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Reflexive Cultural Proximity: The Case of Young Vietnamese
Korean-Media Audiences in the Czech Republic
Journal: Journal of Intercultural Studies
Manuscript ID CJIS-2018-0100.R2
Manuscript Type: Original Article
Keywords:
Vietnamese migrants, Czech Republic, cultural proximity, Korean media,
transnational media consumption, diasporic contexts
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Abstract
Based on in-depth interviews with Vietnamese young adults in the Czech Republic
who consume Korean media products on a regular basis, this study investigates how their
diasporic contexts are reflected in the consumption of Korean media products. While
participants quickly spotted cultural proximity as the reason for their preferences, the in-depth
analysis further revealed that cultural proximity was particularly identified (a) when they
devised a concept of the Asian family from the dialectic relationship among their family
experiences, the represented family culture in Korean media, and the observed Czech family
culture; (b) when they found their diasporic identity in the image of hardworking immigrants;
and (c) when they highlighted their cultural tastes and valued their human capital in contrast
to those of Czech people and other kinds of Vietnamese migrants. This study demonstrates
that cultural proximity is reflexively defined in a dynamic between diasporic communities and
transnational media
Keywords: Vietnamese migrants, Czech Republic, cultural proximity, Korean media,
transnational media consumption, diasporic contexts
Reflexive Cultural Proximity: The Case of Young Vietnamese Korean-Media Audiences
in the Czech Republic
Introduction
In 2012 when I started teaching at a university in the Czech Republic (hereafter, CR),
I came across an interesting news story about a K-pop (Korean pop music) World Festival
held in Korea. A Czech girl band won the grand prize with its performance, which copied a
famous K-pop girl band, Girls’ Generation. It was the picture of the girl band that caught my
attention, though, because five members out of eight looked not Czech but Asian. The news
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story made me aware that Vietnamese performers account for a large segment of Korean
popular culture fandom in the CR. And a simple question, why?, popped up, which was
followed by a few common-sense questions: Is the popularity of Korean media in the CR
because of the popularity of Korean media in their home country, Vietnam? Is it because they
find commonalities with Korean media? or Is it because globally mobile people are naturally
more into transnational media products? I learned in casual conversations with Vietnamese
people that the answer to these questions is mostly yes Korean media has been popular for
years in Vietnam. The cultural distance between Vietnam and Korea is much smaller than that
between Vietnam and the CR. Transnational people like the Vietnamese in the CR and me
tend to be more exposed to various cultures. Thus, the answer must be yes. However, the
questions and answer were firmly grounded in so-called methodological nationalism that does
not account for various cultural variations and individual contexts. Thus, my questions led me
to plan a research project focusing more on the transnational dynamics of migrants’ lives,
cultural flows, media representations, and so on.
This study focuses specifically on young Vietnamese migrants who routinely consume
Korean media by posing a broad question: How are their diasporic contexts reflected in their
consumption of Korean media? In order to fully understand their life experiences and cultural
orientations, this study delves specifically into how the young migrants place themselves in
diasporic contexts in the CR and how their life experiences directly and indirectly shape their
preferences for Korean media. Cultural proximity is a theoretical concept that may explain
their daily consumption of Korean media.
Addressing the limits of a cultural-proximity thesis that often posits culture as a static
and essential unit, this article demonstrates how migrant audiences identify cultural proximity
with Korean media by subjectively reflecting on their own diasporic experiences in the CR.
The empirical findings highlight the importance of reflexivity in understanding cultural
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proximity because reflexivity may provide a context-based understanding of transnational
media practices in a diasporic community.
Literature Review
Vietnamese in the CR
The official number of Vietnamese in the CR reached 58,025 in 2016 (Czech
Statistical Office 2017). Czechoslovakia was one of the popular destinations for Vietnamese
occupational trainees under the economic cooperation among Soviet bloc countries.
(Szymańska-Matusiewicz, 2015). After a short period post-1989, during which the number of
Vietnamese dropped, the size of the Vietnamese community dramatically expanded from
3,500 in 1992 (Drbohlav et al. 2009). Vietnamese are currently the third-largest group of
foreigners with long-term residence permits, following Ukraine and Slovak nationals
(Kušniráková 2014).
Since Vietnamese are generally classified as economic migrants, there have been
many studies focusing specifically on economic motives and labour relations (e.g.,
Hüwelmeier 2015). In addition, since most studies have been reported in the Czech language,
Vietnamese are a relatively less known population of international migration. Recently, they
have been examined by multiple studies aiming to evaluate multiculturalism and integration
policy in the CR as a country facing a transition from an emigration country to a country of
immigration (e.g., Drbohlav and Dzúrová 2007). However, the migrants’ everyday
experiences have been less represented in academia compared to multiple criminological
studies on this population (e.g., Nožina and Kraus 2016).
Intercultural studies have recently focused on the sociocultural experiences of
Vietnamese in the CR. One study investigated the history of the racialization of Vietnamese
and cultural adaptation in comparison with other minority groups (Alamgir 2013). A
sociological study highlighted distinctive kinship relations in Vietnamese families who have
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hired Czech nannies; the nannies supplement the role of parents who are absent due to
extensive economic activity (Souralová 2014). Also, multiple studies have been conducted on
the language practices of the study population (e.g., Sherman and Homoláč 2017)
Vietnamese are also known for a higher number of children (30%) and women (43%)
compared to other groups of migrants in the CR (Drbohlav et al. 2009). The number of
children and youth in the Vietnamese immigrant population has increased and accounts for
40% of the Vietnamese population (Kušniráková 2014). Despite the large number of
children, detailed demographic information such as birthplace and educational level is very
limited. A recent study that focuses specifically on the identity construction of young
Vietnamese migrants illustrates how identity hovers between one that reflects their family
traditions and another that reflects the majority community in the CR (Svobodová and Janská
2016). In response to the increasing interest in the diasporic identity of Vietnamese in the CR,
this study pays a close attention to their transnational life and cultural experiences.
Migrants’ Transnational Media Practices
Migrants’ transnational communication practices have been increasingly studied as
advanced communication technologies have been adopted in everyday life and global
mobility has increased in recent decades. Previous studies have demonstrated how new media
from satellites to the Internet have changed the life experiences of international migrants;
aided by various communication technologies, migrants (re)build human and social networks
across borders by keeping ties with people like family members and peers in their countries of
origin (e.g., Chib, Malik, Aricat, and Kadir 2014). Transnational communication is also an
important means of engaging in domestic politics in their home countries (Aricat 2015).
While some studies highlight the importance of transnational media consumption in
maintaining native identity (e.g., Kama and Malka 2013), others demonstrate how migrants’
transnational practices reciprocally shape members of the receiving society and their identity
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(e.g., Ehrkamp 2005). Transnational media consumption is also practiced by migrants to cope
with daily stress in their new home (e. g., Kim 2016).
The above-mentioned studies focus on transnational practices between migrants’ old
and new home. As the distribution of cultural products widens along with rapid technological
advancements, however, migrants have often crossed multiple borders to find culturally
relevant media products. Using data across Europe, Christiansen (2004) demonstrates that
migrants tend to seek more news than does the majority population by accessing not only
news media of their country of origin but also international news media in English, such as
BBC World, which is available on satellite television. An earlier study presents the cultural
negotiation of Vietnamese youths in Australia, who consume media products from Hong
Kong by using video recorders (Cunningham and Nguyen 2001). Similarly, Korean American
youths access Japanese as well as Korean television series not only because they prefer media
products with which they are familiar but also because they want to compensate themselves
for limited cultural representation in U.S. television products (Park 2004). Kartosen and Tan
(2013) investigate a broader population of young Asian migrants in the Netherlands who
extensively consume nonhomeland Asian media products mainly from China, Japan, and
Korea.
Global Korean Media
Since the late 1990s, when several Korean television dramas gained popularity with
Chinese audiences, the increasing popularity of Korean media in Asia has been noted by both
academia and the public (Shim 2006). Since then, multiple Korean blockbuster films and
systematically commodified pop singers have successfully infiltrated Asian cultural markets
(Shim 2006). The popularity of Korean media products has also stimulated developments in
related industries such as tourism and consumer-goods markets in Asia (Ryoo 2009).
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Originally coined by Chinese news media in the late 1990s, the term “Korean Wave” has been
widely used to describe the international success of Korean media (Kim 2013).
While the early phase of Korean media’s success in Asia was initiated through more
traditional practices of media marketing, such as the export of media products, the diffusion
of Korean media products beyond Asia in recent years has been propelled by integrating
media products into consumers’ activities on Web 2.0, which is called “Korean Wave 2.0”
(e.g., Jin 2012). The huge success of certain media products on social media such as
YouTube has attracted giant media corporations to invest their resources in social media
(Hess and Waller 2011). The strategic new media promotion has been backed by the
voluntary distribution of Korean media products by audiences, widening the scope of
consumption and distribution of Korean media products in the world (Jung and Shim 2013).
Audiences for Korean media have become more active in sharing their opinions and feelings
about Korean media with their peers via social media (Jin 2018).
Propelled by extended dissemination, Korean media have gradually gained popularity
with non-Asian audiences (e.g., Lee 2018;; Meza and Park 2015). Once established through
an increased market share in the Asian-culture industry, Korean media corporations promoted
their products to reach beyond Asia. Studies on the non-Asian reception of Korean media
have also focused on Asian diasporic audiences in the West. Asian immigrant audiences in
Austria, who are marginalised in Western society, have constructed an East Asian imagined
community by consuming culturally familiar media products from Korea (Sung 2013). In the
United States, Asian migrants nurture a pan ethnic identity while constructing a coeval
territory of East Asia (Ju and Lee 2015). As diasporic Asians, K-pop fans in Canada embrace
cultural products by reflexively interpreting the meaning of cultural products as a means of
exercising their diasporic identity (Yoon 2017).
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The extended transnationalization of Korean media in an advanced technological
context, the Western reception of Korean media, and the transnational imagined communities
of Asian migrants consuming Korean media may define the current study population, young
Vietnamese in the CR who extensively consume Korean media products. Guided by these
previous studies, the current study focuses mainly on how the migrant audiences reflect their
diasporic contexts in their transnational media consumption.
Transnational Media Consumption: Reflexively Identifying Cultural Proximity
The success of Korean media in the globalised media market has become additional
evidence for the emergence of new transnational media flow decentralizing the global media
market (e.g., Thussu 2007). Especially in Asia, rapid economic growth, the
transnationalization of the media industry, the large size of the regional market based on its
high density of population, and advanced communication technologies have been important
contextual bases of the emergence of intra-regional flow (Iwabuchi 2002). Media industries in
East Asia have successfully localised their media products in the course of trasnationalization
in their regional markets (Iwabuchi 2008).
The cultural proximity thesis has been usefully employed to explain decentralised
media flow. Exemplifying the regional media flow in Latin America, the thesis posits that
media consumers tend to prefer media products from culturally adjacent regions (Straubhaar,
1991). The notion has been useful in explaining migrants’ consumption of media products
from their countries of origin. La Pastina and Straubhaar (2005) further developed the notion
of cultural proximity by presenting the existence of multilayered proximity; first, cultural
proximity varies across locals within a country, and second, people often identify their
cultural proximity with certain genres dominated by advanced media industries, such as U.S.
cartoons. In studies on the transnational dissemination of Korean media products, cultural
proximity has been widely applied to explain their popularity not only in East and South East
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Asia (e.g., Yoo, Jo, and Jung 2014) but also in distant countries like Turkey (Oh and Chae
2013). These studies centre on international audiences’ shared cultural values and traditions,
such as family values reflected through Korean cultural products. Similarly, social proximity
is a common variable explaining the popularity of Korean media products in different East
Asian countries (Yang 2012).
However, the notion of cultural proximity has also been criticised, mainly because it
sees culture as a static unit that can be observable and predictable (Kraidy 2002). Viewing
culture as a static unit in which the essence of a culture is unchangeable hinders
understanding of the variation in reception (Kim 2009). On the other hand, recent studies have
particularly focused on migrants’ media consumption, highlighting diasporic identities
reflexively positioned between the migrants’ past experiences in home cultures and their
experiences across the border (e.g., Georgiou 2012). In her study on Arab women in the
United Kingdom who consume soap operas on Arabic television, Georgiou (2012)
demonstrates that while the migrant women appropriate Arabic soap operas as a means to
connect them with their region of origin, some of them reflect their gender identity as Arab
women in London in the course of distancing themselves from the cultural logics underlying
the television shows. Similarly, cultural proximity does not lie in national or ethnic origin but
is presented through an individual’s reflexive contexts. Audiences tend to individually
identify proximity in certain media texts (Yamato 2014). Iwabuchi (2001, 58) claims that
cultural proximity could only be “subjectively identified and experienced by the audience” in
his study on the dissemination of Japanese pop culture in Taiwan. Taiwanese audiences do
not find an intrinsically similar culture in Japanese cultural products but identify cultural
proximity by recognizing the same temporality in Japanese contemporary culture.
