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Refrains of memory: poetics of loss and the Korean diaspora

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Refrains of memory: poetics of loss and the Korean diaspora

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Content REFRAINS OF MEMORY: POETICS OF LOSS AND THE KOREAN DIASPORA by Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut ________________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING) August 2012 Copyright 2012 Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I cannot thank my thesis advisors, mentors and friends enough for their support and critical feedback over the years of writing and revising. I would like to thank Barry Goldensohn for encouraging me to dedicate my practice to craft poems with emotion and not art for art’s sake; for my doctoral adviser Viet T. Nguyen for his invaluable seed of advice to “investigate the personal through the critical” and for pushing me to rigorous scholarly writing; for my committee members Susan McCabe and Sunyoung Park for their generous support and feedback through this long process. Warm thanks to my close friends Shona and Alice and Christine; for Bruce Fulton, for his encouragement of my early drafts of autobiographical writing; for my editor at Kaya Press, Sunyoung Lee, for her acute editorial eye; and lastly, for my family who have encouraged me to pursue the road less taken. Without all of these individuals, my life and writing would not have these rich hues and slants of light! iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Abstract iv SECTION I. CRITICAL ESSAYS Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Untranslatability of Memory and History 8 in Dance Dance Revolution Chapter Two: Uncomfortable Subjects: Militarized Comfort 32 Women, War Brides, and Adoptees Chapter Three: Adoptees As Haunted Slates in Documentary Films 64 Chapter Four: The Division of Loss: Towards a Poetics 80 References 91 SECTION II. POETRY COLLECTION: MAGNETIC REFRAIN Table of Contents 96 Section I. 98 Section II. 104 Section III. 116 Section IV. 131 Section V. 140 Notes 144 iv ABSTRACT My dissertation Refrains of Memory: Poetics of Loss and the Korean Diaspora consists of two major components: 1) a critical section comprised of four scholarly essays, and 2) a creative section that includes a full-length collection of poetry. Intended to be published as article-length essays, the critical section is organized around the representations of loss and cultural trauma in Korean-American diasporic texts. Reflecting similar concerns, my poetry book Magnetic Refrain is a collection of formal and lyrical verse that explores overshadowed Korean myths and diasporic voices, and is forthcoming publication from Kaya Press in fall of 2012. The critical part of the dissertation is a collection of chapters that analyze Korean modernity across the different genres of poetry, fiction, and documentary. In particular, my project looks at how individual and collective traumas in Korean modern history, particularly from Japanese colonization and the Korean civil war, are represented differently by popular and lesser-known Korean-American artists that range from the novelist Chang-rae Lee to Language poet Cathy Park Hong. In the last chapter, an autocritical reflection on how being a Korean adoptee and a writer are entwined, the tone is informed by a curiosity and a skepticism to recover a lost personal history by returning to unofficial, collective histories and other forms of story-telling that complicate the veracity of memory. In my poetic work, I am focused on infusing aspects of history and myth with the personal and experiential. Largely framed around exploring the silenced voices of the v Korean American diaspora, my poems in Magnetic Refrain speak to the difficulties of representing a singular, “authentic” experience of militarized comfort women, war brides, North Korean refugees, and Korean birthmothers and adoptees. Drawing on both historical events and popular culture to approach the subject of trauma as nuanced, overall my aesthetic plays with the notion of the contradictory: to refrain as in to sing, and to refrain as in to withhold from or be restrained from singing. From playful Korean folktales to rewritten fairytales to lyrical prose poems, my intention is to bring the personal, political, and historical into play with another, and delightfully in tension. 