In her 1997 overview of Korean American literature, Elaine H. Kim states that writings by Korean wives of American servicemen are conspicuously missing from published Korean American texts. Kim problematizes the absence of the voices of the Korean women married to American soldiers, since they constitute a significant part of the Korean American population and have sponsored a considerable portion of Korean immigration to the USA.Footnote ¹ In her later survey of Korean American literature, Kim duly notes the significance of Korean women's voices in documentary films and scholarly books on the Korean prostitutes and their biracial children in camptowns around US military installations in Korea: Diana S. Lee and Grace Yoon Kyung Lee's Camp Arirang (1995), J. T. Takagi and Hye Jung Park's The Women Outside (1996), Katherine H. S. Moon's Sex among Allies (1997), and Ji-Yeon Yuh's Beyond the Shadow of Camptown (2002).Footnote ² Not only Korean American filmmakers and scholars but also poets and novelists have gradually addressed the issue of the Korean women, servicing or married to American soldiers, and their Amerasian children. In fact, literature on the camptown Korean women and their mixed-blood children has comprised a growing sub-genre of Korean American literature: Myung Mi Kim's “Into Such Assembly” (1989) and “A Rose of Sharon” (1989), Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996), Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life (1999), Ishle Yi Park's “Saewoomtuh Flower Shop” (2000), Don Lee's “Domo Arigato” (2001), and Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl (2002).

Out of the Korean American literary texts on camptown women and Amerasian children, Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother is a unique text: unlike other texts, it is an autobiographical narrative by an Amerasian writer born of a Korean woman and an American soldier.Footnote ³ Fenkl's narrative realistically presents the world of an Amerasian boy growing up in a Korean camptown during the Vietnam War. It not only provides an intimate account of the camptown world positioned at the interstice between US military life and Korean civilian life in the 1960s but also challenges popular assumptions about camptown women and Amerasian children. Despite its unique significance, Fenkl's narrative has not been properly studied by scholars of Korean American literature. There is no article-length study on Memories of My Ghost Brother, although some critical studies of Korean/Asian American literature mention or discuss the text.Footnote ⁴ Significantly enough, though, two articles – Elaine Kim's “Myth, Memory, and Desire” and Hyungji Park's “The Globalization of Asian American Studies” – out of the limited existing critical scholarship on Fenkl mention the intertextuality between Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother and Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901). Kim states that Insu, Fenkl's narrator-cum-protagonist, “wonders why his father thinks he should read Rudyard Kipling's Kim.”Footnote ⁵ In a more detailed study, Park notes Fenkl's identification of “the U. S. presence” in Asia with “the Great Game of British Empire,” compares Kipling's Kim and Fenkl's Insu, and discusses Insu's father's direct allusion to Kipling's Kim.Footnote ⁶

Indeed, as Park notes, Insu vividly remembers a crucial moment in his relationship with his father, Sergeant Heinz Fenkl. After his first tour of duty in Vietnam, Sergeant Fenkl took his seven-year-old son to the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, Korea. To take a picture of his Amerasian son, the American sergeant positioned Insu astride a howitzer at the edge of the parade field of the US 8th Army Headquarters. When Insu asked what his father had done in Vietnam, the American soldier did not answer the question but said enigmatically, “You're sitting on top of Zam-Zammah!” Heinz went on to exclaim to his bewildered son: “Thy father was a pastry cook!” Insu repeated his question, but Heinz continued “some sort of riddle”: “I was a red bull on a green field.”Footnote ⁷ Sergeant Fenkl resumed his riddle later when he said to Insu that he would soon leave for “[t]he Great Game” again (132). Needless to say, Zam-Zammah, a red bull on a green field, and the Great Game are key images in Kipling's Kim. A great admirer of Kim, Heinz in fact reenacted the opening scene of Kipling's fiction when he sat Insu astraddle the heavy gun and repeated Kim's taunting exclamation at the American military compound. Moreover, he bought Insu a cloth-bound copy of the novel on his son's eleventh birthday, and quoted Kipling to his son again when Insu was in high school. Thus Heinz tried to pass his fatherly message down to his son through Kipling's Kim throughout his life. He died believing that Insu “had made some decision about [Kim's] contents,” his message to his son (63).

Most prophetically, however, the photograph of the Amerasian boy astride the howitzer at the US military compound in Korea, the visual representation of Heinz's message, never came out. In fact, Insu did not get his father's message encoded in Kim even at the time of his father's death, sixteen years after his posture for the photo, simply because he had not read Kipling's novel. It was only after the fourth anniversary of his father's death that Insu read Kim and could understand what his father had meant by Zam-Zammah, a red bull on a green field, and the Great Game. Nonetheless, the narrator makes Kim one of the most crucial palimpsests of Memories of My Ghost Brother, as if to make up for his long neglect of Kipling's text. Indeed, one can find what Fenkl calls “the remarkable coincidences” and “the ironic resonances” between the two texts throughout Memories of My Ghost Brother (63).

This essay will flesh out the full spectrum of Fenkl's allusions to Kipling and the layers of irony in those allusions. In Memories of My Ghost Brother, Fenkl twists key episodes and political contexts of Kim to emphasize the continuity of the Great Game in Asia: he transforms the adventures of a white boy in colonial India into those of an Amerasian boy in post-/neocolonial Korea and changes the Russo-British rivalry of the nineteenth-century Great Game into the Russo-/Communist–American competition of the twentieth-century Cold War. In so doing, Fenkl focusses less on the achievements than on the predicaments of American Great Game players. At the same time, he resurrects the native voice silenced by colonial discourse and highlights the dilemma of Asian women and their biracial children. While thus identifying and problematizing the US Great Game, the Korean American writer ultimately denounces the troubling legacy of the US military presence in Korea and critiques the centuries-old Western imperialist project and its devastating effects in Asia in his postcolonial rewriting of the British colonial text from a uniquely Amerasian perspective.

