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Kichung Kim
The Korean diaspora has now become a worldwide phenomenon. How has this come about? Until the twentieth century, the first stage of the Korean diaspora-affliction-driven and confined mostly to Russia, China, Japan, and the United States-had passed into history without leaving much record of its traumas. Unlike the first stage of the Korean diaspora, the second stage since the mid-1960s has largely been a voluntary, opportunity-seeking emigration of Koreans to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia in search of economic, professional, and educational opportunities. Over the last forty years, a remarkable evolution has thus occurred to the Korean diaspora. Not only has it become worldwide, it has also swelled to more than five million overseas Koreans living in 140 countries. How has this growth of the worldwide overseas Korean community affected the evolution of Korean diaspora literature? It is a bilingual literature composed in Korean and the language of the host/ adopted country, mirroring the bicultural and bilingual reality of the worldwide Korean diaspora community. One key question for overseas Korean writers is how they resolve the competing demands, pressures, and influences of the two different traditions and communities they embody in themselves, the very different cultures of Korea and their host/adopted country.
History
Korean studies is no longer a discipline that is pursued only in Seoul and Pyongyang or in Beijing and Osaka. Many important centers of Korean studies now exist outside Korea: in the United States and Canada, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand, China and the former Soviet Union, and in many countries in Europe. The reason for this proliferation is obvious. Until recently, that is, the1950s, Koreans living outside Korea resided mainly in
Korean Studies, Volume 25, No. 2. љ2002 by University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.
China, Japan, the United States, and the countries comprising the former Soviet Union, but now Koreans are everywhere throughout the world. As Segye yi hanminjok (The Korean People in the World), compiled by the Ministry of Unification of South Korea, points out on the very first page of its summary volume, as of 1996 there were more than 5.3 million Koreans living in 140 countries,1 in addition to the 68 million Koreans living in South and North Korea. Koreans living outside Korea thus represent approximately 7.2 percent of all Koreans.2 In terms of the proportion of its people living outside to those living in the home country, Koreans rank second only to the Jewish people.3
The Korean diaspora has now become global, and so have Korean studies and Korean literature. Before proceeding any further, lets look at a map of the worldwide Korean diaspora, for which Im indebted to Segye hanminjok pyonlam (A Handbook of the Korean People in the World) and Prof. Yoon Hong-key of Auckland University of New Zealand. The numbers for a few of the countries such as the United States and Japan might be on the low side, being figures compiled in 1993; however, the map gives us a comprehensive picture of the worldwide Korean diaspora at a glance.4
How has this worldwide Korean diaspora come about? As I studied the history of the Korean diaspora, I began to see that not only does it go back a long way but also that much of it is intertwined with many of the tragic events in the history of the Korean people. Although I realize the folly of generalization, I must venture one generalization at the outset of this essay, and I take some comfort in its obviousness. I see the history of the Korean diaspora mainly in two stages: first, an affliction-driven diaspora, from the earliest recorded incidents through the Korean War (1950-53) and its aftermath; and second, an opportunity-seeking diaspora from the mid-1960s to the present.
I present only a summary of the details of the first stage of the Korean diaspora here, just enough to support my argument that it was an affliction-driven diaspora. First of all, I think of all those Koreans forcibly relocated to China when Paekche and Koguryo fell to the combined forces of Tang and Silla. According to the Samguk sagi, when Paekche fell in 660 c.e., more than 12,000 Paekche people were transported to China, and when Koguryo fell eight years later, more than 38,000 households were removed to southern and western parts of China. Counting five persons to a household-a conservative figure-that comes to more than 150,000 Koguryo people who were involuntarily removed to China.5 We also know that a large number of Koreans relocated to Japan when Paekche and Koguryo fell.
The next large involuntary dispersals of Koreans came during the Mongol invasions and occupations. According to Koryosa, in the year 1253 alone more than 200,000 Koreans were forcibly transported to China by the Mongol forces.6 Although accurate figures are hard to come by, between 50,000 and 100,000 Koreans are believed to have been abducted to Japan during the Japa
Figure 1. A map of the Korean diaspora. Adapted from Segye hanminjok pyonlam [A handbook of the Korean people in the world] (Seoul: Tongilwon, 1996).
nese invasions of 1592-98, and out of that number only a little more than 7,000 were ever repatriated. Additionally, thousands more were sold off as slaves to Portuguese merchants and were literally scattered to the world, never to be heard from.7 Though in smaller numbers, abduction and enslavement also occurred during the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636.
