for shining star 001

277MOVED BY WAR • YUH •

MOVED BY WAR Migration, Diaspora and the Korean War

ji-yeon yuh

JAAS OCTOBER 2005 • 277–291 © THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

THE STUDY OF KOREAN MIGRATION has long been a stepchild constrainedby the nationalist visions of larger and more powerful fields. Among U.S. scholars, Korean migration largely has been defined as immigration

to the United States and examined within the sometimes conflicting con-

texts of Asian American studies and immigration/assimilation studies.1

Within Korean studies, Korean migration has been of interest primarily

as another perspective from which to examine the nation, such that the

most researched aspect of Korean migration isn’t migration at all but rather

the overseas activities of Korean nationalists and independence fighters.2

In short, the questions asked of Korean migration have been rooted in

research agendas that take the nation, whether the United States or colo-

nial Korea or South Korea, as its point of reference. It is only in the past

decade that scholarly attention has turned to Korean migration with some-

thing approaching seriousness. Yet most scholarly approaches remain

constrained by national paradigms and the difficulties of multiple-coun-

try research. The result is a lack of global perspective on what is most

surely a global phenomenon. Although preliminary, this article is an at-

tempt to sketch a global framework for post-1945 Korean migration. The

goal is not so much to show linkages—by now we all know that migra-

tion is about global linkages—but to stimulate research questions rooted

within migration itself and to transcend nation-bound perspectives.

278 • JAAS • 8:3

Post-1945 Korean migration has been shaped by the division and

militarization of the Korean peninsula. The Korean War in particular has

had a dramatic and profound impact. Most, if not all, of Korean migra-

tion since 1950 can be traced to the war and its consequences. Taking the

Korean War as a starting point for discussing Korean migration high-

lights the international nature of that migration, reminding us forcefully

that Korean migration is a global phenomenon linking multiple coun-

tries in multiple ways. The many different kinds of migrants—military

brides, adoptees, labor migrants, political exiles, international students

turned immigrants—ended up in dozens of countries around the world.

With the exception of adoptees, most fall in the broad category I term

“refuge migrants,” those seeking refuge from the consequences of the

Korean War. This migration—although spurred by the nationalist struggle

embodied in the war and division—leads to community and identity con-

figurations that rely on shared memory and experience rather than

nation-state ties.

The most immediate migrations spurred by the war were military

bride migration and adoption migration, and both were heavily oriented

toward the United States. Since 1950, more than 100,000 Korean military

brides have immigrated to the United States. Due to the ongoing military

relationship between South Korea and the United States, Korean women

are still marrying U.S. soldiers and arriving in America. At its peak in the

1970s and 1980s, more than 4,000 women were arriving annually. Now,

it’s estimated that about 2,000 per year are immigrating. The majority of

Korean immigration to the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s

can be traced to military brides, who sponsored relatives and thus be-

came the first link in chain migrations. By inviting their family members

under the family reunification provision of U.S. immigration law, it is

estimated that military brides are responsible (directly and indirectly) for

bringing forty to fifty percent of all Korean immigrants since 1965.3 Some

women are the beginning of chain migrations that include dozens of ex-

tended family members. Nearly every military bride I met had invited at

least one family member to the United States.

The first Korean military brides began arriving in the 1950s. Of the

more than 150 women whom I met during the early and mid-1990s, the

279MOVED BY WAR • YUH •

earliest to arrive had come in 1951. As wives of U.S. citizens, they were

able to immigrate during a time when immigration from Korea and most

of Asia was legally blocked. Thus, they make up the largest group of Ko-

rean immigrants to the United States between 1945 and 1965, when im-

migration laws were liberalized after some five decades of strict, anti-Asian

immigration restrictions. Daniel B. Lee notes that between 1962 and 1968,

Korean women who immigrated as wives of U.S. citizens accounted for

39.4 percent, the largest single immigration category, of all Korean immi-

gration to the United States. Lee estimates that between 1950 and 1989,

some 90,000 Korean women immigrated to America as wives of U.S. sol-

diers.4 They followed their husbands to every corner of the United States.

