Beyond trauma: Positive postmemories among second- and third-generation North Korean war refugees

Abstract

In this article, I discuss how children and grandchildren of North Korean war refugees who were displaced during the Korean War construct identity and belonging in relation to their North Korean heritage. Drawing from the concept of postmemory, I examine how their northern heritage is experienced, constructed, mediated, and even solidified across generations who did not directly experience the Korean War. Unlike existing literature that predominantly focuses on the traumatic aspects of postmemory, I found that one’s construction of postmemory also encompasses positive family memories. These affirming memories exist alongside traumatic ones, countering the overdetermined paradigm of trauma across memory studies. Thus, I propose alternative ways of remembering that capture a nuanced understanding of how the second and third generations construct positive postmemories alongside the traumatic memories of their ancestors.

Keywords

collective memory North Korea Korean diaspora positive postmemory intergenerational perspectives

Introduction

In this article, I discuss how children (second generation) and grandchildren (third generation) of North Korean (NK) war refugees who were displaced during the Korean War reflect on their family’s narratives and construct postmemories vis-à-vis their NK heritage. Researchers across disciplines have extensively studied the generation that succeeded the Jewish Holocaust survivors of World War II, with a particular emphasis on the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories (Hirsch, 2012a; Rigney, 2018; Rothberg, 2009; Wolf, 2019). Centering on family memory as a pivotal component of transcultural transmission, scholars in the field of memory studies have underscored the embodied form of family memory vis-à-vis its affective and bodily connection to their descendants who were raised with the memory throughout their upbringing. However, despite its importance as a critical explanatory vehicle to disrupt Eurocentric traditions, the primary focus within memory studies has been on Holocaust survivors and their descendants, although memories travel across the globe as a transnational construct (Erll, 2011). Moreover, studies that have looked at the intergenerational transmission of trauma were prominently confined to examining Holocaust survivors and their children, the second generation. It is only in recent years that scholars have shown a growing interest in exploring the experiences of the third generation, with a particular focus on postmemories (Al-Hardan, 2016; Cohn and Morrison, 2018; Jacobs, 2017). Furthermore, memory studies have been overflooded with the “paradigm of trauma” (Rigney, 2018), while more comprehensive approaches have also engaged memories of joy, hope, and happiness (Rigney, 2018; Sindbæk Andersen and Ortner, 2019; Welland, 2018; Wolf, 2019). Following this scholarly inquiry, I aim to show that postmemories of trauma exist alongside positive postmemories and depart from either-or approaches such as seeing the past legacy only as trauma, as “an escapist optimism” or as “a paralyzing nostalgia” (Rigney, 2018: 370).

With this, I depart from the idea of trauma as the sole focus of memory studies and strive to unpack the complexities of transnational and intergenerational construction of family memory. I aim to unflatten postmemories situated on the axis of second/third generation, traumatic/positivist, and European/non-European perspectives of memories, and agree that postmemories or their construction should be understood with multiple vantage points to foster new ways of seeing (Sousanis, 2015). For this, I worked both with the second- and third-generation war refugees to understand how they individually and collectively made sense of their (grand)parents’ memories of displacement. Especially for the displaced populations whose lives have been torn apart across multiple countries, I subscribe to Erll (2011) who contended that all memories are fundamentally transnational. Examining the experiences of (grand)children of the displaced helps us move forward with our understanding of migrant children whose upbringing involves multiple places in the world. Therefore, I examined the following: What are the individual and collective postmemories that inform the ways the second- and third-generation NK war refugees construct their identity and belonging? In what ways does the construction of postmemories between and among the second and third generations of NK war refugees differ from one another?

Postmemory and the generation that came after

In examining how the generation of postmemory that was displaced during the Korean War discussed individual and collective construction of memories, I drew from Hirsch’s (1992) concept of postmemory. Inspired by the work of Art Spiegelman, who incorporated photos of Holocaust survivors in Maus, Hirsch (2008) argued that photos play a pivotal role in mediating memory and postmemory among second-generation Holocaust survivors. As a child of Holocaust survivors, Hirsch contended that the generation of postmemory grows up with narratives that preceded one’s birth, marked by the enduring stories of traumatic experiences that previous generations had to suffer. Hirsch (2012a) later suggested expanding the concept of postmemory to encompass other trauma-invoking events beyond the Holocaust as they are relevant to broader transnational memories.

