ABSTRACT
Since the late 1980s, the Korean minority community in Northeast China has experienced an unprecedented “Korean wind”: Many ethnic Koreans in China made efforts to pursue wealth accumulation and to raise their social status through transnational migration from China to South Korea. In the past four decades, two generations of Korean Chinese migrants born from the 1940s to the 1980s have worked in South Korea as laborers in “3D jobs”: Difficult, dirty, and dangerous work, in a country that they were both familiar with and also estranged from at the same time. Based on eight months of anthropological fieldwork among left-behind members of a Korean community in Northeast China, this chapter explains how elderly people in rural China have faced the crisis of loneliness, various health problems, and even the threat of death in their daily life. The chapter reveals the deep roots of the Korean Chinese community's social disintegration and cultural dilemma. Finally, this chapter presents the view that these elderly people are constantly negotiating with and struggling to keep their ethnic and national identities, and thus, they tend to search for a sense of belonging through the means of space imagination.
