Between 1980 and 1995, Korean immigrants were heavily concentrated in small businesses. A large proportion of their retail stores (grocery, liquor, produce, seafood, and hair-care/clothing/gift shops) were located in lower-income Black and Latino neighborhoods. Korean merchants distributed retail items, mostly produced by White corporations, to lower-income minority customers in neighborhoods where White corporations and independent store owners were reluctant to run businesses due to high crime rates and the residents’ lower spending capacity. Korean immigrants played a classic middleman minority role in lower-income minority neighborhoods in major American cities. Like middleman merchants in other societies (Jews in Poland and the U.S., Chinese in Southeast Asian countries, and Indians in South and East Africa), Korean merchants in Black neighborhoods were victimized by boycotts, physical violence, arson, and riots. All major Korean communities in the U.S. experienced Korean-Black conflicts in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, the interracial conflicts were most severe in New York and Los Angeles, the two largest Korean population centers in the U.S. This chapter from Pyong Gap Min’s book, Caught in the Middle: Korean Communities in New York and Los Angeles, examines Korean merchants’ business-related conflicts with Blacks in New York and Los Angeles in the 1980s and early 1990s. Korean merchants in New York City’s Black neighborhoods encountered several long-term boycotts, while those in South Central Los Angeles suffered more physical violence and destruction of their stores during the riots.  Reading this chapter on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Sa-I-Gu will be meaningful. 

This paper examines the impact of return migration to South Korea on the formation of hybrid ethnic identities in two immigrant communities, Korean Chinese (Joseonjok) and Korean Americans, within the Korean diaspora that emerge from two different state policies concerning ethnic minorities.  I explore how migration histories out of Korea impact the creation of stable Korean immigrant communities abroad and how these communities reproduce lifestyles and identities closely linked to the homeland by incorporating aspects of what it means to be “Korean,” embedded in a specific history, culture and tradition.  The findings are based on empirical data collected from semi-structured interviews conducted with 63 research participants, supplemented by informal conversations and participant observation during a 16-month fieldwork period in Seoul, South Korea between August 2004 and December 2005.  A comparative analysis of ethnic identity construction within the US assimilationist model and Joseonjok within a Chinese state protectionist model sheds light on the everyday negotiations of transnational “third culture kids” with ethnicity, nationality and gender ideologies.  The thread throughout the interviews is the struggle of cultural hybridity, of inhabiting a liminal space between two distinct national identities but linked to a diaspora through a sense of shared ethnic identity. 

Contemporary migration is distinct from past migration, and the transnational family currently encompasses an increasingly wider range of family structures that affects a wider range of cultures and nations. In the 1960s and 1970s, labor migrants from a developing South Korea left spouses, mostly wives, and children for economic opportunities abroad only to have their families re-connect with them in a more or less permanent move overseas. More recently, Korea's new position in the global economy has shifted family demography and strategies for social and economic mobility. It is in this context that the transnational family has re-emerged and taken a new form. This time children are being sent abroad for edcuational opportunities, leaving one or both parents to work in Korea, and often with the hope of re-uniting as a family back in Korea. But, this type of transnational family in contrast to the intact migrant family remains little understood. In this paper, we begin with a brief discussion of the social and political context of transnational family migration from South Korea to Canada and then using TKFS 2011 survey data, we situate our empirical comparisons of transnational and intact families in the literature on migration motivations and on those dimensions understood to be important for structuring transnational opportunities such as motivations, social class background, gender and the division of household labor, and social networks and previous exposure. 

The traditional cultural characteristics are challenged and negotiated in the process of acculturation. Some characteristics are discarded, others are maintained, still others may get strengthened, new characteristics from the new cultures are adopted, and possibly a new hybrid of a culture of family socialization may emerge. The focus group interviews conducted with Korean-American parents and their children attest to the complexity of this process mixed with core and peripheral changes. The study findings show that Korean-American families appear to live more distinctively in the Korean culture than the mainstream Western culture, and the parental cultural adaptation is, at least at this point, minimal. Korean immigrant parents show reluctance and resistance to change, except in some areas that they believe are necessary and potentially helpful to their children. Family values are core values that parents are eager to maintain and transmit to their children. Korean-American parents are also deeply concerned that their children are growing up as a racial and cultural minority, which they believe, is likely to impede children’s development and future prospects. To protect their children, parents focus quite intensively on ethnic socialization within the family. The overall responses suggest that Korean-American youth are aware of their minority status and cultural differences but have a positive and strong sense of ethnic identity as Korean-Americans, which also might be a sign of successful family socialization.