Hirsch’s (1992) concept of postmemory particularly resonates with my study for two reasons. First, my study participants, who are (grand)children of the displaced, are not only temporally distant from Korean War experiences, but also spatially dislocated from NK, their parents’ place of origin. In a similar vein, Hirsch (1992, 2012a) documented that she considered her cultural home to be Czernowitz, her parents’ country of origin, although she had never been there when she initially coined the term. However, Czernowitz remains a “space of postmemory” to her (Hirsch, 1997), where she could specifically describe the details because her upbringing was profoundly influenced by her parents’ memories and narratives of home. More recent literature on Palestinian refugee youth and children born in exile also bolstered the idea of postmemories across generations. Although many of them were born in the camp and had never been to their parental homeland, they construct, assemble, and perform the idea of the homeland by building connections through the memories and narratives passed down in the refugee camp shared by their parents and elders (Fincham, 2012; Mason, 2007). For this reason, I argue that one’s experiences of displacement create a space for inquiries (Tadeo Fuica, 2015), and the ways the grand(children) of NK refugees endure temporal and spatial dislocation highlights the importance of postmemory in examining how it mediates the disjuncture created by displacement.

Second, the globalization of the Holocaust as a universal memory trope has latched onto other local situations that are also distant from the actual event (Huyssen, 2001; Tadeo Fuica, 2015). Looking at diverse experiences in local contexts lived by the second- and third-generation NK war refugees can challenge the existing Eurocentric framework and expand the scope of memory studies in broader and more complex ways that argue against a reified, clear-cut, and territory-bounded concept (Feindt et al. 2014, pp. 24–25; cited in Bull & Clarke, 2019) of memory studies. In other words, as Michael Rothberg (2009) suggested, understanding the complex ecology of memory studies helps us raise a multidirectional consciousness that highlights the human condition configured across time and space, especially in relation to others. This perspective argues against the compartmentalization of each memory that gives authority to a specific memory over others, which can result in an uneven terrain of social justice across the globe. Therefore, my research brings together the relational, multidirectional, and mutually constitutive aspects of memory studies by focusing on a non-European event that has transnational implications for diasporic memory.

Although I acknowledge Hirsch (1992) initially theorized the concept of postmemory to understand the second generation like herself, I aim to extend the possibility of postmemories to the third generation, in this case, the grandchildren of NK war refugees. I agree with Al-Hardan (2016), who adopted the lens of postmemories to understand both the second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees’ memories of loss in exploring the intergenerational narration and transmission. I also contend that it is problematic to delimit the notion of postmemory only to the second generation because it essentializes the reference point of postmemory as if it only “pertains to the first and second generations (Stanley and Dampier, 2005: 94).” Therefore it is crucial to extend the possibility of postmemory beyond the second generation (Al-Hardan, 2016). Indeed, more recently, Hirsch herself pointed out that examining both second and now also third generation’s construction of postmemory can provide meaningful insights into the multi-layered aesthetic that best addresses “the contradictory needs, desires, refusals and aversions—the proximity and the distance—characterizing this experience (Hirsch, 2012b).” For this reason, it is important to discuss the concept of generation, how its construction has evolved, and ultimately, how it intersects with postmemory.

Generation, generationality, and heritage

In examining the concept of generation, I drew from Erll’s (2014) framework of generationality, or generation identity, which refers to “the conscious identification of a group of people, either by itself or by others, as a generation” (p. 387). It is particularly critical to attend to the concept of generation in the context of forced migration because trauma can be transmitted between and across generations (Bloch, 2018). The concept of postmemory is aimed at a particular generational perspective that situates individuals within a broader sociopolitical context (Assmann, 2016; Mannheim, 1952; Wolf, 2019). Following scholars who view generation as a social construct, Erll argued that generation is “highly dependent on different historical experiences and changing cultural practices, on intellectual developments and social challenges” (p. 387). Based on this perspective, Erll documented that generationality precisely draws “attention to identities,” whether “self-made or fabricated by others (p.387).” This viewpoint emphasized the issue of cultural memory and its transition from familial inheritance to societal construction of heritage. In exploring heritage, I subscribe to Lowenthal (1998) and argue that it “starts with what individuals inherit and bequeath (p. 31).” In other words, one’s construction of heritage vis-à-vis familial and cultural memories goes beyond the mere inheritance. Grounded in this view, I define the concept of generation not as a fixed or bounded unit but rather as a certain group of people who phenomenologically experienced a certain time and space across different lifeworlds.

The concept of a generation emerged around the war period, alongside the emergence of the “war generation” as European veterans claimed themselves as the “lost generation” (Erll, 2014: 386). People who bodily experienced the war automatically formed the first generation. Within this context, the term first generation is readily associated with migrants, whereas their children are second generation and their grandchildren become third generation. As Erll noted, I also acknowledge that assigning these generations with specific immigration status can be problematic, not only because it enforces a perpetual immigrant status but also because it oversimplifies the inherent complexities they must navigate as immigrants. However, examining their lives within and across generations through the lens of memory sheds light on the complexities of their lives because it highlights how a group of people, who phenomenologically experienced a certain time and space, both individually and collectively, can share and challenge cross-generational mnemonic discourses. For this reason, I posit generation as a critical identity marker for comprehending how the children and grandchildren of the displaced population similarly or differently made sense of their NK heritage by engaging in mnemonic discourses. In other words, I contend that neither the idea of generation nor the concept of postmemory refer to simple linearity (Kandasamy, 2019). In the next section, I present a brief context about the Korean War and the forced displacement as a consequence before delving into how the construction of postmemories has evolved across different generations among the (grand)children of the displaced, particularly regarding their (grand)parents’ lives in exile.

