For Koreans living abroad, a move to South Korea represents a homecoming of sorts, a psychic return to the country of one’s ancestry, romanticized and distant. The dissertation explores the migration projects of Korean Americans and Korean Chinese (Joseonjok) to Seoul, South Korea in search of an ideal Koreanness, embodied in a specific history, culture and tradition. Rather than following inevitable paths of assimilation in the U.S. or China, technological advances in communication, global media and transportation have created islands of immigrant communities abroad within which these ethnic Koreans have reproduced lifestyles and values strongly linked to the homeland.

This project addresses how return migration flows challenge the authenticity of these ethnic identities internalized by immigrant Korean communities within the diaspora. As these actors confront new expectations regarding gender and national identity, the expectation of returning home and being embraced as prodigal sons and daughters is laced with bittersweet reactions. Korean American and Joseonjok return migrants are perceived as both foreign yet familiar, which informs their positions within Korean society in distinct ways.

Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I center the narratives of these actors who negotiate the interplay of ethnicity, nationality and gender ideologies in their everyday lives. The thread throughout the interviews is the struggle of cultural hybridity, of inhabiting a liminal space between two distinct national identities but linked to others through a sense of shared ethnic identity. A comparison of these two groups also illuminates the differences within these hybrid identities across ethnic Korean communities, informed by occupational segregation in the South Korean labor market, relationships within their social networks, obligations within the extended family and general perceptions held by South Koreans about Korean Americans and Joseonjok .

The research contributes to a larger dialogue on the nature of transnational ethnic identities in the 21^st century and how immigrant groups construct new cultural forms through their experiences in the homeland.