Forbidden Homeland: Divided Belonging on the China-KoreaBorder
June Hee Kwon
junehee.kwon@nyu.eduView all authors and affiliations
Volume 39, Issue 1
https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X18790799
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Abstract
This article explores the old Korean Chinese communist party members’ rearticulation and re-remembering of the traumatic ethnic past and ethnic politics in the wake of the Korean Wind – the massive transnational migration from Yanbian, the Korean Chinese autonomous prefecture (China) to the former enemy homeland, South Korea.
The ethnographic analysis is twofold.
First, I examine the influence of the Korean Wind, a unique type of economic reform and open economy that Korean Chinese have experienced as an ethnic minority, in destabilizing and reconfiguring their ethnic identity. Second, I analyze the divided sense of belonging of these Korean Chinese Communists as they discuss transnational migration to South Korea as an economic phenomenon while remaining politically faithful to socialism and China. I argue that the construction of divided belonging is a Korean Chinese effort to reconcile their ethnic place in contemporary “Yanbian socialism” as it is buffeted by the Korean Wind.
In Yanbian, the Korean Chinese Autonomous Prefecture in Northeast China bordering North Korea, one of my closest informants, Mr Kim Chul, a Communist Party member, warned me time and again: (1) “Do not criticize the Communist Party or socialism”; (2) “Do not ask for help or any information related to North Korea”; and (3) “Do not refer to me by my real name in your work.” These precautions reflect a structure of Korean Chinese feeling1 built through the political turmoil and persecutions that occurred mainly during the Cultural Revolution, a structure that has persisted even after the normalization of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea in 1992. The gradual reshaping of the political climate since then has enabled numerous Korean Chinese to find long-lost family members in South Korea and to make frequent trips there as migrant workers. And the region’s intimate cultural ties to South Korea are increasingly apparent in popular songs and other mass media. The nearly forgotten Korean homeland, long forbidden to Korean Chinese during the Cold War, has been dramatically transformed into a source of modernity and economic betterment, a resource for Korean Chinese attempting to survive in a rapidly privatizing China. This current state of affairs – the fashion and passion for Korean Chinese to go to South Korea – is called “the Korean Wind.”
This article examines Korean Chinese ambivalence toward South Korea and its people in the context of the Korean Wind. Yanbian, as a geographical borderland between China and North Korea, and as a cultural–economic borderland between North Korea and South Korea, has been seen as an in-between space, an interstice where different cultural values and inter-subjective experiences are negotiated, linking two (or more) worlds and imbuing its people with peripheral vision, a sense of marginalization, as Homi Bahbha (1994) elaborates in his discussion of borderlands. The inhabitants of borderlands, aware of the “double” world they occupy, express both complex identities and resistance against the dominant social order (Anzaldúa, 1987). Along with this embedded doubleness, Yanbian-as-borderland inculcates the desolate, disconnected, and displaced feeling that Bhabha (1994: 13) calls “unhomeliness” – the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiation. The tropes of unhomeliness and doubleness frequently appear in widely circulated Yanbian sayings; for example, Korean Chinese are said to be always ready to pick up and move again like a “floating weed” (bucho in Korean) in search of better farm lands, whereas Han Chinese are perceived as “settled,” extending their lands little by little every year.
I reassess and enrich the idea of the doubleness, duality, or in-between-ness that previous diaspora studies have long emphasized, by capturing the differentiated engagements within Korean Chinese talk of unhomeliness and ethnic identification at this particular moment of Chinese economic reform and the Korean Wind. Hyun Ok Park describes a Korean Chinese duality that stems from the tension between territorialization and displacement in China. On the one hand, in the first phase of migration to China in the early 20th century, Korean Chinese pursued Chinese nationality because it promised land ownership and other material advantages, while at the same time, they remained affectively attached to the Korean Peninsula as an ancestral homeland (Park, 2015: 157). Later, during the Rectification Movement and the Cultural Revolution, Korean Chinese minority-ness was exposed to state violence in the form of an intra-ethnocide (in Park’s term) – violence that repressed ethnic identity instead of strengthening ethnic bonds or coherence. Most Korean Chinese see these historical events as a suspension or temporary pause in the normal functioning of the state. Here, Park’s (2015) observation is apt: remembering is not an act of resolving the past, but rather a suspended way of making sense of the present.
I build on but extend Park’s insights on Korean Chinese duality by reconnecting the traumatic ethnic past to the Korean Wind with a focus on the narratives of male Korean Chinese retired party members who have remained faithful to the Chinese Communist Party and the power of socialist revolution. Their interpretation of ethnic history is a uniquely revealing source that leads us to a deep-rooted Korean Chinese minority sensibility formulated through the socialist revolution and the Cold War. How should we understand the vigilant attitude of Korean Chinese toward China and South Korea in relation to their political and economic standing, as exemplified by Mr Kim Chul at the beginning of the article, given the prevalent influence of the Korean Wind and deep dependence on “Korean money,” remittances sent from Korea? In what ways has the Korean Wind enabled Korean Chinese to rearticulate their relationship with the homeland in the new political contexts of post-socialist China and post-Cold War Korea? Moreover, in comparison with or in contrast to the perspectives of Korean Chinese migrant workers, what new insights do these retired party members (who have remained in Yanbian) offer us about the current state of Chinese socialism or post-socialism, in particular “Yanbian post-socialism”?
In addressing these issues, I am attuned to recent Chinese post-socialism studies, which explore recollections of the socialist past in order to historicize the subjectivities and material conditions rapidly emerging from Chinese urban migration and increasing global connections (Chu, 2009; Pun, 2005; Rojas, 2016; Yan, 2009). These studies pay attention to the contrasting experiences under socialism and post-socialism by focusing on the disparate relationships between the state, markets, and citizens-subjects. Neither the memory of socialism nor the current experience of post-socialism is clear-cut or continuous. Rather, individuals invoke the past differently and distinctively, depending on their social status and expectations – for instance, as government officers, entrepreneurs, or migrant workers (Rofel, 2016). Strikingly, both recollections of the socialist past and post-socialist worldviews tend to be predicated on the idea that “you’ve got to rely on yourself.” However, the state is still commonly understood as a moral configuration and eventual protector of the people, based on the belief that the people not only owe the state, but the state owes the people (Xiang, 2016).