1 SECTION I. CRITICAL ESSAYS Introduction The title of my dissertation alludes to a tension of irreconcilable opposites: refrain, or spoken songs of remembering, but also restraint, unspoken songs that cannot be remembered, or are difficult to express. The in-between spaces, the thresholds, are what shape and contour these narratives and counter-narratives of experience and loss. My scholarship and poetry are both invested in teasing out these contradictions on an aesthetic and a political level. My first poetry collection, Magnetic Refrain, which began as a manuscript at the beginning of my doctoral studies at USC, is forthcoming publication from Kaya Press in fall of 2012; as a book of formal and lyrical verse, it explores overshadowed Korean myths and diasporic voices. The rich, textured illustrations that accompany the poems are images by the surrealist painter, Jung-Yeon Min, whose sensibility feels akin to my work. The critical part of the dissertation, Refrains of Memory: Poetics of Loss and the Korean Diaspora, is a collection of chapters that analyze Korean modernity across the different genres of poetry, fiction, and documentary. In particular, my project looks at how individual and collective traumas in Korean modern history, particularly from Japanese colonization and the Korean civil war, are represented differently by popular 2 and lesser-known Korean-American artists that range from the novelist Chang-rae Lee to Language poet Cathy Park Hong. In the last chapter, an autocritical reflection on how being a Korean adoptee and a writer are entwined, the tone is informed by a curiosity and a skepticism to recover a lost personal history by returning to unofficial, collective histories and other forms of story-telling that complicate the veracity of memory. Methodology Rather than relying on a single field research method, my critical approach was interdisciplinary. Strongly influenced by Grace M. Cho’s work in Haunting the Korean Diaspora, and other major critics such as Giorgio Agamben and Ruth Leys, my research adds to those practitioners who reinterpret psychoanalysis and trauma for reframing trauma in terms of articulating a new direction in ethics and indeterminacy of meaning. Trauma studies that stems from the Holocaust was a useful framework in using those paradigms for other circumstances of war for my own scholarly purposes of contextualizing diasporic subjects and transnational adoptees from Korea. I also borrowed, when appropriate, from the cultural theories of David L. Eng, Ann Anlin Cheng, and Jodi Kim whose research in Asian American political subjectivities was influential for my focus on transnational adoption. To give a brief overview of the development and relevancy of trauma studies, it is necessary to acknowledge the influence of the 1970s and 1980s poststructuralism and postcolonialism on the initial emergence of trauma studies in the 1990s. As Karyn Ball has pointed out, the emergence of the field was catalyzed by the support of parallel social 3 movements for civil rights and minority groups in the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in the widespread recognition of post-traumatic survivors affected by the Vietnam war. The clinical study of post-traumatic effects of soldiers and the medicalization of trauma also helped validate the eventual academic institutionalization of it in cultural studies and the humanities. However, as Ball argues, a critical contradiction emerged when the claims for identity politics and subjectivity clashed with the post-humanist, deconstructionist skepticism of the validity of the individual and personal experience, a gulf that she argues can be bridged by trauma theory. “Traumatic memory provides one answer to the question of how to talk about the affective aftermath of oppression without recourse to idealist notions of coherent identity and ‘authentic’ experience’” (7). Additionally, she argues that in the wake of the deconstruction era, “in focusing on memories rather than experiences of oppression, it becomes possible to validate the events that occasioned suffering while acknowledging the rhetorical function of memories as signs that are shaped by the contingencies of interpretation” (8). For the purposes of my dissertation, I focus primarily on the aspects of unrepresentability and untranslatability that emerge from the overlapping areas of language, memory, and identity which are as significant as the tangible signifiers that construct narratives and scripts. Overview of Chapters In Chapter One, “The Untranslatability of Memory and History in Dance Dance Revolution,” I set up the larger motifs of refrain, repetition, fragment, dislocation and multiple location that are catalyzed by individual memory and cultural memory. This 4 chapter, which focuses on the language poetics of Cathy Park Hong in her book Dance Dance Revolution, is an extension of earlier feminist concerns with representing subjectivity in a multidimensional way in order to avoid othering or simplification. By inventing a living language from an amalgam of international languages, Hong is able to capture the spirit of Language Poetry’s motive to defamiliarize the personal, while including a lesser-known narrative of Korean history, the Kwangju Uprising, that makes her work recuperative, and thus relevant. What is inventive about the form of the book is the mode of dual