This book about Korean American immigrant families is the result of a collaboration between an anthropologist and a psychologist. Combining quantitative surveys with family ethnography, the book explored the central question, How do Korean American teens and parents navigate immigrant America? Both survey and ethnographic data revealed that acculturation differences between parents and teens—long assumed in the psychological literature to account for distress—did not necessarily make for family hardship. Instead, this research found that families struggle together, although not always easily, to figure out how best to navigate an American society that they all understood to be racist. This is not to say that the parents did not speak about cultural distinctions or that they were unconcerned about academic achievement. But what these parents anguished over most was how to fortify their children with protective psychological health and character traits that would allow them to succeed. Ethnographic chapters on five Korean American immigrant families introduce the parenting strategies and adolescents’ responses, which were at times defiantly resistant, sometimes accommodating, and at other times enormously appreciative. The book examines the delicate negotiations between parents and teens in the intimacy of family life, following them from homes to shopping malls, music recitals, church, workplaces, and school. The five families reflect a diversity of family dynamics, but uniting them all is the hard work that parents and children engage in to maintain the bonds of their family relationships.

This chapter features the Hyun family, the most recently immigrated family, who had arrived in the United States only two years prior to our meeting. Although the parents had decided to emigrate to the United States to provide their teenage sons with better opportunities—riding the popular wave of sending Korean children overseas for precollege study abroad—the mother had her own dreams about the desired impact of immigration for her own sense of cosmopolitanism as well as family cohesiveness. The chapter follows the travails of the older son as he struggled to meet the demands of being a college-bound English language learner—a fate foisted upon him against his will by his parents and initially resisted by him. The immigrant son eventually embraced his new American young adulthood in unexpected ways (and somewhat to his parents’ dismay) by joining the U.S. Army and serving tours in the Middle East. This chapter draws continuity between the more settled Korean American families (like those featured in previous chapters) and the more recently immigrated Korean American families by capturing the illusiveness as well as the unexpected possibilities of immigrant American young adulthood.

This chapter sets the context for our study, including highlights from a study conducted on the campus of the University of Illinois that served as the impetus for the study of Korean American teens and parents in Chicagoland. The chapter presents the findings—as well as new questions sparked by the findings—of that campus study in light of the prevailing narrative about Korean American (and Asian American) families from previous scholarly works about the nature of intergenerational relationships in immigrant families. The Chicagoland Korean American families featured in our study are also placed in the context of the local, national, and transnational conversations that were ongoing among, and about, Korean American and Korean families and teens at the time of the study.

This chapter features the Chung family, who, like the Koh family, were keenly aware of racism. Both parents prided themselves on working outside of the ethnic sector—the mother as a highly skilled surgical nurse and the father as an owner of a video rental store. The family’s higher income compelled the parents to move their family from an affluent suburb populated by many other Korean American families to another affluent suburb that was overwhelmingly White—a strategy to exit the ethnic enclave in order to assimilate themselves and their children into multicultural (but mostly White) America to ensure successful transitions to professional occupations populated by successful (White) others. The chapter follows the family through the eyes of the younger son, who realized the illusive nature of the parents’ assimilation strategy and eventually pursued graduate study in a humanities discipline.

This chapter describes the research process, from survey data collection to family ethnography. It details the ethnic geography of the Chicagoland Korean American community through ethnographic observations of the churches, neighborhoods, social service agencies, and schools that mattered in the lives of the Korean Americans in the book. The survey included 204 Korean American teens and 102 parents, from whom five families were selected and followed. The chapter briefly discusses what the survey revealed about how the Chicagoland Korean American parents and teens viewed individual and family well-being. Among Korean American teen, their perception of how well their family was functioning correlated highly with their individual psychological distress and wellness. However, although the survey responses did reveal glimpses of parent-child acculturation gaps and individual distress, the survey findings did not conform very well to the familiar story of a generational gap in acculturation between parents and teens as the primary driver of family or individual difficulties. Whereas the survey gives a broad brushstroke picture of Korean American families with teens, it also left many intriguing questions to be answered. The chapter ends with a description of how the families were selected for intensive and long-term follow-up.

Through the lives and narratives of eight women, The Melodrama of Mobility chronicles South Korea's experience of dizzyingly rapid development. Nancy Abelmann captures the mood, feeling, and language of a generation and an era while providing a rare window on the personal and social struggles of South Korean modernity. Drawing also from television soap operas and films, she argues that a melodramatic sensibility speaks to South Korea's transformation because it preserves the tension and ambivalence of daily life in unsettled times.