Abstract
This paper explores intersecting narratives of loss and possibility through the experiences of undocumented Peruvian migrant workers who find previously unimaginable possibilities for migration and love despite—and often because of—their inability to remain in South Korea. In this global space, Peruvians are surrounded by people in transit and are inspired to create long-term plans that would be difficult, if not impossible, were they documented and permanent—such as entering into hurried romantic relationships with other migrants. Forging temporarily permanent legal ties in Korea (such as marrying other undocumented foreigners) can have tragic results, such as when marriages dissolve and one partner disappears with the children into the global realm where the other has no legal or financial means to follow. Through re-telling the narrative, both the migrant and ethnographer locate points of possibility and opportunity, and give voice to otherwise undocumented global stories.
One winter afternoon, Oliver, an undocumented Peruvian man working in South Korea, suffered a work-related accident that caused him to lose two important things: sight in one eye and contact with his young family. 1 It had all started a few years after arriving in Korea in 1997, when Oliver met and fell in love with Katya, a migrant worker from Russia. When Katya became pregnant, they decided to get married and raise their child together. Katya stayed home to take care of their daughter while Oliver worked fourteen-hour shifts at a glass factory. A few years later he was hit in the eye with broken glass while working in his factory and partially blinded. After a period of hospitalization, he told me he was released to discover Katya had emptied his bank account of the money he had earned while in Korea, stolen his passport, and taken their young daughter to Russia.
I first met Oliver in 2007 at an evangelical church where I was conducting research about the migration and religious experiences of Peruvians in South Korea. By then years had passed since the accident, and Katya had already returned to Russia, but Oliver’s emotional and physical injuries were still a regular topic of conversation between him and his friends. This was not only because the events had left visible scars, but also because Oliver did not seem to view them as being completely tragic. While he was clearly sad, and often angry, as he discussed his estrangement from his wife, it was also evident to me that he saw their relationship as part of an ongoing, and even enviable, transnational love story that he displayed on his social media pages and offered up in conversations with new friends. While just a single incident, Oliver’s love story speaks to the larger experiences of migrants in Korea because he was not alone among my interlocutors for his dedication to presenting the potential and possibility in what an outsider might view as an unpleasant and precarious migration experience.
Like Oliver’s, the migration stories of most Peruvians in Korea had an element of long-term separation and heartbreak, as the majority of these migrants were undocumented and unable to travel freely between Korea and Peru. Their inability to travel meant that the only time they could return to Peru was if they were deported or decided to leave Korea permanently. Some had found and lost loves in Korea, while for others, a bad break up in Peru had prompted their emigration in the first place. Most however, were married in Peru, and had migrated to Korea alone or with their spouses specifically so they could remit money to their children left behind. One man, Victor, had left Peru alone before his wife realized she was pregnant. He told me that despite never having met his four-year-old daughter in person, they were very close and she made him set up his webcam so that she could watch over him while he slept. Most Peruvians, including Victor and Oliver, had taken many financial, legal, and personal risks to get to Korea and they wanted to stay there as long as possible. As a result, their separations from their families were both fraught with loss and filled with possibility. While they were not able to see their children grow up, their temporarily permanent absences from Peru allowed them to support their families and feel that they were working toward improving their lives.
In this article, I look at Oliver’s story as an example of this narrative framework of temporarily permanent love, loss, and possibility that circulated among my interlocutors. Not only did it become indicative of their migration experiences, both connecting them to and separating them from Peru, but the act of sharing their stories in this light seemed to have a real impact on their lives and plans for the future. This narrative framework also permeated my own ethnographic writing, and allowed me to explore transnationalism by moving back and forth between Peru and Korea as I interviewed migrants and their families and explored the changing issues that kept them both connected and separated.