story-telling, one from the perspective of a former revolutionary and the other from a historian, which creates a disorienting, disjunctive kind of dialogue. Overall, my chapter argues that the indeterminacy of language provides a metaphor for the instability of identity and experience. Related to this idea of an in-between space of indeterminacy, Chapter Two’s “Uncomfortable Subjects: Militarized Comfort Women, War Brides and Adoptees” looks critically at Chang-rae Lee’s depiction of adoptees and orphans as melancholic victims in three of his post-war novels. As figures who emerge out of different colonialisms—first Japanese colonialism and then American neoimperialism—the female characters are represented as circumstantial victims who act out their unresolved traumas upon others in intimate relationships. Giorgio Agamben’s theory of a “grey zone” of suspended ethics originally applied to the Jewish prisoners who became guards themselves, but could also open up space to imagine extending empathetic identification towards other victimized subjects who perform in the role of oppressors as a way to gain agency in their situations. Yet, that perspective of blurring perpetrators and victims leaves the issue of responsibility unaddressed, which is where I interjected a counterargument by Ruth Leys, who argues 5 for a nuanced approach towards the experience of trauma as encompassing aspects of guilt, shame, repression and recollection as inseparable. My main intention in that essay was to show that there is a legacy established, in the Korean-American imaginary, between comfort women, brides, and adoptees that needs to be interrogated for their ethical implications. Chapter Three, “Adoptees as Haunted Slates in Documentary Film,” builds on the idea that adoptees perform a similar intimate and cultural role that a Korean bride does in an interracial marriage, but I also wanted to focus my analysis on recent documentaries that critique adoption as a gendered, racialized production of bodies. Using the most popular adoptee-produced film by Deann Borshay Liem and a non-adoptee film that features juxtaposed perspectives in the triad, I argue that, ultimately, an adoptee needs to be realized as a member of a living, Korean family and not as a parentless orphan, a blank slate upon which a new identity will be inscribed. Opposite to the conclusion reached hastily by the adoptive parents in the documentary Adopted who say that their daughter ‘got over’ her trauma in China, the residual effects of erasing one’s biological roots and culture needs to be addressed as an ethical and cultural issue and not as a byproduct of the adoption practice. My final chapter, “The Division of Loss: Towards a Poetics” is a creative exploration of aesthetic influences that explore the links between writing and adoption. As part of a wider diaspora of Koreans scattered internationally after the civil war, I see the necessity of revisiting the origins for that displacement of Korean adoptees, of which adoptees make up 200,000 since 1953. Not only adoptees are separated from their families and origins, but millions of North Koreans continue to be separated from their 6 relatives in South Korea. Without interference from the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Korean war, these divisions of families and the magnitude of losses would not have occurred on the same scale. Those losses are significant, but remain difficult to represent in measurable terms. Similar questions of speakability or vocalization arise from the poetry of Paul Celan, a Holocaust survivor, which I situate as irretrievable, or untranslatable. His metaphor for poetry as a meridian encompasses those contradictions and paradoxes that language communicates as many meanings as gaps and misunderstandings that cannot be overcome linguistically and emotionally. The unmourned spaces generate a different kind of space for unknowing and uncertainty but equally important, yearning. My position, particularly when I refer to the work of W.G. Sebald’s, is part of a larger discourse of post-memory writers, who never directly experienced the trauma of war but feel compelled to write about it, a yearning to retrieve the past that is melancholic at its core because it remains unacknowledged and unrecognized. For adoptees who return to Korea to “retrieve” the missing answers to their pasts, they are often radically shocked and disillusioned by the lack of access to their family records and histories. My visit to a Buddhist shaman who initiated a sense of hope and skepticism reflects my own ambivalence towards the desire for kinship that is biological, which is partially why I say that she represents the spectrum of fluctuating belief, self-deception, and possibility. In the end, I conclude that it’s a “different kind of loss, to never know,” to reside in a position of not having resolution. And being in a stasis, an in-between, is itself a poetics, signifying a poetics of uncertainty. 