I shall give only the barest outline of the more recent Korean emigration to China, Russia, Japan, and the United States starting in the second half of the nineteenth century and continuing through the first half of the twentieth century. Some of these emigrants might be considered opportunity-seeking rather than affliction-driven. Beginning in the 1840s and 1860s, there were emigrations of landless Korean peasants across the northern borders into China and the Russian Far East, driven largely by poverty and famine, who were later joined by displaced Korean peasants and political exiles after Korea was annexed by Japan. During the Japanese occupation of Korea, a large number of Korean laborers went to Japan to find work, and later during World War II a large Korean labor force was conscripted to work in Japan, many of whom became stranded in Japan after the end of the war. Korean emigration to the United States began with more than 7,000 Korean laborers recruited to work on the sugar plantations of Hawaii between 1903 and 1905.8 They were followed by a steady trickle of students, political exiles, and picture brides. Later, during and after the Korean War (1950-53), 28,205 Korean wives of U.S. soldiers moved to the United States and were later joined by many of their family members.9
Until the mid-twentieth century, this first stage of the Korean diaspora, largely affliction-driven and confined mostly to China, Russia, Japan, and the United States, appears to have passed into history without leaving much of a record of its traumas, unless we include the diaries and memoirs left by a small number of Korean scholars and scholar-officials abducted to and repatriated from Japan during the Imjin War (1592-98).
Unlike the first stage of the Korean diaspora, the second stage since the mid-1960s has largely been a voluntary, opportunity-seeking emigration of Koreans to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia in search of economic, professional, and educational opportunities. I am not suggesting, however, that just because their emigration has been largely voluntary and opportunity-seeking, it has been without affliction. Though the nature of their affliction might have been different, it has been real enough: they suffered from the pervasive, virulent racism in the white-dominated countries of the Americas and the West; from the traumas of having to start their economic struggle over with practically nothing in countries where the language and customs were unfamiliar to them; and from the many unexpected conflicts and difficulties that cropped up in their new environments, such as severe marital and generational conflicts.
Although some 15,000 Koreans, including war brides, students, and orphans, came to the United States between 1950 and 1964 in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War,10 the most significant impetus for this new opportunity-seeking Korean diaspora11 came in 1965 when changes in the U.S. immigration law made it possible for a greatly increased number of Asians- including Koreans-to enter the United States as immigrants.12 Implemented in 1968, the changes in the U.S. immigration law allowed for up to 20,000 Korean immigrants per year,13 and this number rose to 30,000 in 1976.14 At about the same time, Canada and South American countries also began allowing Koreans to enter as immigrants. A few years earlier, West Germany had also allowed entry of Korean miners and nurses.15 After 1970, Korean emigration to the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia accelerated, swelling the total number of Koreans living outside Korea to more than five million by 199516 with nearly two million in the Americas and more than half a million in Europe.17
One example of this dramatic expansion of the overseas Korean population during the last thirty years is the growth of the Korean community in Southern California, which includes the city of Los Angeles. According to Kapson Yim Lee, editor of the bilingual edition of The Korea Times LA, the population of Koreans in Southern California in the early 1970s was 10,000, and today it has swelled to half a million (1999); in 1974, 54 Korean churches were listed in the Korea Times Directory, and today there are 844 churches; in 1974 there were six Korean lawyers and seven Korean cpas, and today there are 291 lawyers and 217 cpas; and in 1974 there were 26 Korean-run medical facilities, and today there are 439 such clinics and hospitals.18
In most of these overseas communities with a sizable Korean population, Koreans live surrounded by their own social, economic, religious, and cultural institutions such as Korean churches (as well as Buddhist temples in urban centers such as Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area), Korean language schools, Korean-language newspapers (and sometimes bilingual editions as in Los Angeles), Korean chambers of commerce, literary associations, community and community service organizations, and the like. For example, Professor Yoon of Auckland University has told me that in 1999 New Zealand, with about eight thousand Koreans, had four Korean-language biweekly news-paper-magazines and two Korean-language Saturday schools, one of them with four hundred students and twenty-nine teachers. He adds that a woman who runs a pizza shop in Auckland is also a writer of childrens stories. I mention these anecdotal details because they strike me as fairly representa-tive.19 In countries and cities where there are larger Korean communities, there are correspondingly larger numbers of Korean community organizations.20
With the globalization of the world through advances in air travel and telecommunications, the distance between Korea and the overseas Korean communities has literally shrunk, making telecommunications instantaneous and even the farthest places in the world no more than a days journey from Korea. Faster, more frequent, and easier travel and communication between Korea and the overseas Korean communities have greatly increased exchanges of all kinds between them, including more translations both of works of Korean literature into English and works of overseas Korean writers into Korean. There are also exchanges of writers, translators, and scholars. Additionally, as Korea has become more industrialized and the living standards of Korean middle classes have risen, emigration of Koreans has ceased to be an irreversible one-way emigration out of Korea, for lately there has also been reverse emigration back to Korea. In sum, there has been an extraordinary expansion of exchanges of all kinds between Korea and the worldwide overseas Korean communities.
