Introduction

Since early the 2000s, the number of long-term immigrants to New Zealand deciding to return to their homelands has increased. Simultaneously, Korea has made changes to its residency policy in an attempt to attract ‘global talent’ back to its shores. The result has been an increase in the number of overseas Koreans returning from their emigration destinations. The processes driving this movement and the experience(s) of returnees on resettlement have received little attention in research.

My research project (Lee, 2012) focused on the everyday experiences of the 1.5 generation Korean immigrants of Auckland, New Zealand, who permanently returned to Korea between 1999 and 2009. Moreover, the journeys of those returnees who moved back to New Zealand after living in Korea for a short period were traced. In total, the lives of 40 returnees and nine re-returnees were explored through a life history approach within transnational ethnography including semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The research argued that although transnational linkages facilitate movements and allow immigrants to make strategic life choices across borders, longings for home as well as a sense of national identity and belonging remain prevalent among recent Korean New Zealander returnees. While most returnees learn to value and embrace their hybrid identities and find ways to settle permanently in Korea, some eventually move back to New Zealand in the ongoing quest for ‘home’.

The process behind knowledge production is highly subjective and it functions as an important determinant of both the research process and the research outcomes. Nevertheless, there are not enough places in which we can converse about how fieldwork gets prepared, carried out, analysed, and finally written. This chapter is a place for the privileging of such important matters. In this chapter, I reflect on certain aspects of my personal journey throughout the study of young Korean New Zealander return migrants. My personal migration journey, the fact that I was an immigrant before becoming a researcher, was significant to this study in terms of shaping its initial research design and the way I analysed my findings. In the next section, I explain how I began to develop a life history approach within ‘transnational ethnography’ in an attempt to expand traditional ethnography approaches and to expose the nature of my ethnographic work. I employed a life history approach within transnational ethnography to develop the complexity of research on return migration.