Korea Dreaming: Vietnamese Women's Stories from the Marriage Migration Cycle

Abstract

My dissertation entitled "Korea Dreaming: Vietnamese Women’s Stories from the Marriage Migration Cycle" is a long-term ethnographic project that interweaves the diverse, multi-faceted life stories of Vietnamese women at various points of their marriage migration cycle between Vietnam and South Korea. Previous studies on marriage migration usually focus on one point of the migration cycle from either the vantage point of the sending country or that of the receiving country, with few studies on return marriage migration, and practically no studies on repeat marriage migration. My project, in contrast, takes a cyclical, transnational perspective on Vietnamese women’s marriage migration process with focused attention on the women’s narratives, whether as waiting (non-)migrants, current migrants, undocumented workers, returnees, or repeat migrants. By forefronting marriage migrant women’s narratives and life stories, I show how these women move between different phases of their marriage migration cycle—that is, desiring, waiting, working, returning, repeating—and, through these movements, emerge as full desiring selves with multidimensional subjectivities. I conducted engaged ethnographic field research mostly in Can Tho, Vietnam from October 2015 to November 2018, including participant observation, informal conversations, and in-depth interviews (a total of 55 interviews with 30 women) based on long-term relationships with Vietnamese marriage migrant women and members of their communities. While most of my field work took place in Vietnam, I took eight research trips to Korea in order to follow the real-time migration process of several women I met in Vietnam before their migration. From September 2016 to March 2018, I volunteered then worked as the counseling program manager at a local NGO that serves and advocates for marriage migrant women to South Korea and their children. My full-time involvement at the NGO as a Korean teacher, counseling team member then manager, and community organizer allowed me to meet hundreds of marriage migrant women. I learned about their stories and the structural difficulties they faced, as well as engaged in the NGO’s efforts to advance their human rights. Many of my long-term relationships with marriage migrant women started during my time there. In my study, I argue that marriage migrant women’s stories are a powerful antidote to enduring nationalist, patriarchal discourses that racialize or “other” these women on local, regional, and global scales, whether as opportunistic gold-diggers, traitors of the nation, inadequate foreign mothers, or victims of human trafficking and domestic violence. The study’s cyclical, transnational perspective combined with focused attention on marriage migrant women’s narratives contributes to migration theories by considering migrant selves that extend to before and beyond their actual phase as migrants in a foreign country. This research also shows how women forge, break, or re-negotiate kinship ties, as well as strategize and generate meaning in their lives amid their shifting intersectional positionalities in transnational contexts that often put them at the lowest rungs of society. This study also contributes to feminist and kinship theories through its narrative approach and analysis of the links among transnational migration, family, interlocking social inequalities, and women’s selves over time and space. Furthermore, this study addresses some of the dilemmas in bridging feminist ethnography and intersectional social work practice surrounding transnational marriage migration.