In order to extend and diversify our understanding of the dialectical relationship between socialist past and post-socialist present, between state and market, I would like to further consider the ethnic minority’s traumatic Cold War experience under socialism, and the emerging articulation of the transnational economy in the wake of economic transformations – for Korean Chinese, the Korean Wind. It is difficult to deny the visible role of the state in constructing and narrativizing Korean Chinese ethnic identity – especially for those Korean Chinese who contributed to the socialist revolution in Northeast China in the 1940s, and gained official recognition when the Communist Party granted the Yanbian autonomous prefecture to its Korean Chinese inhabitants in 1952. Despite the state’s embrace of Korean Chinese as rigorously loyal party members, Korean Chinese have struggled with a duality mainly derived from their geopolitical and ethnic condition – as a group of migrant settlers from the Korean Peninsula and as a Chinese ethnic minority. As I introduced the Park’s discussion above, this duality evinces not simply a double belonging, but an instability in Korean Chinese life and identity, especially during the Cultural Revolution – when they fell under suspicion as an internal other, as potential spies, at the peak of the Cold War.
Here, I bring to light the interconnection between the post-socialist and post-Cold War eras, as current scholarship has widely addressed (Hann et al., 2002; Kwon, 2010; Whitfield, 1991). I construe the Cold War not as an “imaginary war” consisting of competition in economic development and the avoidance of actual war between the West and East or capitalism and socialism (Kwon, 2008). Rather, it should be remembered that the Cold War, sometimes understood as a long, relatively peaceful era, was in fact accompanied by massive numbers of violent deaths, resulting in trauma that still exists as an ongoing state, as we can see in historical cases such as the wars in Korea and Vietnam. In that sense, as Heonik Kwon argues in The Other Cold War, clear periodizations such as “after 1989” or “after the fall of communism” show a limited, Europe-centered understanding of the Cold War. They also impose coherence and unity on the Cold War through the idea of “ending” without considering locally diverse regimes of ideas and practices. In the same manner, the widely used term “post” socialism dismisses the radical diversities that have occurred in the transitory realities in former socialist countries. The limbo or liminal state between socialism and capitalism, moral economy and market economy, past and future has often been simply characterized by the umbrella term “post-socialist transition.” Kwon’s telling observation is that neither the Cold War nor socialism ended at a certain point, but instead went through a “slow process of decomposition” (Kwon, 2010: 32).
In the case of the Korean Chinese in particular, the “decomposition” of the Cold War and post-socialist transition was expedited through the diplomatic normalization between China and South Korea, and the Korean Wind has been a critical catalyst for this decomposition. In addition, Chinese economic reforms eventually allowed “the revival of the ethnic” (Litzinger, 1998), especially in the form of promoting ethnic tourism and ethnic harmony, in contrast to the previous era, when talk about ethnicity was discouraged in order to avoid splintering a unified conception of Chinese nationality. In response to the “new” era, the following ethnography offers analysis in two ways. First, the socialist past – when the state’s involvement shaped ethnic marginality and suppressed the question of belonging – has not been erased from memory, but has rather been preserved in the form of fear, pride, or active forgetting. The long unspoken history described here includes an effort by Korean Chinese to articulate and cultivate their ethnic identity and memories through vernacular theorization in reaction to the Korean Wind. Second, I pay attention to the narrative strategies of these Korean Chinese Communists as they discuss transnational migration to South Korea as an economic phenomenon while remaining politically faithful to socialism and China. Despite the long silence about, and deep vigilance toward, their ethnic identity and homeland, the Korean Wind has enabled Korean Chinese to speak about the long unspeakable, traumatic past and to participate in a new ethnic politics in juxtaposition with the capitalist present (Park, 2015).2 In other words, I suggest that the Korean Wind is not only a source of rapid economic betterment and modern life but also a medium through which Korean Chinese can rearticulate their ambivalence about the past and the future, politics and economy, socialism and capitalism. Restaging a deeply rooted, ongoing Cold War sensibility through encounters with transnational migration and related economic transformations, my argument is that the construction of divided belonging is a Korean Chinese effort to reconcile their ethnic place in contemporary “Yanbian socialism,” buffeted as it is by the Korean Wind emerging from the intersection between post-socialism and the post-Cold War era.
Forbidden homeland
There are around two million Korean Chinese living in China nationwide, mostly concentrated in the northeastern provinces of Jilin, Liaoning, and Heilongjiang. About 700,000 of them, 35% of the total, now live in the borderland of Yanbian, an autonomous prefecture in southeastern Jilin province. The Korean Chinese are an ethnic minority group with Chinese nationality, their ancestors having crossed the Tumen River3 from the Korean peninsula in search of better farming lands beginning in the late 19th century.4 Later, Koreans moved to Manchuria to escape from poverty exacerbated by Japanese imperialism, or, in the 1930s and 1940s, to support the independence movement from relative safety outside Korea.5 Korean Chinese in Yanbian are mostly the descendants of immigrants from the northern part of Korea – Hamkyoungbukdo, the northeast region of contemporary North Korea – who crossed over in the late 19th century. Most Korean Chinese in Yanbian still speak a dialect similar to that spoken right across the river in North Korea, and maintain the regional food culture and housing styles.
When the new China was established in 1949, and Yanbian was designated as the Korean Chinese Autonomous Prefecture in 1952, the descendants of Korean immigrants became Chinese nationals,6 one of 55 ethnic minorities officially recognized by the Chinese government.7 However, even after Korean Chinese became recognized as an ethnic minority group with Chinese nationality, their ethnic identity seemed to supersede their (official) national identity. I heard from Communist Party members, now in their 80s, about their emotional and national attachment to Korea in the 1950s. For example, when filling out official documents and forms related to the registration of their houses, ethnic Koreans entered North Korea as their “original” address or “birth” place. They read, wrote, and sang in Korean. Surrounded by other Korean Chinese, they had no need to be able to speak Chinese in their everyday life. Even though Han Chinese lived and worked in Yanbian, the main language was Korean in official meetings, while “small translation” (xiaofanyi in Chinese) from Korean to Chinese was provided for Han Chinese in a low voice. An old Communist Party member recalls Yanbian in that era as an “all Korean Chinese world” (chosunjok sesang in Korean).
