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?
