Korean Chinese, Chinese Korean: A Life Across Languages, Countries, and Names - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

What does it mean to belong to two countries when neither citizenship nor ancestry provides a final answer?

Yongjun Zhu was born in Yanbian, China, into a Korean-speaking family. He was educated in Korean, studied in Korea and America, and later returned to Korea as a professor. In 2025, on his thirty-eighth birthday, he applied for Korean citizenship. He hoped official recognition might change how he understood himself, but the result was not as simple as he had imagined.

Moving through childhood memories, languages, migration, family ancestry, academic life, citizenship, and the preservation of his name, Korean Chinese, Chinese Korean follows one person’s long investigation into identity. It examines how the same word—朝鲜族 in China and 조선족 in Korea—can carry belonging, pride, uncertainty, and burden.

This book does not offer an answer for every Korean Chinese person or ask anyone to choose one country over another. It is a personal inquiry into what we inherit, what others call us, and what we choose to carry. It is also a formal farewell to the need for one final definition.

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