Zam-Zammah, recalled by Sergeant Fenkl, is a huge iron cannon built on the orders of an Afghan warrior-king in 1762. The largest gun ever made in India in its day, Zam-Zammah had an appropriate inscription in Persian on its barrel: “taker of the Ramparts of Heaven.” As befitted its impressive size and awesome firepower, the cannon was widely believed to have “divine powers” and served as “a powerful talisman for victory.”Footnote ⁸ The narrator of Kim repeats this popular belief: “Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon,’ hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.”Footnote ⁹ Kim, the eponymous hero of Kim, makes his first appearance while playing with his native friends a king-of-the-castle game on Zam-Zammah opposite the Lahore Museum. After first clambering over Zam-Zammah, Kim repels Abdullah and Chota Lal by kicking them off the trunnion and wheel of the ancient gun. Kipling's narrator justifies Kim's revilement of and tyranny over his native friends succinctly: “the English held the Punjab and Kim was English” (3). Indeed, Kim uses local history to explain to his Muslim and Hindu friends his exclusive right to possess the cannon: “All Mussalmans fell off Zam-Zammah long ago”; “The Hindus fell off Zam-Zammah too. The Mussalmans pushed them off” (6).

Well aware of the political significance of Zam-Zammah in the local history, Sergeant Fenkl positions his Korean American son astride a howitzer, calls the heavy gun Zam-Zammah, and repeats Kim's teasing taunt to the native boys. His recall of Zam-Zammah is a most appropriate one, for the American howitzer in the Yongsan Garrison has a symbolic meaning strikingly similar to that of Zam-Zammah in Punjab. Yongsan, the site of the US military compound, is close to the Han River and has been used as the site of advance command and logistics by foreign invaders at least from the thirteenth century. Since Yongsan has been the site of a bitter legacy of foreign invasions and occupations and is still the prominent symbol of Korea's neocolonial status,Footnote ¹⁰ some Koreans have self-derisively expressed the idea that “those who rule Yongsan are the masters of the [Korean] peninsula.”Footnote ¹¹ It is striking that the self-scorning expression echoes the matter-of-fact statement of Kipling's narrator: “Who hold Zam-Zammah … hold the Punjab.” Not surprisingly, then, as Zam-Zammah under British control justified the British occupation of Punjab, so the howitzer in the Yongsan Garrison proclaims the neoimperialist presence of the USA in Korea and reminds Koreans of their neocolonial status every day: the howitzer under the flagpole of the US 8th Army Headquarters in the capital city of Korea fires “deafening blanks” when the Stars and Stripes comes down and “the sad taps music” is played just before sundown everyday (127). Therefore Sergeant Fenkl, part of an imperialist game, reveals his imperialist unconscious when he equates the American howitzer in the Yongsan Garrison with Zam-Zammah opposite the Lahore museum.

Sergeant Fenkl discloses his imperialist mindset also when he states that he was “a red bull on a green field” (127). A red bull on a green field was first mentioned by Kim's father, Kimball O'Hara, in Kim. In his opium-induced delirium, Kimball used to predict his son's glorious future: “Nine hundred first-class devils, whose God was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to him” (4). A native priest in Umballa casts Kim's horoscope and interprets the red bull as “a red and an angry sign of War” (38). Indeed, “the great Red Bull on a background of Irish green” turns out to be “the crest of the Mavericks” (70). The Mavericks were a fictive Irish regiment in the British Army and Kimball was the color sergeant of “the finest Regiment in the world” (4). By calling himself a red bull on a green field, then, Sergeant Fenkl identifies with Sergeant O'Hara, who fetishized his regimental device. In fact, there are intriguing similarities between the two white sergeants: both serve the interests of the empires that subjugated or defeated their own countries – Kimball was an Irishman in the British army, and Heinz is a German immigrant in the US army. Kimball married a woman who had been a nursemaid in “a Colonel's family” (3); Heinz's wife lives in the “house of the Japanese Colonel” (5). Kimball and Heinz also both named their sons born in Asia after themselves. Moreover, their (neo)colonial agency is at best ambivalent, since they are simultaneously agents and victims of (neo)colonialism. After all, both white sergeants stationed in Asia are displaced men par excellence in times of colonialism and neocolonialism. Kimball moved with his regiment under the control of the British Empire. After leaving his regiment, he took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi Railway and loafed up and down the line. He drifted away and almost went native by living with a half-caste woman. Heinz was born in Czechoslovakia, but his family was “chased” out of their home to Germany (71). An outsider in Czechoslovakia and Germany, Heinz became an alien again when he immigrated to the USA. After joining the US army, he was sent to Korea, where he married a native woman. While stationed in Korea, he did two tours of duty in Vietnam in the 1960s. The displaced soldier's life on the periphery of the empire is succinctly described when Insu's uncle advises Insu to study hard: “Otherwise, you'll be a grunt just like [your father]. You'll wind up in some no-name country with some war going on and you'll knock up some dark-skinned whore and end up marrying her” (221).

A latter-day “red bull on a green field,” Sergeant Fenkl appropriately makes a joking allusion to the Mavericks and their regimental device. His jeep substitutes the UN flag with the Jolly Roger, which is “emblazoned in red with ‘Alpha Company’ and ‘Angry Alpha’” (251). On their way to Panmunjom in the middle of the Demilitarized Zone, Sergeant Fenkl and Private Jones sing the “Angry Alpha song”:

The “Angry Alpha song” of “Hooligan Fenkl and his Gang” (251) in a US army jeep curiously reminds one of the Mavericks' marching song, “The Mulligan Guard,” in Kim:

In fact, as Kim hears “The Mulligan Guard” after he finds the fictive regimental device of the Mavericks, so Insu hears the “Angry Alpha song” after he sees the unofficial company flag of “Hooligan Fenkl and his Gang.”