Studies on the reception of Korean media in Asian societies have also found cultural
proximity between the audiences’ contexts reflected in their consumption and the Korean
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context placed in the products. Positing the recent popularity of Korean cultural products in
East Asia as a descendent of previous Asian pop culture once led by Hong Kong and Japanese
media industries, Cho (2011) suggests Asian audiences find a coeval relationship with the
represented Korean sociocultural context in Korean media. Asian fans of Korean media
products feel the contemporariness of the modern and urban styles of Korean media products,
which project their shared capitalist-consumerist orientations. Also, Ainslie (2016) shows that
Thai fans of Korean television programs use foreign cultural products as a means to assess
and critique their own positions in diverse Thai sociocultural contexts. Kim (2005) describes a
coeval relationship between the characteristics of contemporary Korean society represented in
Korean media and everyday experiences and identities in contemporary Taiwanese society.
Recently, Yoon (2017) elaborates cultural proximity by introducing a new concept called
“cultural affinity.” In his study, Asian K-pop fans in Canada exercise their identity as Asian
migrants by appropriating the represented images of youthful and successful individuals in
Korean media.
Along with the findings of previous studies on young migrant audiences who consume
Korean media products, an understanding of reflexive cultural proximity guides the current
study to focus particularly on the contextual reflection on Korean media consumption by
diasporic young Vietnamese migrants in the CR. Previous studies have focused on various
identities, such as gender, ethnic, and cosmopolitan identities, that migrant audiences possibly
reflect in their transnational media consumption. The present study also aims to demonstrate
that cultural proximity to their own and Korean culture represented in Korean media is
reflexively identified by the young diasporic audiences in the CR. The findings are expected
to support the claim that reflexivity contributes to the theoretical richness of the culturalproximity
thesis.
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Methodology
As part of a larger research project on transnational media practices in the Vietnamese
diasporic community of the CR, the current study focused particularly on young adults who
consumed Korean media products. Before starting the study, the investigator learned that
young Vietnamese in the CR were the first group of people who explicated their cultural
preference for Korean media products. Vietnamese migrant children were mostly born in
Vietnam and moved to the CR in their early years; they were relatively well educated; many
of them could speak multiple languages, including Vietnamese, Czech, and English.
Investigating the contextual connection between participants’ life experiences and their media
practices, the current study focused narrowly on this relatively homogenous population in the
Vietnamese diasporic community of the CR.
This study was based on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews conducted in
two major Czech cities, Prague and Brno. Following the basic principle of purposive
sampling, this study specifically selected participants who were suitable for the research
focus. The youngest participant was 18 years old, while the oldest was 26. Since it was not
difficult to find fluent English speakers in this population, all interviews were conducted in
English. With the exception of two participants who attended English-based private colleges
in the CR, all participants were either students at or graduates of Czech national universities.
Likewise, the economic status of their families was generally homogeneous. Despite the
occupational diversity of their parents, most participants identified their families as middle
class. In this study, however, gender was not equally represented because it was known that
Korean media fans in the Vietnamese community were predominantly female, and thus
female participants could be recruited much more easily. Although two male participants
joined the research initially, their interview data were excluded from this study because of the
weak intensity of their Korean media consumption. Planning a larger future research project
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covering a wider scope of participants, the investigator ruled out other young Vietnamese
migrants who either were born or arrived in the CR only recently because these two
populations were far less representative of the young-adult generation of the Vietnamese
diasporic community. Thus, all study participants were born in Vietnam and moved to the CR
at young ages ranging from 5 to 8.
The first four participants were recruited through a Czech informant who was involved
in diverse international communities in Prague, including Vietnamese and Korean
communities. Snowball sampling was used to recruit the rest of the participants with the help
of earlier participants. Although the researcher conducted a total of 17 interviews, five
interviews were excluded from this study due to lack of relevance, such as weak intensity of
Korean media consumption or multiple relocations for family reasons. The semistructured
interview was composed of two broad themes, life experiences and media consumption. The
investigator transcribed interviews verbatim for data analysis and coded the data by
repeatedly reading the transcription. By comparing interviews, the investigator found
similarities and differences in the data, which eventually led to identifying significant
common themes. During the process of data analysis, each participant was assigned a number.
Findings
Why Korean Media?
Although most households of the study participants subscribed to satellite television, it
was a technology for their parents, who used it for watching Vietnamese news and shows both
at home and in the workplace. On the other hand, the youngsters were loyal Internet users.
Like many other Internet users, they used a variety of online services primarily for practical
purposes. When it came to entertainment, however, they almost exclusively consumed Korean
media available on the Internet.
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Many participants started consuming Korean television shows regularly in their early
years. While some of them started watching dramas with their mother or sibling, others first
learned about Korean media from their Vietnamese friends in the CR. Participants often used
abstract adjectives such as funny, interesting, and entertaining to explain the reason they
consistently consume Korean media. Cultural proximity was also frequently cited by
participants as the reason for their cultural preference for Korean media. Asked more about
cultural proximity, however, many participants initially responded that “Korean culture is
similar to Vietnamese culture,” which was based on the commonsensical understanding of
culture as national culture. Aiming to know how to interpret the cultural proximity between
the young Vietnamese in the CR and Korean media texts, this study inquired further about
their life experiences as diasporic children and transnational Korean media consumption.
Based on the answers, this study found that cultural proximity between participants and
Korean media texts was reflexively identified (a) when they devised the concept of the Asian
family from the dialectic relationship among their family experiences, family practices
portrayed in Korean dramas, and Czech family culture; (b) when they found their diasporic
identity in the image of hardworking immigrants; and (c) when they highlighted their cultural
tastes and valued their human capital in contrast to those of Czech people and other kinds of
Vietnamese migrants.
Dialectically Identified Meaning of Family
“When I first saw Full House (a drama series) more than 10 years ago, I liked the
stars on the show. The two main stars were good looking. . . I liked the warm-hearted
story. People in the show had kind hearts like family members.” (Participant 1)
Family was a frequently mentioned word when participants stressed familiarity with
Korean television shows. As family is one of the most salient themes of Korean television
dramas (Kang and Kim 2011), much literature on Korean drama consumption points out
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family values as evidence of cultural proximity between Asian (diasporic) audiences and
Korean cultural texts (e.g., Sung 2013). Likewise, participants of this study found cultural
similarities in the structure of Korean family practices, which are often depicted in Korean
dramas. Particularly, some participants specifically pointed out that the authority-submission
relationship between parents and children was commonly seen in many Korean dramas as
well as in their own families. As immigrants, their parents often stress that conventional
family values be strictly kept in their diasporic life, such as the importance of family meal
time, family language practices, and discipline in child education.
“In Korean drama, there are many scenes of family dinner. It’s an important scene to
understand family relationship. . . . It’s similar to my family. Dinner time is my mom’s
nagging time (laugh).” (Participant 5)
Participants also defined the conservative family culture in their close, yet
subordinate, relationship with their parents. More importantly, conservative family values are
reflected in their diasporic context. For many participants, family was a diaspora separated
from everyday Czech society. Even if they were well integrated into Czech society and
culture, their parents believe family should be maintained in conventional Vietnamese ways
because it was one of the most distinctive cultures accounting for their identity. When
contrasted to Czech family culture, their found common ground with Korean family culture
depicted in Korean dramas. This was typically reflected in a term, “Asian family culture,”
used by participant 12.
“I know my Czech friends also have family gathering often. Family is important for
Czech people. But, it’s not like Asian family. My parents are stricter than Czech
parents and they are crazy about our education. I don’t think Czech parents are like
that” (Participant 12).
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In sum, their families’ cultural proximity to Korean families represented in television
products was formulated in the transnational dynamic of their lives: (a) their parents
conservatively maintained family practices that originated across the border; (b) family
culture was one important cultural element that distinguished them from Czech culture; and
(c) they found a seemingly similar family culture in television dramas produced in another
Asian country. Family is the fundamental place for the migrant children not only to
experience Vietnamese-ness but also to differentiate themselves from their mainstream
counterparts. The cultural proximity of their own and Korean families was not found in the
essence of the two cultures but identified in their reflexive interpretation of family cultures
experienced in the CR.
Hardworking People
“I’ve seen many Korean dramas about people working hard. It’s a kind of cliché.
Everyone in Korean dramas work hard. It’s a typical image of Korean people to
me . . . Vietnamese people work very hard. It is a kind of our thing.” (Participant 2)
As many academic studies emphasise work ethic as a common traditional value that
facilitates rapid economic development in Asia (i.e., Chan 1996), participants of this study
often identified their fellow Vietnamese and themselves as hardworking migrants while
stereotypically associating Korean people with the image of hardworking people in the media.
Responding to the stereotype, Korean media has been keen on embedding traditional cultural
values like work ethic in their products as part of their industrial strategy (Choi 2010). Some
participants preferred a story about people who made every effort to succeed, calling it a
typical genre of Korean dramas. The young migrant audiences sympathised not only with
fictitious characters in media products but also with Korean celebrities who devoted
themselves to excelling in their areas. Well informed about the Korean media industry, they
knew that Korean actors and singers had spent many years to train, as planned by their
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management companies. Participant 3, who was a loyal fan of many K-pop bands said that
she liked not only their music but also their behind-the-scenes stories portraying the long
hours of practice and multiple hardships necessary to be stars.
While appreciating stories about hardworking people from Korea, participants were
proud of the image of Vietnamese people as hardworking migrants. Although they agreed that
the work ethic originated in traditional Vietnamese cultural values, they specifically
constructed the image of hardworking people from their daily context in the diasporic
community. Most participants shared a similar view of their diligent parents as the main
reason for their current stable life. Their hardworking parents spent excessive hours at their
workplaces, such as small grocery stores called potraviny1 in Czech or large Vietnamese
wholesale complexes located in major Czech cities like Prague and Brno.
“Vietnamese people are known as hardworking people. I agree. Our older generations
like my parents have worked so hard. Vietnamese’s stores always open first and close
last.” (Participant 3)
A strong work ethic was also practiced by the young migrants, who displayed their
belief in the norm as a necessary condition for their diasporic life. Some participants
summarised their school life with the image of a hard-studying student, regarding their
educational achievement as a reward for their sacrificial parents. It was important to them to
point out that they were willing to embrace the stereotypical image of hardworking migrants.
Participant 7, who shared her experience at her school, where teachers and classmates
stereotypically expected her to outperform, said the image helped her devote herself to
schoolwork. For her, a strong work ethic was not only an inherited value from her family and
1 Potraviny is a very important contextual cue in understanding the Vietnamese diasporic community in CR.
Backed by large wholesale networks of Vietnamese, Vietnamese run small grocery stores on every corner of
Czech cities. Stores carry a variety of groceries and open early and stay open late to attract local customers who
casually shop for a small amount of groceries. Participants also said that Vietnamese in the CR are typically
represented as people working at a potraviny.
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community but also a role she played as a young migrant from a stereotyped diasporic
community.
Raised in a hardworking family and motivated to be diligent, participants were
familiar with the stories about hardworking people in Korean media. Cultural proximity was
identified through the familiarity. By consuming the image of Korea and the represented
image of hardworking Koreans in the media, they could confirm the willingly embraced
image of hardworking migrants. Going one step further, some of them even shaped their
future by consuming the images of fictitious characters. Those who liked Korean television
shows dramatizing a variety of professionals yearned to live like the characters who made
every effort to achieve their life goals. Another component of reflexive cultural proximity was
found in the lifestyles of the fictitious, hardworking professionals.
Keeping Pace with Trends
As previous studies have explained, Asian (migrant) audiences can feel the
contemporariness in the up-to-date styles of Korean media products (e.g., Yoon 2017). This
study’s participants were also loyal audiences of the so-called Korean trendy dramas
characterised by stories about urban professionals surrounded by contemporary lifestyle
amenities. Participant 2 revealed her cultural tastes by romanticizing about the image of the
technologically advanced society and hypermodern urban spaces frequently represented in
Korean television shows.
“It’s funny to see every person on Korean dramas lives in a luxurious flat. They wear
expensive suits and drive expensive cars. I know it’s just a drama. But, I am interested
in them. I want to visit Seoul to see this kind of scenes. Especially, I want to go to
Gangnam and Hongdae. I heard people are very stylish in these areas” (Participant 2).
In the meantime, consuming Korean media is a cultural practice differentiating the
young Vietnamese migrants not only from Czech people but also from other kinds of
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Vietnamese migrants, such as their parents’ generation and recent migrants. They tended to
regard Czech people as slow to adopt new cultures and insensitive to trends. Many
participants bluntly said Czech people looked outdated. They contrasted Czech society with
the young Vietnamese community as old versus young people. This attitude was partly
affected by their earlier experiences in small Czech towns. More than half the participants
were raised in small towns because of their parents’ businesses. They often compared their
life in small towns with their life in Prague or Brno.
