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Broadcasting Solidarity across the Pacific: Reimagining the Tongp'o in Take Me Home and the Free Chol Soo Lee Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2020

Jina E. Kim Open the ORCID record for Jina E. Kim [Opens in a new window]
Jina E. Kim*
Affiliation:
Jina E. Kim (jinak@uoregon.edu) is Assistant Professor of Korean Literature and Culture at the University of Oregon.
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Abstract

The South Korean radio docudrama and adapted novel Take Me Home (1978) were based on the real-life case of Chol Soo Lee, who in 1974 was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States. Lee was later acquitted following a series of investigative reports and amid an emerging social movement calling for his release that spanned South Korea and the United States. Influenced by both the American civil rights movement and the Korean progressive minjung ideology, Take Me Home is among several popular radio programs and novels that helped spark this transpacific movement by critiquing US hegemony and Korean state nationalism and by reimagining the figure of the tongp'o in the context of a nascent pan-Korean consciousness. This article traces how the tongp'o is foregrounded, constructed, and ultimately saved in Take Me Home and argues that the radio novel's sonic imagination played a crucial role in broadcasting solidarity across the Pacific.

Keywords

Chol Soo LeeKorean/Korean American ethnic nationalismtongp'oradio dramatranspacific spacecontact zonetransnationalismcitizens movement
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 79 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 891 - 910
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Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2020

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