In Kim, the Mavericks entrain at Umballa for “thee War” in the far north of India (84). A latter-day Maverick, Sergeant Fenkl leaves Korea twice for the Vietnam War in Memories of My Ghost Brother. Significantly, the American sergeant calls the Vietnam War the “Great Game” (132). The Great Game, a term coined by Lieutenant Arthur Conolly in the mid-nineteenth century, refers to that century's imperial contest between Britain and Russia for hegemony in the Middle East and Central Asia. In their imperial contest, Britain and Russia sought to win the friendship, confidence, and allegiance of the tribes and semi-independent states in the political no-man's-lands separating the two empires. The century-long Great Game was fundamentally a “shadowy struggle for political ascendancy” between Russia and Britain in the buffer zone,Footnote ¹² since the Anglo-Russian rivalry was carried on mostly through “diplomacy, alliances, client states, espionage, exploration, surveys, maps, and the out-positioning of each other along their border areas.”Footnote ¹³ The imperial rivalry between Victorian Britain and tsarist Russia was endowed with a mythic status by Kipling in Kim: Mahbub Ali states that the Great Game “is so large that one sees but a little at a time,” Lurgan understands that the Great Game “never ceases day and night,” Kim thinks that it “runs like a shuttle throughout all Hind,” and Hurree Chunder Mookerjee predicts that the Great Game will be finished only “when everyone is dead” (143, 148, 188, 185). The Great Game seemed to end with the Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907,Footnote ¹⁴ but a second round resumed during the Cold War period between the USA and the USSR.Footnote ¹⁵ It is the continuity between the Great Game and the Cold War which Sergeant Fenkl clearly identifies when he calls the Vietnam War the Great Game.

The British players in the Great Game were convinced that St. Petersburg's ultimate ambition was to invade and dominate India, the treasure of the British Empire. In a similar vein, American policymakers during the Cold War era believed that the Kremlin's eventual intention was to communize all the “free” Asian countries. Thus the Englishmen's obsessive fear of the tsarist Russian threats to Central and South Asia in the nineteenth century anticipated the Americans' paranoid anxiety over the Communist Russian designs on East and Southeast Asia in the twentieth century. Most interestingly, the American version of the Great Game also used the metaphor of a game: dominoes. The “domino theory” was first mentioned by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953,Footnote ¹⁶ but its classic example had already been expressed by Harry S. Truman at the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950: “if South Korea was allowed to fall Communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores.”Footnote ¹⁷ The domino theory provided the USA with one of the rationales justifying US intervention in Korea and Vietnam. The theory arguing for the need to contain Communist influences with military power developed most fully during the Vietnam War. With the collapse of Vietnam, American policymakers feared, the Asian Communist bloc controlled by Moscow and Beijing would not only invade neighboring Asian countries but also spread communism beyond the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain to the rest of the world, ultimately isolating and endangering the last domino, the USA. The apocalyptic vision of the domino theory that viewed every military confrontation in Asia as a part of a larger plan of the USSR seemed to come true when the most serious threats to US Asian front lines broke out in Korea and Vietnam consecutively in January 1968.

Thirty-one heavily armed North Korean commandos left Pyongyang on 16 January 1968 in an attempt to assassinate the South Korean president and the US ambassador to Korea. After crossing the demilitarized zone (DMZ) undetected, they came within five hundred yards of the Blue House, President Park Chung Hee's presidential residence, and encountered the now-alerted South Korean military and police on 21 January 1968. In the ensuing firefight, twenty-seven guerrillas were killed, three escaped, and one was captured.Footnote ¹⁸ The “Blue House Raid”Footnote ¹⁹ was a volatile prelude to the Pueblo incident and the Tet offensive. Insu describes the two military confrontations between the USA and Asian communist regimes succinctly: two days after the Blue House Raid, “the U. S. S. Pueblo, an electronic spy ship, was captured off the coast of North Korea … Later that month, during the Vietnamese New Year's celebration of Têt, the NVA and the Vietcong simultaneously attacked over a hundred towns, cities, and military installations all over Vietnam” (131). Most fittingly, Insu situates the Pueblo incident and the Tet offensive in the context of the Great Game: he mentions his father's Great Game for the first time after his description of the two military confrontations (132). After all, the Pueblo incident and the Tet offensive had to do with military information and espionage, most closely associated with the Great Game. The Pueblo was officially “an oceanographic research vessel designed for ‘technical research operations to support oceanographic, electromagnetic, and related research projects.’”Footnote ²⁰ But the secret mission of the auxiliary general environmental research vessel was to “determine the nature and extent of North Korean naval activity, conduct surveillance of Soviet naval units in the Tsushima Strait … [and] report the deployment of North Korean and Soviet units.”Footnote ²¹ Since the intelligence-gathering ship was disguised as a research vessel, it was truly in the tradition of the nineteenth-century players of the British Great Game who had been disguised as merchants, pilgrims, and holy men while collecting information among hostile tribes and states. The Tet offensive in Vietnam has also been recorded in US military history as a case of the failure of intelligence-gathering. US forces could not anticipate “the scope, intensity, targets, and timing” of the Tet offensive, which marked the turning point between US escalation in and withdrawal from the Vietnam War. This was so simply because the Communists had used a series of “deceptive strategies to mislead the allies about the location of the offensive and to hide preparations for the coming attacks.”Footnote ²²

Some American policymakers suspected that the Pueblo incident and the Tet offensive were linked to each other. They believed that Moscow might have backed the North Korean provocation in order to inflict a fatal blow on the US position in the Vietnam War and ultimately to cause a chain reaction of the dominoes. Naturally enough, the GIs stationed in Korea did not differentiate between the two military confrontations involving the US military. “The mood among the GIs in Korea,” notes Insu,

Unlike most GIs, however, Sergeant Fenkl volunteered for a second tour of duty in Vietnam, seeking “retribution” for his comrades in arms killed during the Tet offensive (132). The American red bull on a green field thus followed in the footsteps of British Great Game players: it was not uncommon that Britain sent punitive expeditions when some British players had been killed by hostile tribes or states during the Great Game.

