Abstract
Just as the world was watching with amazement the series of summit meetings between Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, and Moon Jae-in regarding the dramatic changes on the Korean Peninsula after almost seventy years of division, The Guardian reported the struggle of Kim Ryon-hui, a North Korean defector currently living in Seoul, to return to the North. She had come to the South through China in 2011 as a defector and was given South Korean citizenship, after signing a statement that disavowed her allegiance to the North. But she soon realized that defectors are treated as “second class citizens” in the South and that she was unable to go home without the South Korean government’s approval. She has since protested, gone on speaking tours, and petitioned the United Nations for help, but it was not until the summit meetings that began in May 2018 that she saw a glimmer of hope (Haas 2018).
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
—Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13.2 (1948)
This essay is an abridged version of the article previously published under a separate title in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 20.2 (2019).
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Notes
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Yen Le Espiritu et al. (2018, 186) have argued that “Whether expressed through Asian immigrant exclusion or inclusion, the U.S. state has produced itself as a global power through the formation of the “Asian American” as a means to resolve the contradictions of the U.S. racial capitalism and its imperial military project. Yet we wish to emphasize that for this reason, now, as before, the ‘Asian American’ is a critical mediating figure for diagnosing racial power and geopolitical ordering.”
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Lankov (2006) notes that the number of North Korean defectors/refugees reaching South Korea has dwindled since 2005 because the South Korean government changed its policy from one that encourages defection to that which discourages defection by reducing the aid package. This does not mean the North Korean refugee issue has been resolved, but rather that their crossings have been made more difficult and costly. Miriam Jordan (2018) reports that since 2004, at least 220 North Korean defectors and refugees arrived in the United States when Congress passed the North Korean Human Rights Act and opened the door to political refugees. But only six have been admitted since November 2016 when Trump was elected president.
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Sung-Kyung Kim’s research (2014, 557) for instance shows that “North Korean women choose to cross the border in order to perform the role of ‘good mother’ and ‘filial daughter’” to suggest that their migration was propelled not only by economic forces but also by other social concerns.
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The Chinese term is minzu, meaning nationality, and China boasts itself being a country consisting of 56 minzu although the Han nationality occupies about 90% of the population.
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The depiction of the Joseonjok as downtrodden outcast living in South Korea is often seen in South Korean popular culture. Na Hong-jin’s action thriller film Hwanghae (The Yellow Sea, 2010) is an obvious example.
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On the complexities of such inter-colonial and inter-national entanglements during the periods of Japanese colonialism, U.S. occupation, and the Korean War, see Cumings (2010).
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The term is borrowed from the title of Bae’s interview (2016) with Krys Lee.
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Wang, Cm. (2022). Refugee Migration Through the Division System: On the Ethics of Copresence in Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean. In: Chou, S.S., Kim, S., Wilson, R.S. (eds) Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_8
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