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INTRODUCTION The Melodrama of Mobility Although they necessarily fall at the beginnings of books, introductions strike me as foremost betwixt and between. With one arm they coax the readers, imploring them to read on, promising treasures in the pages that stretch ahead. With the other arm, they pull back, warning that the o¬erings are frail, that they falter here or there. Hubris makes her claims, just as humility softens, or even retracts, them. And ethnography, with its often resolutely local lens—focused, in the case of this book, on the talk of not even a dozen middle-aged South Korean women—similarly straddles diverse claims: at its brazen-most it argues that this-or-that corner of reality will render the world anew; more sheepishly, it often promises no more (or less) than the integrity and humanity of a small story. To the reader, let me say: at its boldest, this introduction will proclaim that the lives of the South Korean women who figure prominently in this book tell a story that is nothing short of the history and sensibility of post–Korean War South Korea; in its more modest moments, this introduction will suggest that these lives introduce the “talk” of a particular generation of South Korean women. The reader wonders, “But what does the writer really think? Which is it, after all?” My answer: both, both, betwixt and between. But in another vein, let me be perhaps even more bold: it is not just introductions that do more than one thing at once, at times even at crosspurposes , but all writing and speech—all words. And this is a book that examines many words, those comprising the stories of eight South Korean women, asking always about the various things they are doing, doing all at once. Boldly again, I will assert that the myriad social contests that rivet their words and stories reveal these women’s times, in the historical sense. 1 1 1 1 Pulling in the reins a bit, I marvel at the complexity of their stories, and the struggles of their lives. If introductions are, as I suggest, precarious, I take titles to be straightforward promises. They are promises about ideas that figure centrally in the book, and about places, often metaphorical ones, the writer visits. My title promises, then, that at the very least I will introduce the reader to “talk,” “class” (and “mobility”), “women,” and “melodrama.” Much of this introduction is devoted to what I mean by these words and how I use them here. And the words, those five, vie for attention with other words, words that might just as easily have found their way into the title: “narrative,” “family,” “gender,” and “identity” among them. This Book in Short This book draws upon women’s social mobility stories, that is, their talk about the course of their lives and of the lives in their midst, most typically those of siblings, cousins, and in-laws (see Plath 1980, 8, on “consociates”; also see Stack and Burton 1993, on “kinscripts”). Unlike life histories, chronological accounts of people’s lives, social mobility stories take up the particular problematic of social origins and destinations (see Ginsburg 1989, on “strategic life stories”). I appreciate origins and destinations not as fixed points but rather as narratives or stories. As such, social mobility stories engage the social imagination—a topic I turn to later in this chapter. I met with these women intensively during two extended research stays in Seoul, South Korea (one in 1992 and 1993; the other in 1995 and 1996), and thereafter more briefly during shorter stays in 1998, 2000, and 2001. I met each of them at least eight times, some of them a dozen or more times. In shorter visits we sat together for a couple of hours, in longer ones, for the better part of a half day. I tell in chapter 2 how I came to meet each woman—how they came to be what anthropologist John Langston Gwaltney calls “donors of personal documents” (1980, xxv)—stories that I use to begin my foray into the complexity of class and gender in South Korea. Although I assert that the women who figure in this book span South Korea’s class spectrum, I also argue that class is not a structural variable to be considered in isolation of women’s narratives like the ones readers find here. Hence, although I assert these women’s class diversity, I resolutely refuse to classify...

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