The Great Game was carried out in the vast area that stretched from “the snow-capped Caucasus,” across “the great deserts and mountain ranges of Central Asia,” to “Chinese Turkestan and Tibet” throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ²³ Kipling focusses on the northwestern provinces of India as the main chessboard of the Great Game in Kim. Two agents of the tsar – one Russian and the other French – explore, survey, and map the valleys and passes, while coming down through the Karakorum Mountains “to Leh … and down the Indus to Hanlé … and then down … to Bushahr and Chini valley” (195). It is in Chini valley between Punjab and Tibet that Hurree Babu and Kim foil the Russo-French plot to stir up troubles in the Northwest Frontier region by stealing the spies' handwritten books, diaries, and “native correspondence”; “the murasla” from Hilás to the tsar; and “their pictures of the country” (211, 203, 213). Kipling's focus on the northwest of India reflects his obsessive fear of a Russian threat to – and a joint Franco-Russian invasion of – India through the northwestern passes, already shown in his “The Man Who Was” (1890), “The Ballad of the King's Jest” (1890), and “The Truce of the Bear” (1898).

Sergeant Fenkl was sent to the central highlands of Vietnam. Like the tribal lands in the northwest of India, the central highlands of Vietnam were a strategically important area, because they included the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North Vietnamese infiltration route and supply line for Vietcong forces in the south. Aware of the strategic significance of the central highlands, the US Central Intelligence Agency first used the Montagnards living there “to gather intelligence on Viet Cong movements.” The CIA also recruited and organized the Montagnards with Village Defense and Mountain Scout programs.Footnote ²⁴ Like the Indian “pundits” recruited and trained as indispensable players of the Great Game by the Survey of India,Footnote ²⁵ the Montagnard trainees were taught by the CIA “to use weapons, to form an intelligence system,” to use radios, and to read maps.Footnote ²⁶ The CIA's highland operations were later turned over to the US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, which deployed special forces in the central highlands to train Montagnard strike forces. A Green Beret on an advisory team, a special forces A detachment, Sergeant Fenkl duly recruited and trained Montagnard Strikers against the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army in the highlands near Nha Trang (127–28, 256).

One of the most striking features in Kim is that the major players of the Great Game belong to peoples subjugated and colonized by the British Empire, and even those “unpacified” by it: Kim is Irish, Hurree is a Bengali, and Mahbub is a Pathan. Kipling's fantasy about coopting alien peoples for the interests of the British Empire ultimately makes an Irish orphan, a Bengali Babu, and a Pathan horse-trader “happy with British rule, and even … collaborator[s] with it.”Footnote ²⁷ In Memories of My Ghost Brother, however, the Montagnards are critical of the US policy of mobilizing the highlanders in the American Great Game. This is best demonstrated in the folktale a Montagnard chief tells to Sergeant Fenkl. The Montagnard folktale is basically an explanatory story of why “the monkeys steal corn and rice from people and they're always screaming in anger” (257). But the monkey story is more than a purely explanatory myth, since it metaphorically reflects the history of the Montagnards, who have, over the centuries, been driven from the fertile areas to the mountains of Southeast Asia by the Vietnamese. More significantly, the folktale has contemporary political relevance as well. With the folktale, the Montagnard chief bitterly regrets his and other tribal leaders' connivance in the US recruitment and training of Montagnard youths, many of whom were ultimately killed in the Vietnam War: “Now the monkeys still trusted the men for their wisdom, so they went home, and … butchered all their children” (257). The chief's incorporation of the contemporary motif in his folktale is not unique in Montagnard culture. After all, many Montagnard carvings around highland tombs depict “American military personnel, notably those in the Special Forces” and “American military cargo aircraft and jet bombers.”Footnote ²⁸ More specifically, one Jarai girl who was famous for improvising songs with contemporary motifs sang sadly of “highland boys in the Mobile Strike Force going off in helicopters to conduct guerrilla operations in distant places … and never returning.”Footnote ²⁹ With the monkey story, then, the Montagnard chief not only succinctly metaphorizes that the Montagnards have been betrayed by the Vietnamese, the French, and the Vietcong, but also eloquently predicts that he and his tribes will be ultimately discarded again by the USA.Footnote ³⁰ Thus the chief's story is “designed to evoke guilt in [the American sergeant] for his complicity with one of the armies that forcibly recruited Montagnard sons from their villages.”Footnote ³¹

Indeed, Sergeant Fenkl retells the monkey story after frankly acknowledging that the USA, like the French, the South Vietnamese, and the Vietcong, dumped the Montagnards. No less significant, he takes the place of and identifies with the Montagnard chief when he narrates the folktale to his half-Asian son. He seems to be sympathetic to the plight of the displaced and mistreated Montagnards partly because his family was forcefully relocated from Czechoslovakia to Germany by “[s]ome bad people” as well (71). Living with the Montagnards, he also came to understand their mentality, customs, culture, and history (128–0, 255–7) and to trust the natives much more than any South Vietnamese, his allies. He even identified with the Montagnards symbolically when he lost his partial plate: he said to the highlanders, who filed down their front teeth, “See, me Montagnards, too” (129). His experience with them seems to have left an indelible mark on his life even after his return from Vietnam. Montagnard swords, scabbards, and bracelets – his main mementos from Vietnam – are conspicuously displayed at his Quonset hut in the DMZ separating North and South Korea. Like the Montagnards, who “don't quite live in this world” (256), he is sometimes “distant, as if a part of him ha[s] not made it back” from Vietnam. Insu imagines that his father has left something “back in the highlands outside Nha Trang” (128), where Sergeant Fenkl used to watch big planes spraying “beautiful” clouds of defoliant, Agent Orange, which would ultimately kill him and Montagnards, as well as denude the forests of trees and grass (129).