Things changed dramatically beginning in the late 1950s, however. The “National Identity Education Program” (Zuguoguan Jiaoyu) launched in 1958 emphasizing the idea that Korean Chinese were citizens of China and requiring Korean Chinese to break off their national ties to the two Koreas – both North and South. Under this intensive education, Korean Chinese were taught that China was their only home country and reassured that they were, without exception, welcome members of the Chinese nation. The Cultural Revolution was a particularly harsh period for Korean Chinese, as they became subject to random and continuous purges and persecutions. Their ethnic affinity to North and South Korea came into play in the political tumult. When Kim Il Sung, the leader of North Korea at the time, criticized the brutal aspects of the Cultural Revolution, criticism which ignited the fury of Mao,8 the reciprocal relationship between the neighboring socialist states frayed seriously. During this time, culture and discourse that could be considered “ethnic” was strictly prohibited as a betrayal of the state of China. Any possible tie to the two Koreas – familial, economic, or political – could provide a cause for political persecution. Kinship ties to North Korea were treated with suspicion, given the proximity of Korean Chinese to the North Korean border. In particular, ties to South Korea – the capitalist enemy – were used as critical evidence for accusations that an individual was a “child of capitalism” (jabonjuuisaggi in Korean). Many Korean Chinese were put to death as political scapegoats, caught up in unfair accusations and false reports. The overall turmoil deeply scarred the whole ethnic community of Korean Chinese, as many members of the older generation of Korean Chinese testified to me.
In order to avoid this emotional, political, and physical trauma, Korean Chinese had to prove their loyalty to China and their identity as Chinese by de-emphasizing their ethnicity. Korean Chinese who lived through the Cultural Revolution said that they had to eradicate their “ethnic color” by prohibiting ethnic songs and dances, and were not allowed to speak freely about anything related to their Korean ethnicity in public spaces. Politically speaking, Korean Chinese had to avoid any association with North or South Korea. People tried to defend themselves from arbitrary political persecution by making overt declarations that they were “anti-capitalist” or “anti-South Korea,” or by pledging allegiance to China. The period from the late 1950s to the late 1970s was culturally sterile and politically brutal for Korean Chinese. After the chaotic age of the Cultural Revolution eventually ended in the late 1970s, Yanbian ushered in a new phase of economic reform and an open economy, like other regions of China. In this new era, multiple fashions, new desires for a different world, new flows of goods, and new forms of border crossing have continuously swept Yanbian; Korean Chinese merchants began to do business with, and travel to, North Korea and Russia.
The situation radically changed, however, when China and South Korea normalized diplomatic relations in 1992, and the Cold War officially came to an end. Korean Chinese have since developed a close relationship with South Korea, mostly through kinship visits and labor migration. First came recognition of cultural and familial ties, which reinvigorated a sense of belonging that had been forbidden and neglected under Cold War politics. Later, a persistent, even obsessive labor migration began, driven by the vast income gap between China and South Korea.9 As the Korean Wind dominated material conditions, affective comportment, and attitudes toward the future, what it means to be Korean Chinese has undergone a redefining process.
Redefining ethnicity
Besides the political–economic shifts occasioned by the Korean Wind, the Korean Chinese effort to define and redefine ethnic minority identities calls for special attention from the point of view of post-socialist ethnicity policy. I have encountered numberless analyses of Korean Chinese identity questions written by Korean Chinese and South Koreans. In November 2009, I witnessed a heated debate scene in Yanji, the capital city of Yanbian: a conference on “the New Direction of Korean Chinese Literature,” organized by a major Korean Chinese literary magazine. As interactions between Korean Chinese and South Korean writers has grown questions of identity concerning Korean Chinese and their literature have held the attention of Korean Chinese intellectual communities for the last two decades. Much discussion is focused on finding the uniqueness of Korean Chinese literature and explaining how it is distinct from that of North Korea and South Korea. There are several widely circulated vernacular “theories” of Korean Chinese identity. The first is known as the “daughter-in-law” theory (myunrilon in Korean). It was coined by a famous Korean Chinese literary intellectual, Cheong Panryong, who viewed the situation of Korean Chinese as parallel to that of a newlywed woman. According to the assumptions of Confucian gender patriarchy, the daughter-in-law (Korean Chinese) must obey the rule of the husband’s family (China) and make a special effort to become a full family member. A common criticism of this theory is that it portrays Korean Chinese as a people without agency, mere subjects of the Chinese state. Another theory relies on the metaphor of “the apple-pear graft.” This is derived from an ethnic tale about a farmer, newly arrived in China from North Korea, who decided to graft the Korean apple onto the Chinese pear. The graft turned out to be a great success, creating a new, delicious fruit, the “apple-pear,” which combines the tastes of both parent fruits. The fruit has become a popular symbol of the double-ness of Korean Chinese, who have in effect grafted Korean culture upon that of China, as we have seen in our discussion of doubleness, hybridity and borderlands.
Yet alongside these two metaphors, which emphasize the dual characteristics of Korean Chinese culture, runs another argument, the subject of a presentation at the conference (as well as an article) by a renowned Korean Chinese scholar. He suggests that Korean Chinese should be considered neither a diasporic group nor an ethnic minority. Instead, he insists, Korean Chinese are “100% Korean Chinese” as citizens and ethnic minorities in China, not migrants caught between China and Korea (Huang, 2009). The first two theories (“daughter-in-law” and “apple-pear graft”) assume border-ness as an essential part of Korean Chinese identity, whereas the last theory de-emphasizes and unmarks border-ness as an ethnic characteristic. Huang’s position caused heated debate at the conference on the question of the “root” or “style” of Korean Chinese culture, language and identity in general. What, then, constitutes the “100%” Korean Chineseness he describes? Moreover, in what ways do these vernacular theories shape or reshape the discussion of “ethnic minority,” a critical dimension in determining what it means to be Korean Chinese? Why does the debate happen at this moment? My point here is that the Korean Chinese ethnicity question is formulated and circulated not only by efforts at self-identification but also by contentious historical–political drives that aim to condition the meaning of ethnicity at any particular moment.
