• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.75
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• pp.43-79
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• 2016

An increase in the number of immigrants to Korea since the late 1980s' has signified the proliferation of globalization and global capitalism. In Korea, most married immigrants are women, as the culture emphasizes patrilineage and the stability of the institution of marriage, particularly in rural areas. Immigrant women have experienced dual ordeals. The Aogra Internet community in Korea has been one of the most representative sites that has shown the power of communities in cyberspace since 2002, leading the discussion of social issues and deliberative democracy both online and offline. This paper analyzed Koreans' writings (such as long comments) on immigrant women in the Agora community. The analysis revealed the following results: first, immigrant women were referred to using terms related to prostitution, with excessive expression of disgust, which is called a "narrative of identity." Second, anti-multiculturalists called Korean men victims of married immigrant women and expressed hatred toward immigrant women, which is called a "narrative of sacrifice." Third, anti-multiculturalists justified their emotions as just resentment based on ideas of justice, equality, and patriotism, concealing the emotion of disgust, which is called the "narrative of justice, equality." Fourth, antimulticulturalists played roles to spread the emotion of disgust, by repeatedly referring to international marriage fraud and immigrant workers' crimes, which is called "narrative of crime." Fifth, some positive writings on immigrant women were based on empathy(a concept defined in this context by Martha Nussbaum), but they can be analyzed as narratives encouraging cultural integration through the perspective of orientalism. Therefore, comments on immigrant women in the Agora represent a "catch-22" dilemma. To deal with conflicts arising from disgust and violations of human rights, civic education focusing on humanism is needed in this multicultural era.

• Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.695-704
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• 2018

This study attempted literary therapy approach to establish a healthy identity of Korean married immigrant women by using . The research suggests the difficulties of forming a healthy identity in the process of adaptation of Korean marriage imm6igrants to international marriage, and suggests a literary therapeutic alternative using the narrative structure of Ondal tales. In this study, we used the proven narrative, classical literature, to help the marriage migrant women to develop healthy self - narration, and furthermore, the possibility of reestablishing a healthy identity is centered on their human relations. The research suggests that self-narratives can provide a confidence that a happy life can be managed by providing a literary therapeutic alternative to establish a healthy identity. Through this study, it was positively pointed out that married immigrant women can utilize classical literature in their programs for establishing a healthy identity and that they can have an expected effect on their understanding of Korean culture and Korean language ability.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.907-930
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• 2010

Most previous studies on A Gesture Life focused on illuminating the role and significance of Kkutaeh, the Korean comfort woman, whom Hata runs across at a military camp in the Burmese jungle. For instance, Carroll Hamilton argues that the return of Kkutaeh as a traumatic subject disrupts Hata's nationalist narrative, causing the protagonist's eventual failure at national enfranchisement. However, this paper focuses on Hata's relationship with Bedley Run, the sleepy suburban white town, in which the protagonist settles down right after immigration to the US. The racial/racist nature of Bedley Run has not received due critical attention, although a few studies on the novel saw Hata's gestures as a survival tactic deployed against the hostile environment of his new host society. This paper, resorting to Pierre Macherey's thesis on symptomatic reading, exposes what Hata, the narrator/protagonist, hides from his readers concerning his status in his muchbeloved town; and it also explores the subversive significance of Hata's ethnic memories. The aim of this study is, after all, to map both the subversive possibilities and the limitations of Hata's immigrant narrative as a bildungsroman.

• American Studies
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.193-210
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• 2021

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée proliferates with many pronouns. Whether the various subjects invoked in Dictée refer to a single common figure remains ambiguous. By paying close attention to the ambiguity of narrative voice, this essay examines how the creation of narrative ambiguity in Dictée is closely linked to the author's employment of the second person voice. This essay particularly attends to how Cha explores the narrative possibilities of the second person voice in the text's "Calliope/Epic Poetry" section in order to reflect upon experiences of exile and migration on a transnational scale. Through the intimacy and narrative ambiguity of the second person voice, Cha is able to create an epic on migration that is not only transnational in scope, but also invites the reader to engage with the self-alienating aspects of exilic and immigrant life in an unusually intimate yet powerful manner.