Sergeant Fenkl might have expressed his doubts and reservations about his involvement in the American Great Game in his subtle identification with the Montagnard chief who criticized the US treatment of the highlanders. But eleven-year-old Insu just wonders why his father has told him the monkey story. He unwittingly puts himself in the position of the Montagnards, however, when he goes on to muse on his interstitial status as an Amerasian who is “caught here in the boundary between the two Koreas, caught between North and South and East and West with [his] own blood mixed from the blood of enemies” (258). The Korean American boy differentiates two Koreas without explicitly antagonizing them, but he contraposes the West and the East as enemies. Fenkl subverts the popular assumptions about Amerasians' split ethnic identity: far from being torn by conflicting loyalties, Insu prefers his mother's Korea and Koreans to his father's USA and Americans. On his way to the DMZ area to see his white father, the biracial boy has aligned himself with Koreans: he looks out the window of a US army bus, gazes at the familiar Korean faces and scenery wistfully, and concludes that he “belong[s] out there” (248). In his dichotomized world, the GIs are foreign intruders “whose boots and tanks trod the earth of [Korea] to bitter dust” and “wired” the peaceful Korean landscape for immediate destruction in case of invasions from the North (248, 253). Naturally enough, Insu feels alienated by the camaraderie of his father and Jones, who sing the “Angry Alpha song” harmoniously. He senses that he would never understand the white GIs' “secret language of knowing glances and inside jokes.” He also differentiates himself from his white father and affirms his Koreanness rather dejectedly: “I would forever be tainted by a Koreanness that would make the words ‘gook’ or ‘dink’ sound strange coming from my lips, like the word ‘nigger’ spoken by a Black GI to anyone but his brothers” (253–54). He understands perfectly well that GIs' “gook” and “dink,” apparently directed against the Vietcong and North Koreans, are in fact derogatory terms for all Asians and Asian Americans, including himself. No less significant, the Korean American boy identifies with African Americans as fellow victims of American racism. Insu's identification with African American GIs was already presaged on his first day at the Seoul American Elementary School. The segregated US Army bus that took him to the school colored him black: white GIs sat in the front half of the bus; Korean women with their biracial children, KATUSAs,Footnote ³² and black GIs sat in the back half of the bus (93).

Insu shows his pan-Asian consciousness most clearly while pondering the significance of his father's military insignia:

The first four insignia are “the totemic symbols” of Sergeant Fenkl, who was in the Seventh Division, the Second Infantry Division, the First Cavalry Division, and the Fourth Mechanized Infantry Division (132). The last two insignia represent the Vietnam campaign and superior marksmanship. Hence all the six military insignia of the US army are American “bulls on green fields” (132), clearly the descendants of the Mavericks' regimental badge. Whereas a red bull on a green field is “a sort of fetish” Kim follows to confirm his whiteness (97), the US military insignia are the very “[s]ymbols of power” and “[t]otems of the clan that kills people whose skin is the color of [Insu's]” (133). Here Insu subverts the popular binary opposition between the “good” Americans and the “bad” Asians. The Amerasian boy proclaims his Asianness by sympathizing with the Vietnamese killed by his father and other American soldiers.Footnote ³³ While thus transforming and multiplying the Mavericks' insignia into the US soldiers' dreadful symbols against Asians, Insu focusses on Asian women and their biracial children who are marginalized by or hidden beneath the mythopoeic metaphors of Zam-Zammah, a red bull on a green field, and the Great Game in Kipling's Kim.

Mahbub Ali states that many plans of the Great Game have “come to ruin” because of women (150). For Kim, however, the potential danger of Asian women is not personified by the Flower of Delight who attempts to steal information from the Afghan horse-dealer. In Kim Asian women are dangerous less as spies than as potential sexual partners who can indigenize and damn white men. Although Kim is pestered also by a “girl at Akrola of the Ford” and a “scullion's wife” (214), Kipling illustrates the danger of an interracial relationship between a white man and an Indian woman most clearly in his portrayal of the Woman of Shamlegh. The Woman of Shamlegh tells Kim about her experience with a Sahib: once she was a “Ker-lis-ti-an” and spoke English; she nursed a Sahib when he was sick; he promised to return and wed her; he went away, but never returned (219). She is identified as “Lispeth” (223) and, as scholars have pointed out, her narrative recapitulates the plot of Kipling's 1886 “Lispeth.” In the short story the title character is an orphan and lives in the Kotgarh Mission. She rescues an injured Englishman. She falls in love with him at first glance and makes up her mind to marry him when he is recovered. The Englishman finds it “very pleasant to talk to Lispeth, and walk with Lispeth, and say nice things to her, and call her pet names” while he is recovering from the injury. He also falsely assures the girl that he will come back and marry her. But he forgets everything about Lispeth after leaving Kotgarh. After learning the truth, Lispeth returns to her “own people.”Footnote ³⁴

One of Lispeth's descendants is Gannan in Memories of My Ghost Brother. Gannan is Insu's cousin from a rural family impoverished by the Korean War. To help out her poor family, she comes to her aunt in search of work in Pupyong, which has the oldest camptown in Korea.Footnote ³⁵ She works for a while as a waitress in the Lower Four Club of the US Army Service Command (ASCOM). She later joins the group of camptown women who are “waiting outside the ASCOM gate each day until a GI [takes] her through” (19). Insu's mother introduces her to a white GI in the NCO Club of ASCOM. The American soldier takes Gannan to the bar. Later, he comes to Insu's house and spends the night in Gannan's room. She maintains a steady relationship with the GI, in the hope of marrying him. She becomes pregnant, but the white GI refuses to marry her. Unable to give birth to or abort an illegitimate biracial baby, she commits suicide by hanging herself from a thick branch of a chestnut tree. Before she dies Gannan tells Insu “a big secret”: “When you're grown up, you must have compassion. … You must have injong.” She goes on to explain to her little cousin that injong “means you have to be a kind person and think of others,” thereby indirectly criticizing GIs' frivolous treatment of camptown women (22).

