“Bled in, Letter by Letter”

This chapter examines how Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student and Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered negotiate the ethical and political complexities that shape the relationship between Koreans who directly experienced the trauma of war and Korean American authors who have constructed literary memories of that event. These are novels that are engaged in the cultural process that Marianne Hirsch has termed “postmemory.” These works constitute exemplary postmemorial texts that refrain from making the trauma of the war into the essentialist foundation of an ethnonationalist conception of Korean or Korean diasporic identity. These novels do so by highlighting the artifice of their constructions of memories that only belong, properly speaking, to those who experienced the war. In so doing they enact a form of postmemory that involves a kind of translation that is structured by approximations, interpolations, and gaps. Choi’s The Foreign Student is particularly noteworthy for gesturing as well toward the Korean War’s significance for Japanese Americans and African Americans without engaging in a problematic politics of racial comparison. This novel theorizes a mode of cultural memory that resonates not only with Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” but also with Alexander Weheliye’s notion of “racializing assemblages.”

“Tan Yanks” and Black Korea

This chapter analyzes cinematic and journalistic depictions of the Korean War that centered on the role played by African American soldiers serving in integrated combat units. Heroic depictions of “Tan Yanks” in both the mainstream press and black newspapers highlighted the usefulness of an integrated military to the global ideological battle against Communism, especially in terms of winning “the hearts and minds” of the formerly colonized. This chapter demonstrates how the Korean War facilitated the articulation of an early version of the ideology that Melanie McAllister has termed “military multiculturalism,” which is evident in two Hollywood films from the 1950s: Pork Chop Hill (1959) and All the Young Men (1960). This chapter also addresses two strains of Orientalism that also surfaced on the pages of black newspapers: the first expressed an Afro-Asian sense of racial solidarity and intimacy with the Korean people as a nonwhite nation that had suffered under a Japanese colonialism that had been supported by US and European powers prior to World War II; the second took shape as a fascination with amorous relationships that had formed between black servicemen and Japanese female civilians prior to and during the Korean War and the interracial desires they embodied.

The Intimacies of Complicity

This chapter elaborates a transnational literary critical methodology for approaching South Korean depictions of the Korean War that now circulate in the United States in translated form through an analysis of Hwang Sok-yong’s novel The Guest. This magical realist work recounts a massacre that occurred in late 1950 in which roughly thirty-five thousand residents of Sinch’on, located in what is now North Korea, were slaughtered by their friends and neighbors. This chapter situates The Guest in its domestic context, elaborating its critique of both North and South Korean nationalist narratives that tend to avoid holding Koreans themselves accountable for such atrocities, and its complex engagement with the history of Korean Christianity. Even as it does so, however, the novel also implicates Japanese colonialism and Western Christianity in the violence that erupted in Sinch’on. However, this chapter also argues that this novel in its translated form must also be read within the context of its circulation in the United States, which highlights certain aspects of it: the affinities it suggests between working-class Koreans drawn to Marxism and enslaved Africans and its critique of the bystander role adopted by the US military in relation to atrocities committed by its Korean allies.

Picturing Koreans

This chapter focuses on how civilians—particularly refugees and orphans—were depicted in US cinematic and journalistic representations of the Korean War. While revelations by a team of Associated Press reporters in 1999 of a massacre of Korean civilians by US soldiers near No Gun Ri in late 1950 shocked the American public, the fact that such actions, essentially war crimes, were committed by their nation’s military men was openly acknowledged in cultural works from the Korean War era. This chapter looks to accounts of “the refugee problem” in Life magazine, which explained that US soldiers were now firing on civilians because Communists were routinely infiltrating their ranks. It also takes up two Hollywood films—One Minute to Zero (1952) and Battle Hymn (1959)—in which such killings feature prominently. These works exemplify the humanitarian Orientalism that took shape during the Korean War, which purported to make surgical distinctions between populations that required killing and ones that were worthy objects of humanitarian care. These works render such deaths, however, as a tragic and necessary outcome and endow them with an aura of religious sacrifice, giving divine sanction to the deathworlds created by the necropolitical and biopolitical machinery of US war-making.

Introduction

This introduction establishes the historiographical and methodological orientation to the Korean War adopted by The Intimacies of Conflict, which works against the erasure of this event in US cultural memory in two ways. First of all, it returns us to cultural works from the 1950s: films and journalistic representations that used the conflict to stage a number of compelling dramas of interracial and transnational intimacy. Such texts articulate two cultural logics central to US Cold War liberalism and military multiculturalism: “military Orientalism,” which frames Japanese American soldiers and other Asian combatants as loyal allies, and “humanitarian Orientalism,” which constructs Korean civilians as worthy objects of humanitarian care. Both logics, however, legitimate any Asian deaths that occur in the course of the fighting, revealing the particular biopolitical and necropolitical formations that emerged during the Korean War. Second, this study looks to a body of recent novels on the conflict authored primarily by US writers of color. These offer trenchant critiques of the forms of intimacy privileged by midcentury Cold War ideologies and constitute an exemplary assemblage of cultural memory that highlights the intimacies of the multiple histories of race and empire that converged in the conflict.

