Korean

Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

admin — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

When men are shipped out to foreign locations to engage in wartime activities, it seems inevitable that they will become romantically and sexually involved with foreign women. In Entangling Alliances, Susan Zeiger explores this phenomenon, examining governmental, military, and societal responses to American soldiers’ desires for sex, companionship, and marriage while engaged in combat overseas. She argues that the changing ways Americans treated war brides over the course of the twentieth century demonstrates shifting American sensibilities regarding foreign policy, race, and gender. More than anything, because war brides involved an exchange of women across cultural and national boundaries, American discourse about war brides was ultimately about what constituted American manhood, men’s relationships with women, and the role of the nation in its relationship to other countries.

During World War I, the military preached sexual abstinence while devising methods to keep American soldiers and local women apart, in particular African-American soldiers and white European women. The army’s response to marriage requests vacillated until an official policy was handed down that marriage was a personal, not military, question. Meanwhile, domestic policy concerns in the U.S. triumphed over an internationally-oriented political outlook; xenophobia for newcomers was inevitable and Americans wondered if these foreign women could become good American wives. Though many predicted the demise of these marriages, evidence reveals that the majority made it.

In World War II, military policy differed depending on location. It encouraged marriage in Great Britain and Australia, both Allied countries with similar cultural backgrounds to white middle-class America. Likewise, American society welcomed these brides, suggesting that American women should emulate their domesticity and loyalty to husbands. Alternatively, the military encouraged prostitution, rather than marriage, in both Italy and the Philippines, while American society viewed these war brides as less desirable immigrants. Zeiger argues that both policies—encouraging prostitution or marriage—“shared... the intention to preserve and extend male control over women.” She also points out that though many of these local women showed independence and an assertion of personal freedom by going out with American men, sometimes against their family’s wishes, their stories “end with marriage and dependence.”

Race played a huge role in war bride stories post-WWII and throughout the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Congressional policy actively limited brides from Asian countries, outright barring Japanese spouses for several years, while all interracial couples faced social discrimination and, occasionally, found that their marriages were not legal when they moved from one state to another.

Zeiger argues that the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam saw the “demise” of the war bride as a phenomenon considered and debated by the American public. The military did not provide transport to war brides the way they did in WWI and WWII, and it actively encouraged prostitution rather than marriage, extending its WWII policy of creating red-light districts where prostitutes were regularly examined by medical officials and given “safe” ratings to prevent the spread of venereal disease. Korean and Vietnamese wives were not written about widely in the American press and they have not written about their post-war experiences in America, the way war brides from earlier eras have done. They have been, Zeiger writes, “all but invisible in American culture.”

Demographic information suggests that these Asian war brides tend to be isolated, even in comparison to other Asian immigrants though they have sponsored family members to come to the U.S., unlike earlier war brides. Though Asian war brides were an untold story, there was a lot of media attention paid to the mixed-race children left behind in Vietnam and, sometimes airlifted out and brought to the U.S. Zeiger argues that the story of Amerasian children, and the efforts to bring them to the U.S. allowed Americans to re-conceptualize the war, seeing both Amerasian children and American soldiers as victims in the story. “The American nation becomes father and, also, paradoxically, child. Vietnam, the mother, the war bride, is not part of this reconciliation.”

Entangling Alliances is a compelling read, illuminating twentieth century social struggles encountered by men and women on both domestic and foreign soil over questions of gender, race, and nationality. Though Zeiger argues that the war bride phenomenon died out with the Korean and Vietnam wars, clearly, soldiers still took wives and fathered children with Korean and Vietnamese women. More recently, stories of male American soldiers marrying Iraqi women have been exploited in the media. Because Zeiger only covers the period from WWI up through the Vietnam War, she leaves a perplexing question unexplored: What has happened with female soldiers and local men in the conflicts that the U.S. has engaged in the last twenty years? Have female soldiers, like male soldiers, engaged in romantic and sexual conquests with non-U.S. citizens? I suspect their experience has been radically different than their male counterparts.

Written by: Jessica Powers, June 5th 2010

To Kill a Tiger: A Memoir of Korea

admin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Jid Lee

Overlook Press

Spanning five generations, this memoir explores the author’s upbringing and the sociopolitical climate of Korea during the last century through the anecdotes and interpretations of her family. The tales come mainly from her father as told to her mother. (Fathers, we learn, would only discuss such matters with their sons and sometimes their wives, but never with their "unworthy" daughters).

Historical lessons such as these are strewn throughout the text, interspersed with details from Lee’s day-to-day life as a child and teenager and anecdotes told to her by her family members (although most are the author’s own). These are all enhanced by the inclusion of black and white photographs of her family and community placed in nearly every chapter.

Lee presents us with analyses and divergent points of view regarding the Korean War, the Japanese-American-Korean triangle, and what’s gone on in South and North Korea for the last century. Lee also presents us with a brief history of the Korean Feminist movement, which was a joy to read about.

To Kill a Tiger is heavy on Confucian family structure and dynamics. We learn that Lee always came last after her brothers: her Big Brother and Less Big Brother, along with her Father, always got the best foods and the biggest portions, whereas Big Sister, the author, Little Sister, Mother, and Grandmother got the least nourishing foods and the smallest portions—especially Mother and Grandmother. Lee's upbringing is a stifling way of life, so oppressive and palpably rendered by the author that it floated off the page and painted my experience of the memoir, sometimes making me shake with disdain. This is particularly true in the passages told from the viewpoint of the author, a vehemently feminist child who argued and fought for her equality in repeated bursts of frustration and anger, way before she ever knew what feminism was or that anyone might agree with her.

