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Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea . By Caren Freeman . Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press , 2011. xiv, 263 pp. $35.00 (cloth).
Book Reviews--Korea
In Making and Faking Kinship, City Imo, one of Caren Freeman's ChosÅnjok (ethnically Korean Chinese) informants, fails to pull together the right personal connections, kinship ties, and documents to secure a family reunification visa to South Korea. Outraged by seeing other applicants celebrate not only that they were approved, but that they did so with forged documents and no real family ties, she proclaims, "Fake is realer than real!" (p. 185). This is an apt statement, not only because City Imo's own documents and family connections are a blend of originals and forgeries, but also because it captures the elusive, taut, and ever-forming quality of the "transnational kinship" (p. 7) ties that Freeman traces historically, discursively, and ethnographically between South Korea and China through examining state-promoted international marriages of ChosÅnjok women and Korean men.
Freeman's book opens in 1995, shortly after ChosÅnjok brides and workers were first welcomed into South Korea as long-lost kin, a plan devised as a quick solution for meeting the nation's rural bride-shortage and rising need for cheap factory labor,...