The majority of the 30,000-plus undergraduates at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign—including the large population of Korean American students—come from nearby metropolitan Chicago. Among the campus’s largest non-white ethnicities, Korean American students arrive at college hoping to realize the liberal ideals of the modern American university, in which individuals can exit their comfort zones to realize their full potential regardless of race, nation, or religion. However, thes...

No one will soon forget the image, blazed across the airwaves, of armed Korean Americans taking to the rooftops as their businesses went up in flames during the Los Angeles riots. Why Korean Americans? What stoked the wrath the riots unleashed against them? Blue Dreams is the first book to make sense of these questions, to show how Korean Americans, variously depicted as immigrant seekers after the American dream or as racist merchants exploiting African Americans, emerged at the ...

An engaging ethnography of Korean American immigrant families navigating the United StatesBoth scholarship and popular culture on Asian American immigrant families have long focused on intergenerational cultural conflict and stereotypes about “tiger mothers” and “model minority” students. This book turns the tables on the conventional imagination of the Asian American immigrant family, arguing that, in fact, families are often on the same page about the challenges ...

South Korea's Education Exodus analyzes Early Study Abroad in relation to the neoliberalization of South Korean education and labor. With chapters based on demographic and survey data, discourse analysis, and ethnography in destinations such as Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United States, the book considers the complex motivations that spur families of pre-college youth to embark on often arduous and expensive journeys. In addition to examining various forms and locations of stud...

On March 9, 1996, tens of thousands of readers of a daily newspaper in China’s Anhui province saw a photograph of two young women at a local long-distance bus station. Dressed in fashionable new winter coats and carrying luggage printed with Latin letters, the women were returning home from their jobs in one of China’s large cities. As the photo caption indicated, the image represented the “transformation of migrant women”; the women’s “transformation” was signaled by their status as consu...

This is the first ethnographic study of lala (lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) communities and politics in China, focusing on the city of Shanghai. Based on several years of in-depth interviews, the volume concentrates on lalas’ everyday struggle to reconcile same-sex desire with a dominant rhetoric of family harmony and compulsory marriage, all within a culture denying women’s active and legitimate sexual agency. Lucetta Yip Lo Kam reads discourses on homophobia in China, including the...

In 2004, Vanessa Fong offered a groundbreaking ethnographic exploration of the social, economic, and psychological development of children born since China's one-child policy was introduced in 1979. Her book Only Hope left readers with a picture of stressed, ambitious adolescents for whom elite status was the ultimate goal, though relatively few were in a position to achieve it.In Paradise Redefined, Fong tracks the experiences of many in her initial cohort of Chi...

South Koreans in the Debt Crisis is a detailed examination of the logic underlying the neoliberal welfare state that South Korea created in response to the devastating Asian Debt Crisis (1997–2001). Jesook Song argues that while the government proclaimed that it would guarantee all South Koreans a minimum standard of living, it prioritized assisting those citizens perceived as embodying the neoliberal ideals of employability, flexibility, and self-sufficiency. Song demonstrates th...

What is the state of intimate romantic relationships and marriage in urban China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan? Since the 1980's, the character of intimate life in these urban settings has changed dramatically. While many speculate about the 21st century as Asia's century, this book turns to the more intimate territory of sexuality and marriage—and observes the unprecedented changes in the law and popular expectations for romantic bonds and the creation of new families.Wives, Husbands...

What happens when Chinese American youths travel to mainland China in search of their ancestral roots, only to realize that in many ways they still feel out of place, or when mainland Chinese realize that the lives of the Chinese abroad may not be as good as they had imagined? By considering programs designed to facilitate interactions between overseas Chinese and their ancestral homelands, Andrea Louie highlights how these programs not only create opportunities for new connections but als...

There are more than 225 million rural-to-urban migrant workers, and some 20 million migrant children in Chinese cities. Because of policies related to the household registration (hukou) system, migrant students are not allowed a public high school education in the cities, so their urban education stops abruptly at the end of middle school. This book investigates the post-middle school education and labor market decisions of migrant students in Beijing and Shanghai, and provides a ...

Tongzhi, which translates into English as “same purpose” or “same will,” was once widely used to mean “comrade.” Since the 1990s, the word has been appropriated by the LGBT community in China and now refers to a broad range of people who do not espouse heteronormativity.Tongzhi Living, the first study of its kind, offers insights into the community of same-sex-attracted men in the metropolitan city of Dalian in northeast China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork by T...