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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 examines the cultural and fellowship functions of Korean immigrant churches and other related topics in New York City based on the results of ethnographic research on the Shin Kwang Church of New York. It begins by describing the history, location, and structure of the Shin Kwang Church of New York. The church opened its doors in October 1985 with a worship service for about thirty Korean immigrants at a park in Yonkers. It then relocated to Queens, an area where many Korean immigrants lived. The church is one of the sixteen Korean Presbyterian churches in New York affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, a conservative Presbyterian denomination that originated in the Netherlands and emphasizes John Calvin's theological principles. The remainder of the chapter discusses the church's programs and activities for fellowship and ethnic networks; programs and activities to preserve ethnic culture; and Korean immigrant churches' enforcement of Confucian patriarchal traditions and gender hierarchy.

This chapter explores how adult children of Korean immigrants in their twenties, thirties, and forties are navigating and remembering their parents' traumatic, war-inflected pre-migration histories. In particular, it considers how immigrant children are giving back for their parents' challenges and sacrifices while also making choices for themselves with respect to career, love, and marriage. It also shows how the immigration experience is connected to American-born and/or American-raised adult children to the Korean War experiences of their immigrant parents. Finally, it examines how adult children recognize their own feelings around obligations and duty to their parents as they reflect on their own dreams, passions, and needs for self-care.

This chapter narrates how second-generation Korean American ministers make use of both Korean American spirituality and contemporary evangelical worship styles and organizational structures. It points to the fact that these new, hybrid congregations may reconfigure what is considered a minority or mainstream church in today's multicultural America. The chapter reviews the different models of the second-generation's religious participation and reveals that rather than inheriting the churches of their immigrant parents or joining preestablished mainstream churches, second-generation Korean Americans are creatively forming their own houses of worship. Furthermore, within these newly built churches, they are actively and intentionally reaching out to all Americans, regardless of their ethnicity and race.

This chapter explores the invisible nature of today's racism by drawing attention to the "silent affinity" of Korean immigrants in San Francisco's Japantown (Nihonmachi). Nihonmachi has functioned as a geographical base for Korean immigrant communities in San Francisco since the 1970s. In this sense, Nihonmachi remains one of the most culturally familiar and practically useful neighborhoods for Korean Americans in San Francisco. However, the informants of the study who live, work, and socialize in Nihonmachi repeated the phrase “Japantown is Japantown, emphasizing their otherness, foreignness, and invisibility. In order to highlight this conflicted position and subjectivity of Korean immigrants in Nihonmachi, the author proposed a concept of “silent affinity” instead of articulated identity as a source of their privatized livelihoods as well as a source of their racial struggles. The Korean immigrants in Nihonmachi have participated silently in the construction of Nihonmachi not just simply as citizens. Rather, their invisibility was highlighted and strategically used by themselves as they prioritized their everyday survival in the realities of experiencing the blurred ethical divides between “discrimination” that needs to be fought against and “differentiation” that is sometimes deemed empowering and progressive for the lives of racial minorities.

This chapter focuses on the intergenerational costs and benefits of linked lives, and especially how adult children of aging Korean immigrants find meaning through caring across lifetimes, while functioning at maximum capacity. It considers the model minority image within the context of the social, cultural, political, and familial pressures that come with the responsibility to care for immigrant parents. It also examines how immigrant children find meaning in care work based on their parents' histories and sacrifices and shows that they were able to adapt and learn how to be flexible and balance caring for themselves and others as their aging parents grow more reliant on others. Furthermore, it explores how the role of Korean Americans as an intergenerational bridge could be extended to supporting a social reform agenda focused on aging and health care. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policy implications and the importance of community and support in the face of the cultural, political, and structural challenges facing older Korean immigrants and their adult children.

This book explores the experiences of adult children of Korean immigrants in the United States who have supported their parents working long hours while trying to navigate language issues, racism and discrimination. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 137 adult Korean Americans conducted between 2006 and 2012, the book focuses on how immigrant children interpret the past and current concerns and cultural values of their parents as they make their own life choices. It analyzes the types of work that these children do for their immigrant parents over their lifetimes and how this work, especially cultural brokering and care work, shifts and changes during different life stages, including childhood, college, marriage, and child-rearing. In the context of Korean and many Asian immigrant families in the United States, the book also examines ideas of filial piety as they relate to the documented everyday experiences of racialized immigrants—experiences that include prejudice, racism, and institutional barriers.

This chapter looks at two seminal black films: Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1988) and John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood (1991). Lee's film marks a convergence of historical processes by which the Korean immigrant merchant emerged as a highly visible trope in imaginings of the postindustrial urban ghetto: the rapid demographic increase of Korean immigrant businesses in large U.S. cities in the 1980s, mobilizations against Korean merchants in poor black neighborhoods, the unprecedented commercial success of young black filmmakers and other black cultural producers, and the discursive national production of the black urban ghetto as both nightmarish dystopia and object of voyeuristic consumption. Meanwhile, Singleton's film cites Korean capital as a threatening and invasive force of black displacement.

This chapter focuses on the childhoods of adult children of Korean immigrants, with particular emphasis on the pressures and challenges they experienced growing up as their parents pursued the “Korean American dream” of financial and social stability, with much of their dreams pinned on and invested in their children's educational achievements. It also examines different types of care work, especially emotional work, that the children provided to their immigrant parents in childhood. It shows that these immigrant children often found themselves brokering their parents' interactions with official worlds during their childhoods. Korean American children and teenagers also provided care and solace to their immigrant parents by getting good grades, working in family businesses, and managing family relations.

This chapter explores how adult children of Korean immigrants work to be present for their aging parents, with particular emphasis on the interrelationships among ethnicity, culture, and gender that shape expectations, attitudes, and practices concerning care giving. It considers how immigrant children become more aware of changes and losses happening in their parents' lives, including retirement from work, selling businesses, marital difficulties, and death of close friends and family members. It shows that adult daughters, both near and far, are more acutely aware of and responsive to changes happening in their parents' lives, and that they maintain close ties with their immigrant parents even as they are cognizant of and empathetic to changes their parents experience as they age. This chapter also examines the negotiations that take place between spouses and among siblings in providing financial and other types of support to aging parents.

This chapter examines the federal government's suppression of the political activities of Korean radicals in the United States in an effort to protect the integrity of the country's political system. After providing an overview of the McCarran Act of 1950 and the rise of the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, the chapter explains how the McCarran Act was used by the federal government to monitor the nation's political activities and to identify the aliens, especially those from countries that had become communist, as most susceptible to communist infiltration. Citing the arrests of Korean immigrants David Hyun and Diamond Kimm, it highlights the U.S. government's narrow understanding of communist activities and which activities it deemed “un-American” and undermined the superiority of U.S. democracy. It also considers how the Hyun and Kimm cases revealed the efforts of progressive organizations to fight against the stigma of communism and of the foreign.

This chapter explores how adult children of Korean immigrants navigate health care options for their parents, paying attention to the personal limitations and challenges that they face in caring for chronically ill or frail elders. The lives of Korean immigrants are intertwined with those of their adult children as many parents face challenges that include language barriers, prejudice and discrimination, lack of information regarding illness, health, and health care services, and difficulties interacting with health care providers and institutions. Furthermore, many Korean Americans lack insurance due to high rates of self-employment. This chapter considers the ways that immigrant children fulfill the roles of advocate and intermediary in order to secure health care and wellness for their immigrant parents, along with their own struggle to find ways to care for themselves and balance their lives.