• American Studies
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.67-96
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• 2021

The Canadian public broadcaster CBC had successfully aired a sitcom centered on a Korean immigrant family from 2016 to 2021. The show is based on the play Kim's Convenience written by a Korean-Canadian playwright Ins Choi. This study explores literary features of Kim's Convenience that accounts for its popularity; three elements of the show play crucial roles in maintaining the balance between specificity and universality. First, Choi deploys a Korean immigrant story in the form of comedy. Second, the main plot revolves around an ordinary family with generational strains that ends in reconciliation. Third. the Kims are depicted more as an archetypical family than a stereotypically Asian one. By closely interweaving these elements, Choi induces the audience to find commonalities from the show, and racial specificities of the Kim's family become "spicy" attractions of the play.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1023-1039
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• 2012

The rising urban space in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century was an exemplary site of struggles between the dominant white population and those who migrated from the imperial peripheries. By setting up the space of Chinatown as a segregated sphere within the urban space, the dominant white American society attempted to recreate the sense of distance between themselves and the racial "others." Accordingly, the dominant narrative representations of San Francisco Chinatown at the turn of the century endeavored to produce and maintain the spatial dichotomies between the orderly spaces of natives and the disruptive immigrant communities within the larger boundary of modern American city space. As a Eurasian woman writer, Sui Sin Far attempted to provide distinctive portrayals of the space of Chinatown and its inhabitants that were far different from those of her contemporaries. Through her portrayals of San Francisco Chinatown in her collection of short-stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (1912), Far challenges against the false stereotypes and misreading of this unique immigrant space within and efforts to present the Chinatown as a heterotopic diaspora space where the "insiders" and the "outsiders" of the American urban space intermingle and influence each other.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.188-198
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• 2016

This study explored the experience of clinical nurses caring for foreign wives in Korea. A narrative study approach within the qualitative research paradigm was applied in this study. The data were collected using individual in-depth interviews with 10 clinical nurses who had at least 5 years working experiences caring for foreign wives and their children in the Women and Children's clinical setting. The narrative stories of the clinical nurses were analyzed in the frame of culture-bounded nursing care. In the culture-bounded nursing care, ethnocentric viewpoints, acceptable viewpoints, and culture-based viewpoints were identified within the time frame. Significantly, the narrator identified herself as a therapeutic caregiver in the culture-based viewpoints providing tailored caregiving for foreign wives. This study requires cultural sensitivity of nurses who care for the people with different cultural backgrounds. Self-awareness would be the starting point to reach culturally competent nursing care.

• Journal of Korean Classical Literature and Education
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• no.38
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• pp.201-238
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• 2018