Adoption migration is the other immediate category of migration

traceable to the Korean War. Evangelicals Bertha and Harry Holt saw doz-

ens of abandoned babies in South Korea, many of them fathered by Ameri-

can soldiers, and they began an adoption service in 1955. A year earlier in

1954, the South Korean government had created a social service agency

whose purpose was to place Korean children for overseas adoption. The

demand for babies in the United States and in Europe turned out to be

pretty strong. Initially, the emphasis was on placing orphans and on mixed-

race children left behind by their non-Korean fathers. But by the 1960s,

international adoption from Korea was dealing in children whose par-

ents were pressured by poverty, and by the 1970s, as the rate of pregnancy

among unmarried women rose, young pregnant women were being se-

questered in homes for unwed mothers and pressured to give up their

babies. Approximately 200,000 children have been sent to the United States

and another 50,000 to Europe, where they make up the largest ethnic

Korean community in that region. The latest statistics show that annually

about 2,000 are still being sent overseas despite dramatic increases in the

rate of domestic adoptions.5

Although most Korean adoptees are not war orphans, the image of

the Korean War orphan seems virtually indelible. One Korean American

woman recalls that her adoptive mother always told her that her biologi-

cal father had died in the Korean War and that she was a war orphan.

Armed with that information, she repressed the vague memories of par-

ents and siblings from her early childhood in Korea as mere dreams. As a

280 • JAAS • 8:3

young adult, this woman discovered that although she had been born in

1957, the Korean War had ended in 1953. No longer able to repress those

dreams, she set out to search for her biological family, and she found

them, mother, siblings, and a whole extended family. That woman, of

course, is Deann Borshay Liem, who chronicled her journey in the docu-

mentary film, First Person Plural.

The Korean War, due to the particularly complex political situation

of the early Cold War as it unfolded in East Asia, also created a small

group of Korean POWs who refused to be repatriated to either North or

South Korea. Fifty-five of them ended up in Brazil. When South Korea

began to send migrants to South America, primarily to Brazil, in the early

1960s, these former POWS became the nucleus of what is now an ethnic

Korean community of about 50,000 in that country. Furthermore, many

Koreans re-migrated to the United States from South America and have

formed their own communities at the interstices of Korean American and

Latin American immigrant communities.6

But, why were South Koreans migrating to Brazil in the 1960s? That

migration was pushed by the Park Chung Hee government, specifically

through the 1963 Emigration Act, to relieve perceived pressures of unem-

ployment and to increase foreign exchange earnings. The same act also

encouraged labor migration to Germany, most notably of men who

worked in mining and women who worked as nurses. Thus, Germany has

the largest community of adult Korean immigrants in Europe and boasts

a second generation of German-born and German-speaking Koreans,

many of them the multi-racial children of Koreans and Germans.7

But, what does this migration have to do with war? War was an ever-

present threat in the decades following the 1953 armistice that ended

military hostilities, and those who could grabbed the chance to escape.

This desire to leave matched up nicely with South Korean government

concerns about overpopulation and unemployment leading to a restless

populace less easily controlled and less likely to put up with the rigors of

maintaining a society on the constant alert for war. Hence the 1963 Emi-

gration Act encouraging South Koreans to migrate abroad. Thus, I argue

that the Korean War created an expanded refugee migration that led Ko-

reans to Europe, Latin America, and the United States in search of secu-

281MOVED BY WAR • YUH •

rity. I call this development refuge migration. This refuge migration is hid-

den in other categories, such as the marriage migration of military brides

and the labor and professional migration of miners, doctors and nurses.

Although ostensibly migrants or immigrants rather than refugees fleeing

from an immediate danger, their life narratives demonstrate that flight

from war and its consequences is a crucial factor in their migration.

As a United Nations-defined category, refugee migration is limited

in scope, and the process of its definition can be overtly political. But,

most scholars and refugee workers agree that whether or not they have

official UN designation as such, refugees are fleeing an immediate danger

such as war or persecution. Often, the definition of a refugee—whether

by the UN, aid workers, or scholars—is tied to the equally politicized

definition of human rights: refugees are fleeing situations where their

human rights are being violated or are in immediate danger of being vio-

lated. Economics—like a famine—generally isn’t considered enough un-

less the famine is immediately life-threatening.

