Local Authors Past and Present
Work in progress here -- the field is richer than first envisioned. We hope to incorporate past authors (Marianne Moore, Jean Craighead George, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and so on), present authors/illustrators (Amy Bates, Megan Lloyd-Thompson, Adrienne Su, Kim van Alkemade, Sherry Knowlton, and so on), and books from authors who knew the Valley well and wrote about events here (Lois Lenski, Lois Lowry, Conrad Richter, and so on). We will organize them with category headers for better searching and annotate them with the particulars as we work on this. Keep checking!
Between Foreign and Family: Return Migration and Identity Construction Among Korean Americans and Korean Chinese
Between Foreign and Family: Return Migration and Identity Construction Among Korean Americans and Korean Chinese
Between Foreign and Family explores the impact of inconsistent rules of ethnic inclusion and exclusion on the economic and social lives of Korean Americans and Korean Chinese living in Seoul. These actors are part of a growing number of return migrants, members of an ethnic diaspora who migrate “back” to the ancestral homeland from which their families emigrated. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interview data, Helene K. Lee highlights the “logics of transnationalism” that shape the relationships between these return migrants and their employers, co-workers, friends, family, and the South Korean state.
While Koreanness marks these return migrants as outsiders who never truly feel at home in the United States and China, it simultaneously traps them into a liminal space in which they are neither fully family, nor fully foreign in South Korea. Return migration reveals how ethnic identity construction is not an indisputable and universal fact defined by blood and ancestry, but a contested and uneven process informed by the interplay of ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, gender, and history.
HELENE K. LEE is an assistant professor of sociology at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.