Ethnicity, denoting both the peoplehood as well as the otherness of particular groups (Sollors, 1995), has been a major factor in producing and fixing others within and beyond the nation state. Despite the flexibility and vagueness ingrained in the concept, ethnicity tends to be confined to “named human populations with shared ancestry myth, histories, and cultures, having an association with a specific territory and a sense of solidarity” (Smith, 1991). Ethnicity also can function as both a term of exclusion, a clear boundary marker keeping out certain groups, and as a term of inclusion aimed at removing boundaries and discrimination against othered groups (Chow, 2002: 25). But counter to the perspective that views “ethnicity as a group” runs another argument about “ethnicity without groups” (Brubaker, 2004). Brubaker (2004: 11) suggests that ethnicity does not merely mark out specific entities or groups, but should rather be understood as defining “group-ness” and “event” in “relational, processual, dynamic, eventful, and disaggregated terms”. Ethnicity thus emerges not as an attribute of group identity bounded by biology, culture, and geography, but as a process of ethnicization, forming and reforming the “human artifice” that maintains practical inequality (Wallerstein, 1991).
The Korean Chinese ethnic question needs to be contextualized as part of the process of ethnicization clearly projected in the construction of the 56 ethno-national groups (minzu) scattered throughout China. Under the theme of the nation as “a plural singularity” (Mullaney, 2011), anthropologists on Chinese ethnic minorities have long emphasized the state’s role in constructing “ethnic culture” and “ethnic identity” as a consequence of the “backwardness” of remote zones (Dautcher, 2009; Harrell, 2000; Litzinger, 2000; Mueggler, 2001). Characterizing the Chinese politics of ethnic minority as a civilizing project, Harrell argues that the Han Chinese-dominated central government has engendered an ethnic periphery with a “stigmatized identity” as backward, uncivilized, dirty, and stupid (Harrell, 2000). The arbitrary and simplified category of ethnicity devised by the Communist state as a consequence of the ethnic classification project conducted in the 1950s ignores the complicated histories, cultures, and politics of ethnic groups and assimilates them under the rubric of “One China” (Friedman, 2006; Harrell, 2000; Litzinger, 2000).
Since the 1980s, however, the Chinese government has begun, in the wake of economic reforms, to support the revival of the traditional cultures and rituals of ethnic minorities, recognizing cultural differences that were repressed during the Cultural Revolution. As part of a modernizing project, the state’s past mistakes have been tacitly admitted, and forgotten or repressed traditions and cultures of ethnic minorities have been recovered and recuperated through “memory work” (Litzinger, 1998). The recognition of ethnic others by the Chinese Communist Party has given rise to more openly displayed cultural differences and an appreciation of the uniqueness of each ethnic group. Deployed in the form of colorful attire or song and dance, cultural difference becomes the subject of ethnic tourism, and Chinese ethnic harmony is exhibited as an idealized “plural singularity.” Chinese ethnic minorities now take their place in the pageant of legitimate and official others that help constitute the long and grand history of China. I take “the revival of the ethnic” (Litzinger, 1998) as a key analytical turning point in understanding the new dynamics between ethnic others and the Chinese Communist Party, one that attempts to go beyond the simple dichotomy between domination and resistance, the center and periphery (Harrell, 2000), or internal orientalism (Schein, 2000). Despite the constant and strong presence of the state in the governance of ethnic minorities, ethnic others emerge in the public and political domain as active agents who engage in deploying and promoting would-be-proper ethnic elements and politics in order to define and redefine who they are and what they would like to be.
In comparison with the thriving ethnic culture, I would like to point out that the rise of Korean Chinese ethnic talk has been triggered not only by “the revival of the ethnic” in the economic reforms of China, but also by the Korean Wind. Instead of dramatizing their ethnic cultural identity through attire, dance, food, and rituals for the benefit of tourists and state contests like other ethnic minority groups, Korean Chinese have more intensively deployed and promoted their assembled ethnic characteristics and associated values in the service of transnational labor migration. In other words, a new type of border-crossing between China and South Korea has led Korean Chinese to undertake multiple redefinitions of their own ethnicity. Expanding the ongoing debate surrounding terms such as “daughter-in-law,” “apple-pear,” and “100% Korean Chinese,” I develop the seemingly clear-cut politics built on this divided and reserved attitude as the center of my analysis: Korean Chinese have appropriated their border-ness as an economic means of facilitating transnational migration to South Korea while displaying their political affiliation to the state of China as an ethnic survival tactic. In other words, the ethnic identity constructed on the borderland is repressed at certain points but revived at others. Some people celebrate it, while others obscure or ignore it.
Long public secrets
In the wake of the Korean Wind, the most difficult and poignant questions about Korean Chinese identity have arisen, for me, from the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. Despite the mass exodus to South Korea for economic betterment, and the consequently strong cultural influence from South Korea, those who stay behind in Yanbian adopt a certain caution about their encounters with South Koreans. During five meetings with elderly Communist Party members, I found them all strikingly hesitant about how to assess the politics of these events and how to situate their relationship to South Korea and South Koreans – what Park has termed a “suspension” of interpretation. My conversations with these retired party members give a glimpse of mixed Korean Chinese feelings about how the Korean Wind has affected the Chinese ethnic margin. Mr An, a former member of the Longjing police department in his early 80s, admired the cleanliness and good manners of Koreans in Seoul when he visited there. His son had worked in South Korea for more than a decade and had sent money back to China. After An spoke, Mr Oh – a retired middle school teacher – proudly responded,
I heard that there is nothing to see in South Korea. It is such a tiny country. Everybody is crazy about work-work. I have never been to South Korea. And I don’t want to go, either. Look at the greatness of China – the economic achievement. The Communist Party is developing the welfare of the people. I would rather travel in China than go to South Korea.
