most prominent areas of Christian ministry in America. These include the African American, Hispanic, and Korean churches.

Unlike Korean Chinese and CIS Koreans, who migrated to their diaspora countries before 1945, the majority of Korean Americans migrated to the United States between the 1970s and the 1990s. This chapter traces Korean American history from the early twentieth century, when the first organized migration to the United States took place, to the present, illuminating how Korean/Asian Americans have continuously been positioned as “foreigners” in the racial landscape of the United States. In navigating racial relationships in the United States, Korean Americans developed an equivocal stance toward the maintenance of the Korean language and ethnic Korean identity: on the one hand, they consider the Korean language to be integral to ethnic identity, and they also take pride in their Korean ethnicity; on the other hand, they actively differentiate themselves from native Koreans and have created their own intraethnic hierarchy for Koreans in Korea and Koreans in the United States.

This chapter focuses upon US aid efforts spearheaded by nongovernmental agencies in wartime and postwar Korea. It examines the work of the Christian Children’s Fund, the American-Korean Foundation (AKF), and World Vision, among others. The chapter pays special attention to the AKF-sponsored Korean Children’s Choir, which toured fifty American cities in 1954 to raise over $10 million for postwar recovery. While images of war waifs in US media helped Americans imagine Korea in the context of rescue and the choir furthered these scripts, the choristers also helped to reframe Korean children as anti-communists with radical democratizing potential. The singing choristers promoted healing and understanding between Korea and the United States on the heels of the war, and, perhaps inadvertently, helped American audiences who witnessed the performances imagine what it might be like to have Korean children in the United States permanently.

This chapter reviews the book’s main themes and findings through the broader lens of the mixed-method approach, noting the ways in which the survey data and the family ethnographies provided surprises and novel insights into the workings of immigrant Korean American parents and their adolescent children. The chapter ends with the conclusion that, contrary to previous common portraits of immigrant Asian American parents as “tiger parents” focused on intense cultivation of academic and occupational attainment for their children, immigrant parents care deeply about how to cultivate their children’s healthy sense of self, with awareness of their gendered and racialized positions within the U.S. society. In turn, their children respond to their immigrant parents’ aspirations and care in resilient—and often surprising—ways.

This chapter explores how adult children of Korean immigrants view their cultural identity and practice cultural traditions while also reclaiming and re-making their culture and interpreting it in new ways that provide meaning in their Korean American contexts. Focusing on the work of women in continuing and remaking Korean culture, the chapter considers the Korean American children's experiences of familiarity with cultural rituals and their meanings as well as degrees of identification and attachment to their cultural heritage. It also sheds light on the immigrant children's journey towards a formation of cultural and ethnic identity beyond the pivotal college years. Although the cultural experiences of reclaiming and remaking what is Korean vary, the chapter shows that Korean American children have strong desire to retain the value of respect towards elders and to care for their immigrant parents in old age.

This chapter features the Chung family, who, like the Koh family, were keenly aware of racism. Both parents prided themselves on working outside of the ethnic sector—the mother as a highly skilled surgical nurse and the father as an owner of a video rental store. The family’s higher income compelled the parents to move their family from an affluent suburb populated by many other Korean American families to another affluent suburb that was overwhelmingly White—a strategy to exit the ethnic enclave in order to assimilate themselves and their children into multicultural (but mostly White) America to ensure successful transitions to professional occupations populated by successful (White) others. The chapter follows the family through the eyes of the younger son, who realized the illusive nature of the parents’ assimilation strategy and eventually pursued graduate study in a humanities discipline.

This chapter introduces the reader to the premise of the book, starting with an ethnographic episode with one of the five Korean American families featured in the book, in which a now-twenty-something young Korean American woman discloses what had come of her family’s strategy to pour resources into her training to become a classical musician. This episode is used to point to the major theme of the book (parent-child negotiation over a pathway to successful adulthood for the children of immigrants) and the psychological work and effort expended by both parents and teens to maintain the family bond. The chapter ends with a roadmap to the book.

This chapter examines how second-generation Korean Protestants and Indian Hindus have retained their ethnicity by participating in a religious institution. Many younger-generation Korean Protestants believe that Korean cultural traditions should not be included in Korean congregations. Instead Korean churches should focus on programs that bring people to worship. By contrast, younger-generation Indian Hindus were found to visit the temple substantially less frequently than their immigrant parents. One of the main reasons for their unwillingness was their rejection of the rituals practiced there that they considered too excessive, superstitious, and even materialistic. Nonetheless, they still saw themselves as Hindus based on their spiritual beliefs.

This chapter features the Hyun family, the most recently immigrated family, who had arrived in the United States only two years prior to our meeting. Although the parents had decided to emigrate to the United States to provide their teenage sons with better opportunities—riding the popular wave of sending Korean children overseas for precollege study abroad—the mother had her own dreams about the desired impact of immigration for her own sense of cosmopolitanism as well as family cohesiveness. The chapter follows the travails of the older son as he struggled to meet the demands of being a college-bound English language learner—a fate foisted upon him against his will by his parents and initially resisted by him. The immigrant son eventually embraced his new American young adulthood in unexpected ways (and somewhat to his parents’ dismay) by joining the U.S. Army and serving tours in the Middle East. This chapter draws continuity between the more settled Korean American families (like those featured in previous chapters) and the more recently immigrated Korean American families by capturing the illusiveness as well as the unexpected possibilities of immigrant American young adulthood.

This chapter talks about how Korean American Protestant students at elite universities are more likely to maintain ethnic solidarity and group identity because of hybridized ethnoreligion. In the racialized university environment, Korean Americans are lumped with other Asian Americans in programs and studies. In choosing which campus organizations to attend, Korean American students have organizational options already based on ethnicity, accepting these racialized and ethnic identities as “the way things are.” The chapter's findings reveal that not only are Korean Americans more Protestant and religiously observant than their fellow Asian Americans are, but their churches are also more likely to be racially insular compared to other minorities. This insularity stems from a worldview that unifies Korean and Protestant identities. This merging of ethnic and religious identities is a process of hybridization that takes on uniquely American characteristics.

This chapter begins with a discussion of “Fragments of the Forgotten War” and “Still Present Pasts,” which demonstrate how Korean American cultural producers suggest the link between America’s imperial presence in Korea, and the gendered racial “return” of the Korean subject back to the imperial center. It cites Susan Choi’s novel The Foreign Student, Heinz Insu Fenkl’s autobiographical novel Memories of My Ghost Brother, and Deann Borshay Liem’s documentary First Person Plural—all of which offer a troubling interpretation of the Korean War. The Korean War indicates a wider problem of Cold War knowledge that affects both American nationalist discourse and Korean America’s public knowledge regarding the conditions of possibility for its formation in the post-1945 situation.

This chapter features the Shin family and their ongoing efforts to help a wayward son navigate a rocky road toward young adulthood. At the start of the ethnographic involvement with this family, the son had gotten into minor troubles with the law and was struggling to graduate from high school. In the ensuing years, the son wandered from one low-skilled job to another and never managed more than a semester here and there at a community college, creating many parental worries, regrets, and recriminations about what went wrong in their parenting and family life. This chapter illustrates the challenges Korean American families face when their children’s school and career pathways do not conform to the conventional success frame that many immigrant Asian American families hold.