7 Creative Dissertation: Magnetic Refrain In my poetic work, I am focused on infusing aspects of history and myth with the personal and experiential. My collection of poetry, Magnetic Refrain, will be published by Kaya Press in October 2012. Largely framed around exploring the silenced voices of the Korean American diaspora, my poems speak to the difficulties of representing a singular, “authentic” experience of militarized comfort women, war brides, North Korean refugees, and Korean birthmothers and adoptees. Drawing on both historical events and popular culture to approach the subject of trauma as nuanced, overall my aesthetic plays with the notion of the contradictory: to refrain as in to sing, and to refrain as in to withhold from or be restrained from singing. When we speak of refrain in music, hearing a repetition of a line or strong melody is pleasurable because it not only repeats in the same way, but creates a slight difference within the larger pattern of feeling that the repetitions evoke. In a poem, refrain also alters meaning to make multiple patterns and designs. It is to create a texture of memory through echo. In an epistolary series that all address an unknown other, a number of letters are written to imagined birth family members who will never meet each other. In another series that revolve around the trope of a female “doll,” I play with the second-person perspective as a way to engage the reader away from a comfortable, observing position to one of self-reflexivity. From playful Korean folktales to rewritten fairytales to lyrical prose poems, my intention is to bring the personal, political, and historical into play with another, and delightfully in tension. 8 CHAPTER ONE: THE UNTRANSLATABILITY OF MEMORY AND HISTORY IN DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION As an exemplar of an innovative Asian American poetry that engages with the current concerns of transnationalism and Language Poetry politics, Cathy Park Hong’s recent collection Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) revives the significance of the personal and experiential within an imagined and historical, diasporic framework. In my essay, I argue that Hong’s revisionary avant-garde poetics of fragmentation and dislocation of language provides a metacritical view of representing suppressed, traumatic events in postcolonial Korean history as a question of translation. Her aim, as I show, is to challenge how traumatic historical events can be represented in literature from a social realist perspective; in other words, she questions representability itself. By theorizing that modern Korean history, most notably the “forgotten war” or civil war, has largely been ignored in the U.S. imaginary, my project adds to current postcolonial scholarship that aims to revive interest in rehistoricizing imperialism vis-à-vis globalization in East Asia and the transpacific. Through Hong’s deployment of an aesthetics that is self- reflexive and anti-documentary, I argue that her work adds a new perspective to the fields 9 of diasporic and Asian American studies by recasting autobiographical memory through the haunting, fractured voices of diasporic exiles. Their perspectives, as flawed dramatic personae, challenge the notions of stable identity, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism, and suggest instead a hybrid, and indeterminate alternative to approaching knowledge and semiotics. Existing at a periphery of language in which standard and non-standard languages blur, and thus signification becomes equivocal, DDR recasts the politics of memory and history as themselves Other, beyond representability. Hong’s innovation within the field of experimental and language poetry, as my project delineates, stems from a political aesthetic that draws attention to the complexity of geopolitical history as inseparable from individual subjectivity. Whereas the early Language poets of the 1970s primarily refused the lyrical first-person subject as an unreliable contingent, Hong re-positions that individual “I” as diffusive and embedded within an intergenerational, and postcolonial context. Drawing on the techniques of high- modernist collage and defamiliarization, she creates a hybrid, transnational idiom that is distinctive and enigmatic by mixing over 300 émigré languages that include Korean, Latin, Middle English, Spanish Caribbean patois, and Hawai’ian. Alluding to the literary precursors, Dante’s prophetic Virgil and Brecht’s Mother Courage, the Guide Sujin is portrayed as a diasporic, Korean exile who has moved to a dystopic site, the Desert, and now works as a tour guide in a phantasmagoric city comprised of transnational migrants, and in which all subversive political activity is suppressed. Formerly an imprisoned revolutionary leader during the 1980s democratization movement in Korea, which culminated