Abstract
This chapter deals with the South Korean healthcare “guest workers” who settled in Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s. It focuses on the objectives and activities of their continued short-term return visits to South Korea in the context of their migration trajectories. It is based on in-depth life history interviews with 14 former Korean nurses or nursing assistants, which were conducted in Hesse, Germany. The interview results showed that the nature of these guest workers’ “home” visits was: family reunions, vacations, or trips undertaken to fulfill familial obligations. Subsequent analysis sheds light on the role of short-term visits in the formation of im/migrant identities and how these regular visits are transnational practices that play a significant role in retaining complex senses of belonging in the migrants’ country of origin and country of settlement.
This work was supported by the Seed Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2015-INC-2230004). For an earlier version of this article, see Ahn (2016: 1–36). Published in Ewha Sahak Yon’gu 53.
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Ahn, Y. (2019). Here and There: Return Visit Experiences of Korean Health Care Workers in Germany. In: Tsuda, T., Song, C. (eds) Diasporic Returns to the Ethnic Homeland. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90763-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90763-5_9
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