Files
Abstract
The Korean War (1950–1953) left behind two million civilian casualties, ten million separated families, and over 100,000 orphans—producing the largest number of dispersed families in Korean history. Its effects reverberate today not only on the Korean Peninsula but also in diasporic sites such as Poland and Sakhalin Island. This dissertation examines how Korean families displaced by colonialism, war, and Cold War divisions sustained kinship and articulated hope through letter writing. It explores the often competing yet easily conflated notions of home versus homeland, as well as the alienation, privatization, and mediation of hope, through cases of what I call “epistolary kinship”—familial ties maintained across time and space via correspondence—within the Korean diasporas. Drawing on de Certeau’s notion of spatial practice, this study argues that letter writing constituted a form of home-making and hope-making amid displacement.
The dissertation centers on four case studies that span distinct periods, geographies, and modes of separation. Chapter 1 examines the everyday letters of Alice Hyun, a Korean/American eldest daughter writing to her father in 1930s Hawai‘i, showing how gendered responsibilities shaped diasporic kinship and temporarily alienated her from collective political action—tensions that later re-emerged in her defection to North Korea. Chapter 2 turns to the letters of Yi Chungsŏp—modernist artist and Korean War refugee—who corresponded with his wife and children in Japan in the early 1950s. His illustrated marginalia and visual paratexts expressed privatized grief and longing shaped by postcolonial, wartime ruptures within an interethnic family. Chapter 3 analyzes the letters of North Korean war orphans sent to Eastern Europe, distinguishing among publicized, personalized, and privatized articulations of hope and kinship under conditions of state surveillance and abrupt repatriation. These letters reveal how affective ties challenged official narratives of ideological loyalty. Chapter 4 explores letters written by Sakhalin Koreans to a Japan-based civic activist between the 1970s and 1990s, demonstrating how epistolary networks enabled mediated family reunions and sustained emotional belonging across decades of immobility.
Through these case studies, the dissertation highlights the heterogeneity of Korean diasporic experiences shaped by colonial legacies and Cold War geopolitics, as well as differentiated meanings of “home” and “hope” across lines of class, gender, language, generation, and ideology. In all four cases, the epistolary space served as a material and textual medium through which Korean diasporic families sought not only to overcome alienation but also to transform the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural conditions that constrained their mobility. This study thus calls for renewed attention to the enduring role of correspondence in sustaining kinship and connecting divided communities. Foregrounding family letters as a key site for examining multiple layers of displacement, the dissertation contributes to broader conversations in diaspora, kinship, and epistolary studies, while expanding historical understandings of Korean migration and family separation.