Mr Kim argued with him a bit.
Mr. Oh, the greatness of the Chinese Communist Party is undeniable. But it is worth trying to go to South Korea, at least once. However much we hate Koreans or South Korea, it is more developed than China in some parts. There is something we can learn from them. Also, aren’t we the same ethnic people?
Mr Lee – formerly the principal of a middle school in Longjing – kept silent through the discussion. I asked him whether there was a special reason for him not to visit South Korea. He said,
I’ve had several opportunities to go there. My work unit organized a trip. It was in the early 1990s at a beginning stage of the Korean Wind and not so many people had been to South Korea yet. I wanted to go. But I was worried. What if I were persecuted after I came back? I didn’t want to lose my position and political power at that time. So I decided never to go to South Korea. I just watch Korean TV and read their newspapers.
This conversation allowed me to realize that these party members have in effect declined to answer questions of belonging or identity because they perceive these questions as dangerous. In addition, it inspired me to rethink the locus of the two Koreas (North and South) with Korean Chinese, especially South Korea, a country constructed and imagined as an “enemy homeland” throughout the Cold War. South Korea was once a source of fear because any minimal connection to it resulted in harsh persecution. These particular anxieties, structured through the Cold War and the Cultural Revolution, have inhibited Korean Chinese from developing any political discussion and engagement beyond the advocacy of socialism.
In particular, those who were directly victimized during the Cultural Revolution tend to present their ethnic affiliations beyond the duality between China and South Korea, socialism and capitalism. The suspicion that Korean Chinese received as spies to serve North Korea or South Korea during the Revolution gave rise to critical political consequences – it could be a question of life and death. Mr Pi, a Communist Party member in his early 70s, lost his father and brother during the Cultural Revolution. He spoke, it seemed to me, very cautiously.
My father moved from the northern part of Korea. He was a scientist who studied in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. But he was accused, groundlessly, of being a capitalist and killed during the Cultural Revolution. We could not believe why and how it happened. My brother, a scientist too, was falsely persecuted as a spy for North Korea after our father died. My family was completely torn apart. All of my siblings and my mother became impoverished. We were sent to the countryside once. We were raised in different relatives’ houses. Although everybody is gone to South Korea nowadays, almost as if it is our real home, I could never dream of going there. Now I feel that I live in a better world, since I’ve met and eaten with a Korean lady.
Mr Pi’s voice trembled as he spoke to me, the first Korean he had ever talked to in person. He had always believed that any encounters at all with Koreans would result in harm to himself or his family, after seeing his father and brother killed because of the government’s falsified suspicions. Back then, the so-called “elite” families of scientists were major targets in political purges because of the possibility that they could escape to North Korea with their knowledge and skills in order to help that nation’s rebuilding effort after the Korean War. In fact, according to Mr Pi and the testimonies of other party members, even before the actual Cultural Revolution began in 1966, rumors about the persecution of Korean Chinese scientists spread, which resulted in a secretive exodus to North Korea. It was under this circumstance that Mr Pi’s father and brother were victimized. None of the family, including Mr Pi himself, ever recovered from the traumatic experience, and they all had to cope with limited economic opportunities for many years. And yet, after the state officially acknowledged its wrongdoing when Deng Xiaoping took power in 1979, Mr Pi gained a job in the government’s housing affairs office, and he set about to demonstrate his dedication to the Communist Party. Mr Pi could not openly critique the state violence that had afflicted his family. Moreover, nobody in his immediate family – not Mr Pi, not his wife, not even their daughter and son – has taken part in the Korean Wind, the quickest, most common method of economic betterment for Korean Chinese. Even though Mr Pi did not say much about his memories, his trauma has been inherited by the next generation, not in a verbal form, but as intangible shared feelings. He has tried to make this unhomely place homely by keeping his distance from both Koreas and refusing to engage in any political critiques or other activities that might cause suspicion.
Kinship ties to either North or South Korea could become a source of political persecution. Given that the majority of Korean Chinese in Yanbian are descended from settlers from the northern part of Korea, Hamkyuongbukdo, those whose ancestors came from southern Korea, called namdochi, or “people from the south,” tend to stand out. Mr Cho, a renowned novelist in his mid-60s, is one of the rare namdochi in Yanbian. His father moved from a region of southern Korea (Kyungsangbukdo) to Yanbian in the late 1930s. His father’s original plan was to move back to his hometown after making decent money in Yanbian working for a newspaper company and later as a high school teacher. However, his return to southern Korea was delayed when colonial Chosun was liberated from Japan in 1945, and then made permanently impossible when the Korean War broke out in 1950. Amid the harsh Cold War atmosphere, with no diplomatic relationship between China and South Korea, there was no way for his father to stay in touch with his family, or even to know their whereabouts. During the Cultural Revolution, in particular, his father’s origin as a southern Korean became a ground for criticism and political persecution. Mr Cho testifies that he saw his father beaten and accused of being a South Korean spy. Because of this false accusation, Mr Cho’s mother and siblings, including Mr Cho himself, who was in the middle school back then, were separately sent to the countryside. Subjected to multiple accusations during the Cultural Revolution, his father suffered through serious bouts of depression, and made several attempts to commit suicide. His homesickness grew worse and worse. He eventually passed away without ever seeing his hometown again – to the day of his death, he still desperately missed his parents and sister back in South Korea.
Even though nobody in Mr Cho’s family died directly because of the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, the trauma that damaged the father’s health and family’s political economic future raised their awareness of South Korea as a homeland – but a forbidden one. However, in contrast to Mr Pi, Mr Cho has been vocally critical of Chinese state violence and the Communist Party’s authoritarianism. He believes that the Party has been too ready to see Korean Chinese as potential traitors who should not be allowed full participation in the mainstream of Chinese society. At the same time, Mr Cho is critical of South Korea for abandoning and discriminating against Korean Chinese due to their affiliation with China.
