Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 208 pp. US$19.95, paper. ISBN 9780197517901.
If we named the emotional landscape inhabited by those of us who are from neither here nor there, what would it be? Without a name, it somehow also evades capture even if we employ several languages. What is carried in the hearts of transnational migrants, particularly those who migrate to countries where migration is less established? In this impressive and accessible study, sociologist Sharon J. Yoon writes what I consider an ethnography of the transnational migrant heart. The secret longing, the loneliness, the discomfort of barrier after barrier after barrier. It is a touching, vulnerable book written with a plot-driven pace.
Welcome to Wangjing, located in a district of Beijing, the world’s biggest Korea Town. Wangjing is an area designed by the Chinese government to attract foreign investment to the megacity of Beijing. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 saw South Korean multinational corporations (chaebol) move into the area to revive business. As Korean expats entered the area, establishing factories and offices, a market for Korean goods and services emerged. Four years after the financial crisis, only about 500 Korean households were in the district, but by the time Yoon began her fieldwork in 2010, the majority of Beijing’s 200,000 Koreans resided in the area.
Before you assume this is a simple story of expat life, think again. Yoon’s ethnography shows nothing is simple in transnational life. In her sensitive and detailed study, Yoon reveals that migrant existence and the rootless sense it brings, particularly among diverse coethnic communities, are complex ever-present phenomena. Three types of ethnic Korean communities live in Wangjing. There is tension. This intriguing element propels the narrative as if it were a novel, uncovering the lives and adventures of its characters. But this is not fiction—it is the story of real people whose lives are, at times, heartbreaking and fraught.
There are the South Korean expats, sent overseas by chaebol on a short-term assignment. There are the grassroots migrants, South Koreans who opened small businesses in the district in the late 1990s. And then there are the third- and fourth-generation Chinese citizens of Korean ancestry (joseonjok in Korean and chaoxianzu in Chinese). The Korean Chinese migrated from the countryside into Wangjing, becoming the “hands and feet” (acting as translators, and introducing vendors) for South Koreans, one informant told Yoon. Some South Koreans came to Wangjing, spending their retirement savings to open Korean restaurants, cafes, and hair salons. There are middle managers, laid off in corporate downsizing in Seoul. And then there are those who, having failed in Wangjing, decide to cast themselves out: a decision made in the wake of having lost everything in a business that failed to thrive in the enclave. Sometimes South Korean entrepreneurs disappeared into the night, leaving workers without wages and only a cloud of rumours to make sense of things.
“Even casual passersby will notice that the Korean enclave is rife with tension,” Yoon writes, intriguingly, early in her ethnography. Even with this tension, she elaborates, “Koreans from these varied backgrounds have continued to live and work together because they needed one another” (2). To need is deeply human, but when need is combined with distrust, it is fraught. In this way, by accessing the emotional landscape of this transnational migrant community, Yoon offers a case study that is a cutting-edge critique of global capitalism and transnational migration. The dream of financial success offered by transnational migration is, instead, more akin to a sickening, unending nightmare. Further, this troublesome experience takes on a different visage depending on different contexts. Yoon shares with us an overlooked aspect of transnational migration, hinting at a greater need for studies that examine what migration looks and feels like in East Asia for Asians.
Yoon has a couple of objectives in this book, and she achieves them. One is to understand how Korean Chinese entrepreneurs thrived in the enclave, while South Koreans did not. Yoon points out that since the South Koreans had material resources, education, and work experience, we might assume they would do better as entrepreneurs. The success of Korean Chinese migrants is likewise unexpected, and here Yoon cites research showing that the livelihoods of Chinese rural migrants have worsened over the years, despite her own research on this case indicating otherwise. What Yoon reveals is the downward mobility of South Korean migrants, a trend not acknowledged by contemporary theories on transnational entrepreneurship. Rather, the existing literature shows an inaccurately positive picture.
Yoon puts her finger on something of great value for global studies research in this work. She explains: “Whereas globalization is generally criticized for perpetuating the concentration of wealth, transnational migration is valorized as a ‘countervailing’ force, a ‘globalization-from-below’” (4). The assumption is that a transnational migrant can escape dead-end jobs in their country, but Yoon reveals what is rarely shown: some fall deeper, and silently, into poverty. Some cause harm in their transnational coethnic enclave. And yet, even with success—should that come—there remains a longing for the premigration past because in the present, one is neither “here nor there” (6), stuck in an emotional land without a name.
In The Cost of Belonging, Yoon argues that “the growing dominance of global capital and neoliberal restricting has caused ethnic communities to become increasingly stratified spaces where coethnic migrants compete over scarce emotional and material resources” (2). Contrary to what we might imagine—that coethnics benefit from a collective identity and don’t compete against one another—Yoon shows that boundaries of separation are made out of the fabric of conflicting notions of class and morality. Boundaries determine belonging. This brings us to the main thread of Yoon’s book: What is the cost of belonging in a foreign land among your coethnic community? She masterfully weaves together original survey data with nearly 800 Korean migrants and the intimate life stories of several individuals she came to know during her fieldwork in the community. In the process of this analysis, we learn the cost of belonging: emotional angst, alienation, and the feeling of homelessness (6). This is a sad book, but powerful and well worth reading.
Sandra Fahy
Carleton University, Ottawa