Thus, during the last forty years, a great evolution has occurred within the Korean diaspora. Not only has it become worldwide, it has also swelled to more than five million overseas Koreans living in 140 countries. How has this growth of the worldwide Korean diaspora community affected the evolution of Korean diaspora literature?
Korean Literature in Diaspora: Its Language and Theme
At an earlier stage of writing this paper, I had thought that, except in China, overseas Korean writers would write in the language of their host/adopted countries, be it English, Portuguese, or Russian, for example, rather than in Korean. But as I continued with my research on the evolution of the worldwide Korean diaspora, I came to a different conclusion. I came to see that the Korean language has not only maintained but increased its importance in the overseas Korean communities during the last forty years, particularly in the core of these communities where Korean is the predominant language in nearly every medium of communication, whether daily speech, personal or business correspondence, print, radio, or television. In this core of the overseas Korean communities, works composed in Korean have maintained their importance, constantly in demand by the daily and weekly Korean-language newspapers, monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, and yearly Korean language publications as well as Korean radio and television programs. Increasingly, they are also in demand by the newspapers, magazines, and other media back in Korea. Furthermore, in this core of the overseas Korean community, a continual percolation of Korean visitors, sojourners, and new immigrants has ensured and will ensure the continuing use and vitality of the Korean language. Korean literature evolving in the overseas Korean community will therefore be composed, I believe, in Korean as well as in the language of the host/adopted country.
Whether writing in Korean or the language of the host/adopted country, whether first-, 1.5-, second-, third-, or fourth-generation Koreans living in China, the former Soviet Union, Japan, Australia, Brazil, or elsewhere, a key question for overseas Korean writers will be how they go about resolving the competing-sometimes conflicting-demands, pressures, and influences of the two different traditions and communities they embody in themselves. In other words, the very different cultures of Korea and their host/adopted country. Because they represent the confluence of two different cultures, their lives are bound to be a hybrid of languages, cultural traditions, education, personal and communal memories and histories, and even multiple ethnicities. Rooted in two different-even multiple-traditions and communities, whether or how much they feel divided in themselves will depend largely on whether or not they are allowed full participation in the economic, political, social, and cultural life of their host/adopted country. The more they are denied full participation, the more divided they are bound to feel and the more difficult the task of resolution and integration.
Koreans in Japan have probably suffered the most acute sense of self-division, since they have suffered the most extreme forms of exclusion and alienation in their host country. As one student of the subject has put it:
Japan is a closed, culturally and ethnically homogeneous society. Cultural pluralism has been an unknown concept in Japan. Compared to other advanced nations, Japan remains much more closed to the entry of outsiders. These conditions have made the adaptation process of Koreans in Japan extremely difficult. For the Koreans in Japan, Japanization has meant a surrender to an empty promise, thus creating tension in ethnic relations.21
Additionally, for Koreans in Japan, becoming naturalized must have meant identifying themselves with the enemy of their own country, which would have produced in them a sense of betrayal as well as self-betrayal. Thus, even though the number of Koreans becoming naturalized in Japan has been climbing yearly,22 it has been both a prospect and procedure that has taken a tremendous toll on them.
