In Making and Faking Kinship, City Imo, one of Caren Freeman's Chosŏnjok (ethnically Korean Chinese) informants, fails to pull together the right personal connections, kinship ties, and documents to secure a family reunification visa to South Korea. Outraged by seeing other applicants celebrate not only that they were approved, but that they did so with forged documents and no real family ties, she proclaims, “Fake is realer than real!” (p. 185). This is an apt statement, not only because City Imo's own documents and family connections are a blend of originals and forgeries, but also because it captures the elusive, taut, and ever-forming quality of the “transnational kinship” (p. 7) ties that Freeman traces historically, discursively, and ethnographically between South Korea and China through examining state-promoted international marriages of Chosŏnjok women and Korean men.
Freeman's book opens in 1995, shortly after Chosŏnjok brides and workers were first welcomed into South Korea as long-lost kin, a plan devised as a quick solution for meeting the nation's rural bride-shortage and rising need for cheap factory labor, all under the auspices of ethnic and national “re-unification” (p. 13). These “open-door kin policies” (p. 13), which “grew out of the evolving political, economic and demographic circumstances within and between China and South Korea” (p. 3), also continued to evolve. It was not long before media reports of runaway brides, fake marriages, and unscrupulous workers began to sway the public imagination against Chosŏnjok migrants. The book's key strength is the attention it pays to different narrative voices to give “depth and complexity to a cast of characters who might otherwise be viewed as stock villains” (p. 73). These include “the avaricious matchmaker,” the “opportunistic Chosŏnjok bride,” and “the deceitful husband” (p. 73), as well as people like City Imo, who unapologetically pursue “counterfeit kinship practices” (p. 7) out of frustration with “incongruent” (p. 189) policies that welcome Chosŏnjok into the ethnic and national Korean family while simultaneously excluding them.
Making and Faking Kinship's structure and writing style reflect the transnational nature of its subject, moving between rural and urban South Korea and Heilongjiang Province in China, a community that lost over 14 percent of its Chosŏnjok population to South Korea in the 1990s (p. 14). The book is divided into two sections; the first focuses on the historical and social conditions that led to these marriages. Government-sponsored “marriage tours” (p. 31) to China, promoted as a way for rural bachelors to find wives whose “cultural and economic purity” (p. 42) would serve their families' needs better than even a Korean woman could, became popular and were quickly taken over by profit-seeking matchmakers. In a series of memorable vignettes, Freeman takes us on what she describes as her own sort of “Marriage Tour” (p. 32), visiting rural couples and even helping a bride clear a field of rotten potatoes to give her enough time to participate in an interview. “Had I seen where I'd be living, I would never have gotten married” (p. 53), one comments. In challenging the idea that the brides are powerless, Freeman shows that everyone in these families thought they were getting a good deal, whether in the form of upward mobility for the bride, a source of remittances and migration opportunities for her parents, or the chance for children and eldercare for the groom and his parents. Only after the wedding do expectations of “gendered dynamics” (p. 114), which brides and grooms see as differing along national lines, clash.
The second section explores quasi-legal migration strategies and the strains migration places on “geographically dispersed” (p. 194) families. The book convincingly challenges the division between what is “fake” and “real” and what is “illegal” and “legal”—central to many arguments about immigration policy. Arrangements meant to facilitate migration, such as “paper divorces” (p. 211) that allow already-married women to remarry for a visa, or “fake marriages” (p. 6) of convenience often become real and destroy the family left behind. The final chapter asks whether this was a “failed national experiment” (p. 227) because while it “tarnished the myth of ethnic homogeneity” (p. 227), rural Korea's numbers of international brides (now from Southeast Asia) continue to rise. What is certain is the need for further attention to the ever-changing “interrelations between gender, family and nation” (p. 243), as well as the importance of this timely and ethnographically rich book.
Making and Faking Kinship makes a significant contribution to the anthropology of South Korea, as well as scholarship on transnational migration, legality and nationalism, and gender and kinship. I highly recommend it for undergraduate courses, as it complicates issues students might otherwise dismiss as being “natural” (such as kinship) or “immoral” (like undocumented migration or contract marriages), and it helps place larger issues, such as cross-border marriages, multiculturalism, globalization, and nationalism in South Korea, into context with other nations in East Asia and beyond.