Kipling hints that Lispeth's bitter experience with a Sahib stems mostly from her naivety, ignorance, and misunderstanding. But the Englishman is at least partially responsible for her misfortune, since he deceives Lispeth about his own feelings and makes a pledge without at all intending to keep it. Lispeth, who rescues and nurses him, is in the last analysis no better than a butterfly or a plant he collects in the East. He forgets her completely when he resumes butterfly-hunting in Assam, and does not mention even her name in his book on the East. The Englishman has no idea what his betrayal of a marriage pledge would mean to Lispeth. His experience with Lispeth means “nothing at all” to him but “everything in the world” to her.Footnote ³⁶ This is also true of Gannan's case. Lonely in an alien environment, the white GI must have sought companionship with local women and has maintained a steady relationship with Gannan. He might have stated or implied his commitment to her, without intending to marry her. He is just one of the “fickle American soldiers” who have had “merciless affairs with Asian women” and can state, unashamedly, “we played the … games with the poor Korean girls. They meant nothing to us. We used them and just walked away. Nobody pays any attention to promises made in a war zone.”Footnote ³⁷ Learning of Gannan's suicide, the white American soldier brings “a stack of colourful MPC [Military Payment Certificate] bills,” donated by her GI friends, to help out the bereaved family. For him, Gannan is just one of the cheap prostitutes servicing the GIs in the camptown. In other words, she is no more than a commodity easily bought and easily discarded. As he has paid her for companionship and sex, so the GI expresses his condolences with “t'aksan money” (29). Lispeth has her “own people” to return to when she is betrayed by the Englishman, but Gannan cannot return to her own people because she has forfeited herself of her Koreanness by fraternizing with American soldiers in the self-proclaimed homogeneous society.

In Kipling's “Without Benefit of Clergy” Ameera is happy to have a baby, since she believes that the “love of … a white man, [i]s at the best an inconstant affair, but it might … be held fast by a baby's hands.”Footnote ³⁸ In Fenkl's fiction, Korean camptown women have a similar understanding of their biracial children. Unlike Gannan, however, many of the camptown women are more than passive and helpless victims at the mercy of American soldiers. In fact there is a subtle “game” going on between American GIs and Korean camptown women, “both trying to outmaneuver the other.”Footnote ³⁹ Whereas most GIs want to maintain at best a temporary relationship with Korean women during their tour of duty in Korea, many camptown women try to marry GIs and go to the USA in order to escape from poverty and ostracism in Korea. Insu shows rather ruthlessly camptown women shrewdly scheming to catch a GI as a ticket to the USA: Jani's mother wants to find a white GI who looks like Jani's father killed in Vietnam; James's mother drowns her half-black son in a sewer creek to marry a white GI; Changmi's mother is hunting for a black GI to bear a baby, a security to keep her infertile, black husband; and Insu's mother gives up her first son – Kuristo, or Christopher, Insu's half-brother – in order to marry Heinz Fenkl. But, in retrospect, the narrator cannot condemn outright the camptown women for trafficking or killing their own Amerasian children, since he knows that “the path of blame is not an arrow's flight, but the mad scatter of raindrops in a storm.” He only feels “a great blank emptiness” and “a profound sadness, a fatalism” at the way of his world. He goes on to resign himself to the conclusion that in the end “there is no blame, only endurance” (232).

One of the biggest differences between Kipling and Fenkl is their treatment of the biracial children in a (neo)colonial site. Kim was looked after by a “half-caste” ayah until his adolescence (3). Yet he remembers the Eurasian woman with “a gesture of disgust” (76) and the Mavericks do not think her “a good guardian” (82). The narrator does not hide his prejudice against mixed-race Eurasians when he attributes Kimball's early death at least partially to the half-caste woman: Kimball “learned the taste [of opium] from her, and died as poor whites die in India” (4). Kim also reveals his prejudices against Eurasians when he replies to Colonel Creighton's statement that some St. Xavier's boys “despise the black men.” Kim confidently claims that they must be the sons of “bazaar-women,” since he knows well that “there is no hatred like that of the half-caste for his brother-in-law” (102). He expresses his racial and class prejudices most vehemently when he talks of Eurasian students at St. Xavier's: “Their eyes are blued and their nails are blackened with low-caste blood, many of them. Sons of mehteranees—brothers-in-law to the bhungi.” The narrator and Kim do not feel the need to “follow the rest of the pedigree” of the mixed-race students with the clear signs of racial hybridity in their eyes and nails (122). Unlike the half-Sahibs, Kim is a pure “white” boy, as is best symbolized in Mahbub's message to Creighton: “The pedigree of the white stallion is fully established” (21).

Like the Eurasian boys dismissed by Kim, Insu is a biracial boy rejected by both Americans and Koreans. Right after he was born, Insu was proudly presented by his aunt to his father stepping down from a US Army bus. But Sergeant Fenkl held his son “like a piece of wood” and “turned bright red from the shame of having a mixed-blood child” (63).Footnote ⁴⁰ Insu fares no better among Koreans outside home. Whereas Britishness is a symbol of prowess and dominance in Kim's king-of-the-castle game with Indian boys in colonial India, Americanness is a mark of laziness and unprofessionalism in Insu's war games with Korean boys in neocolonial Korea (153). Since even whiteness is thus not privileged in Korea, Insu's half-whiteness is less an asset than a curse in the putatively homogeneous society. Insu is called a “Yankee-brat,” “mongrel dog,” and “shit-dog” (85, 86). As if mixed blood signified intellectual deficiency, he is labeled “a half-wit” or “an idiot” by children and adults alike (76, 86). On his first day in the American school Insu stands by himself and watches American children playing together during recess. To pretend to be doing something, he takes “drink after drink” of water at the water fountain. He also walks back and forth along a wall “to keep from crying” (100). Insu feels happy only when he meets another Amerasian boy, half-black James, in the playground during the lunch recess. The Amerasian children become close friends and after a few months swear a secret oath “never to betray each other” (109). James and Insu feel sympathy to each other as half-bloods. Their sense of commonness is so powerful as to make them disregard even the difference of their skin colors. To them, their difference of skin colors is lost under the common labels of “ainoko [mixed child], chapjong [mixed breed], t'wigi [mongrel]” (232). Naturally enough, James takes center stage when Insu sadly remembers “the misfortunes” of Amerasian children who failed to “escape” to the promised land of the USA: Gannan's baby, who died still in the womb; James, who was killed by his mother; half-white Suzie, James's half-sister, who became a prostitute and ate rat poison after she was disfigured by a Japanese banker; and Paulie, who “apprenticed himself to a pimp and disappeared” (172).