Nearly all of the estimated seven hundred to two thousand Peruvians in Korea today are undocumented and while some have managed to survive in Korea for more than twenty years, they are in constant fear of being detected and deported. 2 Peruvians are a small but enduring community among the hundreds of thousands of other undocumented and documented foreign migrants working in Korean factories—primarily from China, but also from other countries in Asia and elsewhere (Seol and Skrentny 2009). Unlike the more numerous groups of migrant workers in South Korea, like the Chosonjok (ethnically Korean Chinese) who often choose Korea as a destination not only because of its profitability but because of its proximity to China and their own ethnic and familial ties, the majority of the first Peruvians in Korea arrived there almost by accident. Originally, most had hoped to reach a more popular destination for Peruvian labor: Japan. In the early 1990s, former President Alberto Fujimori arranged for ethnically Japanese Peruvians to work in Japan (Takenaka 2004). Although my interlocutors are not ethnically Japanese, they, along with thousands of other Peruvians of mixed European and Indigenous descent, tried to enter Japan too. Some were successful, but many were refused entry and eventually went to nearby South Korea instead. Entering by posing as tourists, most found jobs in small and medium-sized factories and hoped to save money to later reach more profitable and popular destinations for Peruvian labor, such as the United States and Europe. Over time the community began to grow and by the early 2000s, there were more than four thousand Peruvians in Korea. That number started to fall however in 2004 when Korea did not include Peru in its newly implemented Employee Permit System, a quota-based migration policy where only migrants of certain nationalities (primarily from Asia) could receive visas (Employee Permit System 2015). Everyone else, including Peruvians, was ordered to leave.
With the implementation of the Employee Permit System, Peruvians like Oliver became not only undocumented, but what I term undocumentable. I use “undocumentable” as a way to describe how Peruvians in Korea are not made merely illegal (De Genova 2002), but are also essentially placed outside of the realm of legal inclusion because they are both ineligible for current visas and illegible as migrant workers partly because they are Latinos in a place where the majority of migrant laborers are from Asia (Vogel 2014). As undocumentable migrants, no matter how many years they manage to stay, or the number of ties they make in the Korean community, they can never become permanent residents, but are rather stuck being, at best, permanently temporary. Being permanently temporary and undocumentable poses many limits in that it prevents migrants from traveling, restricts their work options, and places them at a constant risk for deportation, just to name a few. Scholars of migration and temporality have also pointed out that keeping migrants in a perpetual state of waiting, for possible deportation or legalization, is a way for states to control undesirable migrant populations (Abrego and Lakhani 2015; Andersson 2014; Griffiths 2014).
However, I find that undocumentability also offers a creative space where people make unexpected choices and plans precisely because they have no other choice and few legal routes to stay permanently. In this article I focus on Oliver’s love story as a way to demonstrate that despite being permanently temporary in Korea, the process of telling the seemingly saddest of stories with a sense of possibility allows my interlocutors to present themselves as being on their way to something better, and despite their undocumentable statuses, helps them to assert cosmopolitan identities. In exploring this story, I will also consider my own role as an ethnographer, and the implications of how my collection and recapitulation of versions of this tale as one not just of loss, but also of possibility, could potentially contribute to the temporary permanence of a relationship and transnational connection that no longer exists.
Connecting and Separating Peru and South Korea
As undocumentable transnational migrants, my interlocutors were simultaneously separated from and connected to Peru and South Korea. To trace and contextualize their stories and histories, I conducted twenty-four months of ethnographic fieldwork in both Peru and South Korea. I took four trips to South Korea (between 2006 and 2009) and three trips to Peru (between 2007 and 2011). Each trip lasted between two weeks and 12 months. I spent time with current and former Peruvian migrants, their families and religious leaders, as well as with members of the Peruvian Embassy in Seoul. I accompanied my interlocutors as they attended church meetings, holiday celebrations, and everyday events. From 2010 to the present I have conducted follow-up interviews with people in Peru and Korea both online and over the phone. We spoke Spanish for the vast majority of the semi-structured interviews, as this was the preferred language of most of the people I talked to, although many knew some English and Korean. Travelling frequently between California (my home base), South Korea and Peru between 2006 and 2011 gave me a unique vantage point to observe how migrants and their communities changed over time in reaction to global issues. Major events included the world economic crisis in 2008, which drastically reduced the value of their remittances, and individual issues that had transnational implications such as when some of my interlocutors converted from Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism or undertook new marriages or divorces.
Romantic relationships tended to end or begin frequently among my interlocutors, and this was partly due to the context of migration between Peru and Korea. First, it is important to note that international migration is incredibly popular in Peru as many see leaving the country as the only way to get ahead (in Spanish to literally salir adelante) (see Takenaka and Pren 2010). Many of my interlocutors saw Peru as a place devoid of opportunities and told me that they could only imagine helping their families get a good chance at life in Peru if they themselves went abroad and sent money home. Everyone I knew who was deported from Korea started to plan their next migration as soon as they landed in Peru, if not before. The idea was to get out of Peru and stay out. Migration for them was both an act of self-sacrifice for the family and a way to achieve personal growth and possibility. Elsewhere, I write about how Peruvians used Korea as a point of transit where they could save money and develop long-term plans. For example, such plans included pursuing visas to Spain or other countries that were popular destinations in Peru at the time, taking advantage of educational opportunities offered by their churches, or embarking on exciting transnational love affairs (Vogel 2011). Unlike some migration flows, which are predominantly male, this one included both men and women of all ages and marital statuses. However, few of the people I knew who had been married when they arrived in Korea (and either came alone or with their spouses) managed to stay together, even when the migration had been initially in the name of supporting the family.
