To people like me, born in the 1990s, North Korea is a country at once so close and yet so far away from us. It is very much a part of our lives, yet it also feels so very absent. It’s somewhere I can neither go nor know, and it is also my family’s home. Gaeseong, North Korea. After their evacuation in the Korean War, they couldn’t go back to it. They settled in Gonghang district in Seoul, built a house, and that house became a home in which I was born and where I was raised. 

But as being from the third generation of a family that evacuated from the North, I know nothing of the pain of division. It’s curious to think that the place where I am from, that place my grandparents yearned for the entirety of their lives in South Korea, is a foreign country, just another land to me. Though it may appear to be disappearing amidst the past and present, there are still many thoughts, feelings and places to be found. The act of recording and reconstructing the spaces I cannot experience through the eyes of others and the internet felt like the process of fiction writing, between the real and unreal.