“I lived in a small village near Ostrava. It’s a never changing town. People are so
conservative and do the same things all the time. They don’t know anything about new
culture. Now I am happy with my life in Prague. There are more young people and
foreigners. In Prague I have many friends who are interested in Korean media. I
haven’t seen anyone (who is interested in Korean media) in the village.” (Participant
7)
They identified themselves as people who were sensitive to cultural trends and had tastes
commensurate with urban life by employing the analogy comparing young Vietnamese versus
old Czech people with urban centres like Prague versus small Czech towns. Meanwhile, they
regarded Korean media culture as a new, trendy one. Distinguishing themselves from the old,
outdated image of the Czech village, they highlighted their cultural taste for the urban, trendy
lifestyle found in Korean media products. The cultural proximity between their cultural tastes
and the represented images of Korean young professionals’ lifestyles kept them aloof from
the stagnant Czech culture as they defined it. Moreover, the distancing strategy was also
carried out in their diasporic community.
While belonging to the Vietnamese diasporic community, they were more tuned in to
the upcoming trends of media, culture, and lifestyle than were other Vietnamese. Benefitting
from stable living conditions, the 1.5 generation of Vietnamese migrants could gain
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multilanguage skills and maintain a relaxed lifestyle, which allowed them to use a wide range
of media sources. On the other hand, the older generation or recently migrated young
Vietnamese were known to have very limited options in their media consumption. Those who
worked all day in their small shops continued to use Vietnamese satellite television, often as
background noise. They also relied on Web services based in Vietnam and narrow compatriot
networks on social media. Their limited language skills as well as long hours of work
hindered the older generation and the new migrants from diversifying their media choices.
Many parents of this study’s participants also watched Korean television shows on a
regular basis. However, the patterns of Korean media consumption of the two generations had
deviated from each other over time. While the young audiences stayed updated on Korean
media and cultural trends by surfing the information ocean, their parents were likely to be
tenacious in their practice of watching seemingly old-fashioned Korean television shows that
were available on Vietnamese satellite and Web services in the Vietnamese language.
“Recently, I only watch Korean dramas with English subtitles. They are more
available and much quicker (to obtain) than those with Vietnamese subtitles. They are
supposed to be distributed by Korean Americans. . . . I get information about Korean
media, culture, and celebrities from many websites in English.” (Participant 6)
The migrants who were competent in English could access all available media
sources, which allowed them to keep pace with Korean media trends. Taking advantage of
their perceived higher human capital, they took a step closer to the cultural tastes of their
contemporary Korean audiences while taking a step back from other Vietnamese who had
experienced different life trajectories. In other words, cultural proximity to cultural trends in
Korean media was identified in the distance lying between their own and other Vietnamese’s
media practices, which was possibly explained by different life experiences.
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In sum, the trendy media consumers recognised that Korean media represented Korean
society’s value of stressing the pursuit of human capital by portraying a variety of professions
that lead the society. The young audiences, who positioned themselves as educated,
modernised, trendy, and urban young migrants, reflexively identified cultural proximity to a
Korean media culture that represents fast-changing urban lifestyles. Korean dramas featuring
young professionals were regarded as a subgenre the migrant children were especially fond
of. By reflecting on their self-defined cosmopolitan identity, they also found their values in a
certain subgenre of Korean media (Pastina and Straubhaar 2005).
Discussion and Concluding Remarks
This study examines how young Vietnamese in the CR reflect their diasporic life
experiences in the way they define the cultural proximity of their lives to Korean culture
represented in the media. While they have been educated in the Czech educational system and
have built various communities with Czech people, they have also been strongly pushed to
maintain Vietnamese cultural practices in their families. The image of hardworking people
earned through their parents’ migratory lives is also actively embraced by the migrant
children. They value the work ethic as the main driving force making it possible for them to
settle in the CR successfully. However, they also differentiate themselves from their parents,
whose community is quite limited within the Vietnamese diaspora. Benefitting from
education and global experiences, the migrant children stress their urban and cosmopolitan
cultural tastes to distinguish themselves from other Vietnamese migrants as well as from
Czech people. These diasporic experiences are reflected when they define the cultural
proximity of their life experiences to Korean culture portrayed in Korean media.
First, grounded in the context of Vietnamese migrant families in the CR continuing
Vietnamese family practices as a way of maintaining (or nurturing) Vietnamese identity, the
migrant children feel closer to the represented Korean family in Korean media. Instead of
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identifying with the essential similarities of Vietnamese and Korean family cultures, they
particularly reflect their diasporic family experiences in defining cultural proximity to Korean
family culture. Raised by selfless, yet strict, parents who believe Vietnamese language and
family practices are important values for maintaining their Vietnamese-ness, the migrant
children appropriate their experience of being part of Vietnamese migrant families as a main
means to contrast with Czech culture. In sum, they place their family experiences in a
diasporic context while identifying the cultural proximity of their families to Korean families
represented in Korean media.
Second, the image of hardworking migrants overlaps with the diligent Korean young
professionals represented in Korean media. Vietnamese migrants have stressed work ethic as
the primary means of survival in a new country of settlement. Having witnessed their
hardworking parents, the migrant children agree that their academic performance is the best
reward for their parents who have made so many sacrifices for them. In doing so, they
appropriate the image of hardworking migrants as part of their own identity. The refelxive
proximity of the image of hardworking migrants to the typified image of young professionals
in Korean media is grounded in this unique context of the migrant children, who embrace the
nurtured as well as the stereotyped image
Last, the young, educated, and cosmopolitan migrants highly value the advanced
lifestyle of successful young professionals, which is one of the most common motifs of
Korean media products. In finding cultural proximity to the cosmopolitan lifestyle stereotyped
in Korean media, the young Vietnamese differentiate themselves not only from local Czech
people but also from the elders in their own diasporic community. Their preference for the
lifestyle portrayed in Korean media, a lifestyle that is contrasted with the seemingly stagnant
lifestyle of their local Czech and diasporic communities, plays an important role in displaying
their cultural tastes. The migrant children have been educated in major Czech cities and have
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acquired multilanguage skills, which allow them to be more accessible to cultural products
overseas than others are. By placing themselves in a cosmopolitan context, they feel close to
the young cosmopolitan professional lifestyle depicted in Korean media.
This study’s findings confirm that young Asian diasporic audiences of Korean media
tend to be attracted to the self-developed, successful young individuals portrayed in Korean
media (Yoon 2017). In addition, the present study demonstrates why the diasporic context of
the migrant youth should be taken into account in understanding their way of identifying their
cultural proximity to the represented Korean culture. Georgiou (2012) illuminates in her
research that Arab audiences in the United Kingdom reflect multiple yet interrelated
identities, and the present study’s participants also reflect multiple yet interrelated identities
as migrant youth: hardworking Vietnamese students, urban professionals, and multilingual
cosmopolitans. By reflecting on their life experiences and their identities, the migrant youth
find cultural proximity to the lifestyles and everyday practices represented in Korean media
products. Their reflexivity in the course of finding cultural proximity to Korean media
products seems to show how they place themselves in a broader global context as well in as
the diasporic context in the CR. When the migrant youth are labelled “Vietnamese” in the
CR, the geocultural distance between Vietnam and Korea is conveniently employed to explain
their cultural preferences for Korean media. This study demonstrates that, to the contrary,
cultural proximity is reflexively defined in a dynamic between diasporic communities and
transnational media. In other words, the young Vietnamese migrants’ diasporic experiences
and their cosmopolitan orientations are intermingled in searching for a preferable culture in
Korean media. Their ethnicity is not the only mediator bridging the young migrants and
Korean media. Having benefited from their stable economic conditions and educational
opportunities, the migrant youth also reflect their urban elite taste in defining cultural
similarities in Korean media. This case of reflexive cultural proximity supports the claim that
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cultural proximity is only subjectively identified by audiences who are firmly grounded in
their own life experiences (Iwabuchi 2001). Thus, this study coins reflexive cultural proximity
to add the theoretical dynamics of cultural proximity to the context of a complicated
transnational world.
However, reflexivity also reveals a limitation of this study. Participants represent only
a relatively homogeneous group of Vietnamese. Their perceived higher human capital
explains their distinctive living context. Thus, the findings limitedly explain cultural
proximity as identified by this specific group of people rather than by the general Vietnamese
population in the CR. In other words, the findings cannot take into account diverse identities
that possibly exist in the diasporic community. However, this study directed me very clearly
to the next steps for my research: studies on media practices of other Vietnamese populations,
such as elderly people, recent migrants with limited language skills, and migrants separated
from or assimilated to Czech society, would further expand the understanding of transnational
media, diasporic community, cultural proximity, and human capital.
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Abstract
Based on in-depth interviews with Vietnamese young adults in the Czech Republic
who consume Korean media products on a regular basis, this study investigates how their
diasporic contexts are reflected in the consumption of Korean media products. While
participants quickly spotted cultural proximity as the reason for their preferences, the in-depth
analysis further revealed that cultural proximity was particularly identified (a) when they
devised a concept of the Asian family from the dialectic relationship among their family
experiences, the represented family culture in Korean media, and the observed Czech family
culture; (b) when they found their diasporic identity in the image of hardworking immigrants;
and (c) when they highlighted their cultural tastes and valued their human capital in contrast
to those of Czech people and other kinds of Vietnamese migrants.
Keywords: Vietnamese migrants, Czech Republic, cultural proximity, Korean media,
transnational media consumption, diasporic contexts
Young Migrant Vietnamese in the Czech Republic Reflect Diasporic Contexts in Their
Identification of Cultural Proximity with Korean Media
Introduction
In 2012 when I started teaching at a university in the Czech Republic (hereafter, CR),
I came across an interesting news story about a K-pop (Korean pop music) World Festival
held in Korea. A Czech girl band won the grand prize with its performance, which copied a
famous K-pop girl band, Girls’ Generation. It was the picture of the girl band that caught my
attention, though, because five members out of eight looked not Czech but Asian. The news
story made me aware that Vietnamese performers account for a large segment of Korean
popular culture fandom in the CR. And a simple question, why?, popped up, which was
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followed by a few common-sense questions: Is the popularity of Korean media in the CR
because of the popularity of Korean media in their home country, Vietnam? Is it because they
find commonalities with Korean media? or Is it because globally mobile people are naturally
more into transnational media products? I learned in casual conversations with Vietnamese
people that the answer to these questions is mostly yes Korean media has been popular for
years in Vietnam. The cultural distance between Vietnam and Korea is much smaller than that
between Vietnam and the CR. Transnational people like the Vietnamese in the CR and me
tend to be more exposed to various cultures. Thus, the answer must be yes. However, the
questions and answer were firmly grounded in so-called methodological nationalism that does
not account for various cultural variations and individual contexts. Thus, my questions led me
to plan a research project focusing more on the transnational dynamics of migrants’ lives,
cultural flows, media representations, and so on.
This study focuses specifically on young Vietnamese migrants who routinely consume
Korean media products by posing a broad question: How are their diasporic contexts reflected
in the consumption of Korean media products? In order to fully understand their life
experiences and cultural orientations, this study delves specifically into how the young
migrants place themselves in diasporic contexts in the CR and how their life experiences
directly and indirectly shape their preferences for Korean media products. Cultural proximity
is a possible theoretical concept that may explain their daily consumption of Korean media.
However, this study looks further into where and how the proximity between the young
migrants and Korean media texts is identified.
Literature Review
Vietnamese in the CR
According to the Czech Statistical Office, the official number of Vietnamese in the CR
reached 58,025 in 2016 (Czech Statistical Office 2017). Along with the Soviet Union and East
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Germany, Czechoslovakia was one of the popular destinations for Vietnamese occupational
trainees under the economic cooperation among Soviet bloc countries. (SzymańskaMatusiewicz,
2015). After a short period post-1989, during which the number of Vietnamese
dropped, the size of the Vietnamese community dramatically expanded from 3,500 in 1992
(Drbohlav et al. 2009). Vietnamese are currently the third-largest group of foreigners with
long-term residence permits in the CR, following Ukraine and Slovak nationals (Kušniráková
2014).
Since Vietnamese are generally classified as economic migrants like other non-EU
migrants from former Soviet states and Mongolia, there have been many studies focusing
specifically on economic motives and labour relations (e.g., Hüwelmeier 2015). In addition,
since most studies have been reported in the Czech language, Vietnamese in the CR are a
relatively less known population of international migration. Recently, Vietnamese have been
one of the main immigrant populations examined by multiple studies aiming to evaluate
multiculturalism and integration policy in the CR as a country facing a transition from an
emigration country to a country of immigration (e.g., Drbohlav and Dzúrová 2007). However,
the migrants’ everyday experiences have been less represented in academia compared to
multiple criminological studies on this population (e.g., Nožina and Kraus 2016).