In Hang jjokppari (A half-Jap) Yi Hoesong represents this conflict of self-division the Koreans in Japan have been experiencing. The most searing episode of the story concerns the self-immolation by fire of a college friend of the narrator who had been naturalized as a child together with his parents. But now as a college student, rejected by both the Japanese and Korean student groups, he envies the narrator for his unnaturalized, Korean, outsider status. And when he is rejected by the mother of his Japanese girlfriend, unable to cope with his despair and confused by his being neither Korean nor Japanese, he commits suicide. The narrator of the story, however, unlike his friend, shows he is able to take advantage of his outsider status, turning its pain into something of an opportunity for growth. As a Korean living in Japan who has decided not to be naturalized, the narrator is not Japanese either legally or by allegiance, because by nationality and allegiance he is Korean. But he also realizes he is not fully Korean either because of his language (Japanese), Japanese education, and life-long residence in Japan. So literally he is half of one and half of another. This is why he calls himself, self-mockingly, Hang jjokppari (a half-Jap). But instead of falling through the gap of inbetweenness and perishing-as does his friend-he is able to turn the inbetweenness into a sort of link between Korea and Japan, and as half of one and half of another, he is able to examine critically not only Korea and Japan, and their strained, paradoxical relationship, but also his own paradoxical relationship to both Korea and Japan.
In a sense, therefore, the narrator of Hang jjokppari has turned being half of one and half of another into being something more than merely Japanese or merely Korean. It makes sense, therefore, when Yi Hoesong says that the work of Korean writers in Japan has been appreciated by the Japanese because the Japanese see in them a new dimension added to Japanese literature, thus making Japanese literature more multivoiced.23 Similarly, if we can accept Yis work as part of Korean literature, it adds to Korean literature as well. The works of Korean writers in Japan such as Yi Hoesongs have thus made important contributions to both Korean and Japanese literature by expanding their boundaries.
What Yi Hoesongs work shows is that the overseas Korean writer has to be something of an amphibian, capable of navigating in two different worlds, capable of being half of one and half of another, that is, at once an insider as well as an outsider. This may be the one gift indispensable to a writer, and it may be why a writer is a creature of inbetweenness, an exile even in his own homeland. We can see this further illustrated in the self-imposed apprenticeship of the late Anatoli Kim, a well-known Korean Russian writer.
Born in 1939 in Kazahkstan, he himself did not experience the traumas of the forced relocation of Koreans in the Soviet Union in 1937, but in his autobiographical volume called Chowon,24 Kim recalls his maternal grand-mothers tearful recollection of the horrors of the 1937 relocation:
Really we had to leave everything behind: the new house we had only just finished building; two horses and one milk-giving cow; the entire rice crop of the year; the jars full of kimchi we had just prepared . . . and beddings neatly piled one on top of another; and shining brass vessels left on the low tables just as they were.25
A deeply rooted conviction of being an outsider, of living in another peoples country rather than ones own, appears to have persisted in Kims family and in Kim long after the forced relocation was over and the period of confinement to Central Asia had ended in 1948. Kim recalls especially those moments in his childhood when his father-a school teacher-principal and government official-encountered something unpleasant or had a quarrel with a neighbor. At those times, his father would look uneasy as if he had no confidence in himself or felt guilt-stricken, and Kim recalls that whenever this happened, even as a child he would suddenly realize Koreans were not natives of the country where they were living.26
And it seems to have been Kims rooted conviction that in order to become a writer, he must reinforce this sense of being an outsider by serving an apprenticeship of extreme isolation and hardship. He therefore purposely sought a term of exile in his own country so that he could learn not to be at home in [his] home,27 so that he could achieve an exiles detachment and vision. Such seems to have been the logic of Kims decision to be drafted into the Soviet army instead of getting an exemption, which he could have easily obtained as a student at a prestigious art school in Moscow. For the next three years, he lived the life of a common soldier, which is only one rung above that of a convict in the state-run prison system. In fact, through most of these three years he was posted to an army unit stationed at a state prison. At age twenty-one, at the conclusion of his army service, he felt he was one with the parched landscape of the Central Asian steppe, ready to cope with any hardship life could offer him,28 for he was now equipped with the ability to see the world as it is, a gift indispensable to becoming a writer. And even when he identifies himself with Kim Si-syp, one of Koreas most celebrated outsiders, it is not so much because Kim Si-syp is a Korean or a distant ancestor of his but because Kim Si-syp, like himself, is an outsider and exile to his own society, the condition Anatoli Kim had himself struggled to attain in order to train himself to be a writer.29
