Abstract
In North America in the late 2000s, there were almost 1.6 million Koreans, more than 1.4 million of whom lived in the United States. This phenomenon of a large Korean population in North America was highlighted by great diversity in their individual demographic backgrounds, socioeconomic status, immigration history, lawful immigration status, settlement patterns, economic activities, social networks, and cultural and political orientations. In Koreans in North America, Pyong Gap Min, one of the pioneers and a leading scholar in the field of Korean American studies, provides us with a comprehensive set of information about the key mechanisms that shape the experiences of Korean immigrants with various backgrounds and circumstances. Moreover, a comprehensive review of the forty-year span of literature on Korean Americans and Korean Canadians is what makes this book an important one. A brief introduction to each chapter’s focal point would have clarified the very different themes contained in this edited volume.
After the opening chapter introducing the aim and organization of the book, the following four chapters, authored or co-authored by Min, provide detailed analyses of changes in Korean Americans’ population structure, residential patterns, and distribution of employment, along with an overview of their involvement in different religious organizations. Chapter Two examines the factors that affected the significant increase in the number of Korean immigrants to the United States since the Immigration Act of 1965 and the rapid growth in recent years in the category of employment-based immigrant visas. Chapter Three describes chronological changes in the size and concentration of Korean Americans by place of birth, four U.S. geographic regions, selected states and metropolitan areas, and two cities—Los Angeles and New York City. Chapter Four, one of the important chapters in this book, explains the close connections between a gradual decline in Korean immigrants’ self-employment rate and each of three forces: more concentration in personal service businesses (dry cleaning and nail salons), racial diversity in traditional African American city neighborhoods, and an increase in their participation in the general labor market. Chapter Five deals with two issues on the religious activities of Korean Americans: the reasons why the majority of Korean immigrants are affiliated with Korean Protestant churches, and the social services, fellowship, and cultural retention functions of Korean religious organizations.
The next two chapters are concerned with transnational family arrangements and transnational practices among Korean immigrants in Canada. The chapter by Ann H. Kim and her associates examines motivations for migration and the importance of gender role, class position, and social networks in migration decisions, through the comparison between two groups of Korean immigrant families: intact families that consist of both parents living together in Canada, and transnational families, also known as “wild goose” families, whose parents live in separate countries. The chapter by Samuel Noh and his associates describes the types and patterns of transnational ties and activities among Korean immigrants living in the Toronto area.
The three chapters that follow cover the experiences of married Korean international students in the United States, second-generation Korean Americans in South Korea, and the experiences of second-generation Korean Americans in both white and immigrant Korean communities. More specifically, Chapter Eight stresses the importance of the legal status and employment of Korean international students’ wives in their achievement of more equalitarian gender relations with their husbands regarding the division of household labor. An interesting point in the chapter by Helene K. Lee is her discussion of the sense of foreignness as non-South Koreans and the construction of a hybridized, transnational Korean identity among second-generation Korean Americans who return to their homeland of South Korea. The similar topic of ethnic identity is also addressed in Chapter Nine, on second-generation Korean Americans’ sense of racial foreignness and their acceptance of blended identity due to their growing up in predominantly white neighborhoods, as well as their position as “cultural foreigners” in South Korea and the Korean immigrant community in the United States.
The final chapter by the editor is a comprehensive, useful review of scholarly publications on Korean Americans over four decades. To that end this difficult task has been done through both chronological and thematic examinations of 124 books and 462 journal articles and book chapters that touch on issues directly involving Korean Americans. In general, this literature on Korean immigrants in North America shows that more attention from scholars in the field of sociology is paid to such topics as Korean immigrants’ business activities and their business-related conflicts with people from other racial or ethnic backgrounds (e.g., African American customers, white suppliers, or Latino employees), family life and related issues, and economic, cultural, and social integration and assimilation. Indeed, this result of a great deal of effort by Min offers researchers on Korean immigrants an insight that is needed to identify their current research issues or their future research directions.
However, there is a lack of coherence and focus in Koreans in North America as a result of its collection of essays that cover a range of different topics on Korean immigrants in North America. Another weakness of this book lies in a poor comparison of Korean immigrant issues and related topics between Korean Americans and Korean Canadians. For example, there is an absence of concern with the patterns of domestic mobility and geographical settlement, economic activities and distinct economic niches, involvement in co-ethnic religious organizations, gender roles in marriage, and the definition or the redefinition of racial and ethnic identities in a sample of first- and second-generation Korean Canadians. Ultimately, these problems make it unclear what exactly is the primary aim of this book. Nonetheless, this book is well worth reading by those interested in understanding the key areas of recent research, as well as the broad scope of past research, on Korean immigrants in North America. The book would be useful as a supplement in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses on Asian Americans, the sociology of migration, race and ethnicity, and family demography.