2024, July 27
Home Stories, Vina Yun

Vienna in the 1970s. Long before high-tech products made in Korea, the kimchi craze, and “Gangnam Style,” the first Korean nurses arrived in Austria as “guest workers.” They were recruited to alleviate the acute shortage of nursing staff that, even then, affected many European countries. In Home Stories, Vina Yun traces the footsteps of this little-known and largely undocumented history of migration.

The comic also tells the story of the children of those immigrants—the so-called second generation. It portrays everyday life in the conservative Alpine republic during the “golden era” of Social Democracy, between Bruno Kreisky and teen magazines, acid house and the Waldheim affair, everyday racism and Whitney Houston.

Home Stories is a semi-documentary comic about the experiences of (post-)migration, as well as intergenerational relationships and family dynamics within the diaspora.