Yi Hoesong, Anatoli Kim, and others like them, children of Korean immigrants, can either feel trapped between Korea and their host/adopted country or feel privileged to have the freedom to navigate in different languages, traditions, and visions. The price of their privilege will be a measure of exile from their host/adopted country as well as Korea. In return they will possess the perspective and vision of an exile, which will give them the power and vision to remake the literature of their host/adopted countries just as the African, Hispanic, Native, Jewish, and Asian American writers have remade American literature during the twentieth century in language, theme, and vision. This will be their challenge.30
Literature in Korean
The evolution of Korean diaspora literature mirrors the evolution of the worldwide Korean diaspora. As that diaspora is still evolving, so is Korean diaspora literature. A description of Korean diaspora literature can therefore be no more than a snapshot of its evolution at a particular moment and place. One thing is certain, however, and it is that this is a bilingual literature, composed in Korean and the language of the host/adopted country, mirroring the bilingual and bicultural reality of the worldwide Korean diaspora community.
For in the core of the immigrant Korean community, there exists a kind of linguistic two-way continuum with Korean at one end and the language of the host/adopted country at the other.
Given such dynamics of the immigrant Korean community, the literature composed in Korean, mostly by the first- and 1.5-generation Koreans, though less prestigious, is no less significant than the literature composed in the language of the host/adopted country. As I have suggested, this is the literature of the core of the immigrant Korean community, dealing with the lives of Korean men and women literally in transit between arrival and settling down, making the difficult crossing between different languages, cultures, and physical circumstances, on their way to becoming assimilated into the host/adopted country. Because it is written in Korean, its readership is limited to the local Korean community-though occasionally a few of these works are published in Korea, having been awarded a minor literary prize-and for this reason it is all but unnoticed and unread by the readers of the host community, unlike some of the works written in the language of the host/adopted country, which gain national and international readership.
The irony of this neglect is that in their representation of Korean immigrant life the best of this literature equals the best works written in the language of the host/adopted country. Furthermore, though written in Korean and for the Korean immigrant community, the best of this literature reach out toward the host community as well, building a kind of literary bridge between the immigrant Korean and host communities.31 Take, for example, the work of Jay Sang Rhee, probably the best-known Korean writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Because he writes in Korean, his readership is limited to the immigrant Korean community, although his writing deals not only with that hazardous crossing every immigrant family makes between languages, cultures, and physical circumstances, but also with what is an essential aspect of life in America, the perspectives, values, and peculiar flavor of life in the immigrant Korean community. Translated and made available nationally, his writing and others like his would add much to the literature of the nation.
There is further irony to this neglect of overseas Korean literature composed in Korean. Through translations and exchanges, there have been numerous contacts between the Korean literary establishment and the overseas Korean writers writing in the language of the host/adopted country. Until recently, however, overseas Korean writers writing in Korean have mostly been ignored in Korea. Thus, for example, Chang-Rae Lees work, which has to be translated from English to Korean, is well known in Korea, while Jay Sang Rhees work, which needs no translation, is hardly known.
So far as I have been able to observe, there is little contact between the two groups of overseas Korean writers-those writing in Korean and those writing in the language of the host/adopted country. A number of differences separate them, of course: generational, linguistic, educational, as well as perspectives and values. Yet each needs the other, for each can complement the other. Who can represent the struggle of the immigrant Korean community during the last forty years better than a writer who is himself a member of that community? By the same token, who can bridge the immigrant Korean community to the host community better than the children of the Korean immigrants born and reared in the host/adopted country? One of the challenges of the twenty-first century will be finding a way to establish a closer connection between these two groups.
