“At every stop along this path of search turned into research, I have found some unconscious evidence of an erasure, of a violently repressed history of violence. So many details, Mother, and I still can’t find you pictured among all these women and girls."
- Grace Cho, 90
This book by Grace Cho is as moving as it is enlightening about the subaltern histories that are rarely told through dominant narratives of Korean history. In tracing her family history through her mother, she reconciles with the intergenerational trauma passed on by a history of unspoken violence.
Cho talks about the figure of the “yanggongju”, meaning “Western princess”. This word was used to describe Korean women who had sexual relationships with Americans, most commonly used for women who were prostitutes for the U.S. military. This figure served as an object of loathing and desire for Koreans; she was all of the patriots who served her country by keeping U.S. interests engaged, the tragic victim of U.S. imperialism, the complicit woman of Korea’s subordination, and the woman within arm’s reach of the American Dream. At the same time, the collective trauma experienced by these women were erased from representation and replaced by the assimilated Korean wife of a G.I. husband.
This creates the “monstrous family”, a tale of an interracial couple of the U.S. GI and Korean woman. They represent the cooperation between two countries as familial relations, having the U.S. as the dominant male figure and Korea as the child/woman that needs guidance. The “monstrous family” erases the history of devastation experienced by wartime bombings and the beginning of U.S. military domination on the southern half of the peninsula that continues to this day.
To Cho, the yanggongju represents the unspoken psychic trauma that exists today and continues to affect Koreans across the world. The Korean diaspora in the United States is haunted by the traumatic experiences of what is not told.
In this book, Grace Cho intends to do two things: study the diaspora in the perspective of the yanggongju to challenge the narratives of family, assimilation, and U.S.-Korea relations, and explore the affective potential of haunting in unspoken grief and trauma (han in Korean).
This week's reading: Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War by Grace M. Cho
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