The forgotten war and the displaced

Discussions regarding North Korea and its population have seldom explored the factors leading to the division between the two Koreas and the subsequent repercussions. The 38th parallel latitude was chosen by the United States and the Soviet Union in September 1945 to demarcate South and North Korea and to occupy them respectively (Kim, 2008). After the armistice of the Korean War in 1953, the Military Demarcation Line was established, serving as the borderline between North and South Korea (Kim, 2008). Following this, the official partition of the Korean peninsula resulted in a massive migration that displaced and separated millions of families and led to an exodus to other countries such as the United States (Shin, 2001). While the Korean War forcibly separated innumerable refugees and orphans from their families, the dominant discourse has centered on the Kim regime and its global political ramifications. What has been forgotten, if not overlooked, are the millions of Koreans who had to flee their hometowns in the north in 1950 and walk hundreds of miles south to avoid being killed or persecuted by Communist troops. Starting from the late 1940s when the country was liberated from Japanese occupation, they had to cross the 38th parallel to flee from the Soviet-occupied North to the US-occupied South (Chu, 2008). The everyday lives of ordinary people in NK before the breakout of the war and how their escape relates to the larger Korean diaspora are significantly underexplored. These people are referred to as the displaced in South Korea because they lost their homeland, were separated from their families, and fled with the memories and life trajectories they once had in the northern part of the Korean peninsula—now known as North Korea. For over 70 years, they remain unaware of whether their separated families and closest relatives are alive or have passed away.

Thus, the Korean migration in a larger context of the diaspora can be attributed to the war and its aftermath, connecting multiple countries in multifaceted ways (Hyon, 2011). For example, the war spawned numerous migrants in different contexts, such as “military brides, adoptees, labor migrants, political exiles” who ended up in dozens of countries (Yuh, 2005). Although driven by the nationalistic agenda characterized by the war, the varying types of migration led to identity configurations rooted in shared memories and experiences rather than mere affiliation with the nation-state (Yuh, 2005). That said, I aimed to expand the scope of current research by focusing on the construction of identity and belonging that highlights these migrants’ construction of postmemories rather than limiting them within the framework of the nation-state. As a result, this work sheds light on the broader migrant community across the globe whose lives encompass multiple homes.

Methodology

This article was developed from a larger multiple-case study that traced and closely documented the second and the third generation of NK war refugees who were displaced from their homeland. One set of cases treated each participant as a separate and distinct case. The second set of cases included and was bounded by generation (the second and third generations) to compare and contrast narratives that run across generations. For this article, I focused on the second set of cases where each individual was categorized by either the second or the third generation. Grouping the participants by generation gave me an in-depth understanding of how the children and grandchildren of the displaced similarly or differently engaged in mnemonic practices, according to how and in which form they were exposed to the memory. Given the scarcity of literature that looked at both generations of postmemory, assigning participants to generations helped me focus on how the generation of postmemory, who (dis)jointly experienced time together, constructed and presented postmemory of their own. Data collection for this study took place over 10 months across both the second and third generations, following what Hirsch (1992) framed as postmemory.

Participant recruitment

I developed selection criteria before contacting potential participants. The recruitment criteria were straightforward. Drawing from a purposeful sampling strategy (Boeije, 2010), I recruited participants who had one or more of their (grand)parents who were displaced from the North before and during the Korean War. I found 17 participants for my research through the snowball sampling method (Bogdan and Biklen, 2007). The research included nine second-generation (aged 62 to 84 years) and eight third-generation (aged 35 to 55 years) participants. My first participant, Junhee, introduced me to potential participants. At the end of the interview, they, in turn, introduced me to another potential participant. This strategy was especially helpful in allowing me to probe into their deepest side of the story because it made participants less anxious about revealing that their (grand)parents fled from the north when introduced by people they had known for years. Since the experience of displacement was not the most pleasant experience, getting access to the community through an insider helped me build rapport with participants, encouraging them to share their genuine stories. I asked fellow researchers and friends working with the displaced population if they knew anyone who would fit my criteria. Since the researchers already had built a good relationship with them, they were willing to participate in my research with less anxiety. All the interviews were conducted in Korean except for Youngjoo and Donghoon, who preferred English. Although not included in the recruitment criteria, almost all of the third-generation participants spent several years across different countries (e.g., Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the United States, and the United Kingdom) in their childhood.

Data collection

Based on Hirsch’s (2008) definition of postmemory, I captured (1) how and in which form the children of NK war refugees, now adults, were told their parents’ personal history; (2) what their parents shared with them; and (3) how that influenced their overall upbringing and their construction of identity and belonging. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 members of the second and third generations of postmemory. Sample interview questions included: “When and how did you get to know that your (grand)parents are from NK?” and “Do you think that your (grand)parents coming from NK influenced your life at all?” I probed their answers and tailored follow-up questions accordingly. All the interviews lasted approximately 60–150 minutes and were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. I also collected copies of materials and artifacts (photos, personal journals, historical documents) for further examination.

Data analysis

I started data analysis alongside data collection. To compare and contrast the data I gained from the second and third generations, I separated the dataset according to generation from the beginning, although the protocol for the data analysis remained the same. Employing grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) in data analysis, I looked across multiple data sources (transcripts from interviews, field notes from observations, and collected artifacts) and assigned descriptive labels, which I then reviewed to identify initial themes (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). In writing analytic memos, I underscored the participants’ responses or any circumstances that described their connection to the past. I reduced the data source by reading all the interview transcripts and eliminating data that did not directly respond to research questions. After reviewing preliminary codes in a recursive and reiterative manner (Bogdan and Biklen, 2007), I created a codebook with those initial codes and used NVivo to assign those reduced data. Throughout the reiterative process, I revisited the transcriptions to confirm that the codes precisely and comprehensively reflected the participants’ ideas and understandings. In other words, the initial codes were constantly compared (Miles and Huberman, 1994) with the larger codes to precisely capture what my participants shared across the interview, writing, drawing, and other materials. I have worked with migrant and displaced populations in varying contexts as a teacher, researcher, and friend, which significantly influenced my analysis of the intergenerational transmission of familial memory.

Throughout the course of this study, the generation of postmemory’s construction of individual and family memories mediated their articulation of identity and belonging in several ways. For the generation of postmemory, the memory of the displacement of their (grand)parents was directly conveyed through their (grand)parents, who either talked incessantly about their traumatized experiences or never spoke about it. As supported by literature (Kellermann, 2009; Stein, 2014; Wolf, 2019), either case profoundly influenced how children connected with parental memories. The Holocaust survivors who constantly talked about their tragedies can evoke feelings of guilt or powerlessness among the subsequent generations (Wolf, 2019), whereas children whose parents remained silent experienced a continuous haunting (Gordon, 2008) whether through their presence or absence. For the latter, these children refrained from asking any questions out of a sense of respect or care for their (grand)parents, who chose to remain silent about their traumatic experiences. However, they were still exposed to information through family gatherings and conversations.

While I acknowledge that a wide variation exists between these two poles, the second generation of postmemory was more directly exposed to their parents’ tragic experiences, whereas the third generation had to discover memories on their own. In what follows, I present how both the second and third generations of postmemory engaged in mnemonic practices, either similarly or differently, and how this influenced their construction of identity and sense of belonging.

The second generation

In this study, all second-generation participants reported that they were raised with their parents’ accounts of displacement, although their individual responses varied. This seems natural given that they are the ones who grew up with the displaced population. However, as Wolf (2019) argued, she and many other researchers observed that some survivors were more inclined to share their past with their grandchildren rather than with their own children, which they attributed to their sense of mortality, greater flexibility in personal schedules, and less concern about the traumatic impact on their grandchildren. Contrary to this finding, all of the second-generation respondents in this study were explicitly exposed to their parents’ memory of displacement. They reported that they could not recall a time when they were unaware of their parents’ northern heritage because they had always grown up with it. The memory of displacement was passed down in everyday settings, such as during meals and bedtime stories, which played a significant role in their upbringing. In many cases, their mealtime story was about the war, displacement, security, and survival—a very different narrative from what is typically envisioned as a story shared at dinner.

For example, Sejin recounted that her parents frequently discussed their wartime experiences, including waking up each morning to the sound of someone proclaiming that all bourgeois should be dead and that they should all face persecution. The fear of death, intertwined with the memory of war, was vividly portrayed in Hejin’s recollection of mealtime stories. She observed that even after more than 50 years, her mother continued to carry the weight of the war. Hejin pointed out that the family’s displacement was normalized because it became the source of the mealtime stories that she and her siblings became familiar with growing up.

My mom lived with the war even after 50 years. Until now, she always says you ought to stay within the community and not attempt to locate family members if war breaks out. These were the mealtime stories we grew up with. She always said we [children] were more important than finding separated families in the north . . . that she even forgot how her mother looked like. So I don’t know anything about my grandparents. For us, my mom and dad are ancestors.

In her second interview, Hejin described how her mother appeared to have suppressed the happy memories of her life in the North to take care of her family in the South. Her mother employed traumatic memories as a means to teach important lessons to her children about the issues of safety and security. Similarly, Kicheol, whose parents’ home forcibly became a primary station of the Soviet Union, recounted how his mother would share her memories whenever she received a morphine injection.

Kicheol:

I remember my mother became very clear-minded when she got the shot when she started to talk about her memory of her home in the north and her experience of displacement.

Researcher:

Why do you think she started sharing her personal narratives after the injection?

Kicheol:

I guess it’s due to emotional pain? The concept of homeland and one’s attachment to home is fundamental among Koreans. . .which also applies to me. I mean, I was born and raised here, but we [second generation] don’t have any homeland. . .which disheartened me from time to time.

Whether it was a recognition of mortality or the fear of health issues, Kicheol’s mother became more revealing whenever she received medical treatment. Kicheol later shared that he even tried to buy a small piece of land, believing that his family, in that way, could secure a sense of rootedness in the South. Place-belongingness was at the center of how he articulated rootedness. He cared so much about his family that his parents’ feelings of uprootedness became palpable to him through their memories, although the South was where he was born and raised. Throughout the interview, he sobbed, making a profound connection with his parents’ feelings of loss. He was not the only participant who became emotionally charged during the interview. Except for Myungho, who shared his parents’ memories in a matter-of-fact manner, all the other participants shed tears as they shared stories. Not only did they just grow up with their parents’ memory of displacement, but they also grew up with their parents’ emotional distress and witnessed moments of sorrow across different contexts.

Regarding emotional distress, my participants specifically shared that family holidays such as Korean Thanksgiving and Lunar New Year served as poignant reminders, making them particularly attuned to their parents’ pain. The absence of other extended family members constantly reminded them that they had no other family members other than their parents, including grandparents. Yeonji, whose father had to leave his brother in the North due to his last-minute escape to the South, explained that her father always wept behind closed doors during the holiday seasons because he missed his younger brother. Minbeom also commented that despite all his years in the South, his roots remained in the North, an idea that made him suffer, especially during family gatherings. Hejin recollected that her father cried watching TV or listening to music because he missed his home and family in the North. It was common for the second generation to shed tears during the interviews, expressing their care and empathy for their parents. The loss of homeland and the severed connections with family were the primary memories with which the second generation grew up, which significantly affected their construction of identity and belonging.

Furthermore, all the participants recalled material objects that were deeply intertwined with their families alongside certain mnemonic narratives. For example, all of them mentioned that they ate traditional northern food, which was extremely rare in the South. Yeonji shared that her father’s favorite food was northern noodles, and visiting his favorite northern restaurant with him and her daughter had been a long-standing tradition for her family for decades. Other participants, such as Minbeom, recalled an episode at a renowned northern food restaurant where he unexpectedly befriended a person with whom he shared his parents’ memory of displacement. In describing mnemonic items that evoke their parents’ northern heritage, Sejin mentioned a newspaper to which his father had subscribed for a long time. She reflected that whenever she headed to school, she would come across a newspaper lying by the front door gate issued by the committee for the five northern Korean provinces, widely read among the displaced population. She also recalled a pen her father owned, with the logo of his high school in the North carved into it. She also noted that her mother had a northern accent, and her use of certain words from the North made their northern heritage highly noticeable. For this reason, she reflected it was impossible not to be aware of her parents’ northern heritage because “It was everywhere.”

Regarding language, several other participants, such as Kicheol, Chiwon, Jimin, Minbeom, Hejin, Sejin, and Yeonji, also noted that their parents’ language, spoken with a northern accent, constantly reminded them of their northern “roots.” This distinction became obvious when they started attending school because interacting with their peers from South Korea prompted them to reflect on how “different” they were regarding family language (i.e., northern dialects) and culture (i.e., food and clothing). For this reason, they chose not to use their home language (i.e., the northern dialect) in public spaces such as school, reserving it exclusively for private spaces such as the home (Bloch and Hirsch, 2017). Their efforts to conceal the NK accent were due to the “testing period” (Kwon, 2020: 128) the postwar families had to endure. Since they moved from the opposite side of the ideological border, the separated families had to constantly confront “the risk of being considered politically impure groups (Kwon, 2020: 128).”

However, it is important to emphasize that the differences they faced did not automatically funnel into a reluctance to discuss or explore their northern heritage. Despite the feeling of pain, all in the second generation felt a deep sense of pride in their northern heritage. Sejin, who grew up in a small town in South Korea, proudly self-identified as a “northerner.” She added that it felt unusual when she finally went to a college in Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, because some professors mistakenly labeled her as a person from a southern town, whereas she considered herself from the North. For this reason, she was confused when the professor inquired about the transportation system in her small southern hometown, feeling “adrift” throughout her entire life. Likewise, Hejin emphasized that the feeling of uprootedness and nostalgia came to her family as pride. Growing up in a household where the front door gate was deliberately closed to isolate themselves from the southern neighbors, she considered herself “special” or even “unique.” She reflected that this was largely attributable to her parents, who chose not to build a relationship with southern neighbors primarily out of northern pride. Kicheol, Jimin, Minbeom, and Chiwon also expressed northern pride by describing how well-educated their parents were, asserting that they themselves were “from the north,” although they had never visited there. None of them described their birthplace in South Korea, nor did they refer to it as their home, despite having been born and raised in South Korea their entire lives. It was North, the place they had never been, that took up a huge part of their descriptions of home, family, and heritage. The feeling of uprootedness did not cause them to hide their parents’ northern heritage. Rather, it evolved into pride, which subsequently played a primary role in how they articulate their relationship with memory, identity, and belonging. In other words, they capitalized on their northern heritage in describing identity and belonging, rather than confining themselves to the traumatic war experience.

The third generation

Although the majority of the second-generation participants responded that they did not think their children would find their grandparents’ memories of displacement engaging, all the third-generation participants were very much aware of their grandparents’ memories. When probed on how they became aware of the displacement, the third generation reported it was inherent to their upbringing because they “grew up with” the narratives revolving around family, regardless of whether their (grand)parents explicitly shared stories. However, unlike the second generation participants who were more directly exposed to memory from their parents, there was a variation among the third generation in how they absorbed memory and how it has influenced their construction of identity and belonging. For example, unlike many second-generation participants who wept during the interviews, Yongsik, Heesoo, and Heeyoon expressed feelings of disinterest in relaying their grandparents’ stories. They emphasized having minimal knowledge of the displacement, yet all were aware of their grandparents’ place of origin ever since they were in elementary school (Yongsik), middle school (Heeyoon), and high school (Heesoo) years. Distinguishing the third generation from the second, Heesoo suggested, “You should talk to my parents [the second generation] instead. They’re more knowledgeable.” Yongsik also noted that his grandparents were displaced from the North, but the knowledge did not influence his life at all. Nonetheless, he admitted that there were specific moments that made him speculate whether the memory of his grandparents’ displacement had influenced his life. He particularly pointed out that all the second- and third-generation members in his family got civil service jobs because his grandfather advised them to seek stable jobs due to the absence of a family network in the South. He specifically added, “perhaps my grandparents’ displacement influenced me that way.” Yongsik’s comments denoted that although he initially remained indifferent to the memory of displacement, it might unexpectedly become significant at any moment, especially when he had to make an important choice in his life. In other words, although some participants reported that memory did not influence their lives at all, they were still constantly reminded of their northern heritage through the persistent presence of family memories and its intergenerational transmission across generations.

For example, Youngjoo recently became conscious of her grandparents’ displacement and its impact on her life. She had a strong bond with her maternal grandparents, who were from the North. Although she knew from a young age they were from the North, it was not until she got married that she realized the difference that her husband’s family, unlike her maternal grandparents, “has a long history in the regions [South] where ancestors and all of the families go to that place for Thanksgiving holidays or New Year’s holiday season.” Later, Youngjoo said it was not a lack of interest that made her “not put too much thought” into the memory of displacement. Rather, it was the banality of the memory that kept her from even contemplating it. Recalling the regular visits to her grandfather’s favorite northern food restaurant before his passing, Youngjoo shared that the place still evokes strong emotions in her. As she put it, it was just “so natural and so normal” to grow up with the memory. That was why it was only after her grandfather’s passing that her mother (second generation) revealed to her that “he closed the door and cried every family holiday,” longing for his family in the North. Since her grandfather tried to protect his granddaughter from his grief, Youngjoo was oblivious to the pain he carried his entire life. Her grandfather deliberately chose not to reveal his painful feelings to his granddaughter, which significantly differed from how he shared his memory with his daughter (second generation), who wept throughout her interview.

By contrast, Gina was familiar with her grandparents’ traumatic memories. She attributed them to her grandmother’s care toward her (grand)children as she always told them “to be vigilant about everything,” a reflection of her own wartime experiences. Although the way Youngjoo’s grandfather and Gina’s grandmother shared their memory with their granddaughters seemed entirely different, they both made every effort to protect their grandchildren from the emotional burden of being displaced. They demonstrated family memory according to what they wanted to share, how they wanted to share, and when they wanted their (grand)children to become aware of it (Wolf, 2019). However, it is important to note that some members of the third generation actively chose to remember and focus on more positive rather than traumatic tales of the past. For example, regardless of all the traumatic stories her grandmother shared, Gina chose to remember joyful memories exclusively. Sharing that her grandmother was always too sensitive about issues of survival and security due to her wartime experiences, Gina added that NK felt like a foreign country to her, which puzzled her whenever people asked where she was from.

Whenever I travel outside of Korea, people ask me whether I’m from North or South. Things get complicated, and I just say yes and then forget about it . . .. We eat traditional foods from there [North], such as potato noodles, and some bean soup, or giant dumplings . . .. I feel the North through the food culture. I feel the North as my roots or hometown only when I share things that are pretty normal and ordinary. I just want to have good and joyful memories—things like their [grandparents’] good memories in youth and having good foods.

