Making and faking kinship
Subtitle: marriage and labor migration between China and South Korea
By: Caren Freeman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Ithaca
Language: eng
Number of pages: 263
ISBN-13: 9780801449581
Subjects: Intercountry marriage; Chinese Foreign workers; Women immigrants; Rural families; Family policy
Description: In the years leading up to and directly following rapprochement with China in 1992, the South Korean government looked to ethnic Korean (Chosonjok) brides and laborers from northeastern China to restore productivity to its industries and countryside. South Korean officials and the media celebrated these overtures not only as a pragmatic solution to population problems but also as a patriotic project of reuniting ethnic Koreans after nearly fifty years of Cold War separation. As Caren Freeman's fieldwork in China and South Korea shows, the attempt to bridge the geopolitical divide in the name of Korean kinship proved more difficult than any of the parties involved could have imagined. Discriminatory treatment, artificially suppressed wages, clashing gender logics, and the criminalization of so-called runaway brides and undocumented workers tarnished the myth of ethnic homogeneity and exposed the contradictions at the heart of South Korea's transnational kin-making project. -- Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Chosŏnjok maidens and farmer bachelors; title: Brides and brokers under suspicion; title: Gender logics in conflict; title: Faking kinship; title: Flexible families, fragile marriages; title: A failed national experiment?.