Remembering the Forgotten POWs of the Korean War: Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters in a Transpacific Literary Tradition

Abstract

This essay begins with an overview of the historical context and the whole process of the 76 Korean War POWs who defected to India, Brazil, and Argentina after the armistice of the war. It then addresses the significance of Choi In-hun’s almost obsessive reworkings of The Square. It goes on to examine the intertextuality between The Square and its Korean and Korean American descendants: Han Su-san’s Our Time and The Apocalypse of Time and Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters. The bilingual, transnational, and intertextual study ultimately argues that the four Korean and Korean American narratives remember the POWs who left the Korean peninsula in search for a home in neutral countries as the most conspicuous personifications of the unending Korean War and the divided Korean nation during and after the Cold War.