Transnational Cultural Flow from Home: Korean Community in Greater New York

By Pyong Gap Min

When the first wave of post-1965 Korean immigrants arrived in the New York-New Jersey area in the early 1970s, they were reliant on retail and service businesses in the minority neighborhoods where they were. This caused ongoing conflicts with customers in black neighborhoods of New York City, with white suppliers at Hunts Point Produce Market, and with city government agencies that regulated small business activities. In addition, because of the times, Korean immigrants had very little contact with their homeland. Korean immigrants in the area were highly segregated from both the mainstream New York society and South Korea. However, after the 1990 Immigration Act, Korean immigrants with professional and managerial backgrounds have found occupations in the mainstream economy. Korean community leaders also engaged in active political campaigns to get Korean candidates elected as city council members and higher levels of legislative positions in the area. The Korean community's integration into mainstream society also increasingly developed stronger transnational ties to their homeland and spurred the inclusion of "everyday Korean life" in the NY-NJ area.

Transnational Cultural Flow from Home examines New York Korean immigrants’ collective efforts to preserve their cultural traditions and cultural practices and their efforts to transmit and promote them to New Yorkers by focusing on the Korean cultural elements such as language, foods, cultural festivals, and traditional and contemporary performing arts.

This publication was supported by the 2022 Korean Studies Grant Program of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2022-P-009).

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Dec 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978827165

Book preview

1 • INTRODUCTION

THE PARADOX OF THE KOREAN COMMUNITY’S INCREASING INTEGRATION IN NEW YORK AND INCREASING CULTURAL LINKAGES TO KOREA

It has been about fifty years since the first wave of post-1965 Korean immigrants arrived in Greater New York in the early 1970s. Korean immigrants in the area were economically segregated, concentrating in retail and service businesses in minority neighborhoods from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. Korean grocery and produce retail store owners had severe conflicts with customers in Black neighborhoods in New York City and white suppliers at Hunts Point Produce Market (Min 1996, 2008a). They also had numerous conflicts with city government agencies that regulated small business activities. Korean immigrant husbands and wives often worked together in family-owned businesses with one or more additional Korean employees. Thus, approximately 80 percent of Korean immigrant adult workers participated in the ethnic economy, either as small business owners or as employees of Korean-owned businesses (Min 1996: 48). The economic segregation of most Korean immigrants in small businesses led to their social segregation as well.

Korean immigrants also had few transnational contacts with their homeland before the 1990s. Although Korean Airlines established a direct flight from New York City to Seoul in 1978, few immigrants in the area at that time could afford to buy a ticket to visit their relatives and friends in Korea. I left Korea in 1972 for further study in the United States and made my first visit back in 1985, when my father passed away. Although Korean immigrants had access to ethnic dramas and popular songs in the form of videotapes and CDs, only a few popular singers/dancers from Korea visited New York before 1990. Thus, immigrants here were highly segregated from both mainstream New York society and their homeland before 1990.

However, helped by the 1990 Immigration Act, many Korean immigrants with professional and managerial backgrounds have found occupations in the mainstream economy since the late 1990s. Also, a growing number of 1.5- and second-generation Korean American adults have obtained professional, managerial, and administrative occupations in the mainstream economy, especially in finance companies, in New York City since the early 2000s (Min 2011). The 2000 U.S. Census indicated that only 5 percent of U.S.-born Koreans and 7 percent of 1.5-generation Koreans in Greater New York were self-employed, compared to 28 percent of first-generation Korean immigrants (Min 2008a: 95). In addition, Korean community leaders have been engaged in active political campaigns to get Korean candidates elected as city council members and higher levels of legislative positions in the area. As a result, about fifteen Korean Americans currently serve as council members of small townships in Bergen County, New Jersey, with two Korean Americans elected as mayors and another second-generation Korean elected as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018 (author interview with Jongmoo Cho, 2019).

