Conclusion

I call for rethinking ethnic return migration through the lens of transborder belongings. Based on analysis of the discursive processes that shape return migrants’ membership status and affective belonging in the domains of citizenship, kinship, and language, I reconceptualize the notions of border and belonging, and theorize the phenomenon of legacy migration. Along the way, I provide evidence of what legacy migrants do to create belonging in the liminal and interstitial spaces they encounter. Ultimately, I propose a more versatile framework for understanding ethnic return migration and its relationship with mobility and affect, which together reflect the multifaceted contexts of contemporary transnational migration.

Enterprising State and Entrepreneurial Self

I trace how conceptions of citizenship have transformed in post-1990 South Korea, focusing on the major formations of and shifts in Korean citizenship, as well as on the evolution of nationality laws concerning diaspora Koreans. I also examine legacy migrants’ perspectives on citizenship and legal belonging. The process of citizen-making, which unfolds through the dynamics between an “enterprising” South Korean state and the “entrepreneurial” strategies incorporated by the legacy migrants in this study, largely rests on the interplay between emotionally charged ethnic nationalism and economic mobility driven by neoliberal global capitalism, both of which in turn have rearticulated and reconfigured the borders of South Korean citizenship and belonging. As a result, various forms of conditional and contingent citizenship—statuses that are neither fully admitted by the state nor fully committed to by returnees—have been produced.

Koreans in China

I trace the sociopolitical history of Korean Chinese, illustrating the pathways they took to become Chinese citizens while negotiating their national minority status as ethnic Koreans. Relative to other diaspora Koreans, Korean Chinese have succeeded to a remarkable degree at maintaining the Korean language and cultural traditions; this is primarily due to the communal living that they were able to sustain due to the Chinese government’s tolerant ethnic policy, which allowed not only the establishment of the Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture, but also ethnic education via the Korean language. Nevertheless, their status as diasporans residing near the national border with the ancestral homeland yet largely prohibited from “returning” has created an affective condition of “longing” among the Korean Chinese, a longing which has been intergenerationally transmitted through family stories, metaphorical teachings, and cultural traditions.

Shifting Affective Linguascapes

I explore how Korean as a heritage language influences and is influenced by returnees’ membership status and affective belonging both in diaspora and in South Korea. After tracing the politics and policies that affect the Korean language in diaspora, I incorporate legacy migrants’ narratives about their linguistic experiences in South Korea. Their stories provide an opportunity to illuminate the affective dimension as it relates to the heritage language and challenge us to move beyond proficiency-oriented understandings of language. I scrutinize the affective dimension of language, giving particular attention to the notions of proficiency and authenticity, which often lend certain meaning to and shape migrant relationships with the heritage language during their homing experiences. As I will show, the meaning and value of languages, especially heritage languages, are often interpreted differently by the returnees and by South Korean society.

Introduction

In this chapter I provide an overview of the book and introduce its conceptual and theoretical articulations. Using the frameworks of affect and global modernity, I delineate the trajectories of mobility involved in later-generation diaspora Koreans’ migration to contemporary South Korea. This serves as a springboard for laying out theories of borders and belonging that help make sense of legacy migrants’ trajectories and experiences. In outlining the book’s chapters, I explain how each adds a new dimension of understanding to transborder belonging. I also suggest that four borders—social spaces, citizenship and nationality law, Korean as a heritage language, and family—intersect to make and remake the notion of Korean peoplehood.

Negotiating Transborder Kinship

I investigate how the interplay between legal-juridical notions of citizenship and socioculturally mediated belonging affects the family lives of return migrants, as well as how and why transborder ties between returnees and their kin have been maintained or broken. I pay special attention to the production of transborder kinship by paying heed to the lives of families across and within nation-state borders. Here, family composition and living arrangements, especially those involving parents and children, often defy normative understandings of family. I investigate how such arrangements have been necessitated by the transnational movements of my interlocutors and their affective connections with each other and with the Korean nation. And though returnees maneuver their locations in time and space in order to accommodate their family lives, their family lives have nevertheless been interrupted by their migration to South Korea, which has repercussions for their affective topographies.

Contouring Social Spaces

I take up fundamental questions regarding later-generation diaspora Koreans and their migration to South Korea. Who are the later-generation diasporas who embark on migratory journeys to South Korea? Why do they migrate to South Korea? What has influenced their sense of South Korean society and of belonging to “imagined homeland”? I explore the divergent homing trajectories taken by Korean Chinese, CIS Koreans, and Korean Americans, as well as the diverse professions, roles, and responsibilities that they perform in South Korea. I further explore the social spaces that legacy migrants have established in South Korea, looking at how they went about creating those spaces and the nature of their engagement with Koreans and Korean society—specifically, how they determined what sort of social spaces they needed and how the social spaces they produced reflected their affective reality in South Korean society.

Koreans in the United States

Unlike Korean Chinese and CIS Koreans, who migrated to their diaspora countries before 1945, the majority of Korean Americans migrated to the United States between the 1970s and the 1990s. This chapter traces Korean American history from the early twentieth century, when the first organized migration to the United States took place, to the present, illuminating how Korean/Asian Americans have continuously been positioned as “foreigners” in the racial landscape of the United States. In navigating racial relationships in the United States, Korean Americans developed an equivocal stance toward the maintenance of the Korean language and ethnic Korean identity: on the one hand, they consider the Korean language to be integral to ethnic identity, and they also take pride in their Korean ethnicity; on the other hand, they actively differentiate themselves from native Koreans and have created their own intraethnic hierarchy for Koreans in Korea and Koreans in the United States.

Koreans in the Commonwealth of Independent States

I delineate the precarious national belongings of CIS Koreans, which encompass their diaspora history in the Russian Far East, their lives during and after the mass deportation to Central Asia, the experience of forced migration to Sakhalin in the later part of the Japanese occupation of Korea, and the post-Soviet emergence of ethnic discrimination and economic hardship that they have faced in diaspora. Although earlier generations tried hard to preserve Korean language and culture and to instill ethnic identity among later-generation diaspora Koreans, CIS Koreans’ geographical distance from the ancestral homeland and the repercussions of the Cold War precluded them from visiting Korea, which ultimately contributed to the loss of Korean language and ethnic identity. The turbulent diaspora history of CIS Koreans resulted in “suffering” as the main contour of their affective condition in diaspora.