Second, another distinguishing characteristic of this migration pattern was that many Peruvians converted from Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism while in Korea. Unlike other destinations for labor in East Asia, South Korea has a significant population of Christians (an estimated 20 percent of the population identifies as either Catholic or Protestant) and many had taken an interest in Korea’s growing population of migrant workers (Kim and Oh 2011). The churches both protected the migrants against abusive immigration practices (Kim 2003) and targeted them for evangelism and conversion. I argue elsewhere that Peruvians make attractive members for global-minded churches that want to show the cosmopolitan nature of their congregations (since Peruvians are so unusual in Korea) and that working with the churches allows Peruvians to create global opportunities for themselves that they would otherwise not be able to find (Vogel 2014). Some of these opportunities include getting scholarships to study theology abroad, or being appointed as leaders. Through the long-term family separations as well as new religious beliefs, migrants’ priorities began to shift, often from making money and sending it home, to focusing on developing their new lives in Korea.
Since departing Korea and Peru, I have kept in regular contact with my interlocutors via social media and found that some, like Oliver, have been deported, but continue to plan future migrations—often back to Korea—where they hope to reunite with lost loves and return to former jobs. Initially these plans to return to Korea sounded far-fetched to me, since Peruvians were not eligible for temporary work visas, and most had already overstayed their three-month tourist visas once and been deported, thereby revealing to the government that they were not actually tourists. The trip itself was also becoming prohibitively expensive. Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, Peruvians without transit visits for the United States were not allowed to fly through the United States, Mexico, or Canada to reach Asia, and instead had to fly through South Africa or Madrid. This route took more than thirty-five hours and depending on the time of year cost between three and seven thousand dollars. Further, it seemed harder than ever to survive as an undocumented worker in Korea. Throughout my fieldwork, I saw an ever-increasing level of surveillance of the streets in their factory towns, and knew more and more people who were picked up and detained by plainclothes officers on their way to places like church or to the corner store. The jobs available to undocumented migrants appeared to be decreasing as well, and many of the people I knew who worked in small factories making things like plastic folders or candles were expecting their jobs to be relocated to factories in China. Considering these factors, I was very surprised to see not one but several of the people I had first met in Korea in 2007, and then saw again in Peru in 2010 after they had been deported, suddenly posting photos on their social media pages of themselves back in Korea in 2013. Often through relationships with other migrants or Koreans, and quasi-legal means, they had successfully navigated global loopholes and exceptions that Korean immigration officers claimed did not exist or were impossible to breach. Theirs then could be seen as a microcosm of the larger story of global migrants who face increasing barriers and divisions particularly designed to obstruct labor from the global South that is deemed “unskilled.” Theirs is a global migration process that is often invisible in official statistics, but can be made known through story telling and ethnography.
Stuck in Love: Temporarily Permanent Ties
Oliver told me about his relationship with Katya the first time we spoke in 2007. He had recently been laid off from his job in a wood factory, and was doing an arebite or short-term job at a restaurant. His shift at the restaurant was usually from 8
He told me that prior to arriving in Seoul, he had tried to join his older sister who was in Japan. She had been there since 1991 after responding to a newspaper advertisement for a job. Unfortunately, his arrival at the Tokyo airport coincided with a terrorism scare and he was denied entry and sent back to Peru after just a few hours. Giving up on Japan, he turned his sights to Korea.
When I asked him if he sent remittances to Peru, he said, “I do have a family in Peru,” referring to his mother and grown siblings. “But I got married in Korea.”
Before I could ask him whom he had married, he interrupted me and said, “No, not to a Korean woman.”
When I asked where his wife was from, he paused, and with a smile said, “Russia.”