But the Korean Wind brought about an irony in Mr Cho’s life. His wife has been working in the long-forbidden homeland to earn extra income that has been a tremendous help to their household, and his son went to graduate school in South Korea. Holding a stable position as a highly respected writer and official, Mr Cho himself did not have to chase the economic opportunities that the former forbidden homeland could promise. However, his wife and son were eager to pursue the Korean dream, and he had to let them go. Without arguing much, Mr Cho and his family seemed to reach a tacit agreement, allowing them to invest their time and future by working in South Korea. Now living alone, Mr Cho expressed both his unhomeliness and homeliness. On the one hand, post-Cold War South Korea invited his family to pursue better economic opportunities; on the other, post-socialist China requires from him faith in the Communist Party’s story of Chinese economic success. The last time I saw him, in the summer of 2016, his critique of China had become much thinner and less strident, as he paid tribute to its leadership in the global economy. But he made the same comparison to me as before – “we Korean Chinese,” he said, “are a drop of oil in the water,” indicating that Korean Chinese, as an ethnic minority, could never be integrated into the “real” China.
Embodied border crossing
On top of the traumatic memories of the Cultural Revolution, the theme of border crossing is another characteristic that defines who Korean Chinese are – deeply ingrained in both everyday conversation and history books.10 Usually, the stories reflect multiple experiences of moving, not only border crossing from the Korean peninsula to China, but also from Yanbian to other parts of Northeast China or beyond. The routes are incoherent and non-unitary. The story of Mr Moon, an old Communist Party member in Longjing (one of six cities in Yanbian) who also lived through the Cultural Revolution, introduces a different way of managing the anxiety and fear that arises from ties to South Korea. Now in his late 70s, he is a retired technician who used to work for the local government. While growing up, the young Mr Moon faced endless poverty and farm work. When he was a teenager in 1950, the Chinese military called for volunteers to participate in the Korean War, fighting on the side of North Korea. Many Korean Chinese soldiers who had previously been trained to participate in the Chinese liberation war were re-deployed to South Korea. He knew he was too young to go to war. But he was not to be denied a place in the army. During the Korean War, his duties did not expose him to much danger: he was a courier from one unit to another and did simple translation work from Chinese to Korean, or the other way around, in order to help the North Korean and Chinese armies communicate with each other. After the Korean War, which was disastrous to both Koreas, paused in 1953, some Korean Chinese soldiers remained in North Korea to aid in the reconstruction effort, while others returned to China. Mr Moon decided to go back to his hometown in China because he had fallen ill and could not engage in hard physical labor.
There, he was again confronted with poverty and farm work, even after the successful socialist revolution and its programs of land redistribution and collectivization. As poverty peaked during the Great Leap Forward and three-year natural disaster of the late 1950s and early 1960s, “running away to North Korea” became the fashion among young Korean Chinese in Yanbian. Like many of his contemporaries, Mr Moon decided to escape to North Korea. He recalled the moment in an excited voice.
Every day, I heard about more and more young people who had disappeared, secretly gone to North Korea. I made a plan with several friends of mine in town to go, since all of us were too sick to farm. I just ran away with my friends without telling my parents. Back then, North Korea was considered much better off than China. I was very brave without thinking much of the future.
His life in North Korea, however, was not even close to what he had imagined. Mr Moon had dreamed of becoming a factory worker in the more industrially developed North Korea, since he hated being a farmer in the cold weather of Northeast China. But working at a factory in North Korea was completely different from his dreams. The work environment was rigid and the supervision was tight everywhere. There were no friends or networks that he could rely on for help. “I was lonely and isolated, as if I lived in a completely foreign country.” The unpleasant conditions made Mr Moon return to Jilin province, his home in China.
Normalized diplomatic relations in 1992 made a dramatic life change when he reconnected with a long-lost uncle living in South Korea. Unlike the majority of Korean Chinese in Yanbian, whose kinship ties are to the current North Korea, Mr Moon, whose parents moved from the southern part of the current South Korea, had an easier time visiting his Korean relatives because of the family reunion program11 initiated by the South Korean government. Making contact with his uncle allowed Mr Moon to be invited to South Korea, where he eventually overstayed his visa while working as a technician in a factory. He recalled his encounter with South Korea as follows:
In China, we learned that South Korea was an impoverished capitalist enemy and a child of American imperialism. It was right after the Seoul Olympics when I first visited South Korea. It was much more developed and cleaner than I had imagined. I looked so small and shabby compared to South Koreans, who were wearing cleaner and more fashionable clothes. Working as a technician, I made much better money than in China. But I did not tell South Koreans that I was from China. Because I speak the Kyungsang dialect [from the southeastern part of South Korea, South Koreans did not realize that I was Korean Chinese. I knew that I would have been discriminated against or looked down upon if I had told them I had come from poor socialist China.
He deeply feared the consequences if his South Korean friends learned that he had fought for North Korea in the Korean War. Aware of the strong anti-communist sentiment in South Korea, Mr Moon tried very hard to avoid saying anything about his war-related experiences. After overstaying in South Korea for five years, Mr Moon had made enough money to buy a new apartment in Yanbian. He felt too old to keep doing physical labor in South Korea, and returned to China in 1998; meanwhile his son and daughter-in-law work in South Korea and his granddaughter goes to college there. But he said, “I have not spoken about my multiple border crossing experiences to others. I want to be careful, just in case.”
Here, I was indeed stunned by the long silence that Mr Moon has kept regarding his multiple border crossing experiences – from South Korea to China, from China to North Korea and back to China, and again, from China to South Korea, and back to China. Melancholia and “unhomeliness” have always been a part of Mr Moon’s identification process throughout his multiple border crossings. But at the same time, Mr Moon openly and proudly talked about his children’s choice to work in South Korea. Their border crossing emerges as an economic and apolitical gesture whereas his experiences may carry a political implication that could burden and impact his life as a Communist Party member who belongs to the generation of the Cultural Revolution. What is the principle or intention behind this wariness about border crossing? In the following section, I articulate how Korean Chinese party members use socialist political claims about who they are and what they should be like to both highlight and obscure their bordered and vigilant ethnicity.