Refuge migrants, on the other hand, are fleeing perceived danger and

seeking peace of mind. This is significantly different from the traditional

immigration model in which immigrants are seeking a better life, a better

education, and an opportunity to move up the economic ladder. Refuge

migrants are motivated by a deep psychological need to leave behind chaos,

and insecurity, and trauma, and they seek out emotional/mental peace

and a stable environment that doesn’t feel like it’s always threatening to

explode. The consequences of the Korean War have created an environ-

ment in Korea, especially in South Korea, where the urge to leave behind

trauma and seek peace of mind has been particularly strong. But because

migration has been categorized as labor migration, family migration, or

economic migration (that is, “seeking the American Dream” migration),

this refuge migration has not been recognized as such.

The story of Cho Soonyi, who left South Korea for the United States

in 1951, barely a year after the Korean War broke out, is the story of a

military bride whose migration bears the hallmarks of refuge migration.

Indeed, one could argue that she is a war refugee, for she left Korea at the

height of the Korean War. Growing up in colonial Korea, she had always

longed to escape what she saw as a backward, stagnant country. Once the

282 • JAAS • 8:3

war broke out, getting out of Korea became a top priority, as Ms. Cho

explained:

I wanted to . . . get out . . . Korea. . . . Go foreign country. Japan, America, don’t matter. So I, I, that’s, that was my wish so, only way you can come to America is you have to marry.

Marrying an American, however, was much easier said than done.

Although, by her own account, there were many Americans who wanted

to marry Korean and Japanese women, such marriages did not give these

Asian brides the legal right to enter America until the law restricting Ko-

rean and Japanese immigration to the U.S. was lifted in 1952. For Ms.

Cho, that made marriage pointless: “You can marry, but, you marry, you

cannot come with your husband. So why, why should you get married?” Even

after American immigration laws were revised to allow Asian military

brides to accompany their husbands to America, red tape made the pro-

cess difficult.8 Besides, meeting a suitable American man wasn’t easy ei-

ther. It was only a series of lucky breaks, she said, that made it possible for

her to leave Korea:

I was a lucky enough to meet nice young man, you know. I met and I come over Japan and got marry. Ah . . . everything was just like a planned. I got very fortunate, lucky.

While working as a sales clerk at a PX in Seoul, she began to date a

white American soldier, an enlisted man. In 1949 he was transferred to

Japan. The Korean War broke out the following spring. With the help of

another friend, she was able to board a ship in Incheon, a port city near

Seoul, and flee to Japan. There she managed to find her American boy-

friend. At age twenty-one, Ms. Cho became Mrs. Mullen and one of eleven

Korean women in 1951 to enter the United States as wives of American

citizens.9

Grandmother Lee, who immigrated on the basis of her nursing pro-

fession, is also a refuge migrant. She grew up in what is now North Korea

in a Christian family during the Japanese colonial period. Through mis-

sionaries, she went to Shanghai to study nursing. She worked at a mission

hospital there after graduation. Then World War II ended, and when Ko-

rea was liberated from Japan, there was talk of something called the 38th

283MOVED BY WAR • YUH •

Parallel and dividing Korea in two, and she decided to return home. It

was chaos once she reached northeast China. Thousands of Koreans were

scrambling to return home, trains were packed, and Russian soldiers were

everywhere. When she arrived home, she found that her family was doing

better than most because they had some land and were able to grow their

own food. Soon, though, they discovered that they were suspect to the

communist Koreans who were beginning to take over the northern half

of Korea. First, they were Christian; and second, they were landowners.

The family had some difficulties, and these problems only increased after

the Korean War broke out in June 1950. Grandmother Lee, by this time

the mother of three young children, took a job as an interpreter for the

U.S. military when they passed near her hometown. She had learned En-

glish in China during her education as a nurse. One day, the unit for which

she worked asked her to get on a boat and come with them below the 38th

Parallel. It would be just for a few days, her commander said. At the time,

UN forces controlled the area. But, the day after they crossed the 38th,

intense fighting broke out and she never made it back to the other side.

She was stuck in the southern half, away from her husband and three

small children, away from her family, in a land full of strangers. Over the

next two decades, she worked as an interpreter and as a nurse. She made

connections with churches and missionaries. She worked in camptowns,

treating military prostitutes for venereal disease and in orphanages treat-

ing abandoned children. She was the epitome of the caring, successful

nurse and socially engaged, educated woman. But, her personal life was

painful. Every night, she had the same nightmare: she stands in front of a

thick black river. On the other side stand her three children, crying out

for their mother. She cannot go to them, for something invisible holds

her back as she strains to cross that thick black river. So every night she

woke up drenched in a cold sweat. Some days, when she had no work, she

would go to the port city of Incheon and trail her hand in the waters of

the Yellow Sea, thinking to herself, these waters flow to the shores of the

North, where my children are.

One day, she could no longer stand being so close and yet so far, know-

ing that it was only a few hours drive north and knowing also that she

could not make that drive. So, she used her missionary connections to

284 • JAAS • 8:3

obtain a job as a nurse in a California hospital. It was the 1970s, and she

was among the first of the nurse migrants from South Korea to enter the

United States.10 She was running away from national division and the

pain of separated families, but that dream followed her across the Pacific.

Even in sunny California, so far removed from Korea and its problems,

she still woke up nightly drenched in that cold sweat, that black river still

visible, the calls of her children still ringing in her ears, the guilt still as

sharp. She died a few years ago in rural Georgia, never having seen or

heard from her children again. Although she wanted to reach out and

find them as so many other separated families had found each other since

the 1980s, she was afraid that her background as an interpreter for the

U.S. military and as a Christian would harm her children by association.

So, she didn’t search for them.11

Ms.Cho/Mrs. Mullen and Grandmother Lee demonstrate that what

seems like marriage migration or labor migration may actually be refuge

migration. Mrs. Mullen was fleeing a war and a place that she views as a

backwards, colonized, place. Mrs. Mullen also put a romantic, modern

gloss on her refugee story. Although she had already described her mar-

riage as “lucky” because through it she achieved her goal, she emphasized

later in her narrative that it was the result of a very modern “falling in

love.” Grandmother Lee’s migration, on the surface professional labor

migration, was actually a flight from the trauma of war, national division,

and separated families. Her migration can also be counted among those

Korean immigrants who are originally from the North. Some scholars

estimate that they may account for as much as 40 percent of Korean im-

migration to the United States. In my interviews with such immigrants,

they speak of the fear of renewed war, their social alienation in the South

as a northerner, and the search for stability as motivating factors in their

migration.

While Korean migration is generally seen as only coming from South

Korea, there has been movement in and out of North Korea as well. Con-

sider the case of Mr. Park, whom I interviewed in northeastern China.

His case is difficult to categorize, for it has elements of return migration,

of refuge migration, and of exile. He was born somewhere around the

border between Manchuria and Korea in the 1930s and grew up in Man-

churia. He fought in the Chinese army during the Korean War, and when

285MOVED BY WAR • YUH •

the war ended he stayed in North Korea, where he was given work as a

journalist and where he married and began to raise a family. One might

say that the war brought him back home, except that he possessed Chi-

nese citizenship as a veteran of the army and he always felt curiously left

out of North Korean society. The Korea he remembered from childhood

was not this divided Korea. In the early 1970s, he had returned to China

with his family and, while he declined to elaborate, was probably a victim

of the various purges that North Korea undertook to rid the country of

ethnic Koreans with foreign citizenship.12 When he told me his life story

in 2001, he was living in a rural area of Yanbian, the autonomous Korean

prefecture near the border with Korea. In his village were several other

veterans who had also stayed in North Korea only to return to China in

the 1970s with their North Korean wives.

Then there is Mrs. Kim, who had come to China in the 1950s as a

guardian for North Korean war orphans and had ended up marrying an

ethnic Korean in China. As she explained while narrating her life story to

me in 2001, North Korea designated war orphans as children of martyrs

and developed a special system to educate and raise them. The children

were sent in groups to friendly socialist countries such as the Soviet Union

and China, accompanied by nurses, guardians, and teachers. In addition

to attending local schools, they were also given daily education in Korean

language, history, and other subjects. When they came of age, they were

called back to attend college or other institutions in North Korea. Host

countries subsidized the education and care of these children. There is

very little, if anything at all, about these children in the literature on North

Korea, on migration, or on orphans.