Paradoxically, whereas the Korean community in the area has been gradually incorporated into mainstream society since the early 2000s, it has been also increasingly linked to South Korea, helped by strong transnational ties. Korean immigrants in the area have maintained increasingly stronger social, economic, and other types of transnational ties to their homeland. However, their transnational linkages to Korea have impacted their cultural lives here more significantly than any other type of transnational connections (Min 2017). Korean immigrants in the area eat Korean food for nearly every meal and are able to purchase ingredients for a wide variety of Korean dishes from Korean supermarkets. They can also buy all types of Korean food as well as breads, pastries, and teas in Korean restaurants and bakeries. Moreover, they can also watch performances by visiting artists and entertainers at Korean festivals and other community venues. Even more significantly, they can watch Korean music and dance performances through Korean transnational TV programs or via digital streaming.

There has been a gradual increase in the cultural linkages of Korean immigrants to Korea over the past five decades. But there was a turning point in the period between the mid-2000s and early 2010s in an almost full access of Korean immigrants to cultural products made in Korea. The digitalization of the media and the emergence of social network services (SNS) and smartphones since the mid-2000s have enabled immigrants and their children to have access to music/dance performances, cultural festivals, TV dramas, and other cultural products made in the home country through computers, smartphones, and/or SNS every day. These internet technology innovations arose in the mid-2000s and have had a major impact on immigrants’ lives since the early 2010s. These radical changes have had a significant positive effect on different types of immigrants’ transnational practices, including transnational social movements (H. Lee 2021; Min 2021a) and many Korean adoptees’ return migration to the home country (E. Kim 2010). But they seem to have had the most significant effect on the cultural lives of Korean immigrants and their children’s ethnic identity. These paradoxical changes, combined with immigrants’ increasing integration into the host society and their much closer relationships with the home country, are not limited to Korean immigrants but are applicable to other major immigrant groups.

Recently arrived Korean immigrants may not appreciate the benefits of and accessibility to ethnic cuisine, music, and dance performances, partly because they are more familiar with American culture in Korea and because they had much stronger cultural connections with their homeland upon their arrival here. But older Korean immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s appreciate the positive changes in our quality of life very much. In a way, they feel like they live in two places, New York and Seoul, every day. Since Korean immigrants and second-generation Koreans are strongly linked to mainstream society individually and throughout the community, they are in a much better position to affect New Yorkers with Korean culture than they were three or four decades ago.

The ability of recent immigrants to enjoy ethnic cuisine and ethnic music/dance performances from the time of their arrival challenges the important assumption of the classical or neoclassical assimilation theory, that new immigrants usually go through feeling culturally uprooted. The fact that older Korean immigrants have felt uprooted at the time of their arrival here but have been increasingly able to enjoy ethnic cuisine and ethnic music/dance performances also challenges the assumption of the same theory, that the gradual acculturation of immigrants is likely to reduce their ethnic cultural traditions.

However, social scientists who have studied contemporary immigrants have focused on their acculturation and socioeconomic integration; immigrants’ ethnic cultural practices and their effects on American society constitute one topic that researchers have neglected. Dozens of books focusing on immigrant groups’ adaptations to American society have been published. But few of them have described the impact of immigrants’ cultural components on American society (Foner 2001; Hirschman 2013; Jimenez 2017). In particular, no one has paid special attention to the fact that members of many immigrant groups have experienced the paradoxical phenomenon of increasing homeland cultural influence, combined with increasing incorporation into mainstream society. Many immigrant groups, especially Korean immigrants, currently take bicultural and binational orientations, with their children holding a strong ethnic identity.

Post-1965 immigrant groups, largely consisting of Hispanics, Asians, and Caribbean Blacks, entered the United States with a high level of racial stratification. Thus, the predominant majority of these immigrants and their children belong to minority groups. As racial minorities, they encounter barriers to their socioeconomic attainment, settlement, and political empowerment. However, they have great advantages over the earlier white immigrant groups at the turn of the twentieth century in preserving their ethnic cultural traditions. There are several important contributing factors to their advantages. More strictly speaking, the Korean immigrants who have come to the New York area since the mid-2000s are likely to have great advantages regarding practicing and preserving Korean cultural components and promoting them to New Yorkers over those who came here in the 1970s and 1980s.