in protests known as the Kwangju Uprising, the Guide becomes a sought-after biographical subject of personal and political interest for the Historian, a young man who 10 is himself a transnational exile. Through this other figure of the English-speaking Historian, I explore the ways in which his perspective, as the Guide’s interpreter and translator for the text, positions him paradoxically as a privileged transmitter of knowledge, but also as an outsider. His position as a sympathetic ethnographer, I point out, is a critique of the dominant positionality of a Western historian seeking to recuperate an unacknowledged Other’s life history. By attempting to narrativize and categorize her autobiographical experiences, he attempts to represent her experiences beyond an inassimilable Other, but ultimately fails. Contrasting their positions of radical alterity, my chapter shows that the Guide’s and Historian’s linguistic differences—and thus, ontological differences—epitomize the larger theme of the book that collective memory, and particularly traumatic events, are beyond translation. Later in this essay, I elucidate that Hong’s experiment in semiotics and translation contribute to an important expansion of the recent projects within Language Poetry, precisely because she invents a hybrid language that invites decoding and deciphering at the same time that it questions that Structuralist desire for translatability and coherence. The subject of imperialism and neocolonialism in Korean history—often a marginalized area in Western cultural memory—is thus reconfigured as a fusing of linguistic collage and displacement, instead of represented under the misleading rubric of social realism. In their recent 2010 introductory article that theorizes the phases of Asian American fiction, the authors Sohn, Lai, and Goellnicht argue for a multidimensional approach to literature, since the very term “Asian American” has been historically and theoretically fraught since its original use in the 1960s for the purposes of establishing political coalition. Popular in the 1970s-80s, the social realism aesthetic presumed that the Asian American writer would 11 represent culturally “authentic” biographical and sociological content, and according to Sunn Shelley Wong, to “depict the particularities of the Asian American experience and to directly thematize pressing political and social issues confronting Asian Americans,” a convention which often presumed that the author’s ethnicity and the text were closely aligned (2). As the canon of Asian American literature has expanded to include the transpacific Southeast and South Asia, the very notion of “Asian” and “Asian Americanness” has been contested and been seen more accurately as a fluid, chameleonic entity across interdisciplinary fields. Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, published during a recent trend of increasingly anti-lyric, experimental poetry by Asian Americans in the last decade, reflects an indebted engagement with the late-Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s earlier preoccupations with representing memory and subjectivity through a Korean American trajectory, whose aesthetics need to be considered as pivotal in initiating a new phase of postmodernism, or hypermodernism. My critical approach to Cathy Park Hong’s 2007 collection of poetry Dance Dance Revolution is multifold and interdisciplinary. Taking up the strategy inaugurated by Kandice Chuh to de-center “Asian American” from cultural and literary studies (10), I incorporate the central objective of her argument to move beyond current epistemologies that presently overdetermine the minority subject around ethnic and gender difference and instead, to look toward the more flexible perspective of ethical justice as a unifying principle (11). By moving the focus away from determined or known subjects within Asian American studies to the area of undetermined, “subjectlessness” instead, Chuh proposes that political critique and change becomes more achievable, remarking that “it augurs a redefinition of the political, an investigation into what ‘justice’ might mean and 12 what (whose) ‘justice’ is being pursued” (11). In my argument, no single discourse is capable of describing the psychic and material experiences of structural trauma, which are immeasurable. As Jean-François Lyotard in The Differend so aptly denotes that devastating loss from unprecedented violence is incapable of being quantified, he compares this unspeakability to a metaphor of shock experienced after a catastrophic earthquake: “The impossibility of quantitatively measuring [loss] does not prohibit, but rather inspires in the minds of the survivors the idea of a very seismic force. The scholars claim to know nothing about it, but the common person has a complex feeling, the one aroused by the negative presentation of the indeterminate” [emphasis mine]. In my larger