Narratives of Separated Korean Families Overseas in South America: Reconfiguring space-time and meaning as possibilities for existence

Abstract

This article addresses the narrative of the separated families in an interpretive framework of meaning. Beginning in the early 1960s, there was a wave of immigration to South America, starting with Brazil and Argentina. Many of these immigrants were separated families with roots in North Korea, and those living abroad are considered compatriots who can be included in both South and North Korea. They turned to the Organization for the Reunification of Separated Korean Families Overseas in Toronto and the Committee on the Protection of Overseas Koreans in in Pyongyang to nd parents and children separated during liberation and the Korean War. The possibility of meeting family members in their hometowns reorganized the meaning of their lives and conrmed their existence in a dierent time and space than they had in the South. It was the family community, the foundation of their identity, that brought their dignity to the universal world. In a world free from a divided society, free from the magnetic eld of ideology, they felt inner freedom and practiced free will toward their homeland, parents and children.