The Story of Minh: The Lifeworld of a Marriage-Labor Immigrant Mother

The Story of Minh: The Lifeworld of a Marriage-Labor Immigrant Mother

In this paper, I investigate how Minh, as an immigrant mother, accepts, resists, and transforms available Korean cultural discourses about mothering. With the goal of exploring and understanding the discourses about mothering that pertain to immigrant families in Korea, I examine how local, national, and international histories of race, gender, class, citizenship, nationality, and culture shape the discourses of mothering in Korea. Through this process, the paper addresses the intersection between the discourses about mothering and marriage-labor immigrant families in the Korean context. To examine disparities and contradictions that emerged from my multiple ethnographic interviews with Minh between 2013 and 2015, I use Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia as an analytic tool. The paper concludes by discussing the need for establishing renewed perspectives on the role of “Koreanness,” the complexities of marriage-labor immigrants’ lifeworlds, and mothering as cultural, emotional, and affective labor.