Intercultural studies have recently focused on the sociocultural experiences of
Vietnamese in the CR. One study investigated the history of the racialization of Vietnamese
and cultural adaptation in comparison with other minority groups (Alamgir 2013). A
sociological study highlighted distinctive kinship relations in Vietnamese families who have
hired Czech nannies; the nannies supplement the role of parents who are absent due to
extensive economic activity (Souralová 2014). Also, multiple studies have been conducted on
the language practices of the study population (e.g., Sherman and Homoláč 2017)
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Vietnamese are also known for a higher number of children (30%) and women (43%)
compared to other groups of migrants in the CR (Drbohlav et al. 2009). The number of
children and youth (up to 26 years of age) in the Vietnamese immigrant population has
increased and accounts for 40% of the Vietnamese population in the CR (Kušniráková 2014).
Despite the large number of children and young adults, detailed demographic information
such as birthplace and educational level is very limited. A recent study that focuses
specifically on the identity construction of young Vietnamese migrants illustrates the fluid
nature of identity construction; identity hovers between one that reflects their family traditions
and another that reflects the majority community in the CR (Svobodová and Janská 2016).
Also, a comparative study highlights the ambivalent identity of Vietnamese in the CR (Cheng
and Hu 2015). In response to the increasing interest in the diasporic identity of Vietnamese in
the CR, this study pays a close attention to their transnational life and cultural experiences.
Migrants’ Transnational Media Practices
Migrants’ transnational communication practices have been increasingly studied as
advanced communication technologies have been widely adopted in everyday life and global
mobility has increased sharply in recent decades. Previous studies from a variety of
disciplines, including migrant studies and intercultural communication, have demonstrated
how new media from satellites to the Internet have changed the life experiences of
international migrants; aided by various communication technologies, migrants (re)build
human and social networks across borders by keeping ties with people like family members
and peers in their countries of origin (e.g., Chib, Malik, Aricat, and Kadir 2014).
Transnational communication is also an important means of engaging in domestic politics in
their home countries (Aricat 2015). While some studies highlight the importance of
transnational media consumption in maintaining native identity (e.g., Kama and Malka 2013),
others demonstrate how migrants’ transnational practices reciprocally shape members of the
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receiving society and their identity (e.g., Ehrkamp 2005). Transnational media
communication is also an important means for migrants to cope with daily stress in their new
home by entertaining themselves (e. g., Kim 2016).
The above-mentioned studies focus on transnational practices between migrants’
country of origin and their new home. As the distribution of cultural products widens along
with rapid technological advancements, however, migrants have often crossed multiple
borders to find culturally relevant media products. Using data across different European
countries, Christiansen (2004) demonstrates that migrants tend to seek more news than does
the majority population by accessing not only news media of their country of origin but also
international news media in English, such as BBC World, which is available on satellite
television. An earlier study presents the cultural negotiation of Vietnamese youths in
Australia, who consume media products from Hong Kong by using earlier forms of electronic
media like video recorders (Cunningham and Nguyen 2001). Similarly, Korean American
youths access Japanese as well as Korean television series not only because they prefer media
products with which they are familiar but also because they want to compensate themselves
for limited cultural representation in U.S. television products (Park 2004). Kartosen and Tan
(2013) investigate a broader population of young Asian migrants in the Netherlands who
extensively consume nonhomeland Asian media products, and they discuss the construction
of Asian ethnic-cultural identity through the consumption of media products mainly from
China, Japan, and Korea.
Global Korean Media
Since the late 1990s when a couple of Korean television dramas (K-dramas) gained
popularity with Chinese audiences, the increasing popularity of Korean media products in
Asia has been noted by both academia and the public (Shim 2006). The cultural phenomenon
came to be called the “Korean Wave,” with a series of successful Korean television dramas
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gaining popularity in China starting in the mid-1990s. Since then, multiple Korean
blockbuster films and systematically commodified pop singers (K-pop) have successfully
penetrated Asian cultural markets (Shim 2006). In particular, the continuous success of
television dramas such as Winter Sonata in various countries, including Japan and Vietnam,
in the early 2000s stimulated developments in related industries such as tourism and
consumer-goods markets in Asia (Ryoo 2009). The popularity of Korean media products,
followed by the increasing market share of Korean businesses in the Asian market, has led to
the formation of a brand-like image of the country (e.g., Sung 2015). Originally coined by
Chinese news media in the late 1990s, the term “Korean Wave” has been widely used to
describe the international success of Korean media (Kim 2013).
The role of advanced communication technologies should not be underestimated in the
later phase of Korean media’s success. While the early phase of Korean media’s success in
Asia was initiated through more traditional practices of media marketing, such as the export
of media products, the diffusion of Korean media products beyond Asia in recent years has
been propelled by integrating media products into consumers’ activities on Web 2.0, which is
called “Korean Wave 2.0” (e.g., Jin 2012). The huge success of certain media products on
social media such as YouTube has attracted giant media corporations to invest their resources
in social media (Hess and Waller 2011). The worldwide success of Psy’s “Gangnam Style”
demonstrates how Korean media corporations elaborately adopt social media in promoting
their products overseas (Edwards 2012). The strategic new media promotion has been backed
by the voluntary distribution of Korean media products by audiences, widening the scope of
consumption and distribution of Korean media products in the world (Jung and Shim 2013).
Audiences for Korean media have become more active in sharing their opinions and feelings
about Korean media with their peers via social media (Jin 2018).
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Propelled by extended dissemination, Korean media products have gradually gained
popularity with non-Asian audiences (e.g., Jin 2018; Lee 2018; Marinescu and Balica 2013;
Meza and Park 2015). Once established through an increased market share in the Asianculture
industry, Korean media corporations aggressively promoted their products to reach
beyond Asia. Studies on the non-Asian reception of Korean media products have also focused
on Asian diasporic audiences in the West, which consume Korean media and form
transnational fan communities. Asian immigrant audiences in Austria, who are marginalised
in Western society, have constructed an East Asian imagined community by consuming
culturally familiar media products from Korea (Sung 2013). In the United States, young Asian
migrants nurture a pan ethnic identity while constructing a coeval territory of East Asia across
borders (Ju and Lee 2015). Asian Canadians, who are mainly networked via social media,
consume advanced and stylish Western tastes and/or their own ethnic traditions from Korean
media texts (Yoon and Jin 2016). As diasporic Asians, Korean pop-music fans in Canada
embrace cultural products by reflexively interpreting the meaning of cultural products as a
means of exercising their diasporic identity (Yoon 2017).
The extended transnationalization of Korean media in an advanced technological
context, the Western reception of Korean media, and the transnational imagined communities
of Asian migrants consuming Korean media may define the current study population,
Vietnamese young adults in the CR who extensively consume Korean media products.
Guided by these previous studies, the current study focuses mainly on how the migrant
audiences reflect their diasporic contexts in their transnational media consumption.
Transnational Media Consumption: Reflexively Identifying Cultural Proximity
The success of Korean media in the globalised media market has become additional
evidence for the emergence of new transnational media flow decentralizing the global media
market (e.g., Thussu 2007). The emergence of regional or counter media flow refutes the
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dominant discourse of cultural imperialism that has highlighted a global media market
monopolised by U.S. media (Thussu 2000). Especially in Asia, rapid economic growth, the
transnationalization of the media industry, the large size of the regional market based on its
high density of population, and advanced communication technologies have been important
contextual bases of the emergence of intra-regional flow (Iwabuchi 2002). Media industries in
East Asia have successfully localised their media products in the course of trasnationalization
in their regional markets (Iwabuchi 2008).
The cultural proximity thesis has been usefully employed to explain decentralised
media flow. Exemplifying the regional media flow in Latin America, the thesis posits that
media consumers tend to prefer media products from culturally adjacent regions (Straubhaar,
1991). With the rapid transnationalization of media industries, the notion has been useful in
explaining migrants’ consumption of media products from their countries of origin. La
Pastina and Straubhaar (2005) further developed the notion of cultural proximity by
presenting the existence of multilayered proximity; first, cultural proximity varies across
locals within a country, and second, people often identify their cultural proximity with certain
genres dominated by advanced media industries, such as U.S. cartoons. In studies on the
transnational dissemination of Korean media products, cultural proximity has been widely
applied to explain their popularity not only in East and South East Asia (e.g., Yoo, Jo, and
Jung 2014) but also in distant countries like Turkey (Oh and Chae 2013). These studies
centre on international audiences’ shared cultural values and traditions, such as family values
reflected through Korean cultural products. Similarly, social proximity is a common variable
explaining the popularity of Korean media products in different East Asian countries (Yang
2012).
However, the notion of cultural proximity has also been criticised mainly because it
sees culture as a static unit that can be observable and predictable (Kraidy 2002). Viewing
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culture as a static unit in which the essence of a culture is unchangeable hinders
understanding of the variation during reception (Kim 2009). On the other hand, the notion of
reflexive (critical) proximity particularly focuses on migrants’ media consumption,
highlighting reflexive diasporic identities positioned between their past experiences in home
cultures and migrant experiences across the border (Georgiou 2012). As Arab women in the
United Kingdom consume soap operas on Arabic television, they reflect multiple identities as
Arabs, Arab women, Muslims, immigrants, Londoners, and more. While the migrant women
appropriate Arabic soap operas as a means to connect them with their region of origin, some
of them reflect their gender identity as Arab women in London in the course of distancing
distance themselves from the cultural logic underlying the television shows (Georgiou 2012).
Similarly, cultural proximity does not lie in national or ethnic origin but is presented through
an individual’s reflexive contexts. Audiences tend to individually identify proximity in certain
media texts (Yamato 2014). Iwabuchi (2001, 58) claims that cultural proximity could only be
“subjectively identified and experienced by the audience” in his study on the dissemination of
Japanese pop culture in Taiwan. Taiwanese audiences do not find an intrinsically similar
culture in Japanese cultural products but identify cultural proximity by recognizing the same
temporality in Japanese contemporary culture.
Studies on the reception of Korean media products in Asian societies have also found
cultural proximity between the audiences’ contexts reflected in their consumption and the
Korean context placed in the products. Positing the recent popularity of Korean cultural
products in East Asia as a descendent of previous Asian pop culture once led by Hong Kong
and Japanese media industries, Cho (2011) suggests Asian audiences find a coeval
relationship with the represented Korean sociocultural context in Korean media products.
Asian fans of Korean media products feel the contemporariness of the modern and urban
styles of Korean media products, which project their shared capitalist-consumerist
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orientations. Also, Ainslie (2016) shows that Thai fans of Korean television programs use
foreign cultural products as a means to assess and critique their own positions in diverse Thai
sociocultural contexts. The study demonstrates how urban audiences and rural-ethnic
audiences find cultural proximity differently in Korean media texts. In an earlier study on the
Taiwanese consumption of Korean media, Kim (2005) describes a coeval relationship
between the characteristics of contemporary Korean society represented in Korean media
products and everyday experiences and identities in contemporary Taiwanese society.
Recently, Yoon (2017) elaborates cultural proximity by introducing a new concept called
“cultural affinity.” In his study, Asian K-pop fans in Canada exercise their identity as Asian
migrants by appropriating the represented images of youthful and successful individuals in
Korean media products. Along with previous studies on young migrant audiences consuming
Korean media products, an understanding of reflexive cultural proximity guides the current
study to focus particularly on the contextual reflection of Korean media consumption by
diasporic Vietnamese young migrants in the CR.
Methodology
As part of a larger research project on transnational media practices in the Vietnamese
diasporic community of the CR, the current study focused particularly on young adults who
actively consumed Korean media products by taking advantage of their language skills and
technological literacies. Before starting the study, the investigator learned that young adult
Vietnamese in the CR were the first group of people who explicated their cultural preference
for Korean media products. They shared some aspects of demographical background with the
investigator; they were mostly born in Vietnam and moved to the CR in their early years; they
were relatively well educated; many of them could speak multiple languages, including
Vietnamese, Czech, and English. Investigating the contextual connection between
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participants’ life experiences and their media practices, the current study focused narrowly on
this relatively homogenous population in the Vietnamese diasporic community of the CR.
This study was based on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews conducted in
two major Czech cities, Prague and Brno. Following the basic principle of purposive
sampling, this study specifically selected participants who were suitable for the research
focus. The youngest participant was 18 years old, while the oldest was 26. Since it was not
difficult to find fluent English speakers in this population, all interviews were conducted in
English. With the exception of two participants who attended English-based private colleges
in the CR, all participants were either students at or graduates of Czech national universities.
Likewise, the economic status of their families was generally homogeneous. Despite the
occupational diversity of their parents, most participants identified their families as middle
class. In this study, however, gender was not equally represented because it was known that
Korean media fans in the Vietnamese community were predominantly female, and thus
female participants could be recruited much more easily. Although two male participants
joined the research initially, their interview data were excluded from this study because of the
weak intensity of their Korean media consumption. Planning a larger future research project
covering a wider scope of participants, the investigator ruled out other young Vietnamese
migrants who either were born or arrived in the CR only recently because these two
populations were far less representative of the young-adult generation of the Vietnamese
diasporic community. Thus, all study participants were born in Vietnam and moved to the CR
at young ages ranging from 5 to 8.