Over the years as I heard more details of this story from Oliver, I came to see that while he had been in love with Katya, it was also apparent that he was first and foremost proud of her nationality as a Russian woman. He always managed to mention her nationality before talking about any personality trait, physical characteristic, or memory they shared. He would often begin a story about her by telling me she was from Russia and then pause, as if to let me fully appreciate the magnitude of his love affair and loss. To understand the significance of this approach, it is important to note that among my Peruvian interlocutors in both Peru and Korea, Russian women were thought of as being extremely beautiful, and entering into a relationship with one was considered to be prestigious and (particularly in Peru where there were not many Russian women) highly unlikely.
When I asked Cristina, a twenty-two-year-old Peruvian woman whether she thought Peruvian men in Korea liked Russian women in particular, she said, “Of course. Because they are tall and blond. For their bodies. But they have a bad reputation.” When I asked her if Russian women were popular in Korea as well, she said, “Yes, but I think here [in Korea] it is easier [to meet them]. And listen, Peruvian men who are working abroad, are not faithful [to their wives in Peru]. That is 100 percent certain.” Perhaps for this reputation cited by Cristina, other Peruvian men envied and respected Oliver for his relationship with Katya. From the way Oliver and his friends described it, having a relationship with her helped him gain a level of prestige among his peers in Korea and friends and family in Peru that he could not have achieved alone, nor in Peru.
Oliver had met Katya near Dongducheon, a city near the border with North Korea that has a U.S. Army base, small and medium-sized factories, as well as businesses catering to migrant workers. The combination of factories and the U.S. base has given Dongducheon a diverse population of migrants with varying legal statuses. In 2008 I attended a migrant-organized soccer tournament there with Oliver. It was held on a Sunday afternoon at an abandoned schoolyard which has since been torn down. Despite reports that immigration officers were patrolling the area, the games lasted until after dark and attracted players and spectators from Peru, the United States, Bolivia, Nigeria, and countries in the former Soviet Union. Men and women watched the game from threadbare couches and chairs people had pulled out of the trash and dragged up to the sidelines. Everyone passed around big bottles of beer to share, and ignored two women who were standing by a table trying to sell containers of Peruvian food they had made. They said it was too expensive at 7,000 won (about $7) a plate.
I found that for those in attendance, this game was simultaneously routine, dangerous, and something that promised the possibility for excitement beyond anything possible in Peru. Even though they had come to Korea for work, the thing that people most wanted to discuss in their interviews with me, and seemed to value most about their time there, were the relationships they formed with other migrants. They were willing to take great risks, both in terms of being detected by immigration officers, and with their families in Peru, to meet and interact with other foreigners. The relationships they formed and ended in Korea were complicated and overlapping, and had beginnings and ends in both Peru and Korea. I spent most of the afternoon standing on the sidelines talking to a woman from Lima named Maria who introduced herself and then started telling me about the players and who they were dating. I cringed as she pointed out that two of the worst players on the field—a sweaty goalie who had just let three goals through in succession and a very tall guy who had immediately gotten injured at the start of the game—were Americans (“like you!” she told me). They were US soldiers stationed at the nearby base and were dating two Peruvian women sitting on the sidelines.
Maria’s eighteen-year-old daughter Gaby, who had recently arrived in Korea and now worked in a factory dying fabrics, arrived late. “She came home the other night with a mark on her neck [a hickey], and I honestly thought she had gotten a stain from the dye at her factory!” Maria told me laughing, as her now embarassed daughter walked off to find her boyfriend, another Peruvian factory worker whom she had met in Korea. Maria herself was separated from her husband in Peru and had recently dated and then broken up with one of the soccer players. She said that he kept trying to get her back, but she refused because he was jealous and accused her of dating other men. She lowered her voice as she told me that one man on the field had slept with many of the women in town, recorded the encounters and then uploaded the videos online. We ran into someone she had flown over with on the plane from Peru, as well as people I had met during fieldwork at various churches in town.
Throughout the day people received calls from friends reporting sightings of immigration officers in the city. However, these calls did not even prompt a stir from the spectators sitting on the couches. I took a train back to Seoul around 10
In this relatively small city, people from all over the world, who are almost all permanently temporary and on their way someplace else, have the chance to cross paths. The unique concentration of foreigners in the factory towns where Oliver and Katya lived and worked made their relationship possible, and the temporary nature of their stay in Korea encouraged them to rush into their relationship. Katya became pregnant soon after they began dating. Oliver asked her to marry him because in addition to wanting to make their relationship permanent, he was also under pressure from his Korean evangelical church to formalize the marriage before their baby was born. Even by Oliver’s own admission, Katya only reluctantly accepted his proposal. They got married at the Peruvian Embassy in Seoul—which then forwarded the documentation to Peru, where their marriage was formally registered. After the birth of their daughter, Oliver’s sister and her Japanese husband visited from Japan. They began to suspect almost immediately that Katya was not the sweet woman her brother had described over the phone. When I visited Oliver’s mother in Peru, she got out an album with photos from this meeting, which contained images of a bored-looking Katya sitting on a chair and gazing off to the side of the camera, away from her Peruvian family. Despite Katya’s attitude, Oliver looked enthusiastically in love, and also thrilled to be part of this particular transnational family.