For Gina, mnemonic mediators such as food played the role of “symbolic identification as more or less a leisure-time activity (Waters, 1990: 7).” In other words, for Gina, NK ethnicity was something that she wanted and chose to remember only through joyful memories, because ethnicity as a subjective identity could only be invoked by individual choice (Waters, 1990). In addition to bodily recall mnemonic mediators such as food, Gina consciously turned distressing wartime memories into joyful memories, although her maternal grandfather frequently guilted her into appreciating what she had. As Wiseman et al. (2006) documented in their research on Holocaust memories, Gina did not want to bring up her grandparents’ traumatic experiences to protect them, so she instead focused on joyful memories for mutual overprotection. She also chose to “forget” the difficult past while intentionally “remembering” the memory of joy. Her act of remembering and forgetting the past was deliberate. The stories of trauma, such as how a broker her grandmother hired to escape to the South set fire to another ship that was full of escapees, were intentionally removed and never discussed among family members. Thus, traumatic memories did not necessarily elide into how my participants constructed their postmemory or overshadow other affirmative family memories (Wolf, 2019).

Similarly, Donghoon was another participant who described being “fascinated” by “interesting stories, like living history. . . . you read about the stuff, but hearing it firsthand is a bit different.” He added that his grandfather embellished his experience of border crossing as an “adventure.”

They walked right from NK down to the border. They shared one potato that they had in the toolbox, that’s all they ate for a week, and then they found small huts where there was an old couple, and the old couple was like, “We want to flee too, but we’re too old. We can’t walk for days. So we’re kind of giving up.” But they gave them a good meal . . . there’s just more like those kinds of, how you help each other during hardship.

Donghoon portrayed his grandfather’s escape as an adventure. Although Gina and Donghoon were well aware of their grandparents’ traumatic experiences, they intentionally emphasized the joyful memories and positioned them as “a fascinating story from a foreign country” (Lowenthal, 2015) rather than exclusively framing them as traumatic memories that had to be silenced or suppressed. In other words, they chose not to be haunted solely by traumatic stories. Just as David Lowenthal (2015) described the past as a foreign country, my participants considered the North as a foreign country about which they felt mysteriously homesick, despite the spatial and temporal exile they experienced. This was partly due to the ways the memories were mediated. For example, Donghoon remarked that his grandparents’ memories of the North were more “light casual,” such as “the food was better there [in the North]” because they “suppressed the memory. . .there are some forward-looking because they don’t dwell on the past.” Gina and Youngjoo also mentioned that their parents shared their grandparents’ traumatic memories, whereas their grandparents never shared those traumas to protect their grandchildren. For this reason, the third generation figured out ways to replace traumatic memories with joyful memories. Although the second generation was more affected by painful memories, the third generation sought alternative ways to make sense of their heritage vis-à-vis a difficult past. Again, this did not mean that the third generation did not connect with traumatic memories. Rather, they employed multiple strategies to navigate the difficult past so that the trauma did not overwhelm their construction of heritage, which was also supported by how the subsequent generations of Holocaust survivors grappled with traumatic memories (Wolf, 2019).

Nonetheless, the feeling of uprootedness continued to be prevalent across the third generation, although the way they connected with their grandparents’ stories varied widely vis-à-vis how they perceived the notion of home. Participants Junhee, Youngho, and Donghoon, for example, strongly identified with their grandparents’ birthplace, regarding it as their ancestral homeland or roots, although none of them, including their parents, had ever physically visited the North. Youngho, for example, shared that he was always reminded of his grandparents’ displacement as he had “nowhere to go when all the other kids visited their grandparents’ hometown.” Donghoon, noting that he did not have an extended family or a home in the South, said that his family “never traveled down South to meet parents, or to meet family or anything,” although other Koreans “return to their old home and all their relatives gather.” They were aware of the absence of extended family members, although how they perceived the displacement was distinct from how the second generation understood it.

Furthermore, it is significant to highlight that some members of the third generation strongly resonated with other displaced populations across the globe such as Jewish people, African Americans, and immigrants. Donghoon and Junhee specifically mentioned the Holocaust in describing how their grandparents were persecuted and displaced to the South. In other words, although the way the third generation understood their grandparents’ displacement was not limited to emotional suffering or trauma, still, the feeling of uprootedness, or an aspiration to connect with their northern heritage, remained central to how they articulated identity and belonging. This accounts for their articulation of a transnational belonging (Jeon, 2020), critical cosmopolitanism (Compton-Lilly and Hawkins, 2023) and a global community of care (Jeon, 2021) where they build an emotional connection with global as well as local perspectives and exist in relation to Others from diverse backgrounds. This relational, reciprocal, and humanistic awareness provides meaningful insights into the cosmopolitan understanding of the world, where individuals can equip themselves with shared humanity across borders (Jeon, 2022).