Limits of Korean Diaspora Literature: Questions and Prospects
During the last forty years, Koreans living outside Korea have generally experienced gradually decreasing ethnicity-based discrimination in the host/ adopted countries. Even in Japan, Koreans have had some success in fighting job discrimination in both public and private sectors.32 And, as we can see in the works published since the end of the Cultural Revolution and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Korean writers in China and the former Soviet Union have gained greater freedom to express themselves. They can now say what they wish to say instead of only what they are permitted to say. According to Chengri Zhao, for example, the end of the Cultural Revolution in China was like a second liberation that ushered in a period during which the Korean writers in China could pursue the discovery of self, and the search for ones own artistic viewpoint.33
The gradual rise in the economic, political, and social status of the overseas Koreans, coupled with the gradually decreasing ethnicity-based discrimination, will help to break down the social isolation of the Korean immigrant community. And with the enhancement in the economic and political fields and improved social status will come greater social mobility and equality, which in turn will accelerate the assimilation of Korean immigrants into the language and culture of the host/adopted country, thus increasing the hybridity and heterogeneity of the worldwide Korean diaspora community.
For the children and grandchildren of Korean immigrants, therefore, many other aspects of their lives, such as class, gender, sexual orientation, the locality of their residence, and multi-ethnicity, will become issues as important as their ethnic identity. They will acknowledge their Korean ethnicity, but increasingly they will refuse to be defined by their ethnicity alone, and this attitude will be reflected in their work, especially in the work of the children and grandchildren of Korean immigrants who have grown up during the last forty years.
An important result of this assimilation into the life of the host/adopted country will be a generational shift in language: the children and grandchildren of Korean immigrants will increasingly speak and write in the language of the host/adopted country rather than in Korean. In consequence, some might question the Koreanness of their literature, literature written neither in Korean nor in Korea, having little to do with life in Korea. Hence the question: What makes this literature Korean which is composed neither in Korean nor in Korea and whose subject matter has little to do with life in Korea? One could answer that it is Korean not only because it is the work of the children of Korean immigrants but also because it mirrors important aspects of the Korean community wherever it may be-in North America, Brazil, Australia, the former Soviet Union, or elsewhere.
But the question will persist. Granted it is the literature of the children and grandchildren of Korean immigrants, but are the children and grandchildren themselves Korean? Havent they become citizens of the host/adopted country by completing the crossing between arrival and assimilation that their parents and grandparents had initiated many years before? And if they have completed the crossing, in what sense could they still be called Korean rather than Japanese, Russian, Australian, or American? Furthermore, in the course of completing the transition, the immigrant Korean community will have become more than just Korean in its language, culture, and even in its population, for it will have incorporated various elements of the host/adopted country. So also will its literature have evolved into something more than Korean, for the writers and their works will have become hybrid in language, style, and theme: Korean American, Korean Japanese, Korean Russian, Korean Brazilian, and so forth. Consequently, not only will this literature differ markedly from Korean literature, but it will also differ markedly among its various branches. Korean diaspora literature in the twenty-first century will thus necessarily be a literature of hybridity and heterogeneity.
Besides, most of the writers of this literature, except for someone like Yi Hoesong of Japan, would probably not see themselves primarily as Korean nor identify themselves with Korea. For them, like Willyce Kim, a Hawaii-born, third-generation Korean American writer, Korean heritage is just one of many facets of her identity.34
Finally, one might ask: How many generations must pass before the children of immigrants could be claimed by the host/adopted country? In Japan, where Koreans have been discouraged and denied assimilation by law and nativist hostility, one can see why they have refused to have their work claimed by Japan even though their work is written in Japanese. But in other countries and under changed circumstances where Koreans are not forever seen as aliens, where they see themselves becoming part of the host/adopted country, and their work accepted as part of the national literature, should they still be claimed by Korea?
Bellow, Mailer, Roth, and other American writers of Jewish ancestry are seen simply as American writers. Similarly, shouldnt the children and grandchildren of Korean immigrants who write in the language of the host/adopted country be seen as writers of the host/adopted country? Or should they be claimed by both Korea and the host/adopted country? To put the question in another way, when does Korean diaspora literature cease to be Korean diaspora literature and become incorporated into the literature of the host/adopted country? Should we simply do away with national or nationalistic labels altogether and recognize with Edward Said that No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind?35
As the distances between Korea and the overseas Korean communities have shrunk, Korean literature and Korean literary tradition have become more readily available to the overseas Koreans just as the works of overseas Korean writers have become to Koreans in Korea. How will closer and more frequent exchanges between Korean literature and Korean diaspora literature affect each other? Since each will differ considerably from the other in language, theme, and perspective, will the exchanges be mutually beneficial, each for example, providing the other with an outsiders views and perspectives, thereby ensuring that each will become multivoiced and multivisioned? Making sure this happens will be another challenge of the twenty-first century.
