Transnational Return Migration of 1.5 Generation Korean New Zealanders
A Quest for Home
Transnational Return Migration of 1.5 Generation Korean New Zealanders
A Quest for Home
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Description
Why do immigrants return home? Is return migration a failure or a success? How do returnees settle back into their original homeland while retaining their connections to their host society? How do returnees contribute to their homeland with their skills gained from overseas?
This book explores the complexities of return migration through the experiences of 1.5-generation Korean New Zealanders. Jane Yeonjae Lee uses intimate, personal narratives to unpack how returnees negotiate the meanings of “home” and “return,” revealing that these concepts are far from fixed or straightforward. Through these stories, the book highlights a deep and often unresolved desire among transnational migrants to belong to a single, coherent identity, even as their lives span multiple national and cultural contexts.
At the same time, Lee illustrates the tensions and disconnections inherent in transnational life, showing how returnees' relationships to both their host and home countries evolve over time. Their transnational practices – such as maintaining social ties or applying skills gained abroad – shift as they resettle, complicating assumptions about seamless reintegration or clear-cut success.
Together, these insights challenge simplistic views of return migration as either failure or achievement, instead revealing it as an ongoing process of negotiation – one that reshapes identity, belonging, and the meaning of home in a globalized world.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Entering the Field
1. Studying the 'Everyday' through a Transnational Ethnography
2. A Transnational Approach to Return Migration
Part II: Return, Home, and Development
3. Korea and its Diaspora
4. Why a Return 'Home'?
5. Returnees in the Workforce and Knowledge Transfer
Part III: Return, Home, and Growth
6. Constructing Identities: Challenge, Negotiation, and Growth
7. Performing Identities: Re-creating 'Home' in Korea
Conclusion: Ongoing Quest for 'Home'
References
Index
About the Author
Product details
| Published | 04 Jun 2018 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 204 |
| ISBN | 9781498575829 |
| Imprint | Lexington Books |
| Illustrations | 6 b/w photos; 7 tables |
| Series | Korean Communities across the World |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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Sandwiched between a myriad of scholarly studies on both the first and the second migrant generations, this book breaks new ground in several respects. It is an engaging enquiry into the lives, identities, and sense of home of a rarely studied yet important migrant cohort - the 1.5 generation - who left their home country when they were children and who now return. Second, it is an ambitious yet nicely nuanced transnational ethnography. It is also, to a certain extent, an 'auto-ethnography,' but never in a cloying way. Finally, it is written in an appealing, jargon-free narrative style which enhances its impact and scholarly significance.
Russell King, University of Sussex
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With auto/ethnographic lucidity and analytical precision this book is a welcome addition to the limited literature on Korean New Zealander return migration. The book sheds light on the everyday experiences of the 1.5 generation of transnational migrants as global talent. Theoretically rich, empirically multi-layered, and thematically diverse, the book deals with a number of important issues with conceptual flair and narrative engagement.
Anastasia Christou, Middlesex University
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This book provides an essential take on the fascinating lives of the 1.5 generation who are the human face of transnational migration stories in the twenty-first century. It sheds light on both the motivational and the emotional aspects of the transnational journey, which is ongoing and circular, and shows the complexity of identity forged between two national contexts, New Zealand and Korea. Such small-scale, personal accounts remind us that migration flows are made up of actual human beings, who are connected to one another through questions of identity, sense of nationhood, family, and social struggles of various kinds. The story is told with compassion and empathy, as well as rigourous scholarship.
Audrey Kobayashi, Patricia Monture distinguished university professor and Queen's research chair, Geography and Planning, Queen's University

























