The current study explored key issues surrounding immigrant mothers and multicultural families of South Korea. While the number of multicultural families has been growing in Korea, there has been little research exploring the challenges they face. In addition to the most basic difficulties such as language barriers and cultural differences, multicultural families of Korea experience a unique set of challenges stemming from the need to rear multicultural children in ethnically homogenous Korean society. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted to explore the challenges that immigrant mothers have as they adjust to their lives in Korea and raise children. The data were analyzed using the method of Grounded Theory. The results indicate that the immigrant mothers are greatly concerned about the challenges they expect their children will face, in addition to the difficulties experienced by the mothers themselves. Most participants found acculturating to the Korean culture, especially in terms of their relationships to their husband's family, particularly difficult. Nonetheless, the immigrant mothers wanted their multicultural children to understand and value the cultural roots of the mothers' home culture. While not one participant said that her transition to Korea was easy, most said that their adjustment improved the longer they stayed in Korea. Hopefully, these results provide a deeper understanding of multicultural families in Korea

Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea: Reflections and Future Directions aims to reinvigorate contemporary discussions about Korean families that include immigrants by expanding the scope of what we consider to be multicultural families to include the families of undocumented migrant workers, divorced marriage immigrants, the families of Korean women with immigrant husbands, and by providing a nuanced look at their lives in Korea, not as newcomers but as first-generation immigrants.

Elusive Belonging examines the post-migration experiences of Filipina marriage immigrants in rural South Korea. Marriage migration—crossing national borders for marriage—has attracted significant public and scholarly attention, especially in new destination countries, which grapple with how to integrate marriage migrants and their children and what that integration means for citizenship boundaries and a once-homogenous national identity. In the early twenty-first century many Filipina marriage immigrants arrived in South Korea under the auspices of the Unification Church, which has long served as an institutional matchmaker. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, Elusive Belonging examines Filipinas who married rural South Korean bachelors in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Turning away from the common stereotype of Filipinas as victims of domestic violence at the mercy of husbands and in-laws, Minjeong Kim provides a nuanced understanding of both the conflicts and emotional attachments of their relationships with marital families and communities. Her close-up accounts of the day-to-day operations of the state’s multicultural policies and public programs show intimate relationships between Filipinas, South Korean husbands, in-laws, and multicultural agents, and how various emotions of love, care, anxiety, and gratitude affect immigrant women’s fragmented citizenship and elusive sense of belonging to their new country. By offering the perspectives of varied actors, the book reveals how women’s experiences of tension and marginalization are not generated within the family alone; they also reflect the socioeconomic conditions of rural Korea and the state’s unbalanced approach to “multiculturalism.” Against a backdrop of the South Korean government’s multicultural policies and projects aimed at integrating marriage immigrants, Elusive Belonging attends to the emotional aspects of citizenship rooted in a sense of belonging. It mediates between a critique of the assimilation inherent in Korea’s “multiculturalism” and the contention that the country’s core identity is shifting from ethnic homogeneity to multiethnic diversity. In the process it shows how marriage immigrants are incorporated into the fabric of Korean society even as they construct new identities as Filipinas in South Korea.

The Guidebook for Living in Korea is a comprehensive guidebook for living in Korea, and was published to enable multicultural families and foreign residents to adapt quickly to life in Korea, by providing up-to-date information on Korean laws, Korean institutions and Korean life. Guidebook for Living in Korea: Table of Contents 1. Introduction to the Republic of Korea 2. Foreigner Support Services 3. Residence and Citizenship 4. Korean Culture and Life 5. Pregnancy and Childcare 6. Education of Children 7. Health and Healthcare 8. Social Security Systems 9. Employment and Labor References

Since the early 1990s, there has been a critical shortage of marriageable women in farming and fishing villages in Korea. This shortage, which has become a major social problem, resulted from a mass exodus of Korean women to cities and industrial zones. Korea's efforts to give rural bachelors a chance to marry have succeeded in providing 120,146 brides from 123 countries. However, the Korean government has proven to be ill-prepared to deal with the problems that foreign brides have encountered: family squabbles, prejudice, discrimination, divorce, suicide, and many adversities. The UN Commission on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination warned Korea to stop mistreatment of foreign brides and their children, those of so-called mixed blood, on account of human rights violations. This book comprehensively covers Korean multiculturalism, with a focus on the foreign brides. In a two-pronged ethnographic approach, it offers a historical account of Korean immigration and naturalization, while also relating that past to the contemporary situation. As more and more people cross national boundaries, this detailed description of Korean multiculturalism serves as a valuable case study for an increasingly globalized world. Kim tells the stories of these voiceless women in a compassionate manner.

With a relatively recent rapid increase in international marriages, Korea provides a fascinating case study in cross-cultural pastoral care at a time of increasing global movement and migration. This book presents a pastoral care model based on interviews with a relatively under-researched demographic of international women marriage migrants. The pastoral care model was developed by listening to the many experiences of women from Western countries who are raising their biracial children in Korea, a country which is still wrestling with the concept of multiculturalism. At a time when many pastors will find themselves with expatriates, repatriates, or international marriages in their congregation, this book presents a model for approaching pastoral care, particularly if such women are mothers.

"Drawn from experience, this in-depth case study presents an integrated approach to social work practice with culturally linguistically diverse clients, to show how theories of postmodernism and multiculturalism can be applied when working with Korean immigrant families."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved