Diaspora and Unification: the Changing Landscape on the Korean Peninsula and A
Diaspora and Unification: The Changing Landscape on the Korean Peninsula and A Diasporic Community’s Response—With the Focus on Korean Americans in the Greater Houston Area Alex Jong-Seok Lee Sonia Ryang Introduction To return to the unified state, which is the original form of the Korean nation—this is the mantra that one hears from many South Korean commentators, professional and lay people alike. The return to one Korea, the original form, in this view, is a return also to the normal and true state that reflects the ontological identity of the Korean nation, or so the historical discourse goes. Koreans, as President Moon Jae In stated in front of the 150,000 citizens of Pyongyang on his historic visit to North Korea in June 2018, have lived together for five thousand years and have lived apart, in partition, for seventy years, the assertion being that it is wrong that one nation be divided into two separate states and that, hence, we are required to right this wrong. Emotions aside, the breadth of the range of discussions about the possibility of unification—or the lack thereof—currently evident in South Korea is truly remarkable. Public and academic discussions are filled with propositions concerning how to Transnational Asia: an online interdisciplinary journal Volume 3, Issue 1 https://transnationalasia.rice.edu https://doi.org/10.25613/efkr-hk17 2 understand, approach, and attain national unification, reflecting the rapidly changing situation on the Korean peninsula that the world witnessed during 2018. Indeed, since the dawning of that year, the Korean peninsula has seen a series of unprecedented events, events that had been utterly unthinkable even as late as 2017.
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