The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS An embarrassing number of people helped me with this book. How absurd to reduce their generosity, work, and kindness to fleeting reference here. More absurd, really, is that neither here nor in the body of the book do I name the eight women featured in it. To call their gift generosity does not even begin to do them justice. Earlier versions of the book included a number of passages that would have revealed the extent to which some of these women nurtured me so very far beyond the book project: one by one, for a variety of reasons, I cut those passages. I would like to single out the Education Mother and Mi-yôn’s Mother for tending to my heart, oh so lovingly. The fieldwork culminating in this book, and the book itself, owe a tremendous amount to research assistants. Each and every one of them cared about the project, sharing their intelligence, skill, and insights so that I might do better, do less damage, in the tricky act of representation. And they have been cheerleaders during the many moments (and stretches) in which my confidence in the project and in myself flagged. Over the course of field research, I was aided by So-Jin Park and Jesook Song, both of whom continued to assist me in the writing process as well; also, both of them conducted follow-up interviews for this book in summer 2001. In addition, in the long process of writing, I have been foremost assisted by Hye-young Jo, Hyunhee Kim, and Soo-Jung Lee. The greatest honor and joy of my career has been the opportunity to mentor each of these five remarkable women in their doctoral studies. My field research was also facilitated by many more people: Cho Hae-joang, Cho Hûi-mun, Cho Sông-ch’ôn, Cho Ûn, Chong Byung-ho, Chong Jin-kyung, Do-Hyun Han, Eun-shil Kim, Hyongy ông Kim, Keun Lee, So-yôn Lee, Oak Hwa-ja, O se-yông, Paek Uk-in, Pak Myông-gyu, Pak Pu-jin, Pak Sang-Ah, Pak Sang-kyu, Shin Hyo-ch’ôl, Song In-ja, Yi Ji-yông, Yi So-yôn, Yi So-yông, and Yoon Taek-lim. I am also grateful for conversations in the field with a number of helpful scholars: Kang xi Myông-kyu, Byoung-Kwan Kim, Eunhee Yi Kim, Myung-hye Kim, So-young Kim, Pak Mi-hye, Pak Myông-jin, Song Bok, and Yi Chông-man. In the writing process I was also aided by Heather Foran, Kang Hye-sûng, Susan Kelleher , Jin-hee Lee, and Yoonjeong Shim. In earlier articles culminating here, I was ably assisted by Carolee Berg, Rosa DeJorio, Ki-bom Lee, Sang Ryong Lee, and Judith Pintar. Thanks to Steve Holland for the many drafts of the kinship charts. What can one say to thank friends, colleagues, and relatives who have read this book in full? I am silenced by the extraordinary generosity of my father, Walter Abelmann (yet again, and again), Nicole Constable, Roger Janelli, Hagen Koo, Kathryn LaTorre, Michael Robinson, Eun Hui Ryo, and Jesook Song. This book is the result of their feedback, (many, many) edits, and unfailing encouragement; the line by line contributions of Eun Hui and Jesook are particularly remarkable. I am also grateful to many kind people who read parts of this manuscript and related earlier articles: Rena Abelmann , Edward Bruner, Cho Hae-joang, Jung-Ah Choi, Ramona Curry, John Finch, Alma Gottlieb, Roy Richard Grinker, JaHyun Kim Haboush, Hiroshi Ishida, Hye-young Jo, Bill Kelleher, Laurel Kendall, Seung Kyung Kim, Shanshan Lan, Grace Lee, Keehyeung Lee, Soo-Jung Lee, F. K. Lehman, John Lie, Miho Matsugu, Kathleen McHugh, Laura Nelson, Theresa DeLeane O’Nell, HehRahn Park, Judith Pintar, Kendall Rafter, Linda-Anne Rebhun, Patricia Sandler, Ann Saphir, Ronald Toby, and Karen Winter-Nelson. I am also grateful to the editorial hands at American Ethnologist and The Journal of Asian Studies. Chapters 5 and 6 are drawn from articles published in The Journal of Asian Studies (Abelmann 1997b) and American Ethnologist (Abelmann 1997a), respectively. This book has also received the generous support of external funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Korea Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. At the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign this work has been generously supported by many research assistant grants from the Research Board and by the departments of anthropology and of...