The Melodrama of Mobility : Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea

How do people make sense of their world in the face of the breakneck speed of contemporary social change? Through the lives and narratives of eight women, __The Melodrama of Mobility__ chronicles South Korea's experience of just such dizzyingly rapid development. Abelmann captures the mood, feeling, and language of a generation and an era while providing a rare window on the personal and social struggles of South Korean modernity. Drawing also from television soap operas and films, she argues that a melodramatic sensibility speaks to South Korea's transformation because it preserves the tension and ambivalence of daily life in unsettled times. The melodramatic mode helps people to wonder: Can individuals be blamed for their social fates? How should we live? Who can say who is good or bad? By combining the ethnographic tools of anthropology, an engagement with prevailing sociological questions, and a literary approach to personal narratives, __The Melodrama of Mobility__ offers a rich portrait of the experience of compressed modernity in the non-West.

"I learned who I was… at Kamehameha."

In 1944, J. Arthur Rath, a part-Hawaiian boy from a broken home, entered the Kamehameha School for Boys as an eighth-grade boarder. Thus began Rath's love affair with an institution that he credits with turning his life around, with giving him and other disadvantaged children of native ancestry - Hawai‘i's "lost generations" - the confidence and support necessary to make something of themselves. This is the story of that love affair. It is also the story of Rath's recent battle, together with other alumni, for the integrity of his beloved Kamehameha against the school's trustees and their organization, the powerful Bishop Estate.

In a lively talk-story manner, Rath reminisces about campus life and his classmates, many of whom became lifelong friends and influential members of the Hawaiian community. Years later Rath, a successful retired businessman, would call on these same friends to hold Kamehameha's trustees accountable for their mismanagement of Bishop Estate's vast financial holdings and ultimately their failure to carry out founder Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop's mandate to educate Hawaiian children. Rath draws on his many personal ties to the school and the estate to provide surprising revelations on the trustees and the "Bishop Estate Scandal," which made headlines daily throughout the mid-1990s.

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE 1. INTRODUCTION: The Melodrama of Mobility 2. THE EIGHT WOMEN 3. KEY WORDS 4. CLASS WORK: Education Stories 5. SOCIAL MOBILITY: “Facts” and “Fictions” 6. PERSONALITY SPEAKING 7. GENDERING DISPLACEMENT. Men, Masculinity, and the Nation 8. ALL IN THE FAMILY: Class Distances and Divides 9. WHEN IT’S ALL SAID AND DONE 10. CONCLUSION: Living Through Compressed Modernity CODA REFERENCES INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR This work chronicles South Korea's experience of rapid development. It captures the mood and language of a generation and an era while providing a window on the personal and social struggles of South Korean modernity.