Divided belonging
Mr Kim Chul, the Communist Party member in his early 70s introduced at the beginning of the essay, is a vibrant storyteller, good at spicing his narratives with emotional expressions and witty jokes. Whenever I heard a story from Mr Kim, it was clear that he wanted to demonstrate his pride in being a party member, and his faith in the Communist Party. As he often told me,
We Korean Chinese have not lost our language and culture even after living in China for a century, all thanks to the greatness of the ethnic minority policy of the Chinese Communist Party. Thanks to this good policy, you and I can speak and become friends.
Mr Kim had shared his detailed biography, full of border crossing. I knew that his wife went to Seoul to work as a waitress in order to pay off the debt incurred by the purchase of their house. As a government officer, he could not make enough money to catch up to the new trend of purchasing apartments and obtaining expensive educations for his children and grandchildren. His wife’s work in South Korea was essential, although he was sad and disheartened about her absence. Besides his wife, his two sons and two daughters-in-law have been working in South Korea. The whole family members have deeply relied on remittances from South Korea.
Despite the important role of remittances in his family economy, Mr Kim has never overtly approved of them, at least to me. “The reason I had to send my wife, sons, and daughter-in-law to South Korea to make money is not because we are poor Korean Chinese, but because my family wants to have a little better life in a faster time.” I asked him if he has ever thought of going to South Korea himself. He responded,
No! I have never thought of going to South Korea to make money myself because I have a good position in China and get good benefits and a pension as a well-positioned Communist Party member. If I go to South Korea to make money, that would not look good. Also, I would have lost my benefits if I had quit before I retired. I need to be the one who keeps up our social position in China while other family members go abroad to work.
Instead of Mr Kim going to South Korea, his wife took on the harsh burden of labor in South Korea to contribute to the family’s economic betterment. Mr Cho and Mr Moon also addressed the close political affiliation to their social status and political position, distinguishing themselves from family members who have gone with the Korean Wind. Mr Kim, however, believes strongly in his role as the core binding force at home, where his wife and his children would eventually return. On his own family’s transnational migration, Mr Kim’s position remained constant – going to South Korea is merely an economic activity. All of Mr Kim’s family members went to South Korea through illegal brokers and stayed undocumented for years, whereas Mr Kim remained politically stable and faithful to the state of China and the Communist Party in the midst of the rampant Korean dream.
The accounts of these veteran Communist Party members collectively challenge the notion of a diasporic subjectivity based on ambiguous belongingness and an unstable sense of home (Clifford, 1997; Safran, 1991), exemplified by such expressions as “I am neither here nor there” (Zavella, 2011) or “between and betwixt.” To those who have been on the move for generations, home can be construed as either “where you are at” (Gilroy, 1991) or “where you are going to” (Chu, 2009). Home may appear as a creolized, hybridized, and impure site to migrants because their mobility has led them to reassess the seemingly absolute and essential link between territory and identity (Hall, 1996) through a process of displacement and temporalization in correspondence with specific histories and geopolitical dynamics (Axel, 2004). However, in contrast to ideas of diasporic ambiguity or unhomeliness, the vigilant attitude of Korean Chinese, especially Communist Party members, involves a strong denial of in-between-belonging, along with an overt identification with China, with being Chinese citizens. Korean Chinese surreptitiously express a long-forbidden sense of belonging to, or longing for, their homeland in a personal setting, while at the same time they foreground their unambiguous political and patriotic affiliations with China – in reaction to the Korean Wind.
Living with reservations
Intervening in critical discussions on borderlands, unhomeliness, and ethnic minority, this oral history-based ethnography has analyzed the formation of an ethnic minority politics that appears at the intersection of post-Cold War circumstances and post-socialist politics. In the midst of the rampant celebration of the Korean Wind’s influence, this article reveals the efforts (some successful, some not) of retired Communist Party members to speak about questions of belonging by resurrecting buried traumatic memories of the Cultural Revolution and multiple border-crossing experiences. Most importantly, in the context of the revival of ethnic talk in post-socialist China and the development of vernacular theories on ethnic identity, I have argued that the Korean Wind has prompted Korean Chinese to redefine their ethnic subjectivity and re-characterize what it means to be Korean Chinese living as an ethnic minority on the Chinese border alongside the two Koreas. Indeed, the Korean Wind creates a critical historical juncture that enables Korean Chinese to confront their collective hesitance to articulate a recollection of the socialist era, while at the same time it requires a new ability to make sense of the current social restructuring in Yanbian.
Among the most interesting ethnographic highlights are the many contradictions observed in the discourse of these party members. Sometimes they are blunt about their political orientations and traumatic memories, but sometimes they are secretive about them. They are proud of their endurance, but are also ashamed of their inability to speak about the state’s wrongdoing. For the most part, they criticize South Korea, portraying it as a disorganized, disordered, or too-democratic country, as opposed to China, which they see as an organized, ordered, and legitimately authoritarian country. They also remain mostly reluctant to visit South Korea due to the emotional vestiges of Cold War politics, despite their deep dependence on the Korean money sent by their children. I believe these contradictions demonstrate that the old fears have not fully disappeared, but persist in the memories, habits, and feelings of these aging party members.
Admittedly, this particular structure of feeling is expressed in a limited selection of personal oral histories, which may reflect only a partial view of the traumas that stem from the Korean Chinese Cold War experience, or from their minority status within China. However, these stories in some cases ended a long silence about the Cultural Revolution by giving voice to radically diverse, incoherent, and traumatic memories evoked during the Korean Wind as part of what Heonik Kwon has termed the “slow decomposition” of the Cold War. Here, I do not mean to suggest that Korean Chinese have faced an especially sharp shift from the era of repressed ethnicity to that of revived ethnicity in the age of economic reform. Rather, following the persistent suggestions of Mr Kim Chul and other party members, my argument is that the repression and revival of ethnicity should be construed not as two separated moments, or as politically antithetical. They are, instead, a concocted effect deeply ingrained in everyday life as an implicit support mechanism for transnational migration between China and South Korea.
