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Originally published in 1981.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691642499 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #636 |
| Pages: | 348 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
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New Urban Immigrants
The Korean Community in New York
By Illsoo Kim
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1981 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09355-0
CHAPTER 1
United States Immigration Law as It Affects Koreans
Historically, Koreans have migrated to foreign countries largely out of their sense that Korea is an international pariah — a status that is a product of Korea's vulnerability to military intervention and to threats of domination by neighboring and distant superpowers. The Korean diaspora in the modern era began with the loss of Korean sovereignty to the Japanese empire at the turn of the twentieth century. During that time, some ten thousand laborers, political refugees, and students took steamships to American shores. But their attempt to construct a Korean community in the new land was severely hampered by white nativists, whose anti-Oriental movements eventually resulted in legislation against the entry of Asians.
When the United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1965, however, a "blessing from heaven" fell upon Asians in general and Koreans in particular; thanks to the act, Asians have become a dominant immigrant group. The passage of the act reflected the liberal, egalitarian, and civil rights movements of the 1960s and had nothing specifically to do with Koreans either in the United States or in South Korea. The immigration of Koreans was a serendipitous by-product of these larger and basically internal political pressures.
As we shall see, United States immigration policy, as embedded in the Immigration Act of 1965 and the 1976 amendment, has become the very warp and woof on which the Korean community has been constructed in the United States; it has determined both the number and the social characteristics of Korean immigrants — their sex, age, occupation, and education. At the same time, anxieties about the prospects of another Korean War have contributed to the exodus of upper-middle-class Koreans to the United States; the status of Korea as an international pariah continues to effect emigration.
The Older Immigrants
During World War II the Japanese government drafted forty-five thousand Koreans as slave laborers for the coal mines of Sakhalin. One of these men recently sent a letter to his wife in South Korea from Sakhalin (now part of the Soviet Union) that describes his plight.
Why did you and I become husband and wife? Over 30 years have passed without my being able to see you. When I think of the life we could have had if I had not been forced to come to Sakhalin I almost go out of my mind. I have become an old man with white hair and live for the hope of being reunited with you.
When the laborers were sent to Sakhalin, a cold and bleak island to the north of Hokkaido, the Korean peninsula and southern Sakhalin belonged to the Japanese empire. However, at the end of World War II the peninsula was liberated from Japanese rule and divided into North and South Korea; the Soviet Union annexed southern Sakhalin and recognized only North Korean citizenship. Since most of the Korean slave laborers had come from provinces in South Korea, they had refused to become North Korean citizens and thus to be repatriated to North Korea.
This is only one example of how Korean migrations have been interwoven with Korea's history of "national tragedies." As a result, Koreans have developed a number of ethnocentric defenses, and many Koreans today still express shame when they discuss the history of their emigrations. Out of self-defense and a sense of national pride, some Koreans today, especially historians, novelists, and journalists, prefer to use the terms yumin (drifting people) or gimin (abandoned people) rather than the formal term yimin (emigrants) when they refer to middle-class Koreans emigrating to the United States partly from fear of another Korean War. Korean intellectuals use the terms yumin or gimin in order to emphasize the hardships and sufferings of the Korean diaspora that began when Korea lost its sovereignty to imperial Japan. Despite their nation's hardships, Koreans are proud of their national identity and their "5,000-year-old history," the early part of which is derived from mythology; and they boast of their "single" race, although they are actually a hybrid of Mongols, Manchurians, Japanese, Chinese, and Polynesians. Yet they sometimes use disparaging nicknames when referring to the Chinese, Manchurians, or Japanese because throughout their recorded history they have been harassed by these neighboring peoples. Koreans have also expressed their ethnocentrism in a negative attitude toward their own emigrants. During the period of the Yi dynasty (1392-1910), Korean kings frequently ordered the Pyongyang governors in the northwestern province of the peninsula to stop Koreans who were migrating to Manchuria because of famine in their home villages. Their decrees called for the death penalty for subjects who attempted to cross either the Yalu or the Tumen rivers to enter the Manchurian virgin lands.
In modern history, Korean emigration has been closely linked with struggles among China, Japan, Russia, and the United States over the domination of the Korean peninsula, a strategically vital region in the Far East. Broadly speaking, the more than 3 million Koreans now residing in the Soviet Union, China, Japan, and the United States are there directly or indirectly as the result of struggles among the four big powers that began at the turn of the century. The struggles still continue along the Korean demilitarized zone, which is manned by more than 1 million soldiers of North and South Korea.
