In Cold War Friendships, Josephine Nock-Hee Park considers a body of work by Asian American writers that fits uneasily within the existing canon of Asian American literature: novels and memoirs whose characters are decisively shaped not so much by the experiences of immigration and ethnic community in America but by wartime alliance with the United States during the Korean and Vietnam wars. These strategic and fraught “friendships,” argues Park, lie at the psychological center of a significant body of Korean American and Vietnamese American literature, including Richard Kim's The Martyred, Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered, Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge, and Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala.Footnote ¹

Park, a professor of English, focuses on the figure of the wartime “friendly,” that ambivalent character who shares a national and racial identity with the enemy yet chooses to affiliate politically and militarily with America. Offering a typology of the friendly, Park catalogues stories of soldiers, foreign students, orphans, and refugees. By making the friendly visible as a recurring literary trope, Park illuminates an existential category that complicates simple binaries of racial difference or political opposition, and she reveals structural connections among texts that might otherwise be slotted into separate genres of wartime or immigrant narratives. Park's conceptualization of the friendly constitutes a fresh contribution to literary and cultural studies, one that may help future scholars grapple with the cultural production emerging out of America's seemingly endless “war on terror.”

Park uses the friendly to make an argument for the “determining effects of war for Asian America” (p. 14). While noting that the wars in Korea and Vietnam stimulated the growth of Asian American populations and fostered the emergence of Asian American studies, her deeper interest lies in the psychic processes through which wartime allies were transformed into Asian Americans, and she probes how these proxies for American power abroad became model minorities in America. Exploring the dynamics of Asian American self-making within the constraining legacies of war, she plumbs the consciousness of literary characters to conclude that, while they try to forge autonomous subjectivities, ultimately they can never fully liberate themselves from the hierarchical bonds of their wartime relationships.

Cold War Friendships participates in numerous scholarly conversations. In its exploration of the literary dimensions of US-Asian intimacies, this book extends the core idea in Park's first book, which charted both Euro-American poets’ fascination with Asia and Asian American poets’ struggles against this Orientalist legacy.Footnote ² As her title suggests, Park positions her book within Cold War cultural studies, specifically the shift away from containment's demonization of Asian enemies and toward the examination of the cultural logics of “free world” integration. Park's book can thus be placed in profitable conversation with recent historical studies such as Arissa Oh's To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), which likewise interrogates the terms of US-Asian affiliation. Park's book also makes a contribution to the conversation within Asian American cultural studies about the relationship between US imperialism and the formation of Asian American subjectivities, and she cites with approval Jodi Kim's The Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Finally, Park's book belongs to the transnational turn in American studies, offering the figure of the wartime-friendly-turned-model-minority as a powerful emblem that links the foreign and domestic spheres of American life.

The execution of Cold War Friendships does not, however, live up to the promise and potential of its rich framing. The textual interpretation tends to focus on plot, theme, and character, and does not delve deeply into other dimensions of literary form. The argument also abstains from situating texts within the rich contexts of Asian American literary and social history, the broad arcs of postwar American culture, or the political history of US-Asian relations. The two framing chapters on Korean war films and television shows and Anglo-American depictions of Vietnam add little to the existing scholarship on these familiar works. The analysis thus remains in an awkward middle distance, rather than moving fluidly between micro textual interpretations and macro historical or cultural perspectives. The writing also betrays a penchant for abstraction that too often devolves into vagueness. Several chapters lack clearly articulated theses, and the reader is too often left struggling to hold on to a slippery analytical insight. To top it off, Park seems vaguely disappointed with the texts. She seems oddly annoyed with the “overwrought” (p. 267) “literary ambitions” (p. 114) of the Korean war novels and the “utilitarian air” (p. 267) of the Vietnam memoirs, as if frustrated that they cannot break free of the bonds of Cold War friendship that were the defining criteria for the texts’ inclusion in this project.