Politics of representation in the era of globalization: discourse about marriage migrant women in two South Korean films

Abstract

The complexity of globalization challenges our understanding of culture and identity as these are reshaped by dominant/marginal identity relations that become increasingly fluid across transnational space. Ex/neo-colonial South Korea, growing in economic power and transnational cultural influence mostly in Asia, has become a host to Asian immigrants. Accompanying the changing ethnoscape, media discourse constitutes (more than reflects) immigrant identities and their experiences. Study of discourse in two South Korean films about marriage migrant women reveals constructions that serve new nation-building policies in the global era while maintaining traditional assumptions about, and realities of, gender, race/ethnic, and class relations.

Keywords:

• globalization
• marginal identity
• marriage migrant women
• South Korean movies

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Hazel Dicken-Garcia for her very helpful guidance.

Notes

1. Between 1990 and 2005, 160,000 South Korean men registered their international marriages; the number for South Korean women was 80,000 (Lee, 2007, p. 1).

2. The two movies, synopses and information:

Failan is about Kang-jae, a South Korean failed gangster, and Failan, a Chinese girl who goes to South Korea to find an aunt after her parents died. The film begins with a brief scene of Failan at an immigration office and jumps to one year later, introducing Kang-jae, who has just got out of jail where he was sent for selling pornography tapes to teenagers. Other gang members no longer respect him because they think him a loser. When Kang-jae's boss, who murdered a rival gang member, offers Kang-jae money to take a fall for him by going to jail for 10 years, Kang-jae thinks it his only chance for redemption in eyes of gang members and agrees. But the arrival of police to tell Kang-jae his wife Failan has died changes everything. He does not remember her, but he must go identify her body and collect her ashes.

The film flashes back one year to Failan's arrival in South Korea from Mainland China after her parents’ death. Failan plans to live with an aunt in South Korea but learns her aunt had emigrated to Canada. Needing a job, Failan goes to an employment agency, which is connected to the gang in which Kang-jae is involved, and learns her tourist visa will not allow her to work in South Korea. Desperate, Failan agrees to a paper marriage to Kang-jae because it enables her to stay in the country and work. She never meets Kang-jae, who is paid for signing the marriage certificate. After being led into a bar to work as a prostitute, Failan escapes and eventually settles in a seaside town as a laundress. The film flashes to the present with Kang-jae en route to pick up Failan's body. While reading letters Failan left, he learns about the woman he married on paper and quickly forgot.

Wedding Campaign is about two aging rural bachelors who have been best friends since childhood. Unable to find a woman willing to marry a rural bachelor, Man-taek, a farmer, and Hee-chul, a taxi driver, suffer much humiliation. Man-taek's grandfather learns that a neighbor found a bride in Uzbekistan and urges his grandson to seek a wife in Uzbekistan. Man-taek and Hee-chul go on a 10-day tour in Uzbekistan where matchmakers attempt to pair them with Uzbek-speaking ethnic South Korean women. While Hee-chul enjoys a date and romance with a potential South Korean Uzbek bride during the day and attempts sexual relations with some Uzbek girls at night, Man-Taek is so shy that he cannot make eye contact with a woman on his blind date. When his translator Lara attempts to give him a self-esteem makeover so he can find a wife, Man-taek falls in love with her. However, Lara, who was introduced as a South Korean Uzbek, is actually a North Korean fugitive named Soon-yi who is working for the marriage agency so she can get a fake South Korean passport. Lara's illegal status dashes Man-taek's hopes to bring her to his home village. One year after Man-taek returns to his village, television news shows Lara climbing over a wall into the German Embassy in Uzbekistan in hopes of being sent to South Korea. In the last scene, Man-taek learns that Lara has arrived in South Korea and wants to see him.

Failan (2001), a South Korean-Chinese production adapted from the Japanese novel Love story by Jiro Asada, won the Lotus for Best Film in the Deauville Asian Film Festival in 2002 and has been released in some countries around the world, including the United States and France. Wedding Campaign (2005) concluded the Pusan International Film Festival in 2005 and has been invited to several other festivals, including the Taipei Film Festival. Nine episodes of the television documentary The Human presented the original story, titled Old Bachelor Goes to Uzbekistan, in 2002.