book project, I focus on those literary works by Asian American authors that seek to provide these powerfully emotive, and unspeakable counternarratives to popular cultural memory; specifically in my article on DDR, I contextualize the historical background of Korean political events in order to recuperate the material and psychic evidence of traumatic effects of Japanese colonialism and American neoimperialism. In that vein, I read the Historian’s troubled position as embodying a theoretical level of ethical ambivalence, in which his overlapping roles as interpreter, linguistic translator, ethnographer, and memoirist are thrust into conflict, producing him as both a powerful agent to construct a different narrative and a melancholic, powerless subject as an Other himself. In my study to focus on poetry that embraces a historical consciousness and political critique of globalization, I approach Hong’s poetry from the angle of close intertextual reading and cultural poetics, described by critic Stephen Greenblatt as “investigating both the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text” (20). 13 The unreliability and opacity of narrative in the book that is embedded within the invented Creole languages clearly presents epistemological challenges for the reader who will not immediately recognize the multiple different languages. Furthermore, the text itself elicits these major theoretical questions: What happens to identification when the other speaks in a subverted, chameleonic language in which meaning is reliant upon the translator and reader? How does that translation—by an unnamed biographer and historian—reveal the potential misrecognitions and erroneous transferences at the same time that it elicits reveries and remarkable insights? How, then, does a historical narrative shape an individual voice, and a poetic voice? And finally, how does the political project of Language poetry to draw attention to the indeterminancy of language and knowledge inform the very local project of DDR to illuminate events in Korean history that have largely been buried and ignored in the U.S. historical imaginary? As my close reading of DDR will show, the linguistic play in Hong’s poetry reflects the impossibility of translating memory, history, and the legacy of the U.S. presence in Korea. Before I begin to approach these questions, I return briefly to an earlier precursor who provoked the current debates over Asian American “authenticity” and political aesthetics in literature by authors of Asian/American descent. Locating the postmodern, hybrid-genre book Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as a pivotal text to signal this ideological shift away from cultural nationalist to transnationalist interpretation in the 1990s, many critics recently have aptly noted that Dictee represents a problematic text that is neither a representative “Asian American” text nor a nonstandard, abstract text more exemplary of postmodernist Language poetry. Josephine Nock-Hee Park’s recent 14 book Apparitions of Asia describes the trajectory of Asian American poetics as originating in activist themes of resistance and cultural nationalism of the 1970s, and progressing to post-activist themes in the 1980s that culminates in a variety of poetry that is more form-driven and sophisticated. Critiquing the essentialist divide between politics and aesthetics, she instead locates the problem of Asian American poetics as a troubled history in relationship to literary modernism, which she claims is embedded in Orientalism and transpacific authorship. The recuperation by critics in 1994 of Cha’s Dictee represents an important re-evaluation of a modernist experimental text that resists a long-standing tradition of Orientalism. Park invokes both Sunn Shelley Wong’s use of a “poetics of cleaving” and Anne Anlin Cheng’s theory of troubled “identification” to frame Dictee as a complicated text that binds itself to both epic and lyric genres while simultaneously destabilizing them, in order to convey the plasticity of ideology and form. The poetic text resists being read as an easy incorporation of the self into the nation because of the context of traumatic successions of colonization and imperialism, which is imitated in form by the fragmented, elliptical style it creates. “In its formal strategies, Dictee has become the banner text for making high modernist aesthetics safe for minority literature; but its heterogenous inclusions—especially its historical documents—ally Cha’s text to a political aim. Cha’s formal allegiance to modernism and transpacific crossings ultimately permits its lessons in history and politics” (131). In other words, the experimental form of indirection and oblique reference should be a racialized form no longer, nor does it have to be separated from a political framework. The politicized issue of authorship related to racialized poetics is also addressed