Kim's natural talents for espionage are systematically developed at St. Xavier's. In the school for Sahibs and half-Sahibs, he learns the basic skills and techniques – mathematics, elementary surveying, and mapmaking – required of him to enter the Survey of India as a chainman. He learns, from Mahbub Ali, Lurgan Sahib, and Hurree Babu, other skills necessary for the performance of the Great Game, for the interests of the British Empire. Insu anticipates he would learn something “mysterious,” “grand,” and “magical” about his father's world in the American school. He wants to “drink in the source” of that power but, like other Amerasian children, he “would come away more parched than before” (92). The school confirms his racial difference from white teachers and students, and makes him feel comfortable only with Korean and half-Korean students. As the first step to being a loyal American he learns to sing “the Star-Spangled Banner” and to “swear to be loyal to the garish flag” on his first day in the American school (100). But he confesses that he has learned “very little” else there. Instead, he learns a lot from his mother, Lee, “how to get by, without her, in [his] father's world” (121). Lee is an ideal teacher for her son, since she is an expert at navigating and surviving in the camptown world shadowed by the US presence. On holidays, Insu accompanies his mother while she is doing her black-market business. She buys American goods at the Post Echange (PX) and the Commissary and sells them to “a Yankee goods vendor at the Hollywood market near Pagoda Park.” Insu enjoys “the fantastic chaos of Seoul” and drinks “cold cans of Coca-Cola with black marketeers and petty criminals” (120). At the same time, he learns to make money through small-time peddling in the black market. He sells “fourteen pounds of M&M's at twice their price” to a Korean storekeeper and takes orders for “Alka-Seltzer, Hershey bars, and Wrigley's chewing gum” (183). He buys “tool boxes for Mr. Fatso and Mr. Chong, a pair of blue jeans for Mr. Panji Lee, and Philips Milk of Magnesia for Mr. Paek” at Yongsan (190). Unlike Kim's systematic education, in other words, Insu's haphazard education is not for the interests of the American empire but for the interest of his own survival as an Amerasian on the periphery of the American empire.

Kim learns how to survive as an orphaned white boy in the alleys and bazaars of Lahore. He is on friendly terms with the natives and becomes the “Little Friend of all the World.” Not surprisingly, he is “hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of” and lives “in a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights.” He also executes nightly “commissions” for young men of fashion for the sake of “the game” (5). Kipling's mention of the eighth-century caliph in The Arabian Nights and Kim's nightly errand for “intrigue” not only exoticizes and romanticizes Kim's boyhood in Lahore but also decontextualizes and dehistoricizes Kim's world in nineteenth-century colonial India. In other words, he brushes past social miseries – poverty, injustice, caste rigidity, and colonialism – into the fictional world of The Arabian Nights. Though not an orphan, Insu is symbolically an abandoned boy. After all, he subconsciously fears that, like his “ghost brother,” he might be abandoned by his parents. Moreover, his father is not only sometimes reluctant to acknowledge Insu as his own son in public but also usually absent from home with his tours of duty in Vietnam and jobs in military camps in Korea. His mother is too busy with her own businesses – “the black-marketing, the gambling, the debts, the friendships and antipathies, the matches she made, the ungrateful friends and business partners” (244) – to take care of him. Not surprisingly, Sergeant Heinz wonders “what old man is going to teach [Insu] the important things while I'm off in The Great Game” (132). But, like Kim, Insu is a savvy boy in the underworld of Pupyong. Even in first grade, Insu comes to know all the black-marketeers, gamblers, “waitresses at the military clubs,” and “prostitutes and husband-seekers” lining up outside the gates of ASCOM (121). He has shadowy and illegal dealings with Korean black-marketeers, buying items for them from the PX. In striking contrast to Kipling, however, Fenkl highlights both the postcolonial and neocolonial status of twentieth-century Korea in the reminiscences of the camptowns around US military installations.

Insu's family lives in a house built by a Japanese colonel during the Japanese occupation. After his stay in Korea, the Japanese colonel was sent to “Burma, then to defend Iwo Jima against the Americans. He lost the island to the U. S. Marines and committed seppuku in his bunker on Mt. Suribachi” (5). The US invasion of Iwo Jima was one of the most crucial victories during World War II, and the US Marines' flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi has been one of the most treasured icons of US military history. Therefore the Japanese colonel's defeat and suicide on the mountain anticipates the Japanese surrender to the USA and his ghost is an apt figure of lingering Japanese colonialism in Korea. More significantly, although his ashes were spread in the rock garden of his house in Korea, the house itself is occupied by the family of a US sergeant. Since the Japanese occupation is thus replaced by the US military intervention, post-independence Korea is both postcolonial and neocolonial. Indeed, Insu's family moves to Tatagumi, a Japanese-named neighbourhood near an American military service center. Insu dramatizes the colonial succession more indirectly in the episode of the stolen camera: an American GI's Japanese-made Pentax is a symbolic “tool used for ‘capturing’ images [of Koreans] by ‘shooting’ them through a lens.” The image of the camera neatly resonates with the image of the black train that takes daily supplies across a rail bridge into ASCOM: the steam engine “was left by the Japanese and now operated by Koreans working for the US Army.”Footnote ⁴¹ The mutual imbrication of the postcolonial and the neocolonial is more clearly reflected in the GI pidgin of Japanese origin such as mama-san, papa-san, boy-san, baby-san, ainokos, t'aksan, number one, number ten, and so on.

