Abstract

This research examines the realities of diaspora through novels depicting North Korean (NK) refugee women and investigates how communities extend hospitality to their gender. The characters in these novels stand their ground as proactive subjects with critical consciousness despite sexual exploitation and social oppression, and therefore they also urge a rethinking of the writer’s role in representing the subaltern’s voice. I focus on Youth Sonata by Kim Yu-kyeong and A Third Home by Yi Kyoung-ja, examining the identity choices of NK refugee women as objects of hospitality, the issues of membership in their receiving country, the role of the subject of hospitality, and boundary crossing between subject and object of hospitality. The women depicted in Youth Sonata each have a complicated past and must confront the other within themselves and accept them, becoming the object of their own self-hospitality. In A Third Home with identity conflict between her past and present, a NK refugee woman opens a third space that can accept difference. A scene of intersection in China, where the subject of hospitality becomes a foreigner and the object of hospitality becomes a foreigner with agency, demonstrates the (im)possibility of unconditional hospitality. Presenting NK women refugees’ gendered suffering as part of history and the process of accommodating the coexistence of difference in everyday life, the novel suggests that hospitality is possible.