Abstract
At first glance, Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divide, by Nan Kim, looks like a book about the meetings of family members separated by the unending Korean War (1950–1953). Indeed, the monograph provides a broad overview of these gatherings, their reliance on the mobilization of memories, and their implications for reconciliation. While historically minded, Kim’s research is also ethnographic, set in the “field” of the August 2000 Reunions that followed the inaugural convening of the two countries’ leaders during the Inter-Korean June 15 Summit. Attempting to appreciate her layered considerations of the epochal and the local can, however, complicate one’s interpretation of the book’s subtitle: what are the “divides” that Kim’s study looks to traverse?
An axiomatic distinction is the political bifurcation of the Korean peninsula. First configured in 1945 at the 38th parallel and redrawn in 1953, a demilitarized zone (DMZ) demarcates the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north. A civil war suspended by ceasefire, not peace, perpetuated in the two postbellum societies routines of surveillance and exclusion justified by customs of loyalty, kinship, and collective responsibility. Individuals that crossed the border north (wŏlbukcha) or south (wŏllammin) and their relatives remaining on the other side faced mistrust, but not in predictable ways. If a logic prevailed, each society branded the missing as traitors and newcomers as ardent supporters that “voted with their feet” to join the “worthier” nation.
A preface regarding “Notes on Methodology, Translation, and Transliteration” offers the timeline, themes, and scope of Kim’s fieldwork, and posits that a “system of associative guilt” (yŏnjwaje) pervasive in postwar South Korea imposed, for anthropologists and researchers of culture, an “ethnographic contingency” (xxiii). In a society where it is common to refer to a stranger as an “uncle” (ajŏssi) or a passerby as an “elder sister” (ŏnni), the families split permanently by the armistice experienced the continuation of conflict in their everyday lives (xix–xx). Launched in the 1980s, televised reunions, featuring “tearful embraces among anguished family members,” generated unprecedented viewership (2). To much of the South Korean public, however, participants appeared out of context as “ciphers of unspoken grief, with often little or no articulation for what is being grieved” (2). In her analysis, Kim likens a sentiment oft associated with Koreanness itself, that is—han—or “unresolved bitterness,” with Sigmund Freud’s “melancholia,” as a state induced by sufferers not knowing the effects of the loss on themselves (24–25). Addressing melancholia through Victor Turner’s interpretative lens that focuses on liminality’s transformative potential, Kim sees reunions as catalysts for breaking through the sustained sadness of war-separated family members (21–22).
To recover what is lost requires revisiting the site of dispossession, which is the subject of the book’s Part I, “Unsettling the Past,” where Kim traces the origins of civil discord and diaspora to modern Korea’s “geopolitical liminality.” To elaborate on the effects of these events on Korea’s liminality, Kim reiterates Charles Armstrong’s assertion that: “nowhere else on earth has national division been so acute, antagonism so bitter, cross-boundary contact so limited, or even mutual suspicion so high as on the Korean peninsula” (20, italics mine). Granting its rhetorical appeal, insisting on the “uniqueness” of the Korean experience could minimize traumas encountered by millions of non-Koreans also permanently cut off from kin as consequences of armed hostilities following decolonization including the Partition of India (1947) and the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949). Readers might also wonder whether Korea’s “liminality” ended with the ceasefire or continued through the Cold War Era into today. Finally, how did North Koreans experience this state of “in-betweenness?”
Part II of the work, “Centering the Margin,” relays how the 1997 election of the opposition leader Kim Daejung ushered in the “sunshine policy” (1998–2008) that promoted peaceful engagement with the north, but the simultaneous Asian Financial Crisis made the economic recovery and prosperity of the south a national priority (80–87, 109). With a view of North Korea as an industrial reserve army, the events aimed to neutralize even the most menacing of presumed traitors: the wŏlbukcha, or the southerners that became North Korean. First held in August 2000 in Seoul and in Pyongyang, the two governments selected the meetings’ attendees: in South Korea, a lottery that favored the eldest applicants picked the wŏllammin bound for Pyongyang whereas North Korean officials named the wŏlbukcha chosen to travel to Seoul. Kim reasons that the latter demographic was “significantly younger” than the former (124), and, as such, media coverage in the south focused on mother-son reunions where elderly women asked their adult sons, “what took you so long to return?” (127). In contrast, the relatives of wŏllammin in the north, perhaps after enduring decades-long suspicion and social exclusion, tended to ask, “why did you come back at all?” (129).
Named “Crossing Over,” Part III delves into the core divide within Kim’s ethnography: the wŏlbukcha relatives participating in the August 2000 reunion. In spite of their seditious status in the south, the wŏlbukcha collective included a range of illustrious colonial nationalists such as Hong Myŏnghŭi, Yi T’aejun, and Pak T’aewŏn, who helped shape the foundations of modern Korean culture in the early twentieth century. During the meetings of 2000–2001, they figured prominently in a list of attendees that included the poet laureate Oh Yŏng-Jae and linguist Ryu Ryŏl (124). Considering the ideological persecutions leading up to the war (166–68) and systems of surveillance after (155), readers might infer that the relatives of revolutionary, rather than ordinary, wŏlbukcha faced weightier barriers to success. But, the Author’s Grandson, a descendant of a prominent North Korean novelist, was not only able to acquire censored knowledge about his grandfather’s celebrity but, by rallying peer support, “circumvented” impediments to his mobility (156).