Finally, there are the refugees from North Korea, who despite mul-

tiple requests have not been granted official refugee status by the United

Nations. Since the 1990s, Koreans have been crossing over into China in a

wave of refugees fleeing from famine. While they are primarily seeking

asylum in South Korea and hiding out in China, they are also going to

countries such as Mongolia and seeking refuge in the diplomatic offices

of sympathetic countries. Their migrations can be traced to the Korean

War and its impact on the Korean peninsula, for while the ongoing fam-

ine in North Korea is the immediate cause, the instability, repression, and

286 • JAAS • 8:3

conflict created by the political result of the Korean War, the framework

of national division and opposing nation-states, are underlying causes.13

In the summer and early fall of 2001, I met with nearly twenty North

Korean refugees hiding out in China—elderly men and women, young

couples with children, middle-aged women who had crossed the border

for food and other goods to take back to families in North Korea—and

each one stated that the fear of another war was pervasive. It was clear

from their accounts that the threat of war was used to control the popu-

lation and justify the extreme militarization of the North in ways similar

to the militarization of the South that reached its apex in the 1970s and

1980s under Park Chung Hee and Chun Du Hwan.

The exodus out of North Korea has resulted in an influx into South

Korea. Once limited to a trickle of political defectors that had amounted

to just over 600 total through 1993, the number of North Koreans enter-

ing South Korea soared from an annual rate below ten to fifty-four in

1994. Since then, North Koreans have been entering South Korea at a rate

that has dramatically increased, from 148 in 1999 to 1,285 in 2003, ac-

cording to South Korea’s Ministry of Unification. With resettlement aid

from the South Korean government, they are trying to integrate into South

Korean society, but the process is difficult. They are a different type of

immigrant—not quite refugees and not quite defectors, now living in the

other half of their native country, a half rendered oddly foreign through

six decades of division and political animosity and yet eerily familiar as

well. Yet they are not a new type. Instead, they are following in the foot-

steps of the war refugees of the 1950s, the northerners who went south

and the southerners who went north in an internal migration that be-

came an international migration with the closing of the border at the

DMZ that demarcates North Korea and South Korea. Despite a common

language, culture, and history, these migrants found themselves in vastly

different social and political worlds where the other half was routinely

maligned as the ultimate enemy. For those northerners who came south

in the 1950s, the most common response was to cultivate a stridently

public anti-communism, in part to counter suspicions that all northerners

were spies for the communist North and in part because the South Ko-

rean government demanded it.14 But, that option is not viable for most of

287MOVED BY WAR • YUH •

the recent refugees, who can see the flaws of the capitalist South as easily

as the flaws of the communist North, and thus many find themselves strug-

gling to find meaning in their lives and to reconcile their historical and

social perspectives with those of their new comrades, the South Koreans.

But, the South Koreans have proven to be not particularly welcoming.

Just as southerners had shunned the northerners who came south in the

1950s, South Koreans are shunning the North Korean refugees. Parents

complain if a North Korean child attends the same school as their chil-

dren, employers prefer not to hire northerners, and even landlords prefer

not to rent to northerners. South Koreans also display a distinct superior-

ity complex toward northerners, such that an early North Korean defec-

tor wrote a memoir of his experience in South Korea titled “Are You Re-

ally So Much Better Than Us?”15

While the origins of Korean migration in the Korean War can be kept

within the framework of the nation, the consequences of that migration

cannot. A diasporic consciousness is developing among the younger gen-

erations, but this is not the classic diaspora oriented toward the home-

land. Rather, it is a consciousness that takes the diaspora, not the homeland,

as the point of reference and seeks community in multiple arenas: among

other diasporic Koreans, among other racial and ethnic minorities, in

local communities, in international networks.

It is perhaps epitomized in communities of adoption migrants. The

Korean adoptee organizations in the United States that have been formed

by adult adoptees (rather than by adoptive parents or social workers) and

similar organizations formed in Europe are primarily interested in get-

ting to know each other and forming a community of Korean adoptees.

This is very clear in the mission statement of the 2004 Gathering, which

drew more than 400 Korean adoptees from around the world to Seoul.