Despite many entertaining sections, the book becomes very tiresome to read after one realizes that the drawn-out conversations between Lee and her family members (her mother in particular) do not appear in just a chapter or two, but consistently throughout. We continually receive a one-sided view of decades of Korean history and politics, often unofficial because the facts have ostensibly been covered up by the government. These portions discuss Korea’s strained relationships with Japan and the United States, the torture of political prisoners and women systematically raped in wars, and other tremendously delicate matters. Not only are these dialogues interminable, but they are also unreliable.

We also read redundant arguments between the author and her misogynist father regarding her worth as a female. I understand that Lee wants to make clear the derisive and poisonous attitude of her male family members towards her and women in general, but it quickly becomes like a broken record.

I had to skip entire pages in order to get through this memoir, which I lament because the premise of this book is promising and intriguing. Alas, it sorely disappoints.

What I applaud is this: It is a story of a tough, feminist kid who goes through hell and emerges victorious against everyone’s expectations. Lee triumphantly gives patriarchy the finger and fulfills her dreams, giving women everywhere—and especially those languishing in a sexist society more oppressive than that of Western culture—hope for everything they wish to accomplish.

Written by: Natalia Real, February 13th 2010

Mijeong

admin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:29:00 +0000

By Byun Byung-Jun

NBM Publishing

Mijeong is a collection of short stories by Byung-Jun Byun in manhwa form. In a word, Mijeong—a Chinese word meaning “pure beauty”—is moving. No matter what the story (there are seven) I was encouraged to think critically about men and women, adults and children, and their relationships to one another. Although the stories don’t seem to overlap, each is about a young person or young people dealing with the realities of their harsh urban world. Whatever else the author does, it’s clear the manhwa is striving for the beauty the title implies.

“Manhwa” is the general term for comics, print cartoons, and graphic novels in Korea. In other parts of the world, it’s usually marketed as Manga, a Japanese term meaning the same thing. One way it’s certainly different from Manga is that it’s read from left to right—the same direction as books in English—not right to left, as Manga traditionally is.

The author’s artistic style is more realistic than most Manga I’ve read. Characters’ eyes, for example, don’t seem to be a dominating facial feature. The art is more expressionist than I was expecting, and each page seems fuzzy, as if I was reading it through a dream. Most of the stories are in black, white, and grey. The one in the middle, “Song for You,” however, is cast in pastel hues and shows Byun’s artistic progress in the representation of space. Over all, the writing is sparse, letting the art speak except in cases of character dialogue.

I was struck most by “Yeon-du, seventeen years old,” which is about a young woman who acts in a porn film in order to be able to pay for a piece of art that a childhood friend of hers loved. We learn that the friend was killed trying to protect her from rapists at a young age, and now she lives to avenge him.

In “Utility,” a group of friends finds one of the girls' siblings hanging in her apartment after committing suicide. Because they’re afraid someone will come in and think they killed the young woman, they try to decide how to dispose of the body. It is, like Byun’s other pieces in Mijeong, very thought provoking.

This collection is quite an undertaking, and it left me with a sense of Korean urban life as well as the life of young people today. It’s not an overtly feminist collection, but it touches on some serious issues and treats them with respect. I’m looking forward to reading more of Byun’s work in the future.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, August 24th 2009

Free Food for Millionaires

admin — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:16:00 +0000

By Min Jin Lee

Warner Books

Free Food for Millionaires is a coming of age novel by prize-winning author Min Jin Lee. It follows the main character, Casey, from her posh college graduation through her uncertainty about what to do with the rest of her life. She struggles throughout the book to reconcile her conservative Korean-American upbringing with feminism and her own desires to break out of proscribed roles.

I found this book very challenging due to both its unconventional narrative style and its flighty, difficult to like protagonist. Although the main character is Casey, the author will often jump inside other character's heads to give you their perspective and stories from their own pasts. Sometimes this works great, as when you jump into Casey's father's head to witness his terrible memories from his childhood in Korea just before he commits an act of domestic violence in the present day. These flashbacks deepen the story and made me more curious about the characters, as well as adding a layer of sadness because the reader can see how often the drama in the story comes from the characters' misunderstanding of each other. But sometimes these "story microbursts" slow down the book when they are from the point of view of very minor characters. The book is already long (560 pages), and seeing things from so many viewpoints takes away from the momentum of Casey's story.

And then there's Casey herself. Here is where I think the author did a very interesting thing in creating a character who is both fascinating to follow and completely infuriating. She will constantly make you analyze both her ideas, especially towards feminism, and your own. Sometimes Casey's feminism seems to consist of, "Let's max out our MasterCards at Bloomie's and then all go get abortions!" or "I like shopping so I'm a feminist rebel!" or "I'm sexually liberated, unlike my silly goose sister who wants to follow her dumb old religion, but my own boyfriend still boinks co-eds two at a time!" Casey is conflicted, and this book certainly throws enough drama her way, but at times I wanted to bang my head against a wall while reading her interior monologues. Still, I was glad that this wasn't just a sugar-coated story, and the characters do have multifaceted discussions about marriage, careers and class issues. It may not be love at first sight with Casey, but you'll want to follow her to the end to see how it all turns out.

Written by: Dominae Petrosini, August 21st 2007