MAJOR CONTRIBUTING FACTORS TO IMMIGRANTS’ TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL TIES TO THE HOMELAND

To illustrate my theoretical perspectives summarized above, I elaborate below on each contributing factor to the advantages of post-1965 immigrants, especially post-2000 immigrants, for transnational cultural linkages to the homeland. I discuss five major contributing factors in the following subsections.

Technological Advances and Emigrant States’ Reactive/Proactive Policy

Technological advances in air transportation, the media, communications, and the internet have gradually strengthened post-1965 immigrants’ transnational linkages to their homeland. Scholars of post-1965 immigrants began to pay close attention to the phenomenon of immigrants’ cross-border linkages to their homeland in the early 1990 (Glick Schiller 1999; Glick Schiller et al. 1992). There are different forms of immigrant transnational ties: social, economic, political, cultural, religious, and health care–related. By virtue of transnational media and social network services, immigrants’ cultural transnational ties to the homeland are more salient than the other forms. Most contemporary immigrants depend upon transnational ethnic media for news and cultural programs (D. Kim 2018; Levitt 2002). Many immigrant groups in the New York area organize annual cultural festivals in which dancers and singers from their home countries perform.

However, most previous studies of immigrant transnationalism have focused on social, economic, and political linkages with their respective homelands (Faist 2000; Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Levitt and Jaworsky 2007; Portes 2001; Portes et al. 1999; Waldinger 2013) but have paid little attention to cultural transnational ties. Only one article discussed immigrants’ cultural transnational ties to the homeland (Itzigsohn and Saucedo 2002) before I published a comprehensive article that examined transnational Korean cultural events held in Greater New York (Min 2017).

All major immigrant groups benefit from transnational ties in preserving their cultural traditions thanks to technological advances. But some benefit more than others by virtue of their home countries’ active efforts to facilitate their expats’ transnational ties. Their home governments have differential financial resources and make various efforts to strengthen their emigrants’ cultural ties to the homeland and their ethnic identity. Many scholars have shown that a number of countries have established dual citizenship programs and taken a number of other political measures to facilitate their emigrants’ cross-border linkages to the homeland (Gamlen 2008; Guarnizo 1998; Hollifield 2004; Jones-Correra 2001; Smith 2006; Waldinger and Fitzgerald 2004). But they have neglected to pay attention to emigrant states’ efforts to help their emigrants preserve the ethnic language and cultural traditions in their host countries.

As I will show in chapters 4, 5, and 7, Korean government agencies have financially supported Korean-language schools and courses in public schools and Korean festivals. Moreover, we will find in chapter 3 that the Korean government has established many heritage education summer programs for young overseas Koreans. The Korean government has financially supported Korean immigrants’ cultural activities and second-generation Koreans’ heritage education partly to enhance the Korean national image and partly to enhance their ethnic identity (Lee et al. 2019). In this book, I consider technological advances and the Korean government’s reactive and proactive policy as two major contributing factors to Korean immigrants’ strong transnational cultural linkages to Korea.

Uninterrupted Immigrant Stream (Replenished Ethnicity Theory)

In addition to the two major factors discussed above, there are three other important contributing factors. One is the uninterrupted stream of immigrants since 1965. White ethnic groups have achieved high levels of assimilation into U.S. society since the early 1930s because immigration from European countries nearly came to an end in the 1930s and 1940s. In contrast, as Tomas Jimenez (Jimenez 2010, 2017; Linton and Jimenez 2009) has shown, large-scale Mexican immigration to the United States without interruption in the 1940s and 1950s allowed multigenerational Mexican Americans to replenish their ethnicity with ethnic culture, social networks, and identity. He also has indicated that the availability of many Mexican immigrants helped multigenerational Mexican Americans marry Mexican immigrants cross-generationally, resulting in the reduction of Mexican Americans’ intermarriages. As with Mexican immigration, the post-1965 immigration stream has continued for over fifty-five years, and there is no sign that it will end anytime soon.

