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A Female North Korean Defector’s Crossing Borderland and Awakening Transnational Subjectivity in Hyeonseo Lee’s Memoirs

  • Chunwon Research journal
  • Abbr : Chunwon Research journal
  • 2017, (11), pp.209-236
  • Publisher : Chunwon Research Society
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature > Korean Literature

Bae, Gaehwa 1

1단국대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

This study is one of case studies on “feminization of migrant” as a global phenomenon and female migrants’ transnational subjectivity, mainly focusing on Hyeonseo Lee’s English memoir The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (William Collins: 2015). This study sheds light on a female North Korean defector’s characteristic as not a refugee or victim-subject but a “transnational subject” who survived through border-crossing and several name changes. After escape from North Korea, Lee renamed herself in five times to hide the North Korean identity, disguising herself with fake identities of a few Korean Chinese. By buying or changing citizenship, she promoted her social status (or exchange value) symbolized by jobs and incomes higher than before. Lee felt herself as an exile or ‘non-entity’ in China, trying to recover her identity through immigration to South Korea. But Lee found that North Koreans hided their identities for avoiding discriminations toward them, and assimilated themselves to ethnicized citizenship of South Korea. Unlike other North Korean settlers, she decided to be ‘a stranger’ in South Korean society. Later, when rescuing her family from North Korea, she had a chance to glance a transnational community based on unconditional “love for humanity.” Now she considers herself as not a South or North Korean but a global citizen, and from this standpoint advocates human rights of both North Korean people and defectors. Hyeonseo Lee’s memoir shows new type of transnational subject and a possibility to think human rights not from a state based citizenship but from global citizenship.

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