The Sino-Japanese War in 1894 and the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905 broke out mainly as a result of conflicting claims for suzerainty over the Korean peninsula. Japan won both wars, and in 1910 Japan annexed Korea outright. As a part of its direct colonial rule, the Japanese government conducted a nationwide land inspection program during the years 1910 to 1918, by which the Japanese expropriated lands from Korean peasants as well as from the royal families of the Yi dynasty. By 1930 the Japanese government had taken about 40 percent of the arable land in Korea. This expropriation produced a mass of landless Korean peasants, most of whom became tenant farmers for Japanese landlords or for a Japanese reclamation company, the so-called Dongcheog. These encroachments were added to the internal development of a "usury capitalism" in Korea, which in the nineteenth century had brought a heavy concentration of land into the hands of a small percentage of Korean landlords.
These changes in land ownership, which favored a small number of Japanese and Korean landlords, forced a vast number of landless peasants to migrate to Manchuria and Siberia. During the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), the Japanese governor general of Korea induced 1.2 million landless Korean peasants to resettle in southern Manchuria, some parts of which needed massive reclamation. As of 1961, about 1.3 million Koreans were reported to be still living in Kirin, Manchuria. It was also reported that 1.5 million live in mainland China and that 0.5 million are Soviet citizens in central Asia. About 0.6 million Koreans in Japan constitute the second-largest Korean community overseas and are the largest ethnic group in Japan. They are the remnants and descendants of the 18.8 million Korean migrants to Japan during the Japanese colonial period.
The Korean emigration to the United States dates from the turn of the century, when the United States received massive waves of immigrants from eastern and southern European nations as well as from Japan and China. A small number of students, some political refugees, and a few ginseng peddlers were the first Koreans to land in the United States: several political refugees sought asylum in the United States after they led the abortive Gabsin coup in 1884, the object of which was an attempt to modernize Korea by fashioning it after Japan; and in 1881 North Korean ginseng peddlers came to the West Coast via China in order to sell their product to the Chinese immigrants, but their numbers were too small to be designated as an immigrant contingent. Official Korean immigration to the United States and its territories began in 1903, when American sugar planters in the Hawaiian Islands imported Koreans as contract laborers for their labor-intensive sugar plantations. Between 1903 and 1905 a total of 7,226 Koreans arrived in the islands; then the Korean government, which was degraded by 1905 to a de facto Japanese protectorate, suddenly forbade emigration; the Japanese government wanted to protect Japanese immigrants in the Hawaiian Islands from the competition of Koreans. The Japanese ambassador to Korea at that time remarked that "the Korean emigration [into the Hawaiian Islands] was banned by the will of Japanese emigration companies. They do not want the Korean immigrants to be competitive with the Japanese immigrants." This statement is understandable when we consider that the sugar planters imported Koreans as strikebreakers against Japanese workers, who initiated strikes and demanded wage increases after they had served their time as contract laborers.
The Hawaiian Islands served as a stepping stone for Japanese and Korean laborers entering the United States mainland: from 1905 to 1910, 2,012 Koreans living in the islands, largely enticed by better economic opportunities, moved to the West Coast. During the decade after 1910 some 541 Korean students entered the United States in order to study at American educational institutions. In addition to these official Korean entries came the unofficial immigrants: during the period from 1910 to 1924, the year when the National Origins Act became effective, some 2,000 Koreans, most of them political refugees from Japanese domination, came to the United States without passports, usually through Shanghai.
The experience of Koreans in the United States was similar to that of Japanese and Chinese immigrants: they all faced economic adjustments and exposure to the anti-Oriental movements on the West Coast. The Koreans engaged in rice and vegetable farming, railroad construction, and in the restaurant and hotel business. Like the Japanese and Chinese, their economic ventures were greatly limited by white nativistic racial discrimination. And like the Japanese, the Koreans were successful in agriculture. Here is one aspect of their success story:
Korean settlers in California, Oregon, Colorado, Montana, Kansas, and Nebraska began vegetable farming as early as 1911. They followed with successful ventures in orchards, nurseries, and vineyards. In 1916, a group of sixty Koreans in the Manteca, California area pooled their resources to lease 1,300 acres for experimental sugar beet production. Business thrived, and a small cooperative village was organized nearby. A smaller group of Koreans in Logan, Utah, succeeded with a 292-acre melon farm. By far the most successful of all Korean enterprises before 1924 were the rice and fruit farming operations in the San Joaquin Valley. One California Korean, Kim Chong-nim, celebrated as the "Rice King" in 1917, was able to expand his operations to 2,085 acres in rice. Near Reedley, two brothers, Kim Ho and Kim Hyong-sun, began a truck farming business in 1921, eventually working 500 acres. Their business grew to $400,000 annually, as they expanded into nectarine and other fruit production and wholesaling along with canning and large-scale nurseries.
When the anti-Oriental movements in California were in full force at the turn of the century, the Koreans were lumped together with the Chinese and Japanese as Mongolians, and all were subject to the same discrimination. And yet they maintained their national pride and identity despite this victimization.
