Assistant Professor of Anthropology Haeng-ja Sachiko Chung presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association held Nov. 21-25 in San Francisco. “Becoming Korean: Family Secret and Hybrid Ethnicity” was a part of “Hybridity in Transnational Japan: Beyond the Multi-Ethnic Frame,” an invited panel of anthropologists from both Japan and the United States.
Chung said that intergenerational storytelling is a way to reconstruct “family histories and identities by filling the gap between the past and present.” She said the storytelling also “exposes multiplicities of experiences and enables new interpretations” and “consequently, it may deconstruct family histories and identities.” In her paper, Chung “qualitatively and descriptively analyze[d] the under-studied ethnically hybrid families by building on Hamaguchi’s study of Japanese families.”