The first four participants were recruited through a Czech informant who was involved
in diverse international communities in Prague, including Vietnamese and Korean
communities. Snowball sampling was used to recruit the rest of the participants with the help
of earlier participants. Although the researcher conducted a total of 17 interviews, five
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interviews were excluded from this study due to lack of relevance, such as weak intensity of
Korean media consumption or multiple relocations for family reasons. The semistructured
interview was composed of two broad themes, life experiences and media consumption. An
interview typically lasted at least two hours because the investigator often asked many
subquestions to encourage participants to share detailed experiences. The investigator
transcribed interviews verbatim for data analysis and coded the data by repeatedly reading the
transcription. By comparing interviews, the investigator found similarities and differences in
the data, which eventually led to identifying significant common themes. During the process
of data analysis, each participant was assigned a number.
Findings
Why Korean Media?
There was a common oxymoron in the interviews. Many participants said, “I like
Korean TV,” but they did not watch television. Rather, they consumed media products mostly
on the Internet by using either their computer or mobile phone. Although most households of
the study participants subscribed to satellite television, it was a technology for their parents,
who used it for watching Vietnamese news and shows both at home and in the workplace. On
the other hand, the youngsters were loyal Internet users. Like many other Internet users, they
used a variety of online services primarily for practical purposes. When it came to
entertainment, however, they almost exclusively consumed Korean media products available
on the Internet.
Many participants started consuming Korean television shows on a daily basis in their
early years. While some of them started watching dramas with their mother or sibling, others
first learned about Korean television shows from their Vietnamese friends in the CR.
Participants often used abstract adjectives such as funny, interesting, and entertaining to
explain the reason they consistently consume Korean media products. Cultural proximity was
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also frequently cited by participants as the reason for their cultural preference for Korean
media. Asked more about cultural proximity, however, many participants initially responded
that “Korean culture is similar to Vietnamese culture,” which was based on the
commonsensical understanding of culture as national culture. Aiming to know how to
interpret the cultural proximity between the young Vietnamese migrants in the CR and
Korean media texts, this study inquired further about their life experiences as diasporic
children in the CR and transnational Korean media consumption. Based on the answers, this
study found that cultural proximity between participants and Korean media texts was
identified (a) when they devised the concept of the Asian family from the dialectic
relationship among their family experiences, family practices portrayed in Korean dramas,
and Czech family culture; (b) when they found their diasporic identity in the image of
hardworking immigrants; and (c) when they highlighted their cultural tastes and valued their
human capital in contrast to those of Czech people and other kinds of Vietnamese migrants.
Dialectically Identified Meaning of Family
“When I first saw Full House (a drama series) more than 10 years ago, I liked the
stars on the show. The two main stars were good looking. . . I liked the warm-hearted
story. People in the show had kind hearts like family members.” (Participant 1)
Family was a frequently mentioned word when participants stressed familiarity with
Korean television shows. As family is one of the most salient themes of Korean television
dramas (Kang and Kim 2011), much literature on Korean drama consumption points out
family values as evidence of cultural proximity between Asian (diasporic) audiences and
Korean cultural texts (e.g., Leung 2008; Sung 2013). Likewise, participants of this study
found cultural similarities in the structure of Korean families, family communication styles,
and the decision-making process in a household, which are often depicted in Korean dramas.
Particularly, some participants specifically pointed out that the authority-submission
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relationship between parents and children was commonly seen in many Korean dramas as
well as in their own families. As immigrants, their parents often stress that conventional
family values be strictly kept in their diasporic life, such as the importance of family meal
time, family language practices, and discipline in child education.
“In Korean drama, there are many scenes of family dinner. It’s an important scene to
understand family relationship. . . . It’s similar to my family. Dinner time is my mom’s
nagging time (laugh).” (Participant 5)
Participants also defined the conservative family culture in their close, yet
subordinate, relationship with their parents. More important, conservative family values are
reflected in their diasporic context. For many participants, family was a diaspora separated
from everyday Czech society. Even if they were well integrated into Czech society and
culture, their parents believe family should be maintained in conventional Vietnamese ways
because it was one of the most distinctive cultures accounting for their identity. When
contrasted to Czech family culture, their own found common ground with Korean family
culture depicted in Korean dramas. This was typically reflected in a term, “Asian family
culture,” used by participant 12.
“I know my Czech friends also have family gathering often. Family is important for
Czech people. But, it’s not like Asian family. My parents are stricter than Czech
parents and they are crazy about our education. I don’t think Czech parents are like
that” (Participant 12).
In sum, their families’ cultural proximity to Korean families represented in television
products was formulated in the transnational dynamic of their lives: (a) their parents
conservatively maintained family practices that originated across the border; (b) family
culture was one important cultural element that distinguished them from Czech culture; and
(c) they found a seemingly similar family culture in television dramas produced in another
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Asian country. Family is the fundamental place for the migrant children not only to
experience Vietnamese-ness but also to differentiate themselves from their mainstream
counterparts. The cultural proximity of their own and Korean families was not found in the
essence of the two cultures but identified in their subjective interpretation of family cultures
experienced in the CR.
Hardworking People
“I’ve seen many Korean dramas about people working hard. It’s a kind of cliché.
Everyone in Korean dramas work hard. It’s a typical image of Korean people to
me . . . Vietnamese people work very hard. It is a kind of our thing.” (Participant 2)
As many academic studies emphasise work ethic as a common traditional value that
facilitates rapid economic development in Asia (i.e., Chan 1996), participants of this study
often identified their fellow Vietnamese and themselves as hardworking migrants while
stereotypically associating Korean people with the image of hardworking people in the media.
Responding to the stereotype, Korean media has been keen on embedding traditional cultural
values like work ethic in their products as part of their industrial strategy (Choi 2010). Some
participants of this study preferred a story about people who made every effort to succeed,
calling it a typical genre of Korean dramas. They sympathised with characters who overcame
unfortunate situations and strived to succeed. The young migrant audiences sympathised not
only with fictitious characters in media products but also with Korean celebrities who devoted
themselves to excelling in their areas. Well informed about the Korean media industry, they
also knew that Korean actors and singers had spent many years to train, as planned by their
management companies. Participant 3, who was a loyal fan of many K-pop bands, such as Big
Bang, said that she liked not only their music but also their behind-the-scenes stories
portraying the long hours of practice and multiple hardships necessary to be stars. Similarly,
some other participants regularly followed the stories about their K-pop stars on the Internet.
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While appreciating stories about hardworking people from Korea, participants were
proud of the image of Vietnamese people as hardworking migrants. Although they agreed that
the work ethic originated in traditional Vietnamese cultural values, they specifically
constructed the image of hardworking people from their daily context in the diasporic
community. Most participants shared a similar view of their diligent parents as the main
reason for their current stable life. Their hardworking parents spent excessive hours at their
work places, such as small grocery stores called potraviny1 in Czech, small retail stores
selling imported goods, or large Vietnamese wholesale complexes located in major Czech
cities like Prague and Brno.
“Vietnamese people are known as hardworking people. I agree. Our older generations
like my parents have worked so hard. Vietnamese’s stores always open first and close
last.” (Participant 3)
A strong work ethic was also practiced by the young migrants, who displayed their
belief in the norm as a necessary condition for their diasporic life. Some participants
summarised their school life with the image of a hard-studying student, regarding their
educational achievement as a reward for their sacrificial parents. It was important to them to
point out that they were willing to embrace the stereotypical image of hardworking migrants.
Participant 7, who shared her experience at her school, where teachers and classmates
stereotypically expected her to outperform, said the image helped her devote herself to
schoolwork. For her, a strong work ethic was not only an inherited value from her family and
community but also a role she played as a young migrant from a stereotyped diasporic
community.
1 Potraviny is a very important contextual cue in understanding the Vietnamese diasporic community in CR.
Backed by large wholesale networks of Vietnamese, Vietnamese run small grocery stores on every corner of
Czech cities. Stores carry a variety of groceries and open early and stay open late to attract local customers who
casually shop for a small amount of groceries. Participants also said that Vietnamese in the CR are typically
represented as people working at a potraviny.
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Raised in a hardworking family and motivated to be diligent, Vietnamese young adults
were familiar with the stories about hardworking people in Korean media products. Cultural
proximity was identified through the familiarity. By consuming the image of Korea and the
represented image of hardworking Koreans in the media, they could confirm the willingly
embraced image of hardworking migrants. Going one step further, some of them even shaped
their future by consuming the images of fictitious characters. Those who liked Korean
television shows dramatizing a variety of professionals such as medical doctors, lawyers,
cooks, IT engineers, and financial managers yearned to live like the characters who made
every effort to achieve their life goals. Another component of cultural proximity was found in
the lifestyles of the fictitious, hardworking professionals.
Keeping Pace with Trends
As previous studies have explained, Asian (migrant) audiences can feel the
contemporariness in the up-to-date styles of Korean media products (e.g., Yoon 2017). This
study’s participants were also loyal audiences of the so-called Korean trendy dramas
characterised by stories about urban professionals surrounded by contemporary lifestyle
amenities. They stayed informed about Korean celebrities, cultural trends in Seoul, new
fashion and beauty products, and so on. Participant 2 revealed her cultural tastes by
romanticizing about the image of the technologically advanced society and hypermodern
urban spaces frequently represented in Korean television shows.
“It’s funny to see every person on Korean dramas lives in a luxurious flat. They wear
expensive suits and drive expensive cars. I know it’s just a drama. But, I am interested
in them. I want to visit Seoul to see this kind of scenes. Especially, I want to go to
Gangnam and Hongdae. I heard people are very stylish in these areas” (Participant 2).
In the meantime, consuming Korean media is a cultural practice differentiating the
young Vietnamese migrants not only from Czech people but also from other kinds of
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Vietnamese migrants, such as their parents’ generation and recent migrants. They tended to
regard Czech people as slow to adopt new cultures and products and insensitive to trends.
Many participants bluntly said Czech people looked outdated. They contrasted Czech society
with the young Vietnamese community as old versus young people. This attitude was partly
affected by their earlier experiences in small Czech towns. More than half the participants
were raised in small towns because of their parents’ businesses. They often compared their
life in small towns with their life in Prague or Brno.
“I lived in a small village near Ostrava. It’s a never changing town. People are so
conservative and do the same things all the time. They don’t know anything about new
culture. Now I am happy with my life in Prague. There are more young people and
foreigners. In Prague I have many friends who are interested in Korean media. I
haven’t seen anyone (who is interested in Korean media) in the village.” (Participant
7)
They identified themselves as people who were sensitive to cultural trends and had tastes
commensurate with urban life by employing the analogy comparing young Vietnamese versus
old Czech people with urban centres like Prague versus small Czech towns. Meanwhile, they
regarded Korean media culture as a new, trendy one. Distinguishing themselves from the old,
outdated image of the Czech village, they highlighted their cultural taste for the urban, trendy
lifestyle found in Korean media products. The cultural proximity between their cultural tastes
and the represented images of Korean young professionals’ lifestyles kept them aloof from
the stagnant Czech culture as they defined it. Moreover, the distancing strategy was also
carried out in their diasporic community.
While belonging to the Vietnamese diasporic community, they were more tuned in to
the upcoming trends of media, culture, and lifestyle than were other Vietnamese because the
young migrants saw themselves as having higher human capital. Benefitting from stable
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living conditions, the 1.5 generation of Vietnamese migrants could gain multilanguage skills
and maintain a relaxed lifestyle, which allowed them to use a wide range of media sources.
On the other hand, the older generation or recently migrated young Vietnamese were known
to have very limited options in their media consumption. Those who worked all day in their
small shops continued to use Vietnamese satellite television, often as background noise.
Although those Vietnamese also used the Internet and mobile devices, they relied on Web
services based in Vietnam and narrow compatriot networks on social media. A limited
linguistic competence in Czech and other foreign languages as well as long hours of work
hindered the older generation and the new migrants from diversifying their media choices.
Many parents of this study’s participants also watched Korean television shows on a
regular basis. However, the patterns of Korean media consumption of the two generations had
deviated from each other over time. While the young audiences stayed updated on Korean
media and cultural trends by surfing the information ocean, their parents were likely to be
tenacious in their practice of watching seemingly old-fashioned Korean television shows that
were available on Vietnamese satellite and Web services in the Vietnamese language.
“Recently, I only watch Korean dramas with English subtitles. They are more
available and much quicker (to obtain) than those with Vietnamese subtitles. They are
supposed to be distributed by Korean Americans. . . . I get information about Korean
media, culture, and celebrities from many websites in English.” (Participant 6)
The migrants who were competent in English could access all available media
sources, which allowed them to keep pace with Korean media trends. Taking advantage of
their perceived higher human capital, they took a step closer to the cultural tastes of their
contemporary Korean audiences while taking a step back from other Vietnamese who had
experienced different life trajectories. In other words, cultural proximity to cultural trends in
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Korean media was identified in the distance lying between their own and other Vietnamese’s
media practices, which was possibly explained by different life experiences.