Summing up the achievements and prospects of Korean American writers, Elaine Kim, who has written extensively on Korean American and Asian American literature, writes:
Korean American writers will have to cross some boundaries and maintain others as they struggle to create a new, hybrid culture from jumbled elements of U.S. and Korean life. Meanwhile, the heretofore small body of work by these writers gives us a tantalizing glimpse into the kinds of Korean American literature we can look forward to in the twenty-first century, when what has been missing will surely burst forth to populate the pages of U.S. American literature with surprises, great beauty, and new meanings.36
In fact, as she adds in the Afternote, this new Korean American literature has already burst forth with a number of new works by Korean American poets and fiction writers.37
Will there be a similar bursting forth of Korean diaspora literature in Canada, Western Europe, South America, Australia, New Zealand, the former Soviet Union, and other worldwide Korean diaspora communities in the years to come? I believe there will be.
NOTES In the course of writing this paper I have received much help from Frank Hoffmann, Robert J. Fouser, Ross King, Yoon Hong-key, Stephen Epstein, Counsul Lee Kee Woo, and last but not least, Kumja Paik Kim, my wife. My sincere thanks to them all.
1. Segye yi hanminjok [The Korean people in the world] (Seoul: Tongilwon, 1996), X. These are approximate figures.
2. Yi Kwanggyu, Segye yi hanminjok, I: 17.
3. Segye hanminjok pyonlam [A handbook of the Korean people in the world] (Seoul: Kungmin Saenghwal Cheyuk Hwoeyihwoe, 1993), 11.
4. Segye hanminjok pyonlam, 16.
5. Samguk sagi: Kugyokpyon, trans. and ed. by Yi Pyong-to (Seoul: Ulyu Munhwasa, 1977), 346, 426.
6. Samguk yusa yongu nonsonchip [Selected essays on the Samguk yusa] (Seoul: Paeksan Charyowon), I: 167.
7. Yi Chaeyon, Imjin woeran poryo silgi yongu [A study of the documentary literature of the Korean captives of the Imjin War] (Seoul: Pakijong Publishers, 1995), 33-46.
8. Segye yi hanminjok, I: 102-3.
9. Won Moo Hurh and Kwang Chung Kim, Korean Immigrants in America: A Structural Analysis of Ethnic Confinement and Adhesive Adaptation (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1984), 49.
10. Segye yi hanminjok, I: 128.
11. The term new emigration is used in Segye yi hanminjok, I: 127.
12. Segye yi hanminjok, I: 127.
13. Segye yi hanminjok, I: 127.
14. Segye yi hanminjok, I: 129.
15. Segye yi hanminjok, I: 127.
16. Segye yi hanminjok, X: 20.
17. Segye yi hanminjok, X: 11.
18. Korea Times, Bilingual Edition, Vol. 8, No. 7 (July 1999): 3.
19. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, works written in Korean by the local Korean and Korean American writers-though not commanding as large a readership as some works written in English-have maintained their importance for the local Korean American community during the last thirty years. Two among them, Mr. Rhee Jay Sang and Ms. Choe Jung, publish their works regularly not only in the local Korean-language newspapers and periodicals but also back in Korea. In fact, both have won important literary prizes in Korea. At an award ceremony held in Seoul in 1999, honoring the best works written in Korean by overseas Korean writers throughout the world, Rhee Jay Sang was among those who were honored. And in the coming years we will see more, not fewer, works composed in Korean by Koreans living outside Korea in China, the Americas, and elsewhere. Thus, just as literature in English has become a literature written in many countries throughout the world, literature in Korean is also becoming a literature written in many countries throughout the world.
