Summary of SEAA READS, session nine, 4/2024

June Hee Kwon 2023 Borderland Dreams, The transnational lives of Korean Chinese Workers.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/borderland-dreams

Our bookclub discussion this time was hosted by Student Councilor, Sojung Kim. Since parts of the book locations and people overlap with her own dissertation work, she gave some added context to the issues of kinship (sponsored visas, remittances, wartime separation of relatives) and transnational dimensions of fieldwork. With people joining the online conversation from several time zones, the get-together itself was transnational in some ways. One member was online at a Seoul cafe, potentially a job site for the Korean Chinese workers introduced in the book who tend to concentrate in construction, restaurant, and other service sectors.

Impressions from readers included matters of method (knowing more about the setting for interviews and if there were others also present), the ethnographic nature of writing about lives (from one’s fieldwork analyzed - how best to tell a story of the issues, ideas, and individuals enmeshed), and the proper place and particular power of emotional dimensions (waiting for migrated loved ones; waiting for remittances, waiting for paperwork to return to S. Korea labor markets) for interpersonal portrayals and accessing the interior lives of interlocutors one engages with by observation and participation.

Other readers were impressed by the longitudinal (about 20 years) relationship of the author to the places featured in NE China and in Korea. The organizing metaphor of “three lenses” effectively tied together the multi-site, multi-year, multi-language, multi-lives project of transnational workers in South Korea, both before and after the labor visas created documentation for the previously undocumented workers. Since the book’s subject was big and complicated, but also sharply defined to a small group of Chinese of Korean descent from borderland NE China, much of the writing and thinking was tied to themes of transnational workers, rather than to dwell on the whole lives of particular people. But the case studies, even if not full life-stories, did make the issues come alive at an interpersonal scale.

Further out-loud thinking came back to the nature of writing (and reading) ethnographic accounts. For example, novelistic technique (and cinematically, too) includes showing the reader rather than verbalizing a line of observation and implication. Perhaps the authoring of engaging ethnography draws on some of the methods used by fiction writers and cinematic storytellers. Then there is the matter of multiple audiences: those featured in the book or their descendants, those of one’s own profession, the general public with non-specialist knowledge but curious and motivated to follow the stories told in the lives of others, readers of the future who want to know about the era and the book’s themes, too.

The next SEAA Reads gathering online is June 1, 2024 and will feature Nuclear Ghost, The Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima’s Gray Zone by Ryo Morimoto (2023, U. California Press)

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520394117/nuclear-ghost

See more about SEAA Reads at https://seaa.americananthro.org/seaa-reads/