ABSTRACT
This chapter explicitly turns to narratives produced by North Koreans themselves to interrogate how survival as a 'North Korean defector' is negotiated in sites of self-representation: memoir writing and autobiography. It is an effort to foreground North Korean narratives more concertedly to understand processes of mediation, translation and creation in these particular sites of politics. The chapter is especially interesting for Hwang's exaggerated authoritative tone. It shows how empathy centrally and problematically structures the conventional survivor stories that enact publics cross-culturally, that is from East to West, North Korea to the international, and North Korea to South Korea. Empathy as an object of intercultural communication and the enactment of narratives of recovery, redemption and salvation in North Korean defector memoirs constrains subjects from creatively translating experiences of suffering. The chapter ends with a return to the scene that began the memoir: Hwang's experience of difficulty and pain in making the decision to defect.