The Racial Borderlands of the Korean War

This chapter brings together an array of Korean War novels, authored by US writers of color, to engage in a counterhegemonic project of cultural memory that explores the conflict’s significance for African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans: Toni Morrison’s Home, Rolando Hinojosa’s trilogy of works set during the conflict (Korean Love Songs, Rites and Witnesses, and The Useless Servants), and Ha Jin’s War Trash. These works critique the mistreatment of US soldiers of color and Chinese combatants by those in command. Morrison’s and Hinojosa’s novels emphasize the racism that persisted within the newly integrated US military, and Jin’s highlights the plight of prisoners of war in US-administered detention centers. These novels also highlight, however, nonwhite soldiers—including African American and Chicano servicemen—who committed atrocities during the conflict. Hinojosa’s and Jin’s writings, moreover, contextualize the war in a wider and longer set of historical trajectories: the former suggests a connection between US imperial aspirations as they took shape in 1950 and the ones that led to the US-Mexico War a century before; the latter conveys how the Korean War has been framed by the nationalist mythology of the People’s Republic of China as a great victory against US imperialism.

Angels of Mercy and the Angel of History

This chapter explores Jayne Anne Phillips’s Lark and Termite and Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered, which focus on the suffering of civilians during the Korean War by subversively reiterating the dominant ways in which US liberal depictions conveyed the plight of refugees—and especially orphans—during the Korean War. Korean noncombatants were framed at midcentury within a humanitarian Orientalism, casting them as objects of humanitarian care whose deaths—even when the result of US actions that were essentially war crimes—were to be recognized as a necessary though tragic by-product of conflict. These novels’ protagonists resemble the salvific figures lionized in such representations and become the focus of readers’ sympathetic responses. However, these works engage in a subversive project of cultural memory by disfiguring the humanitarian identifications they elicit and feature Korean subjects who respond to the putative benevolence extended to them with a self-immolating violence and rage. This chapter argues that Lark and Termite and The Surrendered strive to compel their readers to adopt an excruciating identification with the angel of history as rendered by Walter Benjamin rather than angels of mercy and thus to see the past as a chain of catastrophes in which they are fundamentally implicated.

“He’s a South Korean When He’s Running with You, and He’s a North Korean When He’s Running after You”

Through a carefully contextualized analysis of Samuel Fuller’s 1951 film The Steel Helmet, this chapter illuminates several tropes that circulated in contemporaneous US depictions of the Korean War: an interracial group of US soldiers, a Korean orphan, and enemy soldiers who disguise themselves as refugees and routinely violate other rules of war. In this movie are the remnants of a prior racial ideology that had demonized the entire Japanese population during World War II and the emergence of a new one that emphasized lawfulness as the primary criteria that could distinguish between subjects of color—both American and Asian—who were loyal and those who posed a threat. As this film demonstrates, the integration of the US military, and particularly the incorporation of Japanese American and African American soldiers into formerly all-white units, became vital during the Korean War to US assertions of its own ethical superiority over the Communist enemy, as was its soldiers’ humanitarian commitment to protecting Korean civilians—especially orphans. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how The Steel Helmet both crystallizes the emergent racial ideologies of US Cold War liberalism—especially their legalistic aspects in regards to war and their espousal of military multiculturalism—and then shatters them.

Conclusion

This conclusion explores how the Korean War has been monumentalized in South Korean cultural memory since the end of the era of military dictatorships by analyzing the War Memorial of Korea, which opened in 1994, and the emergence of Korean cinematic blockbusters (as a component of hallyu). These cultural objects are indicative of how digital and film technologies have fundamentally structured the public forms of memory that have taken shape in that country. They also reveal how such rememberings, which express a desire for reconciliation with the North, also give voice to a reconstituted South Korean nationalism. While moving somewhat past the virulent anti-Communism of the Cold War era, the new story of the Korean War that has emerged still is a nationalist expression of soft power, paying tribute to South Korea’s emergence as an economic power that can purportedly negotiate the exigencies and crises wrought by globalization and neoliberalism through its mastery of both military technology and technologies of representation. Nonetheless, the war memorial and films like Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War enable a significant reckoning with the complicity of both South Korean and US military forces and political leaders in the violence that erupted during the Korean War.

Military Orientalism and the Intimacies of Collaboration

The participation of Japanese American soldiers in the Korean War as it was depicted in Hollywood films, the mainstream press, and the Pacific Citizen is the focus of this chapter. Such texts reveal the “military Orientalism,” a subset of military multiculturalism, that took shape during the conflict, which posited Japanese Americans as citizen-subjects par excellence. This ideology asserted that the willingness of Japanese American men to serve their country in World War II (despite the racism of the internment) and in newly integrated combat units during the Korean War exemplified an ethos of sacrifice, a racialized value system crucial to their status as model minority subjects. This chapter traces the emergence of this military Orientalism across several cultural sites: two films that were released in 1959, Pork Chop Hill and The Crimson Kimono; tributes that appeared in the mainstream press to Nisei soldiers like Hiroshi Miyamura, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor during the Korean War; Go for Broke!, a 1951 film set during World War II but released during the Korean War; and finally, the exhaustive coverage of this film’s production and reception in the Pacific Citizen, the newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League.