Introduction to Asian American Studies: Race and War
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Considering all of this week’s readings, I am especially interested in the ways in which each of the texts contend with how the movement/passage (whether voluntary or involuntary) from one country to another can lead to a shift or negotiation in power. From a more generalized perspective, I was struck by the discussion of travel in Chapter 1 of Frazier’s The East is Black. Frazier frames Graham Du Bois’ and Du Bois’ written accounts of their trip to China within the understanding of travel as a non-neutral act; rather, travel is “an ideological and political praxis that facilitates heightened, critical consciousness“ and is “always entrenched in viewing the world from positions of power and standpoints of dominance, exploitation, inequality, and resistance (63).” In the case of the Du Boises, their travel to China and their witnessing of Chinese communism allowed them to see the radical potential of an alternative to Western capitalism and imperialism. By leaving the U.S., the Du Boises were able to view both China and the U.S. itself in a way that challenged representations propagated in U.S. media and culture. Thus, the act of traveling always involves a negotiation of power between individuals and between nation-states. Similarly, I am thinking about how this understanding of travel relates to race and war in Hasting’s text on U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. Hastings mentions that the majority of U.S. forces deployed to Vietnam felt a “cultural disdain” for the Vietnamese people at large, without distinction from “enemies” or civilians. Though not directly addressed in the Hastings text, I think that in war, the material transgression of “crossing” into “enemy territory” whether through attack or occupation already reveals positions of power, dominance, and exploitation. In the case of the Vietnam War, the sentiment of “cultural disdain” towards the Vietnamese people in conjunction with the active dehumanization of the “enemy” serves as a means of “othering” the “enemy” in order to justify U.S. military violence.
In “Diaspora of Camptown: The Forgotten War’s Monstrous Family,” Cho contextualizes the migration of people from the Korean peninsula to the U.S. within the project of U.S. militarism during the Korean War, underscoring the role of the yanggongju and their marriage to American GIs as “both central and spectral” in the Korean diaspora that resulted from the war. Cho describes the yanggongju as a figure that “haunts” because of the yanggongju’s contradictorily central yet spectral position in marriage and migration. While marriage between yanggongju and American GIs is largely responsible for the migration of Korean families to the U.S., these critical relationships are stigmatized and obscured as family secrets for the sake of rapid assimilation. Consequently, the violence and trauma that the yanggongju faced within the system of U.S. militarized prostitution is similarly obscured and relegated to the spectral periphery: “The force of the yanggongju’s haunting lies in the way her unacknowledged traumas are machined together with the far-reaching effect of violence in the camp town to haunt diasporic Koreans who have an unconscious recognition that someone else’s traumas have permeated what might seem to be their normal everyday lives (311).” Here, the movement/passage of the yanggongju to the U.S. is not a neutral migration of peoples but instead a displacement of trauma that is deeply influenced by war.
While doing this week’s readings, I was especially struck by Cho’s piece because of both the challenging subject matter and the unconventional methods she used to approach it. In her effort to examine traumas that are, by their nature, unspoken, she reaches into historical accounts, literary narratives, and her own personal experiences to try to piece together an image of the yanggongju “ghost” as it exists in people’s minds. She acknowledges several factors that make her endeavor difficult: scholars are expected to keep a respectful distance between themselves and their research subjects; sociologists often see interracial marriage and English-speaking children as marks of assimilation while ignoring hidden traumas; and the process of acquiring the “American Dream” requires an erasure of the memories of the camptowns and prostitution that allowed many Koreans to reach America in the first place. Because it is so difficult to get a firm grasp on the yanggongju by studying it directly, Cho uses methods that instead try to perceive the presence of some haunting specter through absences. This means examining secrets or gaps in family history, domestic violence behind closed doors, and unnamed but palpable trauma that gets transmitted from generation to generation. Although at first I was a little skeptical about Cho’s approach being so subjective and hard to define, by the end of the reading, I thought it actually made a lot of sense given her subject matter. In addition, her embrace of subjectivity lined up well with Frazier’s critique of the “politics of seeing,” which ignores the ways in which travelers are not passive mirrors but rather active agents in constructing, organizing, and making meaning out of their experiences. Looking at both these readings together, I’m curious about how efforts to complicate hegemonic historical narratives are tied in with challenges to representation in general, and if this is a larger trend (and on the flip side, how defending/perpetuating modes of representation is related to maintaining structures of oppression).
I remember having a similar skepticism when reading Cho’s “Diaspora of Camptown” due to the unconventionality of her research. She weaves historical analysis with fictional narratives in order to piece together the specter of the yanggongju and the invisible traumas of the Korean War. Yet, upon further reading, I realized that the plight of the yanggongju is not something that can be easily directly studied. The shame and taboo subject matter make interviews and ethnographic studies essentially impossible. As a result, I thought that her method of revealing these “audible silences” made a lot of sense in the context of the subject matter.