This was the third such gathering; the first had been held in D.C. in 1999

and the second in Oslo in 2001. One might surmise that a gathering in

the homeland carried special meaning and that this sentiment would be

reflected in the mission statement. But, the mission statement says little

about connecting to roots or rediscovering one’s Koreanness. Rather, it is

focused on creating networks among adoptees worldwide and creating

an international community of Korean adoptees. Their interest is not in

288 • JAAS • 8:3

the so-called homeland. It is in each other and the community they might

create together. With the growing awareness that there are other ethnic

Koreans in other locales around the world, there is an accompanying sense

of global connections more important than the bilateral connection be-

tween one’s Korean “homeland” and one’s country of residence.

In the 1980s, ethnic Koreans in China read with great interest a series

of articles in the Korean-language Yanbian Daily on ethnic Korean com-

munities around the world. Jung Pan-ryong, a scholar of Korean litera-

ture and an ethnic Korean in China, had written the articles after visiting

these communities on various overseas trips following the liberalization

of China. For his fellow Koreans in China, his articles—which later were

published as a book—opened up a whole new world of Korean diaspora.16

One middle-aged woman in Yanji City noted that she was overwhelmed

to discover so many different Koreans, so many different life styles, and

yet so many similar struggles as a minority. As a result, she explained, her

sense of identity as a Korean had expanded beyond Korea and China and

she had begun to see that she was part of a global phenomenon.17

This is the direction that the Korean diaspora as a whole is taking.

Their origins may be in wars fought in the homeland, and assimilation

into the majority culture of their countries of residence may be the ex-

pectation; but, their envisioned future is in diasporic communities and

identities that privilege neither the homeland as the center nor assimila-

tion as the goal. Expressions of this global diasporic consciousness came

up in different contexts and in different forms during fieldwork in ethnic

Korean communities, and in interviews conducted between 1999 and 2003

with more than 200 ethnic Koreans of all ages and social classes in China,

Japan, and the United States. They are of course not common to all eth-

nic Koreans. The immigrant generation was the least likely to express such

sentiments, the younger generations the most likely. But, such expres-

sions are reinforced by changes in ethnic Korean communities and the

increasing number of global connections among different diasporic groups.

The upshot of this is that Korea, whether North or South, is getting

decentered in the diaspora. Overseas Koreans are no longer looking to

Korea as their primary reference point for an identity that lifts them above

the stereotypical labels accorded racialized minorities. Instead, they are

289MOVED BY WAR • YUH •

identifying with others in diaspora and with fellow minorities. They are

asserting their brand of Koreanness as authentic and are challenging the

authenticity of Koreanness in Korea. At the same time, they are also as-

serting themselves as Japanese, or as American, or as Chinese. Resident

Koreans in Japan, for instance, are naturalizing as Japanese even as they

insist on keeping and using ethnic Korean names. Other resident Koreans

in Japan are fighting for local voting rights as residents without Japanese

citizenship.

Nations, of course, have a difficult time with this approach, and thus

the expression of this freewheeling diasporic identity—with its demands

for multiple inclusion and rights—is welcome neither in the homeland

nor in the countries of residence. Accommodation between nations and

diasporas like the Korean diaspora remains an ongoing and difficult pro-

cess. Despite all the border crossing, decentering, and transcending, na-

tions remain powerful forces. But, examining migration and diaspora on

its own terms allows scholars to think beyond the nation and to recog-

nize the ways in which migrants are imagining different constructions of

community, of history, and of identity.

Notes 1. The two defining texts have been Bong-Youn Choy, Koreans in America

(Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979) and Illsoo Kim, New Urban Immigrants: The Korean Community in New York (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). Only recently, such as with the work of Kyeyoung Park on Koreans from Latin America, have U.S. scholars studying Korean migration looked beyond U.S. borders.

2. Until the work of anthropologist Lee Kwang Gyu in the 1980s, the vast majority of published research within Korean Studies on Korean migration or on overseas Koreans concerned the independence movement. Within Korean studies internationally, there is still very little research on Korean migration or on diasporic Korean communities. What research there is has been limited to anthropology or sociology, with very little in history. A special volume of positions; east asian cultures critique (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press) focused on Korean diaspora. The Korean and Korean American Studies Bulletin (New Haven, Conn.: East Rock Institute), a relatively obscure journal, is one of the few Korean Studies forums that regularly publishes in Korean migration and recently published a series of four issues focusing on Korean diaspora. See volumes 10 and 11, published from 1999 through 2001.

