Haunting the Korean Diaspora traces the genealogy of the kijich'on (camptown) woman from the afflictions of war and her transformation from the disparaged yanggongju (Western princess/whore) to the assimilated American immigrant upon crossing the Pacific Ocean. The book is not an empirical analysis of military prostitution or the political economy of the camptown that produces the yanggongju. Fictional representations of the kijich'on woman abound, yet the book is not fiction. This is a unique kind of sociopolitical-cultural narrative, drawing on the empirical research of others, works of Korean and Asian American literature, the author's personal memories, and more.
Grace Cho, an anthropologist and performance artist, employs multiple methodologies, but she is particularly indebted to psychoanalytic theories as she explores trauma's tendency to “haunt” across families, generations, and national territories, including her own. She focuses on the Korean War's “psychic impact” on survivors and “the traumatic sensations carried by those who survived the war and those who would later be constituted by it” (p. 53). When Cho, growing up in America, would ask her mother about her past life in Korea, her mother “would stare silently at some spot on the wall until the intensity of her gaze compelled me to be quiet, too” (p. 2).
The personal and the political are inextricably bound in Haunting the Diaspora, as the author seeks to unbury the silences of the individual and collective past that bind Koreans and Americans together. Cho employs the “spectral agency” of the yanggongju to piece together the remnants of the Forgotten War—the memories of its survivors, the bodies of its dead, and the charred remains of the American scorched-earth policy. Such an act of memory reveals not only hidden histories of grief but also continuities with contemporary geopolitics, and thus it raises questions about the ways in which the United States is a neocolonial power rather than a peacekeeper bestowing the gift of democracy (p. 51).
For Cho, it is neither North Korea and China—combatants against whom South Koreans, Americans, and other United Nations troops fought—nor the vagaries and vicissitudes of war that traumatize Koreans and Americans today. Rather, the United States is the main source of the violence and suffering—through the “promiscuous strafing” (p. 69) and massacres of Korean civilians by American forces, along with napalm burnings and other atrocities—that long have been overlooked or written out of conventional histories that celebrate America's role in “saving” Koreans from communism. For example, she emphasizes that although more napalm was dropped on Koreans than (later) in Vietnam, the American public took no concern over such destruction until the later war. In her view, the United States exhibited no restraint “in its deployment of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ ” in Korea and their devastating effect on civilians (p. 71).
Cho criticizes the heroic historiography of America's role in the war and South Korea's dogged fight after the war to defeat North Korea through authoritarianism and economic developmentalism. But she writes as if the United States was the only enactor of violence, attributing the 3 million Korean lives (10 percent of the population) lost on the peninsula to U.S. actions, when all the parties involved in the war had a hand in the human suffering.
Cho is more convincing about the insidious nature of trauma's haunting within a family than she is about how “transgenerational haunting” is “unconsciously passed” across cultures and countries. She attempts to connect the seemingly disparate instances and venues of war or militarism and their negative effects on civilians in Vietnam, Vieques, as well as Korea. But diverse psyches in disparate time periods and places do not and cannot “haunt” or make the personal and political connections unconsciously. Activist networks selected and then publicized certain individuals' memories and historical events to make possible the comparisons of how wars hurt and haunt. For example, the constant disturbances and damage that residents of Vieques and Maehyangri suffered because of U.S. bombing exercises were constructed into a larger narrative about the haunting aspects of American militarism because activists forged the connections through the Internet, conferences, and individual travels. Moreover, South Koreans, for all their criticism of the United States' role in the past, present, and future of the peninsula, have selectively ignored and actively written out their own participation in the Vietnam War. At their height, three divisions fought Vietnamese Communists; Korean soldiers perpetrated uncountable atrocities against Vietnamese civilians, but it has remained social taboo and political anathema to raise the issue, even after democratization in the late 1980s.
Haunting the Diaspora's main contribution is in its portrayal of the yanggongju-turned-GI bride, whose silence about her past life in Korea is a requirement of her assimilation and integration into the “American dream.” It is also an interesting text that addresses multiple issues of interest to various disciplines—war, trauma, memory, historiography, gender and culture, racism, migration, diasporic identities—and their interconnections.