Oliver was blindsided then, when his family suddenly fell apart. In 2007, when I asked him where Katya was, he said, “Unfortunately we didn’t get along and unfortunately we decided to split up. But the worst thing is, well, I don’t know if it’s the worst thing. Well, I had an accident. I had an accident in the glass factory where I was working. A piece of glass fell and hit me in the face. I lost my vision.” He indicated the eye that had been injured. It looked like he had a lazy eye, but it was hard to see under the baseball cap he always wore.
“Can you see at all from that side?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “That is what I went through.” Oliver’s injuries were so extensive that the doctors told him he needed to be hospitalized for more than a month. However, Oliver’s boss did not want to pay the hospital fees, so he pulled him out after just two weeks and then told him he could not return to work. When he got home, the house he and Katya had rented together was empty. “The problem was that they thought I might lose my eye. That is when the mother of my child made the decision to leave. She took the money the factory had given me as part of the insurance policy, grabbed my daughter and left,” he said. “It felt like I was thrown against a wall.”
After the accident, Oliver was left blind in one eye, penniless, and with only sporadic phone and Internet contact with his wife and daughter. Of this time, he said: What could she have been thinking? I don’t know. I can’t imagine. The thing was that she made that decision. Maybe she thought that I would be [injured] for awhile. That I wouldn’t be able to work. Maybe she thought she would have to work. Anyway, she took my money and she took my daughter. All the money that I had, she took. I was left with . . . what’s the saying? Without even a dollar. And she took my daughter.
He learned Katya had never registered their marriage in Russia, and had quickly remarried there. She later returned to Korea under a false name, but without Oliver’s daughter. She dated other Peruvian men before being detained by immigration officers. Since the Korean government does not cover the costs of deporting undocumented migrants, Oliver’s pastor pressured him into paying for Katya’s return ticket to Russia to spare her from having to wait for months or even a year in the detention center. The pastor argued that despite Katya’s bad behavior, she was still his wife both legally and in the eyes of God. Oliver reluctantly paid. However, since Katya’s second departure, all of Oliver’s efforts to reconnect with his daughter have failed. When I asked Oliver if his church could help him legally demand parental rights in Russia, he said that when they tried, Katya had changed their daughter’s last name and moved. If he were to travel to Russia to find his daughter, he told me, he would not know where to start looking. If he found her, he would not be able to re-enter Korea and would not have enough money to get back to Peru.
Despite all of this loss, years after I met him, Oliver still talked about how beautiful his Russian wife was and kept her photos posted on his various social networking web pages. Every couple of years he would also re-post the same photo of his daughter on social media. In the photo, his daughter is about six years old, smiling broadly, wearing a white and red Peru jersey that is many sizes too big that he sent her when she first arrived in Russia and they still had limited contact. Oliver continued to post this photo every year because it was the most recent photo he had of her.
Undocumentable Cosmopolitans
In analyzing Oliver’s narratives, I posit that while undocumentability places Peruvians at the interstices of the nation state, at once present and utterly excluded from legal pathways to inclusion, it also encourages them to create new global plans and possibilities as they locate loopholes in laws meant to exclude them. While Peruvian migrants attempt to be at least temporarily permanent in Korea through doing things like establishing families and legal ties, the government works to keep migrants permanently temporary through creating restrictive migration policies. These efforts combine to create new cosmopolitan opportunities for Peruvians (to achieve or imagine a global lifestyle), which also partially binds them forever to Korea, often through the very legal or quasi-legal means they used in order to prolong their time there. While marriages in Korea can result in undocumentable Peruvians changing their statuses and becoming documented (when marrying Koreans, U.S. citizens, or other documented foreigners, for example), they can also result in the production of paperwork that ties them forever to Korea—even after their own departure.