In late June 1913, at the height of the anti-Japanese labor movement in California, eleven Koreans were severely beaten as they attempted to work in an orchard near Riverside. When an official of the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles visited the victims and offered assistance, the Tae-Han Kungminhoe (THK) interfered. Refusing to accept any offer of help from Japanese officials, the THK's leadership dispatched a telegram to William Jennings Bryan, U.S. Secretary of State, making the following points: All Korean residents of the state of California arrived before 1910, when Korea was annexed by the Japanese; they were Koreans, who opposed Japanese domination of Korea; Japanese government assistance was refused, particularly because the acceptance of such aid would imply that Koreans were Japanese subjects; and all matters regarding Koreans in America should be taken up with the community organization, the Tae-Han Kungminhoe, or Korean National Association of North America. Bryan's prompt response, favoring the THK position, was widely published, and the THK gained recognition as a quasi-diplomatic organization representing the Korean immigrant community.
Koreans preserved their ethnic identity and solidarity in the United States by politicizing their ethnic organizations in opposition to Japanese domination of their homeland. In this aspect, Korean immigrants were different from the Japanese and Chinese; and this difference was due to the international pariah status of Korea caused by the big powers' struggles for hegemony over the peninsula. It is thus understandable that Korean anti-Japanese movements and a strong nationalism emerged wherever Korean emigrants settled. Koreans engaged in guerrilla warfare against Japanese colonial rule in Manchuria and in the Vladivostok area; North Korean President Kim II-sung led one of these guerrilla groups. In Shanghai, a Korean provisional government was formed and a revolutionary army was manned by the Korean immigrants in China. Even the United States became a main political center for the Korean independence movement.
The political situation in Korea helps to explain why students or political refugees constituted a high proportion of the Korean immigrants into the United States; but there were religious motivations as well. Most were Protestants regardless of whether they were political refugees or laborers. American missionaries had encouraged and persuaded Korean Christians to depart from their homeland, which was deeply imbued with the Confucian culture of ancestor worship. Most of the Korean plantation workers in the Hawaiian Islands came from port cities and towns in northern provinces of the peninsula, where they had engaged in manual labor; less than 14 percent of them were peasants. American missionaries thus played a decisive role in selecting Koreans for emigration, and this largely explains why Protestant churches became a major community organization in the Hawaiian Islands. Even non-Christian immigrants participated in church life, because churches provided the only opportunities for social interaction. (As we shall see in chapter six, this church-centered community life continues among the new Korean immigrants in the New York metropolitan area.) These religious ties and the Korean national pariah status account for the heavy concentration of political refugees, students, and clergymen among the Korean immigrants at the turn of the century, and thus account for the unique character of the Korean community as compared with the Chinese and Japanese communities. As we shall see, the same factors still apply in the analysis of recent Korean immigration to the United States.
Mainly because of the long time interval that separates the first Korean immigration from the new one, there is at present little social interaction between the two groups. Furthermore, the older Korean immigrants were so few that they could not establish the kinds of ethnic institutions that might link the two contingents. In addition, most of the descendants of the older Korean immigrants have lost their sense of identity as Koreans because they have chosen wives from among other ethnic groups. For instance, from 1960 to 1964, 77 percent of the Korean males who belonged to the second or third generation of immigrants to the Hawaiian Islands chose their spouses from among other racial groups; for Korean females, the interracial marriage rate amounted to 80 percent. This high rate of interracial marriage could be partially attributed to the fact that only about 10 percent of the original Korean immigrants were women; the shortage of Korean women was the most serious problem facing unmarried men. Many of the Korean males solved their problem by relying on the "picture marriage," a marriage arranged between unknown parties who selected each other between exchanges of photographs. During the period between 1910 and 1924 more than one thousand Korean women came to the islands as "picture" brides. But the shortage of Korean women persisted.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Urban Immigrants by Illsoo Kim. Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- List of Tables, pg. xi
- Acknowledgments, pg. xiii
- The Transliteration of Korean Words, pg. xiv
- A Note on Sources, pg. xv
- Introduction, pg. 1
- Chapter One. United States Immigration Law as It Affects Koreans, pg. 17
- Chapter Two. The Formulation of South Korean Emigration Policy, pg. 48
- Chapter Three. South Korean Urbanization and Economic Development as They Affect Emigration, pg. 71
- Chapter Four. Small Business as an Entry Point for Korean Immigrants, pg. 101
- Chapter Five. The Mobility of South Korean Medical Professionals, pg. 147
- Introduction: The Korean Community in the New York Metropolitan Area, pg. 181
- Chapter Six. The Church as a Basis for the Community, pg. 187
- Chapter Seven. Secondary Associations of the Korean Community, pg. 208
- Chapter Eight. The Politics of the Korean Community, pg. 227
- Chapter Nine. Ethnic Media as a Mechanism of Community Integration, pg. 262
- Chapter Ten. The Origin of the Character Structure of Korean Immigrants, pg. 281
- Conclusion: The Future of the Korean Community in the New York Metropolitan Area, pg. 305
- Selective Bibliography, pg. 321
- Index, pg. 325