20. According to a survey published in 1996, the Los Angeles area had the largest number of Korean language schools with 235; New York second with 147; and Chicago 83. There were 79 Korean language schools in Russia; 72 in Canada; 61 in Kazakhstan; and 38 in Germany. As for Korean-language newspapers and radio and television stations, again Los Angeles and New York had the largest number with more than half a dozen daily newspapers as well as weeklies and more than half a dozen radio and television stations in each area. Next to the United States, Canada, Japan, China, and Brazil had the largest number of Korean newspapers and radio and television broadcasts, although in Japan, unlike in the other overseas Korean communities, the language of the Korean media is Japanese rather than Korean. For more details, see Segye yi hanminjok, X: 11-58.
21. Choi Hyup, Overseas Koreans and Their Adaptation Patterns, Korea Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1 (1994): 56.
22. The number rose from 232 in 1952 to 8,244 in 1994. The total number of Koreans naturalized in Japan from 1952 to 1994 came to 184,397. Segye yi hanminjok,
IV: 183.
23. Yi Hoesong, Ilbon sogui hanguk munhak kwa munhagin [Korean literature and Korean writers in Japan), 1996 Munhak yi hae [1996: The year of literature] (Seoul, 1996), 27.
24. Anatoli Kim, Chowon [The steppe], trans. by Kim Hyontaek (Seoul: Taeryuk Yonguso Publications Department, 1995). Chowon is the title of the volume in Korean translation, originally written in Russian. Several of Kims works have been translated into Korean.
25. Kim, Chowon, 14.
26. Kim, Chowon, 20.
27. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 184.
28. Kim, Chowon, 331-33. Both the title and the subtitle of this autobiographical volume allude to the authors sense of exile and freedom achieved through hardship and solitude.
29. Kim, Chowon, 325.
30. A nationthat is not open to new people and new talents (ideas) cannot remake itself. The same is true of a literary tradition. One of the ways American literature maintained its vigor and freshness in the twentieth century was by constantly adding new talent not only from the existing talent pool but also from those groups that had previously been excluded from full participation. The first new group thus added was the African American, followed by the Jewish American, the Hispanic and Native American, and most recently the woman and Asian American. Not only were the works of these hitherto excluded groups brought into American literature, they were brought onto the center stage of American literature alongside the works of European Americans who had traditionally monopolized that stage. Thus, what had in the past been confined to the periphery had been brought into the center.
As T. S. Eliot pointed out in his essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), the emergence of each new talent reshapes the entire tradition. The emergence of the literature of women and the so-called ethnic writers has literally brought about a second American Renaissance, and the result has been an immeasurable enrichment of American literature. Today American literature is unthinkable without the works of women and the so-called ethnic writers. Writers of Korean ancestry, wherever they may be outside Korea, thus have an opportunity to help reshape the literature of the host/ adopted country, bringing to the center what had been confined to the literary fringe, to borrow Robert J. Fousers phrase. According to Fouser, Korean writers in Japan might be helping to bring about a similar change in Japanese literature. For this and other insights, Im indebted to his essay, Finding Friends: Korean Writers in Japan Today.
31. So far, few details of the worldwide Korean diaspora literature have emerged except in places like the United States, Japan, the former Soviet Union, and China, principal locations of Korean diaspora populations until the second half of the twentieth century.
And interest in and research into worldwide Korean diaspora literature are just beginning. In 1999, to give one example, a semigovernmental foundation, Jaewoe Kyo-pojaedan (Overseas Koreans Foundation), published an anthology of literary works written in Korean by Koreans living outside Korea titled, Jaewoe tongpo munhak yi chang [A window into the literature of overseas Koreans] (Seoul: Jaewoe Kyopo-jaedan, 1999), an anthology of more than three hundred pages, including poems, short stories, and essays selected from some fifteen hundred entries submitted by Korean men and women living in twenty-nine countries outside Korea. This volume presents works by overseas Koreans living in eighteen countries, including Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kazahkstan, New Zealand, Paraguay, Peru, and the United States.
32. Segye yi hanminjok, IV: 159-64.
33. Chengri Zhao, An Overview of Contemporary Korean Literature in China, in Koreans In China, ed. Dae-Sook Suh and Edward J. Shultz, Papers of the Center for Korean Studies, No. 16 (Honolulu: Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawaii, 1990), 154, 156.
34. Elaine H. Kim, Korean American Literature, An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King-Kok Cheung (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 173.
35. Edward W. Said, Culture And Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 336.
36. Kim, Korean American Literature, 179-80.
37. Kim, Korean American Literature, 179-80.
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