Not only did Oliver’s failed marriage leave him emotionally devastated but it also caused him to become legally stuck in Korea. In 2009 he tried to file for divorce, but representatives from the Peruvian Embassy told him that he could not do so without having his wife present. To request an exception to this rule, they told him, he would need to collect documents from Peru—either in person or with the help of an expensive lawyer. When I asked him about this situation, he said, “I told the [Peruvian] embassy everything. But they said that basically I could not do it in Korea. That those things are done in Peru. That I had to send a person [a lawyer or agent] who had power of attorney, and do many other things.” After months of attempting to maneuver the bureaucratic red tape that stretched across the Pacific Ocean, Oliver gave up and decided to remain married to a woman he had not seen in years. For both emotional and legal reasons, this transnational marriage prevented him from marrying again.
Oliver’s marriage to Katya gave him a way to assert an undocumentable cosmopolitan identity in that he both transcends global barriers and his permanently temporary status by creating lasting global ties, but is simultaneously entangled within these borders in new ways because of his status. At the same time, they rushed into the relationship because they did not know how long they would have together. Therefore, they were inspired to become cosmopolitans because of their temporarily permanent status. Although the term “cosmopolitanism” has a long literary and philosophical history, here I follow Breckenridge et al. (2002) who define it as being a process of openness and transition (4) that entails “infinite ways of being” (12). Oliver, and other undocumented migrants like him, could be understood as being the antithesis of cosmopolitan travelers in that they lack the privileges that many documented global travelers enjoy such as freedom of movement within and between borders. However, there are restrictions on even the most mobile of travelers, such as Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) who McGuire and Coutin 2013 identify as not being transnational citizens, but rather “transnationally foreign” who unlike “transnationally alien” undocumented migrant workers, are esteemed outsiders within a nation. In their official positions, FSOs are exempted from a foreign nation’s laws and therefore enjoy the freedoms of cosmopolitan travelers precisely because they are permanent outsiders and are restricted from settling. Being permanently temporary for them and for undocumentable cosmopolitans is both limiting and freeing.
While being an undocumentable cosmopolitan gives Oliver a certain level of freedom, its limitations contrast with the myths of upward mobility and global connectedness that untempered cosmopolitanism seems to promise (Cheah 2007). As undocumented migrants, neither Oliver nor Katya had many legal options or ways of solidifying their presence in Korea besides formally registering their marriage, which made them feel their union was valid and recognized both by the state and in their church. However, in this case, rather than opening up new possibilities for future migrations or making his relationship last, Oliver’s cosmopolitan plans actually took away from his freedom of movement by making him forever married, and therefore partially stuck in Korea. Although Oliver’s is an unusual case, being made both forever linked and removable by official documentation such as birth certificates and visas is common for transmigrants in the globalizing world (Yngvesson and Coutin 2010). Rather than just gaining prestige from being a member of a transnational family, Oliver simultaneously became an abandoned husband with little hope for legal recourse. Instead of supporting or validating their marriage and enabling the family to stay together, their legally documented marriage inhibited him from moving on.
Oliver was only able to get a divorce after he was deported to Peru. In 2015, he told me that just prior to his deportation he had started a new relationship with a Latin American woman who had obtained Korean citizenship through her first husband. She and Oliver had planned to get married and change his legal status. However, he had not been able to obtain the divorce from Katya in time. When I asked him if it had been difficult to divorce while in Korea, his voice became sad. He said, “Well, now that I am here [in Peru], I could do it myself. Anyway, they [the Peruvian Ministry of the Interior] told me that with everything Katya had done to me, my marriage was not valid.” So, by officially divorcing, Oliver learned that his marriage to Katya had never existed. He mourned his deportation and the loss of his life in Korea. Unfortunately, his new relationship did not survive the separation, and a few months after he was deported, he and his new partner broke up. “That died too,” he said.
However, through retelling his story, he both kept his relationship with Katya present, and also maintained the cosmopolitan possibilities of his migration. Despite this seemingly harrowing love story, Oliver was not regretful of his marriage, as evidenced by how he would proudly bring up Katya’s beauty or Russian nationality in casual conversation, even while he was sharing a story of something terrible she had done to him. He also did not depict himself as a victim, but rather as a person who was continuing to be part of (albeit mostly through photos, troublesome paperwork, and financial obligations) an enviable transnational union. In this way, Oliver’s attitude toward this relationship shows he is an undocumentable cosmopolitan in that he is inspired to achieve the “infinite ways of being” (Breckenridge et al. 2002, 12) that being a cosmopolitan person entails. He tries to achieve this through the connections he makes with others, especially in the process of establishing a family—getting married, having a child, and supporting them. But he is also limited by his vulnerable legal status, and the path of paperwork that these relationships lay out in that things like marriage licenses, birth documents, and school registration forms can both make him temporarily permanent in Korea and/or make him more visible and susceptible to deportation. Documents make his cosmopolitan dreams real, and they highlight the fragility of his position. This is especially true when migrants make connections with others who are permanently temporary as well.
