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Events found: 2
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2012       11:50 AM KOREA COLLOQUIUM SERIES Seeking Asylum, Finding God: Korean Chinese Migration to the US Jaeeun Kim - Postdoctoral Fellow, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University Room 203, Department of Sociology, 210 Prospect Street Joint with the Comparative Research Workshop (CCR at Yale) and the Program on Ethnicity, Race, & Migration In this paper based on a work in progress, Jaeeun Kim examines the migration careers, settlement patterns, and legalization strategies of ethnic Korean migrants from northeast China (Korean Chinese henceforward) to the United States. As colonial-era migrants from the Korean peninsula, Korean Chinese remained concentrated in their ethnic enclaves in northeast China throughout the Cold War era. Yet since the late 1980s, labor migration to and long-term settlement in other cities inside and outside China have become a major strategy with which Korean Chinese have weathered China’s drastic economic transformation. A decade of diverse and intensive migration to neighboring regions (including North Korea, Russia, Japan, and most importantly, South Korea) prepared the way for the high-cost, high-risk, and (frequently) undocumented migration to the United States from the mid-1990s on. Working in long-established South Korean or (if less frequently) Chinese ethnic enclaves in the United States, some Korean Chinese migrants have sought to legalize their status by seeking asylum, in many cases as members of persecuted religious groups. Although focused on Korean Chinese, the project addresses questions of much more general import. (1) What role do various participants in the “migration industry”—in countries of origin, transit, and destination—play in the organization of contemporary long-distance, unauthorized international migration? (2) How does the complex interplay between immigration regimes, legal professionals, and migrants themselves contribute to the making of “refugees” from above and below? (3) How do religious institutions, which have developed distinctive understandings of the nation and the community of faith, get involved in, respond to, and shape the legalization strategies of migrants? (4) How do migrants themselves and other relevant actors selectively and variably present, invoke, stress, dilute, disguise, or contest the ethnic, national, and religious identities of these migrants—Korean, Chinese, or Christian—in various stages of migration, settlement, and conversion processes, and how do the meaning and resonance of “homeland” change through these processes? Kim’s concern with the Korean Chinese emerged from her dissertation research that examined diaspora politics in twentieth-century Korea, focusing on colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants and their descendants in Japan and northeast China. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University (2012-2013), where she is planning to complete the book manuscript based on her dissertation. Before joining Stanford, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University (2011-2012). Kim was born and grew up in South Korea. She holds a BA (2001) in law and MA in sociology (2003) from Seoul National University, and an MA (2006) and PhD (2011) in sociology from UCLA. After completing her fellowship term at Stanford, Kim will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University beginning in the fall 2013. Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to jessica.chin[at]yale.edu to receive a copy of the paper being discussed once available.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2012       7:00 PM OXHIDE I (NIU PI) Directed by LIU Jiayin, 110 minutes, Mandarin w/English Subtitles Auditorium, Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue CEAS is generously supported by The Pao-Watari Fund for East Asian Studies. Co-sponsored by the Film Study Center This is the breakout film by Director LIU Jiayin, who will be visiting campus on November 1, 2012 in conjunction with a screening of her most recent film, Oxhide II. Daily life in an impossibly cramped Beijing apartment takes on epic proportions in this, intimate portrait, with unprecedented access, of a working-class Chinese family. Boldly transforming documentary into fiction, Liu Jiayin cast her parents and herself as fictionalized versions of themselves. Her father, Liu Zaiping, sells leather bags but is slowly going bankrupt. He argues with his wife, Jia Huifen, and his daughter over methods to boost business in the shop. A cloud of anxiety follows them into sleepless nights shared in the same bed. But through the thousand daily travails of city life, a genuine and deeply moving picture of Chinese familial solidarity emerges from the screen. With virtually no budget and boundless ingenuity, Liu Jiayin's eye-opening debut, shot when she was 23 years old, consists of twenty-three static, one-scene shots within her family's fifty square meter home. Liu keeps her small DV camera in claustrophobic closeness to her subjects, often showing only parts of their bodies as their voices dominate the soundtrack. OXHIDE takes the microscopic physical and emotional details of a family and magnifies them on a widescreen canvas. "The most important Chinese film of the past several years-and one of the most astonishing recent films from any country" —Shelly Kraicer, Cinema-scope "Liu takes the film language of "realism" into an entirely new dimension." —Tony Rayns, Vancouver International Film Festival "The most celebrated Chinese debut since Jia Zhang-ke's XIAO WU" —Mubarak Ali, The Lumiere Reader