The five largest contemporary Asian immigrant groups (Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Korean) and other Caribbean and Latin American immigrant groups in the United States have advantages in retaining their ethnic cultural traditions over generations partly because of their numbers and partly because of the continuity of their immigration streams since 1965. In particular, Chinese and Indian communities have demographic advantages for cultural and ethnic retention over other Asian communities because of phenomenal increases in the numbers of annual immigrants (70,000–85,000 Chinese and 60,000–70,000 Indian immigrants) during recent years. Since adult immigrants constitute the majority of their populations, they can replenish their communities with ethnic cultural and social networks.

Post-1965 Korean immigration peaked between 1976 and 1989 with over 30,000 annual immigrants. But numbers have decreased significantly since the early 1990s, remaining below 20,000 during most recent years (see table 2.1 in chapter 2). Thus, the Korean community has a demographic disadvantage compared to Chinese and Indian immigrants in retaining their cultural traditions over generations, but they have an advantage over the Japanese community in size. Since only several thousand Japanese have immigrated to the United States annually, the majority of Japanese immigrants and second- and multigenerational Japanese Americans have intermarried with other cultural groups (Min and Kim 2009), resulting in more than half of Japanese Americans being multiracial.

The presence of a large number of immigrants has had a positive effect on ethnic preservation, not only demographically but also through immigrant leaders’ active roles in creating mechanisms for heritage education. Korean immigrant community leaders have made great efforts to transmit the Korean language and culture to the next generations. Moreover, not only has the post-1965 legal immigration stream remained uninterrupted, but increasing numbers of foreigners have visited the United States and stayed as temporary residents. They include international students, employees of U.S. branches of foreign corporations, trainees and visiting scholars, and H-1B temporary visa holders. These temporary residents maintain stronger transnational ties to their homeland than formal green card immigrants and naturalized citizens. These temporary residents have refreshed immigrant communities with the culture of the homeland. By paying special attention to immigrant leaders’ active role in heritage education and temporary residents’ neutralizing effect on Korean Americans’ cultural assimilation, I expand the replenished ethnicity theory originally developed by Jimenez (Jimenez 2010, 2017; Linton and Jimenez 2009).

Strong Ethnic Heritage and Cultural Organizations

The fourth major contributing factor to immigrants’ preservation of ethnic language and traditions is the presence of strong ethnic organizations, including ethnic language schools and cultural organizations (Breton 1964; Portes and Schauffler 1994; Zhou and Li 2003). The Jewish community has established many heritage education organizations in the community, including summer camps and the Birthright Israel program (Beck 1965; Freidenreich 2010; Pomson and Schnoor 2008). Among contemporary immigrant groups, Chinese immigrants have established many nonreligious ethnic language schools in various Chinese immigrant communities (Fan 1977; Wang 1996; Zhou and Li 2003). As I will show in chapter 4, the Korean community in Greater New York has established about 150 weekend Korean schools focusing on Korean language, culture, and history.

In maintaining the homeland language and culture, Korean immigrants have advantages over other Asian groups in terms of linguistic and group homogeneity (Min 1991; Min and Kim 2009). Compared to other multilingual Asian immigrant groups, such as Filipinos, Indians, and Chinese, Korean immigrants speak only one language. Moreover, unlike these other Asian immigrant groups, Korean immigrants have neither significant regional differences nor religious conflicts. Their monolingual background can facilitate the Korean language movement in two different ways. First, it is much easier to promote the Korean language because all Koreans speak the same language. Second, because of their monolingual background and group homogeneity, Koreans can use their ethnic collective actions more effectively than other linguistically or religiously divided Asian groups in preserving their language and other cultural traditions.

