Memories of My Ghost Brother

Finally… some rain and a little bit of drop in temperature… It’s still very humid, but at least it’s not as hot and humid as before. I took a break yesterday and watched movies and read for fun. In addition to being lazy and eating lots of sugar. Well, most of that is what I do everyday anyway, but I decided to call it a break.

I read Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother. For fun. (This is why my boyfriend makes fun of me for not being able to distinguish work from play. But it was fun. And I skimmed parts of the book. So it’s not work.) Except for the part about the ghost brother, which seemed contrived, and the parts where there is just too much explanation–I already know what Panmunjum is like; I don’t need a three-page description of it–I enjoyed it. It’s categorized as a novel, but it seems heavily based on autobiography. I mean, the main character’s name is “Insu/Heinz.” What more do you need?

It was sad reading the book. It’s a sad book. People get disfigured, maimed, sell themselves, kill themselves, and hurt other people. Post-Korean war Korea was a sad place to be in. While the book has numerous sad, horrific events in it, it didn’t come across as sensational. The main character is born between a former-prostitute-turned-black marketeer Korean mother and a German American GI father. The maternal family, or what’s left of them, depends on the market formed around the U.S. Army. Goods and people are mixed up in this market, of course. The best selling and the largest profit-making item on the market is women. Some women like Gannan, the young country relative mother brought and introduced to the army club, can’t take it and commit suicide when her naive hope to marry the GI who impregnated her is blown up. But the book doesn’t portray women as victims. Some women are active agents in their pursuit of economic well-being through securing a GI husband. The US army posts in Korea are little Americas and America is where the wealth is. As the mother says, “the streets in America are gold or something. I used to think every American was a millionaire and everyone owned his own house and had a car and drank Coca-Cola instead of water and had meat for every meal.” In a country with no manufacturing industry, the goods from the army PX are worshiped.

Dependency and resentment are thoroughly interwoven in the lives of the people who don’t have yet want. “This must have been how Gannan felt when she first met the yellow-haired GI bastard at the NCO Club,” says the narrator on his first day of American school, eyes fixed on the floor and unable to look up. He resents having to be with the “military brats” speaking English yet loves the amenities provided by the Army shops. I mean, if the other military brats can enjoy them, why can’t he? Because his mom’s Korean and the half of him which is less than the other half is dominant in his life? But Insu doesn’t think about these things. He takes what he can take and loves the people around him, damaged and damaging as they may be.

I may return to James’s story in the book. James is a childhood friend of Insu, half-black and half-Korean. Two mixed-race children with Korean mothers, they were close friends in American school. Having lost touch with James, Insu overhears the story of his death when Changmi’s mother comes to ask advice from his mother about how to keep a GI. Insu later tries to talk to his Hyongbu, his philanderer of an uncle, about this troubling story. Hyongbu tells him more than he would maybe like to know:

“Think about it,” he said. “You’re a dungwhore and you catch yourself a GI by getting pregnant with is brat, but then he goes off to Vietnam and gets himself killed. That leaves you with benefits from the great Emperor of America, but now you have a Black brat to feed, and it’s not enough money. So now you want another GI husband to start things over–maybe a white guy with a higher rank, ungh?–but who would marry a whore with a Black kid?”

My head hung lower and lower until I was staring glumly at the undissolved sugar at the bottom of my mug. Finally, Hyungbu said, “Maybe she was trying to scrub the color off and she held his face down in the washbasin too long.”

Through the tragic death of his half-black friend and the suggested role of his mother in his death, Insu understands the bitter, hateful economy of racial prejudices and the women’s manipulation of these prejudices in postwar Korea. “I would learn that women–even seemingly devoted mothers–will traffic in their children for the mythic promise of America.” Like his own mother.

The book made me think that it’s only been 50 years since all this. How much do we remember of those poverty-ridden, desperate postwar years? And how much of it still influences us and to what extent?

Crossing the Line

is a documentary on James Joseph Dresnok, “a US army private who in 1962 stunned the world by walking across the violently contested DMZ that cuts Korea in two and defecting to the communist North” (from the DVD jacket). It was good. Not all documentaries on North Korea are. I picked it up with mixed feelings of obligation and curiosity and was pleasantly surprised by its balanced portrayal of the defectors and the North Korean society. The director, Daniel Gordon, is English, and in the interview with the director, he said that having grown up in a society where there is really no parading of patriotism (?), he could approach both North Korea and the U.S. with their heavy flaunting of patriotism as a neutral observer. There’s this great scene in the documentary where a scene of the Kim Il Sung statue is succeeded by a scene of the Abraham Lincoln statue in Richmond, Virginia, Dresnok’s hometown. Their poses are strikingly similar with an outstretched hand symbolically beckoning the herd to follow their lead.