290 • JAAS • 8:3

3. See Daniel Boo-Duck Lee, “Korean Women Married to Servicemen” in Korean American Women Living in Two Cultures, Young In Song and Ailee Moon, eds. (Los Angeles: Academia Koreana, Keimyung-Baylo University Press, 1997), 94–123. The quoted statistic is on page 97. Statistics on the actual number of Korean women who entered the United States as wives of U.S. military personnel are not kept by any agency, but must be teased out of records kept by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the City of Seoul’s records of marriages between Korean citizens and citizens of foreign countries, and records kept by the South Korean Emigration Office. With these sources and others, Lee has compiled the most complete figures available on this subject.

4. Ibid., 96–97. 5. These figures come from the Overseas Koreans Foundation and the Ministry

of Health and Welfare in South Korea, August 2004. 6. See Ilsoo Kim, New Urban Immigrants, and Kyeyoung Park, “‘10,000 Senora

Lees’: The Changing Gender Ideology of Korean-Latina-American Women in the Diaspora,” Amerasia 28:2 (2002): 161–181.

7. See works by Lee Kwang Kyu, such as Sye-gye Sok-ae Han Minjok, Suntaek Badeun Han Minjok (Seoul: Uri Munhaksa, 1992); Jae-Jung Hanin [Koreans in China] (Seoul: Iljokak Press, 1994); and Jae-Woi Dongpo [Overseas Koreans] (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2000).

8. Although Public Law 271, also known as the War Brides Act, was passed in 1945 to allow soldiers to bring their wives to the United States, no provision was made for brides from Asian countries. At that time, immigration from most Asian countries was legally prohibited as a result of several laws passed during the 1910s and 1920s. Several amendments to Public Law 271 allowed Asian wives of soldiers to enter the United States, but these amendments expired within one or two years (Ms. Cho appears to have entered the U.S. under one of these amendments.). It was not until 1952 that the law was changed to allow Asian wives of U.S. citizens entry into the United States without legal discrimination. For a discussion of the changes in the law, see Michael C. Thornton, “The Quiet Immigration: Foreign Spouses of U.S. Citizens, 1945–1985” in, Racially Mixed People in America, Maria P. P. Root, ed. (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 64–76.

9. This brief life narrative of Ms. Cho is taken from the longer version published in Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

10. The United States recruited heavily in South Korea and the Philippines for nurses and other medical professionals, spurring tremendous growth in nursing schools in both countries. For a brilliant study of the phenomenon in the Philippines, see Catherine Ceniza Choy’s Empire of Care.

11. Grandmother Lee narrated her life story to me during multiple sessions in 1999 at her home in the American South.

291MOVED BY WAR • YUH •

12. Andrei Lankov discusses some of these purges in relation to ethnic Koreans with Soviet citizenship. See From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945 to 1960 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

13. See Meredith Woo-Cumings, “The Political Economy of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and its Lessons,” unpublished article, Dec. 7, 2001. Draft available on the web at www.asck.org/reports/woocumings1.pdf.

14. The South Korean government sponsored numerous organizations of northerners whose sole purpose was to propagandize on the evils of communism and support the ruling regime of the South. For a study of the northerners based on extensive fieldwork in villages where they congregated and settled, see Kim Gwiok, Wollam-min-eu Saeng-hwal Gyunghum-gwa Jeong-chae-seong [The Life Experience and Identity of Northerners Who Came South] (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 1999).

15. Jang Young Cheol, Dangsin-deul-I Geu-rukke Jallasseo-yo [Are You Really So Much Better Than Us?] (Seoul: Sahwe Pyeongron, 1997). Jang defected to South Korea following the fall of the Berlin Wall while he was a student in East Germany, attended Sogang University in Seoul, and eventually started a chain of cold noodle shops. His memoir details the difficulties of adjusting to a capitalist society, the contempt and disinterest of South Koreans, and his changing views about both North and South Korea.

16. Jung, Pan-ryong. Saegye Sok-ae Han Oori Minjok [Koreans in the World] (Yanji City, China: Yanbian University Press, 1997).

17. From a personal conversation in Yanji City, China in 1999.