Everyday Living in Dual Reality: The Articulated Identity and Silent Affinity of Korean Immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area

• In Event: Transpacific Linkage in Korean Diaspora Studies

Abstract

In the immigration and ethnic studies, previous studies have focused on the identity formation of ethnic groups and often limited their discussions to the context of social and political participation as the citizens of a host or (and) a home country. However, in the context of urban everyday living in the West Coast of the United States, the reality of contemporary immigrants is far more multi-faceted. While the civic ideology encourages minorities to claim and preserve their differences in the public political sphere, the market forces pressure them into increased competitions exploiting and reconfiguring their differences in the private commercial sphere.
Based on my ethnographic research, this paper intends to elaborate this dual reality in today’s everyday diasporic living, focusing on the case of Korean immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area. I particularly focus on how they navigate their everyday lives by shifting their conflicting priorities between cultural resistance and economic survival. Although Asian American activism has fought against the images of exotic Others created and manipulated by the Western imagination, when it comes to Korean American merchants conducting business in the mainstream market, they often face the need to accommodate themselves to situations where these exotic images are potential sources of creating profit. This paper draws attention to the scenes where Korean immigrants have articulated their identities as Koreans as well as the scenes where they have been silent about their affinity to communities of “others.”
　

Author

• Sachiko Kawakami, Kyoto University of Foreign Studies