I remember reading the Jenkins story in Time a few years back. Jenkins was also a US soldier stationed in South Korea who defected to the North. He married a Japanese woman who had been abducted by the North Koreans. (Twenty years his junior!) The woman was able to get back to Japan decades after she was abducted, and decided to stay in Japan instead of going back to the North where her husband and two daughters are. Jenkins, because he’s a deserter, would face extradition and a court martial followed by imprisonment if he went to Japan. After some political orchestration, actively engaged in by the Japanese sympathizers of the Jenkins family, the family did end up together two years later. Jenkins, in exchange for a lenient treatment by the US army, did an exclusive interview on his life in North Korea with a journalist. He regretted the choice he made to defect and criticizes the North Korean society as a tyrannical society that grants no individual freedom. He also criticized one of his fellow defectors, Dresnok, for bullying and beating him.

Crossing the Line was in the making when all this happened. Dresnok, who seems to be happy with his life in North Korea, calls Jenkins a liar and contradicts most of what he says.

Around the time when Dresnok defected, at the height of the Cold War, four US army soldiers crossed the DMZ from the South to the North. Their motivations, while speculated about, remain partly mysterious to the end. The director says that in the case of Dresnok, he probably had a better life in North Korea then he would have had he not defected. He became a kind of minor celebrity in the North because the North Korean government made the four American defectors star in a propaganda movie which became popular in the North. They played the Americans in the movie.

I grew up at a time when everything North Korean was demonized in the South. Even in the democratic South, I grew up amidst heavy propagandas and government-guided “mental education projects”. While information about North Korea is scarce now, it was even scarcer back in the 80s, and I never had a good sense of what North Korea is like. I watched this TV documentary that aired this summer when I was visiting home, “Crossing the Border of Paradise.” It’s about North Korean refugees who cross the North Korean/Chinese border and later cross multiple borders in Southeast Asia in search of a legally recognized refugee status. There was this one scene that really caught my eye between two sisters, one living in South Korea now and one still living in the North. One of the two sisters had crossed the border and ultimately made her way to South Korea. She wanted to get her sister out of North Korea to join her in the South. So she smuggled her sister out. And they’re talking, face-to-face, in a motel room in the border town. The younger sister refuses to leave North Korea. Why don’t you want to leave? The older sister asks her. Mom’s dead, dad’s dead, it’s not like you have relatives in the North. People are starving to death. Why don’t you want to leave? The younger sister protests. You have to stick it out especially when the times are bad. These are bad times, but they will pass. You have to endure and persevere. Then times will change. The older sister finally gives up. The reporter asks the younger sister again at the end of the sisters’ conversation, “Why don’t you want to leave?” The girl sighs and says in a low voice, “됴국이지요” . . .  It’s the motherland.

I don’t know why that scene hit me so hard. Because the girl’s stubborn adherence to her land of birth, her loyalty and affection to all that she’s known for her entire life, seem to go against the utilitarian and pragmatic understanding of economic migration? And against the celebration of transnationalism and a borderless world nowadays in the academy?

The tedious task of putting together a chapter

I’ve kind of known this all along. But there’s a lot of tedious work you have to do when you put together an essay or a chapter. I’m working on my second chapter now on Kingston and Viramontes. I’m reading the bilingual child in each text in the context of the flourishing of child psychology in the postwar era. Erik Erikson’s Chilhood and Society might be one book I look closely at in terms of how cultural differences were viewed and understood in relation to human development. I have various strands of ideas and bits and pieces of interesting information and passages, but I’m not sure how to piece everything together as of now.

One of the most tedious work, I’m finding out is what we usually call “literature review” where we go through all the existing scholarship on the topic of the text. When it comes to an author like Kingston and a book like The Woman Warrior, there’s a lot to go through. I do come across interesting and pertinent criticism and analyses, but then there’s a lot that’s not immediately relevant. I’m learning to be more patient in doing research. It helps that I’m very interested in the topic and love the writers and the texts I work on.