Beyond "Host" and "Home": Asian American "Return" Migration to Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Our panel speaks to the issue of cross-borders and cross-regions in the Asia Pacific-US migration corridors. In recent decades, a different type of migration pattern in Asia has been taking place. Reversing the more typical direction of immigration from Asia to the United States, many Asian Americans of varied generations are now “returning” to their respective ancestral homelands in Asia to live and work. While Asian migrations to the United States have historically fit a broader pattern of Global South to North migration, migration from the United States to Asia does not, raising a variety of questions. How are Asian Americans treated in their Asian homelands – and how does this vary by country and region? More broadly, how are Asian American experiences in Asian “homelands" mediated through class, gender, labor, and bifurcated experiences of national belonging? What can they tell us about constructions of Asianness and Americanness in both the United States and Asia? Offering a pan Asian comparative lens via case studies of Chinese Americans in Beijing, China; Indian Americans in New Delhi and Mumbai, India; Vietnamese Americans in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Korean Americans in Seoul, South Korea; this panel explores how issues of trans-Pacific belonging are complicated by axes of race, class, gender, and nation.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar, University of Washington

Individual Presentations

• Second-Generation Indian Americans in India: Constructing and Negotiating Ethnic Identities in the Context of "Return" Migration - Sonali Jain, UNC Pembroke

• The Benefits of In-Betweenness: Return Migration of Second-Generation Chinese American Professionals to China - Leslie Wang, University of Massachusetts Boston

• “Lower than Lepers” and “Living like Kings”: Gendered Logics of Koreanness and Korean American Return Migrants - Helene K. Lee, Dickinson College

• “I’m a Bigger Fish in a Smaller Pond": The Ambivalent Motives of 1.5 and Second Generation Vietnamese American Skilled "Return" Migrants to Vietnam - Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar, University of Washington

Discussant

• Ivan Small, Central Connecticut State University