Traditionally, the vast majority of scholarship about the Korean War has focused on the military and political dimensions of the conflict while devoting relatively little attention to its traumatizing social effects and complicated cultural legacies. During the last several years, however, scholars in a variety of disciplines have started to grapple with the war's human impact. They have paid attention to how the war inflicted massive suffering in Korea and elsewhere even while transforming societies and reshaping cultures. Recent works by Monica Kim, Heonik Kwon, and Hajimu Masuda, among others, have explored how the war imprinted itself onto everyday life in ways that extended far beyond the battlefield. Daniel Y. Kim's The Intimacies of Conflict is an insightful and welcome addition to this literature.
Relying primarily on cinematic and literary criticism, Kim focuses on the cultural representations and legacies of the war. It is perhaps because Americans have relegated Korea to being a “forgotten war” that there has been a peculiar lack of attention to the many literary works that the conflict has gestated around the world during the last seven decades. Rather than trying to survey this vast literature in its entirety—a nearly impossible task—The Intimacies of Conflict narrows its focus to a carefully selected set of films and novels. Kim divides his book into two fairly distinctive parts that are nonetheless interwoven by several common themes, including the war's influence on transnational conceptions of race and the affective connections between disparate groups engendered by the war. What makes this perspective so useful it that it constantly reminds us of how the war became a site where a diverse array of multinational actors came together in myriad ways.
Part one of The Intimacies of Conflict derives a significant part of its theoretical framing from Christina Klein's pioneering work, Cold War Orientalism.Footnote 1 Klein identified a sentimentalist global imaginary of integration that deepened America's commitments to Asia and undergirded some economic aid and humanitarian programs. Kim describes a militarized “humanitarian orientalism” as well as a “military orientalism,” which served as insidious counterparts to the relatively optimistic and progressive vision that Klein explored. Humanitarian orientalism classified Koreans—especially South Koreans—as objects of care even while allowing that many would have to be sacrificed to ensure victory over the enemy. Kim's notion of military orientalism, on the other hand, applies mainly to Asian American combatants who, he explains, were celebrated as heroes and patriots but only after sacrificing their lives for their country. Taken together, these two forms of orientalism helped to draw a line between Asians and Asian Americans who were loyal to the United States and those who needed to be regarded as threats (p. 14).
The way these two orientalist concepts manifested themselves is nicely explicated in Kim's discussion of Korean War films in his first four chapters. Some of the films taken up in these chapters, such as Battle Hymn, Steel Helmet, and Pork Chop Hill, are relatively well known, but Kim offers a nuanced and original analysis of their portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans. Less well known is the 1951 film Go for Broke!, which, Kim argues, helped cast Japanese Americans as a model minority through its heroic depiction of a World War II regiment composed entirely of Nisei soldiers.
The second part of The Intimacies of Conflict is more wide-ranging. Here Kim shifts his primary focus from films to novels and concentrates on a small number of highly regarded works by authors of color. These include Toni Morrison's Home, Rolando Hinojosa's trilogy of Korean War novels, Ha Jin's War Trash, and Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered, among others. Kim argues that this thematically diverse group of novels reveals how the histories of race and imperialism became tangled together as a result of the war. A strength of Kim's analysis is that it draws connections between subjects and events that are usually not looked at in conjunction with each other. The military and political history of the war informs his discussion of African American and Asian American literature; an understanding of the geopolitics of America's Cold War empire undergirds his analysis of the intimacies forged between combatants and Asian civilians.
Yet there are places where Kim does not push quite hard enough to put the varied texts that he discusses into dialogue with each other. There is an unexplored irony to Kim's juxtapositioning of Clarence Adams's memoir An American Dream and Ha Jin's novel War Trash in chapter 7. The chapter begins with Adams, an African American prisoner of war who chose to repatriate to the People's Republic of China (PRC) after the Korean War armistice, describing postwar China as a land of opportunity where he is able to attend a prestigious college, marry, and find a rewarding job. War Trash, which Kim takes up at the end of the chapter, tells the story of Yu Yuan, a Chinese prisoner of war who ultimately decides to repatriate to the PRC instead of going to Taiwan. But when Yu returns home, he finds that his college education is useless, his wife has deserted him, and he is always regarded with suspicion because of the time he spent in American camps. Kim's comparative analysis of how the different Korean War novels view the American empire is always full of insight, but it is unfortunate that he leaves a potentially fruitful comparison between these two accounts of postwar Communist China undrawn.
Even if The Intimacies of Conflict misses the occasional opportunity to be more innovative than it already is, the book will become a must-read for all serious scholars of the Korean War. Kim's thoughtful analysis and fluid writing help him skillfully weave together a diverse set of literary and cinematic works. With its emphasis on previously unexplored aspects of the war's cultural legacy, The Intimacies of Conflict enables us to better understand just how profoundly the conflict reshaped the individuals and nations that fought in it.
