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13 Imagined Community Sisterhood and Resistance among Korean Military Brides in America, 1950–1996 Ji-Yeon Yuh The lives of Korean military brides, women who immigrated to the United States as wives of American soldiers, can be described as a complex struggle for survival, one characterized by what I call “everyday resistance.” By this I mean resistance that is woven into the fabric of daily life, often covert, usually subtle, and rarely identified as resistance. It is part of a struggle for survival that goes beyond physical survival to include emotional and cultural survival as well, the survival of the whole self, intact with dignity, history, and self-respect. It is a struggle fought on many fronts, for the women are isolated from both Korean and American societies and from their own relatives and within their own families as well. They also face various kinds of disapproval, discrimination , and humiliations from all these sources, as well as various pressures to change and conform to American ways and minimize, even erase, their Korean identities . Resistance is characterized by an outward deference to the authority of husbands,inlaws , and American culture and society, accompanied by an insistent, backstage privileging of the women’s own desires and opinions and of Korean culture and identity. It is expressed in conversations among the women when they criticize their husbands and children or make jokes about American ways, in opinions they do not change even though they may change behavior to suit external demands, and most of all in their creation of an imagined community of sisters.1 This creation was something I gradually discovered as I conducted field research and oral history interviews from 1993 through 1996 in the Philadelphia–New Jersey –New York area. I first made contact with military brides through personal referrals and by beginning fieldwork at a Korean church whose congregants were primarily military brides and their families. Through these initial contacts, I was introduced to the three regional military-bride organizations. The majority of the women I met were from the working class or lower middle class, had one or more children, and worked outside the home. Some juggled two or three jobs. Some were in the middle of second or third marriages, and few had experienced stable married lives. Some were divorced 221 and living alone. Only 2 of the more than 150 women I met could be described as solidly middle-class or higher, and only 1 had graduated from college.Among them, the earliest to arrive immigrated in 1951 and the latest in 1995. The contours of military-bride community were gradually revealed during innumerable meetings. As the women themselves recounted it, it started from the simplest impulse, the desire to meet other Koreans like themselves, and gradually evolved into a network of organizations and personal contacts stretching across oceans and continents . This creation of community reveals a salient characteristic of their resistance. These women are not simply struggling against; they are struggling for. Their resistance is marked by creation of community and affirmation of self.Both are then used for subtle renegotiations of power dynamics in their own families that can provide them with increased freedoms, recognition from family members, and an explicit means of expressing their particular identities as Korean women. This chapter focuses on the kinds of isolation and domination these women encounter and their varied responses, as well as the networks—both formal and informal —that facilitate their imagined community. It discusses the emergence of formal organizations that reinforced the women’s efforts to maintain both their identity as Korean women and their personal dignity as individuals. Chasing the American Dream For the overwhelming majority of the women, coming to America represented the fulfillment of a dream. In Korea, the women had faced dominations and deprivations stemming from poverty, patriarchy, and Korea’s subordinate status vis-à-vis Japan and the United States. In this context, marriage to an American soldier was itself a form of resistance. For women like Mrs. N, who was 1 of 11 Korean wives of American citizens who arrived in 1951, it was resistance to Korean patriarchy and to Korean backwardness . She saw escape from an impoverished, patriarchal Korea dominated by foreign powers as the only hope for obtaining some of the freedoms and privileges being enjoyed first by the Japanese colonizers and then by the American occupiers. It was wonderful luck, she said, to meet and fall in love with a nice young man who could take her...

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