My Korean War Refugee Family: Untold Stories, Forgotten Memories, and Generational Displacement
My unique status as a transnational scholar residing in the U.S. and studying immigration, race, and ethnicity and now identifying as a part of the Korean diaspora has pushed me to reconnect to the history of my Korean War refugee family in the context of the geopolitics of Korea; this has motivated me to develop a new interdisciplinary project about my own family. My mother is a child of Korean War refugees, whose parents fled from the North during the Hungnam Evacuation—the evacuation of United Nations forces and civilians from Hungnam port in 1950. Growing up in Seoul, I knew that my grandparents were war refugees and had some family members left in North Korea, yet our family story was barely told, particularly after my grandfather passed away in the 1980s.
My Korean War Refugee Family: Untold Stories, Forgotten Memories, and Generational Displacement tracks my mother’s journey to reconnect herself to untold stories of her family and parents, many years after her parents passed away. This journey started with a trip to Busan—my mother’s birthplace and a major port city in southeastern Korea—in the summer of 2022, where she had never visited after her family left in the late 1950s. I started following and recording her journey to reconnect herself to untold family stories and forgotten memories of her family’s home and history. After the trip, we closely looked at her old family register before her marriage and other information that she gathered from her siblings in order to put pieces together to recreate narratives. By engaging with literature in critical refugee studies and narrative studies, I locate my family’s forgotten memories and generational displacement in East Asian geopolitics, from Japanese colonial rule to the Korean War, and to the Cold War and its legacies.
