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The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City, by Kyeyoung Park. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. 228 pp. $15.95 paper. ISBN: 0-801-48391-3.
Ethnicity and Entrepreneurship: The New Chinese Immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area, by Bernard Wong. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. 1998. 120 pp. NPL paper. ISBN: 0-205-16672-5.
Kyeyoung Park's The Korean American Dream is the latest, though perhaps the first anthropological, study of Korean immigrants in the United States. Its central topic is the question of Korean entrepreneurship. Whereas the burgeoning literature on the subject considers entrepreneurship as an alternative, yet effective, mode of immigrant adaptation, Park takes a rather different approach, seeking to understand how entrepreneurship serves as an "ideology" and frames the way in which Korean immigrants "make sense of their new lives in America" (p. 2). Through ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 109 Korean immigrants living in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York City, she attempts to answer not simply why Koreans gravitate toward small business but how such gravitation transforms the "old" way of life with regard to kinship relations, family relations, gender, religion, politics, and ethnic identity.
Park's ethnographic account of Korean small business challenges the existing literature on four points. First, Park discounts ethnic or eth-class resources as general explanations of ethnic succession in entrepreneurship, considering these conceptions too "narrow." Accepting, instead, the segmented labor market model, she situates Korean small business in the secondary labor market of the U.S. economy (p. 43); she maintains that immigrants' gravitation to small business is a direct response to disadvantages associated with immigrant status-such as a lack...