In class we talked a lot about these audible silences and their effects across generations. I thought that the discussion of the assimilation of the yanggongju into American society was particularly interesting because of the way that past histories were erased in order to ease the transition into America. The loss of Korean culture is something that is reproduced in subsequent generations. While sociologists may view this as a sign of proper assimilation, this overly simplistic view obscures how damaging this can be to the individual who is suppressing significant parts of her past. The extent of this trauma may never be fully uncovered due to the difficulties in data collection discussed earlier.
This week’s readings provided a perspective on the different effects of war on people, not the powers declaring war for political gains, but the soldiers and the victims. Cho discusses how the Korean brides from the war hid their trauma under a guise of assimilation when coming to America. In talking about My Lai, Max Hastings highlights the “culture of cruelty” prevalent in Vietnam during the war as soldiers witnessed the atrocities committed by the Vietcong and were fueled in the war by a cultural and racial disdain. When the US politicians entered the war merely for their own political interests, not truly caring for the wellbeing of the Vietnamese people, they did not create a culture that allowed the soldiers to respect the people they were supposed to be protecting.
In addition, I was extremely interested in the Frazier reading as I had been exposed to the relationships between Cold War China and Africa previously but had not specifically studied the parallels between African Americans and the Chinese and their shared battles. DuBois depicted China as “colored and knows to what a colored skin in this modern world subjects its owner” which suggests this solidarity against a universal white oppressor. However, his opinions were revealed to be thoroughly idealistic as China’s revolutionary programs were not as successful as DuBois was led to believe and China’s assistance to African nations was more one-sided, like a parent to a child rather than an interactive, two-sided relationship. Thus, China’s relations with Africa proved to be more of a charity relationship than true solidarity. This idea really rings true with me as my father lived through the Cultural Revolution and he tells me stories of how the propaganda they received about the Africans portrayed them more as children rather than partners and equals.
Class Reflection
In class today, most of our conversation revolved around GJ’s term, “audible silences”. We were able to understand these silences, as impacts from traumas, through Cho’s work on yanggongjus. After class, I am left with the idea that the “enemy other” that must always be fought but can never be vanquished is not a group of people, as I thought before, but rather an aspect of those people, whether that be such as the violence and trauma that they have endured. In the case of the yanggongjus, the “assimilation” or “forgetting” of such experiences is the war that is waged on the enemy other, but as Gilmore says, the enemy can never truly be vanquished. In this way, we can better understand Cho’s idea of “haunting”, where even when people try to forget or silence these parts of who they are, it can never truly be vanquished.
With our guest speaker and the topic of Korean reunification, I was left thinking about whether the trauma of war and familial separation that Koreans endured after the drawing of the 38th parallel, and whether those traumas will “haunt” future generations of Korean Americans. As Jenny and I suggested, it seems as though those “ghosts” are not very present in the current generation. I wonder if that is true, and if so, why there is a disconnect between how we understood audible silences and haunting.
Class reflection
In class, Dr. L posed the question to us about the nature of Cho’s work as auto ethnographical, and how that may have affected her research and writing about the unspoken/invisible trauma inherent to the figure of the yanggongju. As we discussed, it makes sense that these “audible silences” that both indicate and transmit transgenerational trauma can only be detected from within, because it’s hard to find something that’s missing or unspoken without having lived with the particular audible silence and experienced the traumas that it carries. I wonder then, if for certain cases of trauma (especially transgenerational trauma, and trauma originating from geopolitical violence), auto ethnography is the only way to identify and analyze these populations. I wonder further how many global, transgenerational ’traumas of silence’ from throughout history have never been documented or examined, because they were never noticed by outsiders.
I think you pose several important questions here Tess. After class, I was asking questions of myself similar to your latter question, “How many global, transgenerational ‘traumas of silence’ from throughout history have never been documented or examined.” (Although, tangentially related, this reflection is an attempt to think through “audible silence” using another course as a lens.) I am in Professor Dan-el Padilla’s course titled “Bondage and Slavery in a Global Context” and this question comes up quite frequently. I mention this because we often find ourselves limited due to the lack of texts, artifacts, and physical evidence depicting slavery in a holistic manner, and part of this holistic understanding is knowing about cases of “transgenerational trauma and trauma originating from geopolitical violence.” Scholars know that slavery existed during the ancient times as evidenced by archeological records, but what is missing from these records (due to a multitude of factors) are these cases of trauma. After our discussion on “audible silences,” I wonder if any of this is because of willful silence or intentional erasure on the part of the slave as a means of pragmatism and practicality of self-preservation. Orlando Patterson’s seminal text “On Slavery and Social Death” uses a heuristic based on honor as a guiding framework for understanding choices made within the institution of slavery. If my hypotheses of intentional silencing were plausible, would it be due to this framework of honor and were slaves privy or have the own agency of preserving their own honor through practices of trauma erasure?
