Collective Memories and Identities Exiles in the ‘Ethnic Homeland’: Trauma, Discourse, and the Negotiation of Diasporic Identity for North Koreans in South Korea.

and the number is rapidly growing by several thousand each year. For North Koreans, getting to South Korea involves an extremely arduous migration that involves multinational border-crossing and exposure to brutal traumas that include near-death experiences, fear of capture and repatriation, rape, forced marriage, and other ordeals. After arrival in South Korea, evidence shows that North Koreans struggle to find acceptance, grappling with difficulties such as unemployment, economic stress, educational problems, family conflict, high levels of depression and anxiety, post traumatic stress symptoms, and low self esteem. Despite an official ideology in South Korea that ostensibly includes North Koreans as fellow dongpo (ethnic brothers), they find themselves rejected as polluting outsiders. The inability of South Koreans to accept their North Korean ‘brothers ’ and the poor level of settlement success for North Koreans in South Korea raise interesting questions about several important issues related to the cultural geography of Korea and indeed the future stability of the North Asian region. This study considers how North Koreans manage the combined pressures of traumatic migration experience, prejudice, and isolation after arrival in South Korea. Drawing on a range of Korean and English language materials as well as the transcripts of origina