In his description of camptown life, Insu indicts the devastating effects of the US military presence on the inhabitants of the camptowns. For his spending money, Insu searches for artillery brass – “wads of C4 plastic explosive, manual fuses, unexploded shells” – in a US firing range at the risk of his own life. He sells the brass to a Korean dealer “who would turn it into ashtrays, bedposts, deep-sea diving helmets, and gaudy decorations for spendthrift GIs to take back to ‘The World’” in Itaewon, the camptown near the Yongsan Garrison (248, 249). Insu's depiction of Itaewon is one of the most dismal portrayals of camptowns in Korea:

Unlike Kim's romantic and even idyllic Lahore, Insu's Itaewon is full of thugs, thieves, hustlers, prostitutes, and pimps. Filled with the awful stench of sewage and urine, Itaewon is mired in poverty, wrongs, disorder, violence, crime, and prostitution. Itaewon relies on the US military compound for its economic survival, and everybody in the camptown is eager to get money from the GIs by whatever means. The seedy world, with its disorder, violence, and crime, is tragic and doomed, for the survival of its inhabitants cannot be extricated from the infrastructures of US imperialism. Whereas Kipling suppresses and disregards the harsh realities of colonial India, Fenkl thus ruthlessly highlights and denounces the self-destroying camptown of neocolonial Korea shadowed by the US military presence. In other words, Kipling implicitly endorses the British presence in India, but Fenkl explicitly criticizes the US presence in Korea (and the US involvement in Vietnam).

Sergeant Fenkl, who has an enduring fascination with Kim, seems to have been intrigued by the “remarkable coincidences” between Kim and his life (63). He identifies himself as a red bull on a green field in the Great Game, makes Insu a latter-day Kim with a reenactment of the opening scene of Kim, and tries to pass down his fatherly message to his son with a copy of Kipling's fiction. He must have seen a bright future for his son while reading Kim's achievements in the Great Game of intelligence-gathering and counterespionage: if a Sahib moving among the Indians did great jobs for the British Empire, an Amerasian boy could achieve much more startling successes for the American empire in the new Great Game. He might have thought of Insu as an ideal descendant of Kim, indeed a much better-qualified secret agent for the American empire. Kipling emphasizes Kim's ability to go native and to pass for an Indian: Kim is “burned black as any native,” fluent in Hindustani, and versatile culturally (3). Yet, in reality, Kim is a white boy who cannot pass for an Indian everywhere permanently: his racial identity and national allegiance can be easily detected by any native, not to mention enemy. In contrast, Sergeant Fenkl might have presumed, biracial Insu could be an ideal imperial boy working for the interests of the American empire with much less chance of being questioned about his racial and national allegiances. Little wonder, then, that Sergeant Fenkl envisions a military career for Insu in Asia: he hopes that his son will study in “the US Military Academy” and go to “'Nam with [him] sometime” (221, 128).

Insu grows up in a camptown around a US military installation and goes to the American school in a US garrison. Naturally enough, the Amerasian boy sees his father as his role model and wants to be a soldier like his father.Footnote ⁴² Sergeant Fenkl earnestly wishes Insu to follow in his footsteps and to participate in the Great Game of the twentieth century. Yet Insu cannot be a latter-day Kim working for the interests of the American empire in Korea. Against his father's wishful thinking, his mixed blood makes it difficult for him to fit in with the Koreans as a successful secret agent of the USA. To Koreans for whom ethnic or racial homogeneity is a crucial issue, his immediately perceptible biracial status signifies at best his divided loyalties. After all, the biracial boy is derogatorily called a t'wigi, which means, etymologically, “uncommon,” “unfamiliar,” “unnatural” – that is, “un-Korean.” Moreover, Insu grows up within his mother's universe and has a natural affinity for his Korean half. Although his father denounces “the barbarism and the pagan ceremonies” in his house (239), Insu feels comfortable in his mother's spiritual world of animism, shamanism, ancestor worship, and Buddhism. And he rejects his father's spiritual world of Christianity which, he thinks, does not have contemporary relevance “outside the gates of the U. S. Army post” (241). Not surprisingly, Insu is not interested in the Great Game for the empire at all. As is best demonstrated in his translation of his father's Great Game into his mother's game of slot machines (132), what is far more interesting for the Amerasian boy is the little games going on around him in the camptown: the little games “of fleecing and being fleeced by the U. S. military; … of flesh-peddling, black-marketing, infanticide, and suicide; … of prostituting a nation and a culture and a language; … of sexual sale and husband-hunting and pregnancies and children used as tickets to the promised land of America.”Footnote ⁴³ Hence it is highly unlikely that he would grow up to be a Great Game player working single-mindedly for the American empire.

Memories of My Ghost Brother is an unexpected and ironic response to the call of Kim, because it was written not by an Indian or Indian British/American writer but by a Korean American writer.Footnote ⁴⁴ Interestingly enough, Fenkl wrote another response to Kim and sequel to Memories of My Ghost Brother in the introductory part of his short story “Song Bird” (2003). In Memories of My Ghost Brother Sergeant Fenkl grows sick with an Agent Orange-related cancer. After his father's departure to the USA for medical treatment, Insu is reluctant to leave Korea to join his father and feels that he will “long to return to the place of [his] birth and the language of [his] mother” (169). Insu seems to return to Korea as the unnamed narrator of “Song Bird.” In the short story the narrator and his friend, Walter K. Lew, meet one Colonel Noakowski of the US 8th Army. The colonel takes the two Fulbright students onto the US 8th Army compound, entertains them with a nice dinner at the Officer's Club, and shows them his personal study in the Yongsan Garrison. To their surprise, the two Korean Americans find in the colonel's study “a fantastic range” of “antique Korean ‘knick-knacks.’” They sense that many of the artifacts – folk paintings, panels from Buddhist temple walls, antique masks, and embroidered rank insignia – in the colonel's study should have been displayed in museums. More significantly, Colonel Noakowski tells them about “the need for good translators in Military Intelligence” and tries to recruit them with “images of exotic advanced military training and skullduggery.” But the narrator is not impressed at all with the “romance” of the images portrayed by the colonel, since he has grown up “as an Army brat” and knows “the underbelly of the military life.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Consequently he rejects the offer of the American colonel, who, an ethnologist of sorts like Colonel Creighton in Kim, attempts to enlist the culturally versatile Korean American scholars for a latter-day Great Game in Korea.