• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.115-130
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to compare marital satisfaction between Korean women and Vietnamese women and to identify ways in which marital satisfaction of immigrant women in an interracial marriage can be enhanced. Subjects of this study are Korean married women and Vietnamese immigrant women in a interracial marriage who have been married for 1-5 years, and they study was conducted for 30 days, from April 1, 2008 - April 30, 2008. A total of 300 questionnaires were distributed, 150 for Korean women and 150 for Vietnamese immigrant women, and they were distributed my mail with a letter requesting cooperation to agencies all over Korea that educate and consult immigrant women as well as international marriage information offices. Because a concern of Vietnamese women not being able to understand Korean was noted in the process of collecting data, a questionnaire for marital satisfaction that was translated to the Vietnamese language was also used.

• Journal of Family Resource Management and Policy Review
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.73-92
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• 2007

This study explored the integration-support paradigm for transnational marriages and families as a well-grounded service model supporting a transnational family of immigrants in Korea at a time when Korean society showed increased interest in interracial marriages. The research mainly focused on the Dongdaemun-gu Transnational Marriage and Family Support Center, utilizing the relative actual practice at the center and the secondary data of previous studies. The findings were as follows: The integration-support paradigm for transnational marriage and family comprised of the following elements : the institutionalization of welfare and medical services; the systematization of legal institution and execution the settlement of mid- and long-term policies and the practical programs of the government proper approaches to the formation of a healthy marital couple and family relations; total services related to rearing and educating children properly including education cost support to family incomehousing for the stabilization of family life support for socio-cultural exchanges within the family : as well as the radical conversion of social recognition of a transnational family. This paradigm is expected to be a well-grounded service for the integration-support of transnational families.

• Journal of Family Resource Management and Policy Review
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.109-122
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• 2010

The present study aims to investigate cultural similarities and differences that influence interracial couples (between Korean men and Vietnamese women) when adapting to Korean family culture in terms of interculturalism. The interviewees consisted of three generations. This study used in-depth interviews. Data was collected from January to August 2008. 15 families (45 people) were used for analysis. Results were as follows: (1) the patriarchal culture of the two nations had a positive influence on the adaptation of members during family interactions(2) the culture of filial piety is a value system that both nations believe is important. However, different rituals had a negative influence on the practice of filial piety (3) the community-oriented culture is regarded as important in the two nations. However, Vietnamese wives cannot lead a free community life because Koreans see them in negative terms (4) the Vietnamese traditional wedding custom called "NopJjeOh" had a negative influence on the adaptation to the Korean family culture (5) the preference for sons in Vietnam is not as high as in Korea. This difference had a negative influence on adaptation (6) clear differences between the daily lives of the two nations had a negative influence on adaptation to Korean family culture. In conclusion, Korea and Vietnam have many similarities in culture, which enable Vietnamese wives to adapt to Korean culture more easily than other foreign wives. If various programs are developed to promote the mutual understanding between both cultures based on these research findings, it would further contribute toward social integration in Korea.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.215-240
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• 2009

This paper focuses on how Younghill Kang internalizes whiteness ideology through interracial romance to build himself as an oriental Yankee and recover his masculinity in his autobiographical novel East Goes West. This paper also focuses on Kang's strategy of racial and cultural hybridity presented in this novel. The theoretical basis of my argument is a mixture of Fanon's psychoanalysis in his Black Skin, White Masks, Bhabha's notion of mimicry in The Location of Culture, and notions related to race and gender of some Asian critics such as Patricia Chu, Jinqi Ling, and Lisa Lowe. In East Goes West, white women appear as "ladder of success" of successful assimilation and serve as cultural mediators and instructors and sometimes adversaries who Korean male immigrants have to win to establish identities in which Americanness, ethnicity, and masculinity are integrated. However, three Korean men, Chungpa Han, To Wan Kim, George Jum, who fall in love with white women fail to win their beloveds in marriage. George Jum fails to sustain a white dancer, Jun' interest. Kim wins the affection of Helen Hancock, a New England lady, but Kim commits suicide when he knows Helen killed herself because her family doesn't approve their relationship. Han's love for Trip remains vague, but Kang implies Han will continue his quest for "the spiritual home" as the name of "Trip." In East Goes West, Kang also attempts to challenge the imagining of a pure, monolithic, and naturalized white dominant U.S. Culture by exploring the cultural and racial hybridity shown by June and the various scenes of Halem in the 1920s. June who works for a Harlem cabaret is a white woman but she wears dark makeup. Kang questions the white face of America's self-understanding and racial constitution of a unified white American culture through June's racial masquerade. Kang shows that like Asian and black Americans, the white American also has an ambivalent racial identity through June's black mimicry and there is no natural and unchanging essence behind one's gender and race identity constitution.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.693-718
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• 2009

Kate Burns, a disillusioned Irish woman in Quetzalcoatl, has alternating feelings of fear, repulsion, oppression, compassion, and fascination vis-à-vis Mexican people. Together, these feelings are constitutive of a psychic process in which an imaginary appropriation of the other takes place. In this process white subjectivity represents or reconstructs the dark race precisely as its other. At the same time, Kate's feelings register her anxious recognition of the resistant, unappropriated being of the dark people: their true 'otherness,' or what Žižek calls "the excess of existence over representation." The otherness, frequently racial and sexual, evokes mixed feelings in the white subject. Kate's at once amorous and aggressive response to Ramón's body provides a case in point. Kate's emotional undulation is considerably mitigated in The Plumed Serpent, the revised version of the novel in which the theme of 'blood-mixing' is pushed to the ultimate point. Yet the interracial marriage resolves neither the racial nor the ontologico-sexual issues raised in the first version. Kate is still attracted to Ramón in his sagacious sensuality but goes on to get married to Cipriano, a pure Indian, only to find his mechanical masculinity ever unpalatable. This shows, not just Lawrence's wilful commitment to the 'blood-mixing' theme, but perhaps his lingering taboo against miscegenation as well. Changes in the plot entail those in the narrative voice. In Quetzalcoatl, Owen, a spectatorial and gossipy character, frequently competes for narration with the fully participant third-person narrator. In The Plumed Serpent, the third-person narrator becomes predominant, now attempting with greater confidence to present the reality of the racial other immediately to European readership. While such immediacy is illusional, narrative insistence on it implies a struggle to displace racial stereotypes and offer an experiential understanding of the other.