In sum, the trendy media consumers recognised that Korean media represented Korean
society’s value of stressing the pursuit of human capital by portraying a variety of professions
that lead the society. The young audiences, who position themselves as educated, modernised,
trendy, and urban young migrants, identified cultural proximity to a Korean media culture that
represents fast-changing urban lifestyles. Korean dramas featuring young professionals are
regarded as a subgenre the migrant children are especially fond of. By reflecting on their selfdefined
cosmopolitan identity, the young Vietnamese identify their cultural proximity to
Korean society and the way they see their values in a certain genre of Korean media (Pastina
and Straubhaar 2005).
Discussion and Concluding Remarks
This study examines how young Vietnamese in the CR reflect their diasporic life
experiences in the way they define the cultural proximity of their lives to Korean culture
represented in the media. While explaining the reasons for their preferences for certain
Korean media genres or programs, the young adults often disclose their life experiences that
are part of their self-identification as the 1.5 generation of Vietnamese in the CR. While they
have been educated in the Czech educational system and have built various communities with
Czech people, they have also been strongly pushed to maintain Vietnamese cultural practices
in their families. The image of hardworking people earned through their parents’ migratory
lives is also actively embraced by the migrant children, who have also been stereotypically
identified as hardworking Vietnamese students. They value the work ethic as the main driving
force making it possible for them to settle in the CR successfully. While appreciating their
parents’ sacrifice for a new life in the CR, they also differentiate themselves from their
parents, whose community is quite limited within the Vietnamese diaspora. Benefitting from
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education and global experiences, the migrant children stress their urban and cosmopolitan
cultural tastes to distinguish themselves from other Vietnamese migrants as well as from
Czech people. These diasporic experiences, which lead them to identify as the 1.5 generation
of Vietnamese migrants in the CR, are reflected when they define the cultural proximity of
their life experiences to Korean culture portrayed in Korean media.
First, grounded in the context of Vietnamese migrant families in the CR continuing
Vietnamese family practices as a way of maintaining (or nurturing) Vietnamese identity, the
migrant children feel closer to the represented Korean family in Korean media. Instead of
identifying with the essential similarities of Vietnamese and Korean family cultures, they
particularly reflect their diasporic family experiences in defining cultural proximity to Korean
family culture. The migrant family is located in the center of their description of their life
experiences in the CR. Raised by selfless, yet strict, parents who believe Vietnamese language
and family practices are important values for maintaining their Vietnamese-ness, the migrant
children appropriate their experience of being part of Vietnamese migrant families as a main
means to contrast with Czech culture. In sum, they place their family experiences in a
diasporic context while identifying the cultural proximity of their families to Korean families
represented in Korean media.
Second, the image of hardworking migrants overlaps with the diligent Korean young
professionals represented in Korean media. Vietnamese migrants have stressed work ethic as
the primary means of survival in a new country of settlement, and consequently, Czech people
have stereotyped them as being hard workers even though they experience Vietnamese people
in many ways. Having witnessed their hardworking parents, the migrant children agree that
their academic performance is the best reward for their parents who have made so many
sacrifices for them. In doing so, they appropriate the image of hardworking migrants as part
of their own identity. The identified proximity of the image of hardworking migrants to the
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typified image of young professionals in Korean media is grounded in this unique context of
the migrant children, who embrace the nurtured as well as the stereotyped image
Last, the young, educated, and cosmopolitan migrants highly value the advanced
lifestyle of successful young professionals, which is one of the most common motifs of
Korean media products. In finding cultural proximity to the cosmopolitan lifestyle stereotyped
in Korean media, the young Vietnamese differentiate themselves not only from local Czech
people but also from the elders in their own diasporic community. Their preference for the
lifestyle portrayed in Korean media, a lifestyle that is contrasted with the seemingly stagnant
lifestyle of their local Czech and diasporic communities, plays an important role in displaying
their cultural tastes. The migrant children have been educated in major Czech cities and have
acquired multilanguage skills, which allow them to be more accessible to cultural products
overseas than others are. By placing themselves in a cosmopolitan context, they feel close to
the young cosmopolitan professional lifestyle depicted in Korean media.
This study’s findings confirm that young Asian diasporic audiences of Korean media
tend to be attracted to the self-developed, successful young individuals portrayed in Korean
media (Yoon 2017). In addition to these findings, this study demonstrates why the diasporic
context of the migrant children should be taken into account in understanding their way of
identifying their cultural proximity to the represented Korean culture. As Georgiou (2012)
illuminates in her research on Arab audiences in the United Kingdom, this study’s participants
also reflect multiple yet interrelated identities as migrant children: hardworking Vietnamese
students, urban professionals, and multilingual cosmopolitans. By reflecting on their life
experiences and their identities, the migrant children find cultural proximity to the lifestyles
and everyday practices represented in Korean media products. Their reflexivity in the course
of finding cultural proximity to Korean media products seems to show how they place
themselves in a broader global context as well as the diasporic context in the CR. Cultural
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proximity is reflexively shaped in a dynamic between transnational migrants and media, yet it
is only subjectively identified by audiences grounded in their own life experiences (Iwabuchi
2001). The reflexive cultural proximity of the young migrant children to the represented
young professionals in Korean media also explains how people find cultural proximity in a
certain genre (Pastina and Straubhaar 2005).
However, the findings of this study also show the limitations of this study. Participants
represent only a relatively homogeneous group of Vietnamese. Their perceived higher human
capital explains their distinctive living context. Thus, the findings limitedly explain cultural
proximity as identified by this specific group of people rather than by the general Vietnamese
population in the CR. However, this study directed me to the next steps for my research very
clearly; studies on media practices of other Vietnamese populations, such as old people,
recent migrants with limited language skills, and migrants separated from or assimilated to
Czech society, would further expand the understanding of transnational media, diasporic
community, cultural proximity, and human capital.
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Abstract
Based on in-depth interviews with Vietnamese young adults in the Czech Republic
who consume Korean media products on a regular basis, this study investigates how their
diasporic contexts are reflected in the consumption of Korean media products. While
participants quickly spotted cultural proximity as the reason for their preferences, the in-depth
analysis further revealed that cultural proximity was particularly identified (a) when they
devised a concept of the Asian family from the dialectic relationship among their family
experiences, the represented family culture in Korean media, and the observed Czech family
culture; (b) when they found their diasporic identity in the image of hardworking immigrants;
and (c) when they highlighted their cultural tastes and valued their human capital in contrast
to those of Czech people and other kinds of Vietnamese migrants.
Keywords: Vietnamese migrants, Czech Republic, cultural proximity, Korean media,
transnational media consumption, diasporic contexts
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Young Migrant Vietnamese in the Czech Republic Reflect Diasporic Contexts in Their
Identification of Cultural Proximity with Korean Media
Introduction
In 2012 when I started teaching at a university in the Czech Republic (hereafter, CR),
I came across an interesting news story about a K-pop (Korean pop music) World Festival
held in Korea. A Czech girl band won the grand prize with its performance, which copied a
famous K-pop girl band, Girl’s Generation. It was the picture of the girl band that caught my
attention, though, because five members out of eight looked not Czech but Asian. The news
story made me aware that Vietnamese performers account for a large segment of Korean
popular culture fandom in the CR. And a simple question, why?, popped up, which was
followed by a few common-sense questions: Is the popularity of Korean media in the CR
because of the popularity of Korean media in their home country, Vietnam? Is it because they
find commonalities with Korean media? or Is it because globally mobile people are naturally
more into transnational media products? I learned in casual conversations with Vietnamese
people that the answer to these questions is mostly yes Korean media has been popular for
years in Vietnam. The cultural distance between Vietnam and Korea is much smaller than that
between Vietnam and the CR. Transnational people like the Vietnamese in the CR and me
tend to be more exposed to various cultures. Thus, the answer must be yes. However, the
questions and answer were firmly grounded in so-called methodological nationalism that does
not account for various cultural variations and individual contexts. Thus, my questions led me
to plan a research project focusing more on the transnational dynamics of migrants’ lives,
cultural flows, media representations, and so on.
This study focuses specifically on young Vietnamese migrants who routinely consume
Korean media products by posing a broad question: How are their diasporic contexts reflected
in the consumption of Korean media products? In order to fully understand their life
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experiences and cultural orientations, this study delves specifically into how the young
migrants place themselves in diasporic contexts in the CR and how their life experiences
directly and indirectly shape their preferences for Korean media products. Cultural proximity
is a possible theoretical concept that may explain their daily consumption of Korean media.
However, this study looks further into where and how the proximity between the young
migrants and Korean media texts is identified.
Literature Review
Vietnamese in the CR
According to the Czech Statistical Office, the official number of Vietnamese in the CR
reached 58,025 in 2016 (Czech Statistical Office 2017). After a short period post-1989, during
which the number of Vietnamese dropped, the size of the Vietnamese community has
dramatically expanded from 3,500 in 1992 (Drbohlav et al. 2009). Vietnamese are currently
the third largest group of foreigners with long-term residence permits in the CR (Kušniráková
2014).
Since Vietnamese are generally classified as economic migrants like other non-EU
migrants from former Soviet states and Mongolia, there have been many studies focusing
specifically on economic motives and labor relations (e.g., Hüwelmeier 2015). In addition,
since most studies have been reported in the Czech language, Vietnamese in the CR are a
relatively less known population of international migration. Recently, Vietnamese have been
one of the main immigrant populations examined by multiple studies aiming to evaluate
multiculturalism and integration policy in the CR as a country facing a transition from an
emigration country to a country of immigration (e.g., Drbohlav and Dzúrová 2007). However,
the migrants’ everyday experiences have been less represented in academia compared to
multiple criminological studies on this population (e.g., Nožina and Kraus 2016),
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Intercultural studies have recently focused on the sociocultural experiences of
Vietnamese in the CR. One study investigated the history of the racialization of Vietnamese
and cultural adaptation in comparison with other minority groups (Alamgir 2013). A
sociological study highlighted distinctive kinship relations in Vietnamese families who have
hired Czech nannies; the nannies supplement the role of parents who are absent due to
extensive economic activity (Souralová 2014). Also, multiple studies have been conducted on
the language practices of the study population (e.g., Sherman and Homoláč 2017)
Vietnamese are also known for a higher number of children (30%) and women (43%)
compared to other groups of migrants in the CR (Drbohlav et al. 2009). The number of
children and youth (up to 26 years of age) in the Vietnamese immigrant population has
increased and accounts for 40% of the Vietnamese population in the CR (Kušniráková 2014).
Despite the large number of children and young adults, detailed demographic information
such as birthplace and educational level is very limited. A recent study that focuses
specifically on the identity construction of young Vietnamese migrants illustrates the fluid
nature of identity construction; identity hovers between one that reflects their family traditions
and another that reflects the majority community in the CR (Svobodová and Janská 2016).
Also, a comparative study highlights the ambivalent identity of Vietnamese in the CR (Cheng
and Hu 2015). In response to the increasing interest in the diasporic identity of Vietnamese in
the CR, this study pays a close attention to their transnational life and cultural experiences.
Migrants’ Transnational Media Practices
Migrants’ transnational communication practices have been increasingly studied as
advanced communication technologies have been widely adopted in everyday life and global
mobility has increased sharply in recent decades. Previous studies from a variety of
disciplines, including migrant studies and intercultural communication, have demonstrated
how new media from satellites to the Internet have changed the life experiences of
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international migrants; aided by various communication technologies, migrants (re)build
human and social networks across borders by keeping ties with people like family members
and peers in their countries of origin (e.g., Chib, Malik, Aricat, and Kadir 2014).
Transnational communication is also an important means of engaging in domestic politics in
their home countries (Aricat 2015). While some studies highlight the importance of
transnational media consumption in maintaining native identity (e.g., Kama and Malka 2013),
others demonstrate how migrants’ transnational practices reciprocally shape members of the
receiving society and their identity (e.g., Ehrkamp 2005). Transnational media
communication is also an important means for migrants to cope with daily stress in their new
home by entertaining themselves (e. g., Kim 2016).
The above-mentioned studies focus on transnational practices between migrants’
country of origin and their new home. As the distribution of cultural products widens along
with rapid technological advancements, however, migrants have often crossed multiple
borders to find culturally relevant media products. Using data across different European
countries, Christiansen (2004) demonstrates that migrants tend to seek more news than does
the majority population by accessing not only news media of their country of origin but also
international news media in English, such as BBC World, which is available on satellite
television. An earlier study presents the cultural negotiation of Vietnamese youths in
Australia, who consume media products from Hong Kong by using earlier forms of electronic
media like video recorders (Cunningham and Nguyen 2001). Similarly, Korean American
youths access Japanese as well as Korean television series not only because they prefer media
products with which they are familiar but also because they want to compensate themselves
for limited cultural representation in U.S. television products (Park 2004). Kartosen and Tan
(2013) investigate a broader population of young Asian migrants in the Netherlands who
extensively consume nonhomeland Asian media products, and they discuss the construction
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of Asian ethnic-cultural identity through the consumption of media products mainly from
China, Japan, and Korea.