In addition to Koreans’ cultural and group homogeneity, Korean reactive nationalism also contributes to Korean immigrants’ efforts to intergenerationally transmit the Korean language and culture and promote them to New Yorkers. A number of neighboring superpowers—Mongolia, a series of Chinese dynasties, Japan, and Russia—have invaded and politically subordinated Korea throughout history. Koreans have developed nationalism in their resistance to these foreign invasions and political subordinations. Korean nationalism in a modern form was developed largely during Koreans’ resistance to Japanese colonization (1910–1945). I call this defensive or reactive nationalism to distinguish it from the rightist aggressive nationalism. During colonization, Koreans were forced to use the Japanese language and adopt Japanese customs and manners. As I will show in chapters 4 and 5, older Korean-language leaders in the New York area emphasize the preservation of Korean language and culture partly because of their memories of the Japanese government’s attempt to annihilate them during the colonial period.

The U.S. Government’s Multicultural Policy

Finally, the U.S. government’s multicultural policy is a major contributing factor to the preservation of immigrants’ cultural traditions. The dominant U.S. social policy up to the early 1960s was Anglo-conformity, according to which immigrants and members of minority groups were required to replace their language with English and their cultural patterns with those of British or European origins (Gordon 1964: 88–89). The English language was associated with being American and patriotic, whereas being bilingual was interpreted as a sign of disloyalty to the United States (Jaret 2002: 51–52; Portes and Rumbaut 2014: 216–217). One of the main functions of public education in the pre-1960s era was Americanizing the children of immigrants in their language and cultural practices. In the 1950s and 1960s, few Asian immigrant parents could speak English fluently and were familiar with American customs. Nevertheless, they made their children learn to speak English and practice American customs at home to promote the children’s survival in American society (Park 2014: 35–38).

However, since the late 1960s, all levels of government and local school districts have gradually changed policies toward minority members and immigrants from Anglo-conformity to cultural pluralism (Goldberg 1994). Multicultural America expects different immigrant groups to bring their unique cultural traditions to the multicultural table (Kurien 2007). The impact of multicultural policies is most salient in public schools. Public schools have tried to increase racial, ethnic, class, and gender diversity in curricula, textbooks, tests, teachers, and extracurricular activities (Banks 2004). Local governments and neighborhoods have encouraged ethnic festivals, parades, food festivals, and multicultural performances and exhibitions.

Today, school boards and administrators in the United States consider bilingualism as an asset. As I will show in chapter 5, school boards and principals in public schools in Greater New York are willing to add any foreign language to the curriculum when they find enough students to study it and enough financial resources to offer it. Since New York City is also the global center of the performing and fine arts, the Korean community in the area may be able to publicize Korean food, cultural performances, and festivals to New Yorkers more effectively than in Southern California, the largest Korean population center in the United States.

In this research I use the efforts of Korean immigrants to preserve and promote Korean culture as the dependent variable and the five contributing factors as independent variables (contributing factors). However, conducting research on Korean cultural preservation and promotion is important because it has very positive effects on Korean immigrants’ and their children’s adaptations to American society. First of all, preserving and promoting ethnic culture contribute to the perpetuation of the ethnic community and help members to take bicultural orientations. Moreover, the preservation of ethnic language, culture, and identity has positive effects on mental health, school performance, and resistance to racial prejudice and discrimination (Portes and Rumbaut 2014: 244–259; Zhou 1997; Zhou and Bankston 1998).

AN ANALYTICAL MODEL OF KOREAN IMMIGRANTS’ EFFORTS TO PRESERVE AND PROMOTE KOREAN CULTURE

Figure 1.1 provides an analytical model to explain the efforts of Korean immigrants to successfully preserve and promote Korean culture in the New York area based on the previous theoretical discussions. In this model, I use five independent variables reviewed in the previous theory section. I consider Korean immigrants’ increasing cultural linkages to Korea as an intervening variable and their successful efforts to preserve and promote Korean culture as the final dependent variable.