It is also important to remember the significance of love in this story: both the love Oliver has for Katya and for the global possibility she promised. In exploring love and migration, Lieba Faier found the terms and conditions of love were central to the transnational experiences of Filipinas who married clients they met while working at men’s clubs in rural Japan (Faier 2007). Faier argued that by professing love for their new husbands, her interlocutors both embodied the cosmopolitan, transnational subjectivities they had coveted and also countered criticisms of their jobs as unsavory. However, only by choosing to enter the “business of love” in the first place were her Filipina interlocutors faced with the necessity or opportunity to define and defend the nature of their love affairs and the validity of their role as cosmopolitan travelers. Similarly, for Oliver and other migrants like him, only by participating in a dangerous and often financially unprofitable migration pattern, and entering into risky relationships with others who might leave at any moment or might dislike them to begin with, are people given the chance to (1) imagine or embark on further migrations and (2) define themselves as transnational travelers, lovers, and parents who have motivations to migrate that extend beyond economic gain. Just as the Filipinas in Faier’s work do not necessarily migrate in order to find love, but rather the pursuit of love comes to define their journeys and themselves as travelers, Peruvians do not travel to Korea to find relationships, but the relationships they find can come to represent the uniqueness and appeal of “Korea” and the global realm for them.
I use the term “global realm” to refer both to the ways my interlocutors have mapped out and ranked the migration destinations important to them, including those destinations that are profitable, prestigious, dangerous, and/or nearly impossible for them to reach (essentially their understanding of the global world as it relates to themselves), and also the laws, policies, and prejudices that contribute to the designation of which types of people can or should move to particular places. The global realm takes into consideration the differing levels of connectivity that people have, and how these connections make up what my interlocutors think of as the global world (Grewal 2005). Migrants convert legal loopholes and personal relationships into potential pathways on which they can traverse the global realm, thereby creating the very world they both participate in and are excluded from (Rouse 1992). Far from being cosmopolitans in the sense that they have the ability to move freely through a now-borderless globalizing world, undocumentable migrants must contend with countless boundaries, blockades, and inequalities that are put in place to keep people like them out. Their efforts to lay global plans both reveal them as cosmopolitans and blur the borders between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, between the documented and undocumentable. Although Oliver had no plans to migrate to Russia, his connection to Katya gave legs to his dreams of being a cosmopolitan person because of her status as an enviable and nearly unattainable Russian wife. That connection will be permanent as long as Oliver keeps it alive.
Co-scripted Narratives
In 2011, Oliver told me that he had been invited to tell his testimonio (testimony or personal story of salvation) at a mega church in Seoul. His testimony was essentially about his love story and injury, and for this evangelical Korean audience, he had to stress the depths and peaks of the events to demonstrate the significance of his rise, fall, and overall redemption by God. He seemed very proud to have been asked to speak. It was as if through the recognition of and telling of his narrative to a group of Korean listeners, Oliver was given a new chance to be the cosmopolitan individual he had struggled to be through his migration and relationship with Katya. When writing about the power of narrative to both connote and shape experience, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps write, “Narrative and self are inseparable” (1996, 20). As illustrated by his testimony, Oliver’s narrative was both part of his personal history, and essential to creating his present experience. He became a new person through his telling of the past. In addition to being invited to give his testimony, he was also included as a key member of his church, and protected by his church’s social circle. The Korean church members created a social safety net for him both while he recovered from his injury and afterwards. They provided him with a place to stay when he was out of work, and found him free legal advice when he was trying to locate his daughter in Russia. The churches also worked with Oliver and other migrants to construct a narrative of themselves.