Global Korean Media
Since the late 1990s when a couple of Korean television dramas (K-dramas) gained
popularity with Chinese audiences, the increasing popularity of Korean media products in
Asia has been noted by both academia and the public (Shim 2006). The cultural phenomenon
came to be called the “Korean Wave,” with a series of successful Korean television dramas
gaining popularity in China starting in the mid-1990s. Since then, multiple Korean
blockbuster films and systematically commodified pop singers (K-pop) have successfully
penetrated Asian cultural markets (Shim 2006). In particular, the continuous success of
television dramas such as Winter Sonata in various countries, including Japan and Vietnam,
in the early 2000s stimulated developments in related industries such as tourism and
consumer-goods markets in Asia (Ryoo 2009). The popularity of Korean media products,
followed by the increasing market share of Korean businesses in the Asian market, has led to
the formation of a brand-like image of the country (e.g., Sung 2015). Originally coined by
Chinese news media in the late 1990s, the term “Korean Wave” has been widely used to
describe the international success of Korean media (Kim 2013).
The role of advanced communication technologies should not be underestimated in the
later phase of Korean media’s success. While the early phase of Korean media’s success in
Asia was initiated through more traditional practices of media marketing, such as the export
of media products, the diffusion of Korean media products beyond Asia in recent years has
been propelled by integrating media products into consumers’ activities on Web 2.0, which is
called “Korean Wave 2.0” (e.g., Jin 2012). The huge success of certain media products on
social media such as YouTube has attracted giant media corporations to invest their resources
in social media (Hess and Waller 2011). The worldwide success of Psy’s “Gangnam Style”
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demonstrates how Korean media corporations elaborately adopt social media in promoting
their products overseas (Edwards 2012). The strategic new media promotion has been backed
by the voluntary distribution of Korean media products by audiences, widening the scope of
consumption and distribution of Korean media products in the world (Jung and Shim 2013).
Audiences for Korean media have become more active in sharing their opinions and feelings
about Korean media with their peers via social media (Jin 2018).
Propelled by extended dissemination, Korean media products have gradually gained
popularity with non-Asian audiences (e.g., Jin 2018; Lee 2018; Marinescu and Balica 2013;
Meza and Park 2015). Once established through an increased market share in the Asianculture
industry, Korean media corporations aggressively promoted their products to reach
beyond Asia. Studies on the non-Asian reception of Korean media products have also focused
on Asian diasporic audiences in the West, which consume Korean media and form
transnational fan communities. Asian immigrant audiences in Austria, who are marginalized
in Western society, have constructed an East Asian imagined community by consuming
culturally familiar media products from Korea (Sung 2013). In the United States, young Asian
migrants nurture a pan ethnic identity while constructing a coeval territory of East Asia across
borders (Ju and Lee 2015). Asian Canadians, who are mainly networked via social media,
consume advanced and stylish Western tastes and/or their own ethnic traditions from Korean
media texts (Yoon and Jin 2016). As diasporic Asians, Korean pop-music fans in Canada
embrace cultural products by reflexively interpreting the meaning of cultural products as a
means of exercising their diasporic identity (Yoon 2017).
The extended transnationalization of Korean media in an advanced technological
context, the Western reception of Korean media, and the transnational imagined communities
of Asian migrants consuming Korean media may define the current study population,
Vietnamese young adults in the CR who extensively consume Korean media products.
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Guided by these previous studies, the current study focuses mainly on how the migrant
audiences reflect their diasporic contexts in their transnational media consumption.
Transnational Media Consumption: Reflexively Identifying Cultural Proximity
The success of Korean media in the globalized media market has become additional
evidence for the emergence of new transnational media flow decentralizing the global media
market (e.g., Thussu 2007). The emergence of regional or counter media flow refutes the
dominant discourse of cultural imperialism that has highlighted a global media market
monopolized by U.S. media (Thussu 2000). Especially in Asia, rapid economic growth, the
transnationalization of the media industry, the large size of the regional market based on its
high density of population, and advanced communication technologies have been important
contextual bases of the emergence of intra-regional flow (Iwabuchi 2002). Media industries in
East Asia have successfully localized their media products in the course of trasnationalization
in their regional markets (Iwabuchi 2008).
The cultural proximity thesis has been usefully employed to explain decentralized
media flow. Exemplifying the regional media flow in Latin America, the thesis posits that
media consumers tend to prefer media products from culturally adjacent regions (Straubhaar,
1991). With the rapid transnationalization of media industries, the notion has been useful in
explaining migrants’ consumption of media products from their countries of origin. La
Pastina and Straubhaar (2005) further developed the notion of cultural proximity by
presenting the existence of multilayered proximity; first, cultural proximity varies across
locals within a country, and second, people often identify their cultural proximity with certain
genres dominated by advanced media industries, such as U.S. cartoons. In studies on the
transnational dissemination of Korean media products, cultural proximity has been widely
applied to explain their popularity not only in East and South East Asia (e.g., Yoo, Jo, and
Jung 2014) but also in distant countries like Turkey (Oh and Chae 2013). These studies
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center on international audiences’ shared cultural values and traditions, such as family values
reflected through Korean cultural products. Similarly, social proximity is a common variable
explaining the popularity of Korean media products in different East Asian countries (Yang
2012).
However, the notion of cultural proximity has also been criticized mainly because it
sees culture as a static unit that can be observable and predictable (Kraidy 2002). Viewing
culture as a static unit in which the essence of a culture is unchangeable hinders
understanding of the variation during reception (Kim 2009). On the other hand, the notion of
reflexive (critical) proximity particularly focuses on migrants’ media consumption,
highlighting reflexive diasporic identities positioned between their past experiences in home
cultures and migrant experiences across the border (Georgiou 2012). As Arab women in the
United Kingdom consume soap operas on Arabic television, they reflect multiple identities as
Arabs, Arab women, Muslims, immigrants, Londoners, and more. While the migrant women
appropriate Arabic soap operas as a means to connect them with their region of origin, some
of them reflect their gender identity as Arab women in London in the course of distancing
distance themselves from the cultural logic underlying the television shows (Georgiou 2012).
Similarly, cultural proximity does not lie in national or ethnic origin but is presented through
an individual’s reflexive contexts. Audiences tend to individually identify proximity in certain
media texts (Yamato 2014). Iwabuchi (2001, 58) claims that cultural proximity could only be
“subjectively identified and experienced by the audience” in his study on the dissemination of
Japanese pop culture in Taiwan. Taiwanese audiences do not find an intrinsically similar
culture in Japanese cultural products but identify cultural proximity by recognizing the same
temporality in Japanese contemporary culture.
Studies on the reception of Korean media products in Asian societies have also found
cultural proximity between the audiences’ contexts reflected in their consumption and the
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Korean context placed in the products. Positing the recent popularity of Korean cultural
products in East Asia as a descendent of previous Asian pop culture once led by Hong Kong
and Japanese media industries, Cho (2011) suggests Asian audiences find a coeval
relationship with the represented Korean sociocultural context in Korean media products.
Asian fans of Korean media products feel the contemporariness of the modern and urban
styles of Korean media products, which project their shared capitalist-consumerist
orientations. Also, Ainslie (2016) shows that Thai fans of Korean television programs use
foreign cultural products as a means to assess and critique their own positions in diverse Thai
sociocultural contexts. The study demonstrates how urban audiences and rural-ethnic
audiences find cultural proximity differently in Korean media texts. In an earlier study on the
Taiwanese consumption of Korean media, Kim (2005) describes a coeval relationship
between the characteristics of contemporary Korean society represented in Korean media
products and everyday experiences and identities in contemporary Taiwanese society.
Recently, Yoon (2017) elaborates cultural proximity by introducing a new concept called
“cultural affinity.” In his study, Asian K-pop fans in Canada exercise their identity as Asian
migrants by appropriating the represented images of youthful and successful individuals in
Korean media products. Along with previous studies on young migrant audiences consuming
Korean media products, an understanding of reflexive cultural proximity guides the current
study to focus particularly on the contextual reflection of Korean media consumption by
diasporic Vietnamese young migrants in the CR.
Methodology
As part of a larger research project on transnational media practices in the Vietnamese
diasporic community of the CR, the current study focused particularly on young adults who
actively consumed Korean media products by taking advantage of their language skills and
technological literacies. Before starting the study, the investigator learned that young adult
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Vietnamese in the CR were the first group of people who explicated their cultural preference
for Korean media products. They shared some aspects of demographical background with the
investigator; they were mostly born in Vietnam and moved to the CR in their early years; they
were relatively well educated; many of them could speak multiple languages, including
Vietnamese, Czech, and English. Investigating the contextual connection between
participants’ life experiences and their media practices, the current study focused narrowly on
this relatively homogenous population in the Vietnamese diasporic community of the CR.
This study was based on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews conducted in
two major Czech cities, Prague and Brno. Following the basic principle of purposive
sampling, this study specifically selected participants who were suitable for the research
focus. The youngest participant was 18 years old, while the oldest was 26. Since it was not
difficult to find fluent English speakers in this population, all interviews were conducted in
English. With the exception of two participants who attended English-based private colleges
in the CR, all participants were either students at or graduates of Czech national universities.
Likewise, the economic status of their families was generally homogeneous. Despite the
occupational diversity of their parents, most participants identified their families as middle
class. In this study, however, gender was not equally represented because it was known that
Korean media fans in the Vietnamese community were predominantly female, and thus
female participants could be recruited much more easily. Although two male participants
joined the research initially, their interview data were excluded from this study because of the
weak intensity of their Korean media consumption. Planning a larger future research project
covering a wider scope of participants, the investigator ruled out other young Vietnamese
migrants who either were born or arrived in the CR only recently because these two
populations were far less representative of the young-adult generation of the Vietnamese
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diasporic community. Thus, all study participants were born in Vietnam and moved to the CR
at young ages ranging from 5 to 8.
The first four participants were recruited through a Czech informant who was involved
in diverse international communities in Prague, including Vietnamese and Korean
communities. Snowball sampling was used to recruit the rest of the participants with the help
of earlier participants. Although the researcher conducted a total of 17 interviews, five
interviews were excluded from this study due to lack of relevance, such as weak intensity of
Korean media consumption or multiple relocations for family reasons. The semistructured
interview was composed of two broad themes, life experiences and media consumption. An
interview typically lasted at least two hours because the investigator often asked many
subquestions to encourage participants to share detailed experiences. The investigator
transcribed interviews verbatim for data analysis and coded the data by repeatedly reading the
transcription. By comparing interviews, the investigator found similarities and differences in
the data, which eventually led to identifying significant common themes. During the process
of data analysis, each participant was assigned a number.
Findings
Why Korean Media?
There was a common oxymoron in the interviews. Many participants said, “I like
Korean TV,” but they did not watch television. Rather, they consumed media products mostly
on the Internet by using either their computer or mobile phone. Although most households of
the study participants subscribed to satellite television, it was a technology for their parents,
who used it for watching Vietnamese news and shows both at home and in the workplace. On
the other hand, the youngsters were loyal Internet users. Like many other Internet users, they
used a variety of online services primarily for practical purposes. When it came to
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entertainment, however, they almost exclusively consumed Korean media products available
on the Internet.
Many participants started consuming Korean television shows on a daily basis in their
early years. While some of them started watching dramas with their mother or sibling, others
first learned about Korean television shows from their Vietnamese friends in the CR.
Participants often used abstract adjectives such as funny, interesting, and entertaining to
explain the reason they consistently consume Korean media products. Cultural proximity was
also frequently cited by participants as the reason for their cultural preference for Korean
media. Asked more about cultural proximity, however, many participants initially responded
that “Korean culture is similar to Vietnamese culture,” which was based on the
commonsensical understanding of culture as national culture. Aiming to know how to
interpret the cultural proximity between the young Vietnamese migrants in the CR and
Korean media texts, this study inquired further about their life experiences as diasporic
children in the CR and transnational Korean media consumption. Based on the answers, this
study found that cultural proximity between participants and Korean media texts was
identified (a) when they devised the concept of the Asian family from the dialectic
relationship among their family experiences, family practices portrayed in Korean dramas,
and Czech family culture; (b) when they found their diasporic identity in the image of
hardworking immigrants; and (c) when they highlighted their cultural tastes and valued their
human capital in contrast to those of Czech people and other kinds of Vietnamese migrants.