Four of the five major contributing factors have both direct effects on Korean immigrants’ successful preservation and promotion of Korean culture and indirect effects by strengthening Korean immigrants’ cultural linkages to their homeland. Only technological advances in air transportation, communication, and the internet have a direct effect on their stronger transnational linkages to the homeland but have no direct effect on their successful effort to preserve and promote Korean culture. But the indirect effect of technological advances during recent years is very powerful because technology has allowed immigrants to practically live in two countries, their host and home countries, in their everyday cultural lives.

The other four contributing factors have direct effects on Korean immigrants’ increasing cultural linkages to their homeland, and by doing so indirectly influence Korean immigrants’ successful effort to preserve and promote of Korean culture. They also have direct positive effects on Korean immigrants’ successful efforts to preserve and promote it. For example, the emigrant state’s role directly facilitates not only Korean immigrants’ strong transnational cultural links with the homeland, but also their efforts to preserve and promote Korean culture. I have highlighted the emigrant state’s facilitating role and strong Korean ethnic organizations to show that these two factors are unique to the Korean group compared to other Asian immigrant groups.

FIGURE 1.1. Analytical model of Korean immigrants’ successful efforts to preserve and promote Korean culture.

THE NEED FOR THE STUDY AND MAIN OBJECTIVES

Without a doubt, contemporary immigrants and especially their children have achieved high levels of assimilation to American culture since their migration to the United States. However, given the above-mentioned advantages for their cultural preservation, many large immigrant groups have preserved their significant cultural components and promoted some of them to American society. Thus, all post-1965 immigrants, especially those who arrived in the United States in the 2000s and after, have gone through two-way integration: to American culture and preservation of ethnic culture through transnational ties to their homeland. Nevertheless, social scientists who have studied contemporary immigrants have focused on their cultural and socioeconomic assimilation. Immigrants’ transnational cultural practices constitute one topic gravely neglected by researchers. Only a small number of researchers have indicated the impact of immigrants’ cultural components on American society (Foner 2001; Hirschman 2013; Jimenez 2017).

Many researchers of immigrants have examined the retention of the mother tongue among children of immigrants using survey or census data (Alba et al. 2002; Kim and Min 2010; Lopez 1996, 1999; Lutz 2006; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Portes and Schauffler 1994; Schrauf 1999; Zhou and Bankston 1998). Since language is probably the most important component of ethnic culture, we need to examine the mechanisms of mother tongue retention among contemporary immigrants. However, there are not enough studies that have systematically examined mechanisms of mother tongue retention, including ethnic language schools. As pointed out above, several studies focus on ethnic language schools in Chinese and Korean immigrant communities (Wang 1996; Zhou and Kim 2006). There are a few studies of Jewish Americans’ heritage trips to Israel (Kelner et al. 2000; Saxe and Chazan 2008). But there is little information about how contemporary immigrant groups organize their heritage tours to the homeland for their children.

The consumption of ethnic popular culture in the forms of ethnic cuisine, music/dance, and festivals/parades is known to contribute to the maintenance of ethnic identity (Gans 1979; Tsuda 2016). However, only a few scholars of immigration (Austerlitz 1997; Feidenberg-Hebstein and Kasnitz 1994; Gabaccia 1998) have conducted research on the impact of immigrant groups’ popular culture on American cities.

Technological advances have strengthened immigrants’ transnational linkages to their homeland. In particular, rapid improvements in communication technology and the internet have strengthened especially their cultural transnational linkages. However, as Hein (2006: 21) indicated, even these transnationalism researchers have neglected to examine immigrants’ transnational cultural activities. As previously stated, only one article examined immigrants’ cultural transnational ties to their homeland (Itzigsohn and Saucedo 2002) before the publication of my article (Min 2017). Transnational scholars have not agreed even on the definition of immigrants’ transnational cultural practices (Min 2017: 1142–1143). As has been pointed out, they have paid far more attention to immigrants’ economic, social, and political activities. Based on his survey data, Portes (2003) noted that only small proportions of high-class respondents engaged in political and economic transnational practices. He concluded that immigrant transnational theory is consistent with assimilation theory. However, the majority of his sample, regardless of their social class, is likely to have been engaged in transnational cultural