Transnational Citizen Subject: The Returned Korean Adoptees’ Beyond-Borders Identities

SO-HEE LEE

doi:10.22901/trans.2010.3.2.199

This paper explores the characteristics of the returned Korean adoptees’ beyond-borders identities with the possibility of their becoming transnational hybrid citizen subjects. Transnational Korean adoptees are a unique group of overseas Koreans because they have experienced separation from their Korean birth families and been raised in most white families and communities. Transnational adoptee networks constitute a unique and ultramodern global community transcending the limitations of geographical boundaries, meeting at gatherings and through the Internet, mostly using English. Moreover, about 500 transnational Korean adoptees have returned to Korea for the settlement by now, searching for their cultural identities in Korean society. But, their trials to “embrace Koreanness” through going back home do not offer a comfortable experience at all. Rather, visiting and resettling in Korea, meeting the birth family, especially meeting the birth mother, are understandably very difficult for one who has a white identity, which is the only identity that they have experienced so far. Thus, their experiences of national, cultural, and racial identities are varied and shifting. Recent changes to Korean immigration law concerning the F4 visa allows the returned transnational adoptees to live and work in Korea for indefinite periods of time. Embracing transnational Korean adoptees as economically and culturally “Korean” citizens includes them among the newest groups of “flexible citizens,” reflecting their ambivalent struggle for the practice of transnational hybrid citizenship and the sense of belonging; born in one culture, raised in another, they cannot wholly accept one and wholly reject the other.

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REFERENCES (25)
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* 2021년 이후 발행 논문의 참고문헌은 현재 구축 중입니다.

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