As a way of enhancing the intercultural ability needed for diverse cultural eras, this study focuses on the "narration" of the Italian education scholar Maddalena De Carlo in order to determine the "diverse values" created by the "symbolic representation" based on the folktales narrated by immigrants living in Korea. Through this, it specifically presents educational elements and contents that can raise relative sensitivity. The authors of this paper have connected, empathized, and communicated with people of various cultures in order to go beyond Carlo's discussion. The paper discusses the expansion of cultural sensitivity as an element of education through narrative topics using the folktales of immigrant narrators in Korea. It also recognizes the limitations of a desire for a homogeneous union within an intercultural society and thus formulates educational contents for creating a relationship with heterogeneous ideas through the elimination of communication barriers through heterogeneity and a consideration of the surface and the back. This is systemized in six steps. Step 1: Listening to oral folktales of immigrants, Step 2: Finding heterogeneous motifs imprinted in the immigrants' memories, Step 3: Understanding the meaning of the opposing qualities symbolized by heterogeneous motifs, Step 4: Creating narrative topics containing the key motifs, Step 5: Generating the value of symbolic representation as a narrative topic, and Step 6: Expanding the value of life into a cultural symbol. In Chapter 3, this study focuses on educational contents using immigrants' folktales by applying these six steps. The class contents include the recognition of the limitations of desire for a homogeneous union within an intercultural society and the consideration of how to create a relationship with heterogeneous ideas through the elimination of communication barriers through heterogeneity and consideration of the surface and the back. This paper then compares the Indonesian folktale, The Inverted Ship Mountain and the Mom's Mountain, with the world-famous Oedipus myth, to determine what the symbolic representation of these heterogeneous motifs is. In Step 6, when the symbolic system is culturally extended, the incestuous desire that appears in the "inverted ship" is interpreted as a fixation that was created when the character sought to unite with homogenous idea. The Cambodian folktale, The Girl and the Tiger, is a story that is reminiscent of the Korean folktale, The Old Man with a Lump. Through the motif in "Tiger," this paper generates a narrative topic that will enhance the students' intercultural abilities by culturally expanding their skills in how to relate with a heterogeneous being that is usually represented as an animal. The Vietnamese folktale, The Coconut Bowl, similar to the Korean folktale, GureongDeongDeong SinSeonBi, is a story that draws a variety of considerations about the surface and theback, and it shows readers how to build a relationship with a heterogeneous idea and how to develop and grow with such a relationship. Thus, if a narrative topic is generated and readers are able to empathize using an opposing feature formed by the core motif of the folktale, it becomes possible, through immigrant folklore, to construct a possibility of a new life through the formation of a relationship with an unfamiliar and heterogeneous culture.

• Korean Journal of Comparative Education
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.71-95
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• 2014

This is a pilot study of multifaceted longitudinal research project to explore educational experiences of students with multicultural family backgrounds in Korea. Especially for this pilot study, I selected three foreign-born immigrant youths and tried to explore how these youths describe constraints of their learning experience in different culture. The data for this study were mainly collected through qualitative research methods. For a better understanding of the research participants' perceptions in this study, narrative inquiry and series of semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted for a period of four months which corresponds to one semester of school system in Korea. As a result, this study found that there is an urgent need to establish a systemic and developmentaly appropriate language education programs that ensure educating the language to the foreign-born immigrant youths because their academic achievement, interpersonal relationships, and future depend greatly on the fluency of Korean language. It was also found that it is necessary to take appropriate educational actions in supporting alternative schools where the foreign-born immigrant youths can fully and seriously considered as a whole person. Although this study has some limitations in examining every single aspect of the current state of education of students with multicultural backgrounds in Korea, it provides deep insight into some of their initial educational experiences and proposes several ways to improve these educational programs for them.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.191-219
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• 2020

This paper aims to identify the key features of the novel writing of Korean American immigrants and their meaning as one aspect of movement and contact occuring in the early modern period. The late return of the novels written by Nakcheong THUN in the 1930s is significant in that it restored ideas on the diversity of early modern mobility and confronted the history and culture of immigrants who were excluded from records and memories. Not only are these novels a product of the phenomenon of immigration, but they have also created a crack in the dichotomous perceptions of domination and subordination, center and periphery by envisioning it as a space that creates new history, culture, institutions and values. These novels treat the free love of intellectual, emotional, and ethical figures as a central event, demystifying Western free love, and at the same time, a society divided by various identities including class, race, and gender. The novels by Nakchung THUN visualize the active exchange between the immigrant and the indigenous community through the character of Jack, and imagines the heterotopia as a place where not for the immigrants' utopia, but for everyone's coexists. These novels have declared a kind of memory war on the subordinate and marginalized contact zones. The contact zones of the immigration area had been a place for experiencing extreme conflicts and discords, and at the same time, it has served as a place where various groups and communities are connected. The contact zones were common areas of solidarity and creation before being subject to division and occupation. The contact zones are far from the border or borderlands, so it is not a fixed and immutable deadlock. As a world free from central domination the contact zones have been a space that preoccupied history and culture through various encounters, and have been a community.