What Kim’s interviews reveal is that wŏlbukcha family seemed to have experienced a kind of “forced” disassociation from, rather than perpetual stigmatization due to, their “Red” relatives. Out of a dozen close informants, Mr. Na, whose uncle went north during the war, was one of two “identifying” his own marginalization. But he did not attribute his burdens to his uncle’s actions. Rather, he blamed his father for keeping his uncle’s name in the family registry, stating, “My uncle had to die so that I could live, but my father refused” (169). In calling this tendency toward genealogical amnesia “the modern equivalent of kin-based punishment,” Kim holds the state and society as responsible for this exclusion (157). Nevertheless, the resolve with which family members enacted the social deaths of wŏlbukcha, by erasing traces of their legacy or believing them to have died, indicates that individuals also severed kinship relations by choice. Mrs. Hwang, the daughter-in-law of a North Korean intellectual, reminds readers that most wŏlbukcha families wish to keep family histories in the past rather than bear their burdens in the future (203). Her resistance to any association with wŏlbukcha accentuates the challenges of reconciliation for those who deal with its consequences most intimately. But one wonders whether her “distance” from the missing—as the “in-law” of a patriarch she never met—made it easier for her to cut off her connection to, at least conceptually, “the weakest link” of her extended family. Still, for other relatives of the missing, such as Yi Halmoni (164), Mr. Na’s father, and Mr. Han (179–80), dissociation from the wŏlbukcha, even to safeguard their kin remaining in the south, was simply not an option. Why not? Eschewing explanations of blood-based loyalty and filiality (hyo), Kim suggests that these relationships were too central in the “self-making” of these bereaved family members. Self-determination aside, it is impossible to overlook the hierarchy of relations and degrees of kinship in these examples.
In the conclusion, entitled “Meeting with the Past,” Kim emphasizes that the 2000–2001 reunions showcased the “cosmopolitan orientation of South Korea’s most proactive decade of engagement with North Korea” (189). Presenting separation as sacrifice, the proceedings ritualized the continuation of national division while offering up the promise of greater integration by easing border restrictions and investing in channels for cooperative production (204–09). Kim’s spotlight on cosmopolitanism reflects a clearing for North Koreans, and, by extension, overseas Koreans, in South Korea’s blueprints for its future. By marshaling the collective memories of local agitators, transnational activists brought to the attention of global publics the lesser-known injustices borne by Koreans, such as the forced mobilization of “comfort women” during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the massacre of several hundred civilians at Nogunri by the US military at the outset of its entry into the war (July 1950). Could cosmopolitanism, therefore, engender more “inclusive” impressions of exiled nationals and their remaining kin in a nation divided even after the so-called “end” of the Cold War? Kim’s findings, dramatized via an “‘interstitial vignette in freezing rain,” imply “no” (199–210).
Ironically, what Kim poses as a prospect for wŏlbukcha reflects a popular narrative of wŏllammin, the northerners that became South Korean. A conservative assessment of the estimates of South Korean ministries and demographers indicates that some 400,000–450,000 migrated before the war with another 600,000–650,000 evacuating southwards in the fall and winter of 1950; by 1960, a little over a million northerners settled in enclaves of South Korea, establishing churches, businesses, and exclusive networks. There, they prospered—so much that by the 1990s, the Committee for the Five Northern Provinces, a division of South Korea’s interior ministry, reported a population of five million “North Koreans” in the ROK—quite possible if migrants married each other and reproduced several children who adhered to distinctive “northern” identities (74). Thus, the slogan of “ten million separated families,” in my view, is not an exaggerated signification of the scale of the exodus but what wŏllammin might consider a real projection of their, and their wŏlbukcha counterparts’, progeny. It was for the wŏllammin that liminality proved triumphant, as recounted in songs, stories, and other cultural forms like the film Kukje sijang (Ode to my father, 2014), and shown by the feats of North Korean natives including the founder of Hyundai, Chung Ju-young and Academy Award-winning actress, Youn Yuh-jeong, as well as their descendants in the south, such as Moon Jae-In, the twelfth president of the ROK.
This genealogy, birthed in the Protestant churches of the northern provinces in the colonial era, traces the links between migration and prosperity in liberal, capitalist, outward-looking societies, but can cosmopolitanism explain or promote the social advancement of wŏlbukcha in North Korea? The testimonies of a couple of Kim’s main informants, Mr. Na and his uncle, hint at a different trajectory. If advancement for the wŏllammin paralleled a centrifugal movement that picked up power as it spiraled away and overseas, wouldn’t social advancement for the wŏlbukcha move the other way—centripetally—amassing power as it drew closer toward Pyongyang, the home of the patriarch-in-chief?
In spite of the widespread presumption of his death, Mr. Na’s uncle, who crossed north with the retreating soldiers of the DPRK People’s Liberation Army, appeared to have thrived in North Korea, boasting of several children and a dozen grandchildren, most likely all based in Pyongyang. The broad contours of Mr. Na’s uncle’s biography echo the wŏllammin story in reverse, with far fewer details. Still, one well-known feature about the wŏlbukcha collective has been their marked masculinity. Whereas the male-to-female sex ratio of wŏllammin was around 2:1, that of the wŏlbukcha, at 7:1, points to their overwhelming representation as heads of families (changnam) in the DPRK. If the size of Mr. Na’s uncle’s family in the north was any measure, one could estimate that the descendants of South Koreans in the north could equal or even outnumber, per capita, the offspring of North Koreans in the south. Whether this potential—one of many Kim unveils in her thought-provoking, award-winning book—is comforting or distressing to members of a society marked by some of the lowest birthrates in the world today, one hopes that recognizing the interrelatedness of northerners and southerners will allow for a reconfiguration of Korean kinship less fettered by the exclusive rights of patrilineage.