Multivocal Post-Diasporic Selves: Entangled in Korean Dramas

I interrogate my personal diaries documenting my life in New York, Beijing, Tokyo, and Sydney over a 20-year period. Taking bearings from Bakhtinian thoughts, I explore the emergence of my post-diasporic identity as a second generation Korean American through watching South Korean dramas. By conversing with journals kept over a 20-year period, I recreate my past, relive memories, and illuminate how dichotomized ways of thinking about language and identity happen within (post-) diasporic speakers. In writing this piece, I venture into the complex terrain of the multilingual self. My focus here is not on past or present Selves but on the processes of the “in-between space” of becoming, exploring the particular dynamics and processes of how certain ways of thinking and seeing are shaped at particular moments, in particular languages, for particular individuals.