Dialectically Identified Meaning of Family
“When I first saw Full House (a drama series) more than 10 years ago, I liked the
stars on the show. The two main stars were good looking. . . I liked the warm-hearted
story. People in the show had kind hearts like family members.” (Participant 1)
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Family was a frequently mentioned word when participants stressed familiarity with
Korean television shows. As family is one of the most salient themes of Korean television
dramas (Kang and Kim 2011), much literature on Korean drama consumption points out
family values as evidence of cultural proximity between Asian (diasporic) audiences and
Korean cultural texts (e.g., Leung 2008; Sung 2013). Likewise, participants of this study
found cultural similarities in the structure of Korean families, family communication styles,
and the decision-making process in a household, which are often depicted in Korean dramas.
Particularly, some participants specifically pointed out that the authority-submission
relationship between parents and children was commonly seen in many Korean dramas as
well as in their own families. As immigrants, their parents often stress that conventional
family values be strictly kept in their diasporic life, such as the importance of family meal
time, family language practices, and discipline in child education.
“In Korean drama, there are many scenes of family dinner. It’s an important scene to
understand family relationship. . . . It’s similar to my family. Dinner time is my mom’s
nagging time (laugh).” (Participant 5)
Participants also defined the conservative family culture in their close, yet
subordinate, relationship with their parents. More important, conservative family values are
reflected in their diasporic context. For many participants, family was a diaspora separated
from everyday Czech society. Even if they were well integrated into Czech society and
culture, their parents believe family should be maintained in conventional Vietnamese ways
because it was one of the most distinctive cultures accounting for their identity. When
contrasted to Czech family culture, their own found common ground with Korean family
culture depicted in Korean dramas. This was typically reflected in a term, “Asian family
culture,” used by participant 12.
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“I know my Czech friends also have family gathering often. Family is important for
Czech people. But, it’s not like Asian family. My parents are stricter than Czech
parents and they are crazy about our education. I don’t think Czech parents are like
that” (Participant 12).
In sum, the cultural proximity found between their families and Korean families
represented in television products was formulated in the transnational dynamic of their lives:
(a) their parents conservatively maintained family practices that originated across the border;
(b) family culture was one important cultural element that distinguished them from Czech
culture; and (c) they found a seemingly similar family culture in television dramas produced
in another Asian country. The individual, diasporic Vietnamese family experience was coined
as Asian family culture when it was contrasted with a Western family culture and supported
by references found in Asian media products.
Hardworking People
“I’ve seen many Korean dramas about people working hard. It’s a kind of cliché.
Everyone in Korean dramas work hard. It’s a typical image of Korean people to
me . . . Vietnamese people work very hard. It is a kind of our thing.” (Participant 2)
As many academic studies emphasize work ethic as a common traditional value that
facilitates rapid economic development in Asia (i.e., Chan 1996), participants of this study
often identified their fellow Vietnamese and themselves as hardworking migrants while
stereotypically associating Korean people with the image of hardworking people in the media.
Responding to the stereotype, Korean media has been keen on embedding traditional cultural
values like work ethic in their products as part of their industrial strategy (Choi 2010). Some
participants of this study preferred a story about people who made every effort to succeed,
calling it a typical genre of Korean dramas. They sympathized with characters who overcame
unfortunate situations and strived to succeed. The young migrant audiences sympathized not
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only with fictitious characters in media products but also with Korean celebrities who devoted
themselves to excelling in their areas. Well informed about the Korean media industry, they
also knew that Korean actors and singers had spent many years to train, as planned by their
management companies. Participant 3, who was a loyal fan of many K-pop bands, such as Big
Bang, said that she liked not only their music but also their behind-the-scenes stories
portraying the long hours of practice and multiple hardships necessary to be stars. Similarly,
some other participants regularly followed the stories about their K-pop stars on the Internet.
While appreciating stories about hardworking people from Korea, participants were
proud of the image of Vietnamese people as hardworking migrants. Although they agreed that
the work ethic originated in traditional Vietnamese cultural values, they specifically
constructed the image of hardworking people from their daily context in the diasporic
community. Most participants shared a similar view of their diligent parents as the main
reason for their current stable life. Their hardworking parents spent excessive hours at their
work places, such as small grocery stores called potraviny1 in Czech, small retail stores
selling imported goods, or large Vietnamese wholesale complexes located in major Czech
cities like Prague and Brno.
“Vietnamese people are known as hardworking people. I agree. Our older generations
like my parents have worked so hard. Vietnamese’s stores always open first and close
last.” (Participant 3)
A strong work ethic was also practiced by the young migrants, who displayed their
belief in the norm as a necessary condition for their diasporic life. Some participants
summarized their school life with the image of a hard-studying student, regarding their
1 Potraviny is a very important contextual cue in understanding the Vietnamese diasporic community in CR.
Backed by large wholesale networks of Vietnamese, Vietnamese run small grocery stores on every corner of
Czech cities. Stores carry a variety of groceries and open early and stay open late to attract local customers who
casually shop for a small amount of groceries. Participants also said that Vietnamese in the CR are typically
represented as people working at a potraviny.
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educational achievement as a reward for their sacrificial parents. It was important to them to
point out that they were willing to embrace the stereotypical image of hardworking migrants.
Participant 7, who shared her experience at her school, where teachers and classmates
stereotypically expected her to outperform, said the image helped her devote herself to
schoolwork. For her, a strong work ethic was not only an inherited value from her family and
community but also a role she played as a young migrant from a stereotyped diasporic
community.
Raised in a hardworking family and motivated to be diligent, Vietnamese young adults
were familiar with the stories about hardworking people in Korean media products. Cultural
proximity was identified through the familiarity. By consuming the image of Korea and the
represented image of hardworking Koreans in the media, they could confirm the willingly
embraced image of hardworking migrants. Going one step further, some of them even shaped
their future by consuming the images of fictitious characters. Those who liked Korean
television shows dramatizing a variety of professionals such as medical doctors, lawyers,
cooks, IT engineers, and financial managers yearned to live like the characters who made
every effort to achieve their life goals. Another component of cultural proximity was found in
the lifestyles of the fictitious, hardworking professionals.
Keeping Pace with Trends
As previous studies have explained, Asian (migrant) audiences can feel the
contemporariness in the up-to-date styles of Korean media products (e.g., Yoon 2017). This
study’s participants were also loyal audiences of the so-called Korean trendy dramas
characterized by stories about urban professionals surrounded by contemporary lifestyle
amenities. They stayed informed about Korean celebrities, cultural trends in Seoul, new
fashion and beauty products, and so on. Participant 2 revealed her cultural tastes by
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romanticizing about the image of the technologically advanced society and hypermodern
urban spaces frequently represented in Korean television shows.
“It’s funny to see every person on Korean dramas lives in a luxurious flat. They wear
expensive suits and drive expensive cars. I know it’s just a drama. But, I am interested
in them. I want to visit Seoul to see this kind of scenes. Especially, I want to go to
Gangnam and Hongdae. I heard people are very stylish in these areas” (Participant 2).
In the meantime, consuming Korean media is a cultural practice differentiating the
young Vietnamese migrants not only from Czech people but also from other kinds of
Vietnamese migrants, such as their parents’ generation and recent migrants. They tended to
regard Czech people as slow to adopt new cultures and products and insensitive to trends.
Many participants bluntly said Czech people looked outdated. They contrasted Czech society
with the young Vietnamese community as old versus young people. This attitude was partly
affected by their earlier experiences in small Czech towns. More than half the participants
were raised in small towns because of their parents’ businesses. They often compared their
life in small towns with their life in Prague or Brno.
“I lived in a small village near Ostrava. It’s a never changing town. People are so
conservative and do the same things all the time. They don’t know anything about new
culture. Now I am happy with my life in Prague. There are more young people and
foreigners. In Prague I have many friends who are interested in Korean media. I
haven’t seen anyone (who is interested in Korean media) in the village.” (Participant
7)
They identified themselves as people who were sensitive to cultural trends and had tastes
commensurate with urban life by employing the analogy comparing young Vietnamese versus
old Czech people with urban centers like Prague versus small Czech towns. Meanwhile, they
regarded Korean media culture as a new, trendy one. Distinguishing themselves from the old,
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outdated image of the Czech village, they highlighted their cultural taste for the urban, trendy
lifestyle found in Korean media products. The cultural proximity between their cultural tastes
and the represented images of Korean young professionals’ lifestyles kept them aloof from
the stagnant Czech culture as they defined it. Moreover, the distancing strategy was also
carried out in their diasporic community.
While belonging to the Vietnamese diasporic community, they were more tuned in to
the upcoming trends of media, culture, and lifestyle than were other Vietnamese because the
young migrants saw themselves as having higher human capital. Benefitting from stable
living conditions, the 1.5 generation of Vietnamese migrants could gain multilanguage skills
and maintain a relaxed lifestyle, which allowed them to use a wide range of media sources.
On the other hand, the older generation or recently migrated young Vietnamese were known
to have very limited options in their media consumption. Those who worked all day in their
small shops continued to use Vietnamese satellite television, often as background noise.
Although those Vietnamese also used the Internet and mobile devices, they relied on Web
services based in Vietnam and narrow compatriot networks on social media. A limited
linguistic competence in Czech and other foreign languages as well as long hours of work
hindered the older generation and the new migrants from diversifying their media choices.
Many parents of this study’s participants also watched Korean television shows on a
regular basis. However, the patterns of Korean media consumption of the two generations had
deviated from each other over time. While the young audiences stayed updated on Korean
media and cultural trends by surfing the information ocean, their parents were likely to be
tenacious in their practice of watching seemingly old-fashioned Korean television shows that
were available on Vietnamese satellite and Web services in the Vietnamese language.
“Recently, I only watch Korean dramas with English subtitles. They are more
available and much quicker (to obtain) than those with Vietnamese subtitles. They are
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supposed to be distributed by Korean Americans. . . . I get information about Korean
media, culture, and celebrities from many websites in English.” (Participant 6)
The migrants who were competent in English could access all available media
sources, which allowed them to keep pace with Korean media trends. Taking advantage of
their perceived higher human capital, they took a step closer to the cultural tastes of their
contemporary Korean audiences while taking a step back from other Vietnamese who had
experienced different life trajectories. In other words, cultural proximity to cultural trends in
Korean media was identified in the distance lying between their own and other Vietnamese’s
media practices, which was possibly explained by different life experiences.
In sum, the trendy Korean media consumers recognized that Korean media
represented the Korean society’s value of stressing the pursuit of human capital by portraying
a variety of professions leading the society. The young audiences, who position themselves as
educated, modernized, trendy, and urban young migrants, identified cultural proximity with a
Korean media culture that represents fast-changing urban lifestyles. Czech people and other
kinds of Vietnamese migrants were often employed to highlight their own closeness to
Korean cultural trends.
Concluding Remarks
As part of a larger study on the transnational media practices of Vietnamese in the CR,
this study focuses specifically on the 1.5 generation of Vietnamese migrants who consume
Korean media products on a regular basis. Even if the youngsters are native Czech speakers
and educated through the formal Czech educational system, they still strongly belong to the
largest Asian immigrant community. Thus, it seemed quite obvious that they were likely to be
fans of cultural products from one of the most powerful media industries in Asia. Cultural
proximity seemed to be an easy thesis explaining their preference for Korean cultural
products, compared to the commonsensical understanding of the cultural distance between an
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Asian culture and a European culture. The young Vietnamese migrants also quickly picked
cultural proximity as the reason for their Korean media consumption. However, this study
goes deeper to understand how cultural proximity originated in their life experiences as
migrant children instead of in the cultural distance classified by cultural regions.
Cultural proximity between the young participants’ life experiences and the
represented Korean cultures and lifestyles in media products was identified around three
interrelated values. Firstly, raised in migrant families, they often differentiate their family
relations from those of Czech people while finding similarities with family values represented
in Korean media products. The similarity is not simply grounded in the notion of the Asian
family but also through their experiences with parents who have strived to survive in a
Central European country. Secondly, the image of hardworking people links their own
identification of Vietnamese people to a typical image of the Korean young professional
portrayed in Korean media products. They value work ethic as a driving force of success
while embracing it as a norm for migrant children who are supposed to perform well in their
family, community, and school. Last, the young, educated, and globalized migrants fix their
sights on the advanced lifestyle of successful professionals living in an urban center, which is
one of the most common motifs of Korean media products. Differentiating themselves from
other kinds of Vietnamese migrants as well as from Czech people, they define themselves by
their distinctive human capital, which is often represented and highlighted in Korean media
products.
The findings of this study also reflect the limitations of this study. Participants only
represent a relatively homogeneous group of Vietnamese. Their perceived higher human
capital explains their distinctive living context. Thus, the findings limitedly explain cultural
proximity as identified by this specific group of people rather than by the general Vietnamese
population in the CR. However, this study directed me to the next steps for my research very
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clearly; studies on media practices of other kinds of Vietnamese, such as old people, recent
migrants with limited language skills, and migrants separated from or assimilated to Czech
society, would further expand the understanding of transnational media, diasporic community,
cultural proximity, and human capital.
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