Rethinking Gender, Generation, and the Everyday Life Through Alice Hyun in Hawai’i, 1936-1941

Aug 30, 2026

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A graduate thesis examines Alice Hyun’s years in Hawai’i from 1936 to 1941, focusing on how everyday choices and constraints shaped her radical, transnational stance. It argues that migration experience, Hawai’i as an exile locality, and gendered limitations within existing structures influenced her decision to defect to North Korea. By re-reading Hyun’s correspondence and situating it within contemporaneous social contexts, the work challenges Cold War historiography and expands diaspora history through a woman-centered perspective.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryPaper Templates

FormatDOCX

Pages39

Reading Time14 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Alice Hyun’s Life and Argument

Current Literature

RETHINKING GENDER, GENERATION, AND THE EVERYDAY LIFE THROUGH ALICE HYUN IN HAWAI’I, 1936-1941 Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences Hannah Park INTRODUCTION Alice Hyun, the eldest daughter of the Methodist reverend and Korean independence activist Soon Hyun, was born in Hawai’i in 1903, spent most of her childhood in Seoul, and fled to Shanghai with her family when she was sixteen due to her father’s involvement in the anti-Japanese March First Independence Movement of 1919. After several years in Shanghai, the family moved to Hawai’i, where Alice spent most of her adult years. During the Pacific War, Alice, along with her brother Peter, joined the U.S. military as an interpreter and censor in Tokyo and then Seoul, until she was deported back to the U.S. for interacting with the Korean Communist Party. She headed to North Korea alone in 1949, where she ultimately was charged as an American spy and executed around 1956. Alice Hyun’s story has been sensationalized in Korean media due to alleged romantic links with prominent Korean socialist leaders like Pak Hŏn-yŏng or Yŏ Un-hyŏng, but there have been few serious academic investigations into her life. While her life story itself is fascinating, I seek to specifically examine Alice Hyun’s time in Hawai’i, where she was involved in the Communist Party, and shed light on what it means to be a Korean nationalist, an American citizen, and a woman in Hawai’i in the 1930’s. In this thesis, I argue that Alice Hyun was a transnational, radical woman who challenged power relations, especially gender norms, through her everyday life. I also argue that the experience of migration, the specific locality of Hawai’i as a land of exile, and first-hand experience of limitations imposed on women in existing structures shaped her decision to defect to North Korea. I believe a close investigation of Alice Hyun’s experience in Hawai’i can provide a deeper understanding of the influence of Communism and socialism on diaspora communities. As an independent, determined woman, Alice Hyun also offers an alternative to the male-dominant, political narrative of modern Korean history and insight into the reality for women at the time. Current Literature Since the South Korean government was founded in 1948 after three years of U.S. trusteeship, the writing of contemporary Korean history has been largely shaped by the anti-communist, pro-American Cold War paradigm, and any scholarly investigations of figures who have criticized the U.S. for their military involvement in Korea or have had communist tendencies have been suppressed. Soon Hyun, Alice Hyun’s father, is one of these figures, according to Robert Kim. The digitization and consequently increased accessibility of primary sources on the Hyun family and the publication of Soon Hyun’s autobiography and genealogy by his son David Hyun in the early 2000s have also allowed more works to be written on Soon Hyun by scholars including Robert Kim, as well as Han Kyu Mu and Daniel Kim. These works mainly focus on Soon Hyun’s leadership in the Korean nationalist movement both inside and outside of Hawai’i. I agree that Soon Hyun is an important and interesting figure. After all, he was the first one to telegram the Koreans in Hawai’i about the 1919 March First Movement, which brought a brief but tangible unity within the Korean immigrant community in Hawai’i. In this thesis, I am interested in exploring beyond the Korean nationalist movement, while maintaining the historiographic trend to look at previously neglected figures in modern Korean history who had had anti-U.S. and pro-Communist ideas. While all of Soon Hyun’s children were influenced by their father’s leadership and nationalism, Alice Hyun was the only one to defect to North Korea. One could say that she was just part of the group of intellectuals, artists, and writers influenced by leftist movements who defected to North Korea after liberation, envisioning a socialist paradise. However, there

FAQs

What is the thesis’s central argument about Alice Hyun’s identity and politics?

The thesis argues Alice Hyun was a transnational, radical woman who challenged power relations—especially gender norms—through everyday life experiences shaped by migration and locality in Hawai’i.

Why does the thesis focus on Alice Hyun’s time in Hawai’i specifically?

Because her Hawai’i experience, including involvement in communist-related activities and exposure to limitations imposed on women, is treated as a key context for understanding her later decision to defect to North Korea.

How does the thesis approach the analysis of Alice Hyun’s letters?

It revisits letters that may seem mundane, using frameworks for analyzing the quotidian to extract meaning from daily concerns and social context rather than only political ideology.

Aug 30, 2026

Upload by Rizky