Narrative, or personal story telling, is essential to ethnography as well. Ethnographers are empowered by and trapped inside of the narratives we create from the stories we hear in the field. I collected versions of Oliver’s love story (and even stories about the story) and put them together in a way that presents the event as ongoing and permanent, although everyone involved may have moved on. That is an unavoidable temporal condition of ethnography in that ethnographers seek out both the unique and typical stories from both the past and present, and place them together, hopefully in context, to understand people in a new way. With narrative details I find that the truth is an ever-shifting and contingent concept. To address this contingency, James L. Peacock and Dorothy C. Holland state that when writing ethnography about people’s lives, they use the term “life story” instead of “life history” because “it does not connote that the narration is true, that the events narrated necessarily happened, or that it matters whether they did or not” (1993, 368). Sometimes it is impossible or even unhelpful to find out whether something is true. In fact, Heath Cabot (in this issue) argues that it can sometimes be productive for ethnographers not to know the full story of their interlocutors (2016). Rather than trying to uncover the truth, I try to find out whether it feels truthful to the person telling the story at the time, or even why they wish it were true. Leo Coleman (in this issue), critiques the ways recent ethnography focuses on the “possibility and on-goingness” of tragic figures, rather than confronting the countless symbolic and tangible barriers they contend with in their daily lives and argues that truth “only emerges in a context” (2016). However, I find that by presenting his relationship with Katya as ongoing and enviable, Oliver has not only created a particular context for himself in which his love affair was central to his own migration story but he has also shown the ways he contends with the limitations, barriers, and possibilities that are indicative of Peruvian migration to South Korea.
For both me as an ethnographer as well as for those I interview, narratives and testimonies help us to create who we are—the narratives of others allow me to become an ethnographer of transnationalism. Narratives can become even more significant in their telling and retelling than in the actual corresponding event, which usually has few witnesses. An event that leaves no memory might as well not have happened, while a memory that contains both joy and loss can be permanently fused to one’s sense of self. I write with an awareness that most narratives are multidimensional, and that telling stories has a power of its own. This power is particularly relevant for stories of transnational migration, where migrants not only occupy more than one world at once but also help create the very pathways and social spheres where they travel and live (Rouse 1992). Their narratives help connect their worlds, as well as lend coherence to otherwise unfair, unjust, or circumstantial past, present, and future events (Gálvez 2010; Ochs and Capps 1996). Migrants, like everyone else, use narratives to organize events in their lives into meaningful stories. While not all migrations or stories are equal or as significant in the global scheme of things, as illustrated by Peruvian migration to Korea, and Oliver’s marriage to Katya, even a temporary transnational connection can become permanent.
Conclusion
In this article, I have argued that migrants become undocumentable cosmopolitans through their creative efforts to find gaps and exceptions in migration policies that are meant to exclude them or make them permanently temporary. In Korea, surrounded by people in transit, Peruvians are inspired to find exceptions to global barriers by creating long-term plans that would be difficult, if not impossible, were these migrants documented and permanent. These plans include entering into hurried romantic relationships with other migrants and working toward future migrations that require time and money to reach fruition. In Oliver’s case, his marriage to Katya (which most everyone except Oliver could see was not going to work out) was only successful in this global space where temporarily permanent ties were the only ones possible. Oliver’s union was only made real through the photos on his social media pages and the official documents he could not access or remove—things that simultaneously symbolized how far he had gone in achieving his cosmopolitan dreams and how much he had lost. The photo and document evidence of his union was also temporarily permanent, holding up a relationship that continued in the virtual universe but whose romantic underpinnings had long ago dissolved. His daughter, who was arguably the most tangible and enduring symbol of his relationship with Katya, was now only available to him through old photographs and memories. By circulating the same photo of her on social media every year, these memories were both made new again but also revealed themselves to be old, particularly for those of us who knew their origin or saw them every year.
I have also argued that memories and stories of possibility and loss like these are constitutive of both migration and ethnography. Through the telling, either in the form of a personal life testimony or an academic article, the story takes on an indelible permanence. Unfortunately, I did not have the chance to interview Katya, but I imagine she would describe this relationship in a very different way than Oliver had. However, that does not make his version any less significant. Narratives, like migration experiences, are relative and multidimensional and include both loss and possibility. This particular story shows the contradictions and paradoxes of undocumented migrants who create lasting ties, but are made to be undocumentable, and the creative ways they assert belonging despite experiencing exclusion on a global level.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography for supporting us with this special issue. I also want to thank Susan Coutin, the anonymous reviewers, as well as Seo Young Park and Erin Hayes for their invaluable comments on this article. Finally, I could not have written this without the many people in Peru and Korea who shared their thoughts and experiences with me.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, Korea Foundation, Pacific Rim Research Program, and Department of Anthropology and the Center for Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine funded the research for this article.