AMS307 Week 8 Class Reflection
In class last week, we talked about the damage that was done to families and communities in the Korean War, and by the drawing of borders. This paralleled strongly with the discussion of the situation in Vietnam by Martin Luther King in this week’s reading of Beyond Vietnam. This made me think about the concept of colonialism. Colonialism is something that we are taught to think of America as distant from, since the United States ‘escaped’ from the colonist system with the revolution, and since then has worked, or at least claimed to, toward freedom and democracy for other countries. Although I realize that the American history that is taught is revisionist, I don’t think I grasped how far the damage of US colonialism extended in countries like Korea and Vietnam.
Colonialism seems to arise from a national narrative surrounding superiority and arrogance. I think, however, that that narrative arises from a fundamental fear and insecurity of the nation’s elite – namely, wealthy white Americans. Their position at the top of the pyramid is maintained by a constant attempt to discover new ways to oppress others. Colonialism serves this purpose in several ways – by uniting factions within a nation, by creating an image of strength, and by potentially adding more subjugants into the pool. These are just some preliminary thoughts following our discussion about the Korean war in class last week.
Class Reflection
I’ve been reflecting a lot about my own perceptions of South Korea and North Korea after hearing our guest speaker share and watching the documentary in class. Like Kate, I’m surprised and troubled by how little I’ve learned about the Korean War and about American colonialism in general through my past U.S. history classes. Together, though, the documentary and Cho’s piece about yanggongju’s have been slowly changing how I see “marks of harmony” between America and South Korea, allowing me to reinterpret them as “marks of militarization.” However, like Ryoo, I wonder what would happen if traumas from the past slowly died away as time went on, and nobody was left to challenge a society’s rewriting of “marks of militarization” as “marks of harmony.” The possibility of this kind of historical erasure might be justification for academics to pay more attention to ethnographic approaches to history, like the interviews in the documentary or Cho’s recounting of her own family history.
Class Reflection
Just as Kate and Karen mentioned, revisionism and agendas of those who construct the narrative of history education is an issue that I kept coming back to while reflecting on the past class. South Korea specifically has had many issues regarding its textbooks, which has been a hot topic of debate especially durning the time that I was in high school. Though the push to make a single government issued textbook has been abolished with the impeachment of Park Geun-hye and the subsequent election of Moon Jae-in, the subject of textbooks is a never ceasing topic of conversation, most recently shown with the stir caused in Korea by Japan’s most recent updates in its textbooks regarding Dokdo.
But also in regards to transgenerational trauma, I wonder as to whether such selective narrative of history has already occurred – I was clueless about the existence of yanggongjus before reading the Cho text but am hyperaware of the ‘comfort women’ who to an extent, manifest as Korean representation of victimization by Japan in the Korean narrative. The traumas of these two women of different areas – one nearly forgotten and one championed as the voice against imperialism makes me wonder about the role of ‘utility’ in achieving a goal may have in the remembrance of pain and trauma. As we have seen from the documentary we watched in class, while unification was also a cause sought after due not just to trauma, McCarthyism and pervasiveness prevented anyone from expressively voicing their support of the North in fear of incarceration, punishment or public shame.
Class Reflection:
I was really moved by Memory of Forgotten War and I am still thinking about trauma, haunting, and what it means to still live in a state of unending war that is simultaneously “forgotten.” For me, the film showed the endlessness of war that extends far beyond the graphic violence of combat, even though that too was brutal to watch. It was especially crushing to learn how arbitrarily created boundaries like the 38th parallel could destroy entire families. Throughout the film, I was thinking about Grace Cho’s text and the notion of haunting, and how trauma is an active force that is individual, collective, and generational. Specifically, the interview with the man who talked about how he had to pretend that his siblings who were in North Korea didn’t exist underscored the extent to which war necessitates a violent forgetting and repressing. In previous classes, we’ve discussed how during Japanese internment, many of the people in the camps were attempting to make rational decisions for their individual interests and the sake of their family more so than they were trying to adhere to any allegiance to a nation-state. Similarly, the film showed how many of the people living in the Korean peninsula during the war tried to make pragmatic decisions in order to keep their family together.
Class Reflection:
It was really eye-opening to watch Memory of Forgotten War and to hear about the divide between North and South Korea. With all the media coverage that creates a framework casting the two as thoroughly different places, one a cold, ruthless, authoritarian dictatorship and the other an emblem of successful democracy, it is hard to imagine the two ever uniting again to become one country. It’s hard to imagine that the people really are the same—with the same culture, language, and roots. They were merely divided due to imperial powers attempting to gain political advantage. I also usually only considered the trauma of war to be suffered by soldiers themselves who have seen violence and killing, but never really thought about how it could affect the people as well, especially women. Women in wars have had to absorb the violence and ravages of war and it creates a trauma that lasts for generations. Especially in the case of the yanggongju who have to hide their true origins and identities, that they are a product of violence and war.