In conclusion, let me go back to the question raised at the conference, what really constitutes “100% Korean Chinese”? I have answered the question in two ways. On the one hand, the Korean Chinese effort to rearticulate the long unspoken past or the uncomfortable relationship with the forbidden homeland is a manifestation of the ways in which they have territorialized and rooted themselves in Yanbian as Korean “Chinese” for the last century – through deep and serious engagements with the Chinese Revolution, the building of the Chinese socialist state, and the rise of China in the global economy. On the other, their reservations about a once-repressed ethnic politics, now foregrounded due to the Korean Wind, addresses their sense of divided belonging as “Korean” Chinese. This duality does not simply demonstrate that they are caught between China and South Korea, socialism and capitalism. Rather, this duality is the very means that forbids Korean Chinese from gaining full access to any homeland at all – whether Yanbian or South Korea. To be “100% Korean Chinese” is to have a forbidden homeland.
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: This work was supported by Duke University Graduate School (Field Research Grant) and Evan Frankel (Write- Up Fellowship).
Footnotes
1By “structure of feeling,” Raymond Williams means the affective elements of consciousness – “not feeling against thought but thought as felt and feeling as thought.” That is a practical consciousness of a present kind in a living and inter-relating continuity as a living process (Williams, 1977: 132–133). I follow Williams’s use of the term by highlighting the ruptured but continuous remembrance of the past through the forgetting or repressing of memories of the Cultural Revolution.
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2Park (2015: 148) states that “Korean Chinese juxtapose the capitalist present with the era of the Cultural Revolution” by highlighting how the Cultural Revolution was construed as the antithesis of capitalism as currently experienced by Korean Chinese.
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3The Tumen River flows for 548 kilometers (340 miles) between China and North Korea, forming the border between them.Where the river is particularly narrow, towns on opposing sides (China and North Korea) are almost like neighborhoods of the same town.
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4The novel Bugando, written by An Su-gil, a Korean writer, deals with Korean Chinese farmers’ border-crossing and settlement stories. Koreans had to face issues of cultural assimilation and ethnic discrimination (see also Park, 2005).
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5Park analyzes the Korean migration to as “territorial osmosis” that led to “natural progression and expansion” of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (Park, 2000: 201). In a different vein, Jaeeun Kim considers the trans-border dimension of Japanese colonial state-building. The colonial state, Kim argues, classified Korean migrants in Manchuria so as to constitute a form of “diaspora nationhood,” thus describing the imagined nation in trans-territorial terms (Kim, 2014).
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6Jin Young Lee (1999) argues that Korean Chinese were tranformed from “Korean people” (Chosunin) into Korean Chinese (Chosunjok) during the socialist revolution and the nation-building process of the new China.
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7Chinese ethnic minority policy is based on the notion of “plural singularity” (Mullaney, 2011), which recognizes diversity while emphasizing the central control of the government.
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8When Yanbian was designated as an autonomous prefecture in 1952, North Korea became an important supporter of its Korean Chinese inhabitants by exchanging teachers and donating textbooks. This socialist reciprocity continued until Kim Il Sung criticized Mao’s socialism as “revisionism” (Lim, 2005).
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9Recent studies on Korean Chinese migration deal with different forms of migration such as “making and faking kinship,” especially marriage migration (Freeman, 2011), and multi-sited Korean Chinese families living across China and South Korea (Park, 2006).
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10Common Sense of Korean Chinese History, The Traces of Korean Chinese, One Hundred Years of Korean Chinese History, Jilin Korean Chinese, and multiple collections of local histories written by local historians (Yanji, Longjing, Tumen, Hualong, Wangqing, Hunchun). All were written in Korean and published in Yanbian.
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11In the late 1980s, the Korean government initiated a homeland visit program for Korean Chinese who were separated from their families in South Korea during the Korean War or before.
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Biographies
June Hee Kwon is an assistant professor/faculty fellow at the Department of East Asian Studies, New York University.
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Between Foreign and Family: Return Migration and Identity Construction among Korean Americans and Korean Chinese (Asian American Studies Today) Paperback – January 31, 2018
by Helene K. Lee (Author)
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Winner of the 2019 ASA Book Award - Asia/Asian-American Section
Between Foreign and Family explores the impact of inconsistent rules of ethnic inclusion and exclusion on the economic and social lives of Korean Americans and Korean Chinese living in Seoul. These actors are part of a growing number of return migrants, members of an ethnic diaspora who migrate “back” to the ancestral homeland from which their families emigrated. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interview data, Helene K. Lee highlights the “logics of transnationalism” that shape the relationships between these return migrants and their employers, co-workers, friends, family, and the South Korean state.
While Koreanness marks these return migrants as outsiders who never truly feel at home in the United States and China, it simultaneously traps them into a liminal space in which they are neither fully family, nor fully foreign in South Korea. Return migration reveals how ethnic identity construction is not an indisputable and universal fact defined by blood and ancestry, but a contested and uneven process informed by the interplay of ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, gender, and history.
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"In this distinct contribution to the field of transnational studies, Helene K. Lee shows how ethnic identity comes to take on a very different significance depending on one's nationality and class position." -- Joshua Roth ― author of Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan
"Lee examines the expectations and experiences of two groups, whose members think of themselves as Korean." ― Asian Affairs
"The book merits reading to encourage reflection on the current social situation and pondering of the possible transformation of Koreanness in the future." ― The Review of Korean Studies
"Lee’s study is a crisply written and cogently argued analysis that makes an original contribution to a range of interrelated subjects that have preoccupied social scientists for decades, including diasporic nationalism, return migration, and (im)migrant incorporation." ― China Review International
"Lee’s book aptly suggests that we should try to imagine the concept of homeland beyond the simple binary between family and foreign, us and them, and in and out." ― The Journal of Asian Studies
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HELENE K. LEE is an assistant professor of sociology at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
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Publisher : Rutgers University Press; None edition (January 31, 2018)
Language : English
Paperback : 192 pages
Customer Reviews: 3.0 out of 5 stars 1 rating
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Between Foreign and Family: Return Migration and Identity Construction among Korean Americans and Korean Chinese. By Helene K. Lee.
New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 192 pp. ISBN: 9780813586144 (cloth).
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 June 2020
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