Discussion

Throughout the study, I have shown that memory is not a mere accumulation of the past. Rather, I argue that memory is an avenue through which one constructs heritage by constantly rearticulating identity and a sense of belonging. Here, heritage refers to “the passing down of stories, mementos, legends, pictures, and other pieces of the past” (Levy, 2014: 2–3), which departs from collective memory (Halbwachs, 1992) or site of memory (Nora, 1989) that imposes a cohesive understanding of a certain ethnic, national, or religious group. The difference between the second and third generations is attributable to how and in what form they engaged with the memory. On the one hand, for the second generation, the memory was explicitly mediated through their parents, who directly experienced displacement. For that reason, their emotional pain was also mediated through memory. On the other hand, because the third generation had to process the memory on their own, the emotional and traumatic ties were relatively distant. For this reason, the second generation resonated more with the emotional or traumatic experiences and the feelings of their parents, whereas the third generation engaged with the memory in relation to their own construction of identity and belonging. Regardless of where they were born or where they now lived, their upbringing with the memories positioned them to invest in both real and imagined experiences of displacement, depending on how they made sense of their (grand)parents’ memory. I also want to underscore the individual awareness and consciousness that played a pivotal role in constructing individual identity and belonging. Although family memory held significant importance in one’s construction of postmemory, it did not necessarily determine how individuals approached, navigated, and performed the memory in constructing identity and belonging.

I further emphasize alternative ways of remembering that have contributed to expanding one’s construction of the past. Memory studies have been overflooded with the paradigm of trauma in understanding a difficult past. Contrary to this, my participants presented varying ways to understand their ancestors’ heritage, which has even extended to positive postmemories. This does not mean that the generation of postmemory was unaware of their (grand)parents’ traumatic memories. They made deliberate efforts to uncover or exclusively remember positive postmemories by intentionally forgetting traumatic experiences, which significantly influenced how they wanted to construct their identity and belonging. It is hard to confirm whether the postmemories of trauma obliterate other affirming memories, including postmemories of joy (Wolf, 2019). I would rather contend that the positive postmemories coexist with traumatic memories, which countered the overdetermined “paradigm of trauma” (Rigney, 2018). The multifaceted portrayal of the displaced empowered my participants to identify with the northern heritage, which they demonstrated with pride.

Furthermore, it is worth noting that all the second- and third-generation participants of postmemories resonated with their northern heritage, regardless of their current circumstances. Family memory work, its transmission across generations, and the resonance with their family’s place of origin illuminated the dynamism of family memories in connecting with one’s heritage. Given that all of my study participants resonated greatly with their northern heritage by referring to the North as their “roots,” how one constructs identity and belonging vis-à-vis postmemory is inherently associated with their construction of heritage. Apart from factual precision, heritage disseminates “exclusive myths of origin and continuance” (Lowenthal, 1998: 128), which is how one interprets the past and future while navigating the complexities of family memories as different groups, individually and collectively, engage in passing on their heritage (Levy, 2014). Therefore, I argue that my participants’ intergenerational mnemonic engagement, their act of (re)constructing it, the varying relations configured in multiple memberships, and, finally, their efforts to reconnect with heritage are all directed towards what I call a practice of (re)membering, a praxis in which one’s way of being and belonging is evolved with and through memory. The generation of postmemory’s (dis)engagement with multiple memberships was mediated by the construction of postmemories across time and space, which eventually developed into how they articulated heritage.

Conclusion and implications

Throughout the study, I have highlighted the nuanced ways in which the second and third generations navigate their (grand)parents’ memories of displacement from the North to the South during the Korean War. My study contributes to the field in three significant ways. First, I argue against the deficit perspective pervasive in the field of memory studies that intergenerational transmission of trauma inevitably results in victimization or other types of traumas. With this, I propose alternative ways of remembering to describe the multifaceted characteristics of the second and third generations of descendants alongside the traumatic memories of their ancestors who fled from the North to the South during the Korean War. Second, my research calls for an expansion of the scope of historical remembering and forgetting. In other words, cumulative efforts to understand other types of postmemories across the globe such as American slavery, within a larger context of decolonization, are more than necessary. Finally, understanding the connections and resonances among postmemories of subsequent generations, in addition to the second generation, can help us highlight the new directions in the field of memory studies.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author expresses deep gratitude towards her participants for their willingness to share the deepest side of their stories. She also extends her appreciation to the anonymous reviewers and journal editors for their invaluable, inspiring, and constructive feedback on a previous draft.

ORCID iD

Ahrum Jeon

Author biography

Ahrum Jeon is a PhD candidate at Boston College. Her research interests center on transnational migrants and their children, with a particular focus on their construction of racial and ethnic identities, their cross-border mobilization of linguistic and cultural repertoire, and the intergenerational transmission of family memories as cultural heritage.

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