Remembering in Solidarity

Abstract

In this dissertation, I discuss how North Korean migrants and their children reflect on their migratory narratives and construct memories and postmemories vis-à-vis their North Korean heritage. The North Korean migration context has primarily centered on women (Sung & Cho, 2018), labeling them as Confucian communist mothers (North Korea), trafficked wives (China), smuggled refugees (Southeast Asian countries), and finally, unsettled settlers (South Korea) across their migration trajectories (Song, 2013). Considering the trafficking of North Korean women to rural Chinese men after crossing the border, and their subsequent experiences of human trafficking, forced marriage, and forced pregnancy (Kim, 2012, 2014, 2020), it is significant to understand how the children who were born to North Korean mothers make sense of their heritage. With this, I foregrounded the intergenerational transmission of family memories as a critical vehicle to examine how bi/multilingual North Korean migrants and their children construct identity and belonging across time and space. I found that the children mobilize multiple linguistic and cultural repertoires to understand varying narratives that run across multiple resources from family, school, and digital platforms to construct a multifaceted understanding of North Korean heritage. I also found that mothers seek a nuanced perspective on migration, challenging the reductionist approach that portrays them solely as impoverished victims by sharing personal and cultural memories in various contexts. By highlighting the evolving culture of memory construction, I argue that North Korean mothers and their children navigate, re-imagine, and re-construct the understanding of ethnic identity through shared narratives and literacy practices, often mediated by digital technology and cultural knowledge. This dissertation contributes to the field by focusing on the dynamic process of intergenerational transmission of memory between North Korean mothers and their children who live across multiple borders.