in Timothy Yu’s Race and the Avant-Garde, which traces the genealogy of Asian 15 American poets writing in the language poetry tradition, and in his chapter on Dictee, he criticizes the tendency of several key feminist cultural critics to overdetermine the Korean historical and national themes at the expense of reading Dictee as largely invested in experimental language. While it is useful to consider Yu’s alternative approach that deflects the socio-political intent for purely textual elements, I would argue instead that Dictee and other similar texts written in the postmodern vein operate successfully by incorporating a certain historical consciousness toward a critique of globalization, which inflects the language used by the author—language is always necessarily political. In an interview, Cathy Park Hong notes that her intention was to move beyond the rhetorics of identity politics and race: “I wanted to work beyond the parameters of identity in Dance Dance Revolution. Korean history plays a large part in the book and there is a latticework of border-crossing, but that has less to do with the self per se than with history and collective…The Desert is an omnibus city, an allegorical space of a present condition, which could be present-day Korea or America as well as other places.” Since Hong’s work so conscientiously refers to specific historical points in Korean collective memory that remain marginalized in the U.S. imaginary, my inclination is to focus on those aspects that gesture towards a self-reflexive political and historical critique. In other words, as critic Ming-qian Ma has argued that postmodernism has called for a “counter-method” of reading, new poetics has inevitably moved towards a hermeneutics approach, “deeply rooted in a ‘historical self-consciousness’” and self-reflexivity (4). In the case of Dance Dance Revolution, which expands the concepts of hybridity and experimentation with historicity and language that Dictee raises and playfully works through, Hong employs a method of dual consciousness, for formal and emotive affect, 16 through the allegorical roles of the Guide and Historian. In the foreword, the Historian reveals an underlying, personal motive to portray the biography of the Guide Chun Sujin, who is his father’s former lost lover, precisely because the Historian lacks direct access to his family legacy. Motherless as an infant and raised at a distance by a reticent father who works for Doctors-Without-Borders and who never speaks about himself nor his past, the Historian seems to hunger for a different life of intimacy, one that he is able to imaginatively experience, albeit indirectly, by transcribing the intergenerational life stories of the Guide Sujin. Formerly a revolutionary leader during the Kwangju Uprising, she comes from a lineage that is embedded in a “yes-man” of collaboration in which both her grandfather and father acquiesced to the authority of Japanese colonialism and authoritarianism of President Syngman Rhee’s regime during the 1960s. The Guide’s biography is thus re-imagined through the eyes of a curious, younger Other, who moves between positions of engagement and detachment; although he claims to be an objective “historian,” he is undeniably associated personally. His role is constructed to transmit—and not to faithfully reproduce, as stated in the preface—the memories of the Guide Chun Sujin and her family during volatile periods of colonization, war and revolutions; he must empathize with the otherness of her subjectivity, but without reducing her to an anthropological object. The juxtaposition of personal confessions by the Historian through brief and prosaic flashbacks are a stylistic device to complicate his role from that of a merely controlling narrator who might otherwise be seen reductively by critics as a ventriloquist or imperialist. In contrast to the Historian’s lack of a historical legacy and identity (he remains unnamed in the book), the Guide Sujin’s life is embedded within an intricate, 17 intergenerational web of traumatic colonial and postcolonial memories within Korean cultural history. Raised in the historically-impoverished Cholla region of Korea in the city of Kwangju, the Guide’s mother dies in childbirth, during the first day of the political take-over of Syngman Rhee’s dictatorial regime in 1960; this pivotal, political event will shadow the rest of the book with recurring ruptures of violent protest and government suppression. In critic Cathy Caruth’s articulation of individual trauma as embedded within a shared, cultural history, she blurs the boundary between the personal experiences of suffering and the externalization, or historicity, of suffering as inseparable: “The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (5). The insistent return to an original, incomplete traumatic event of loss becomes evident in the series of poems “Elegy,” “The Voice,” “Kwangju Replayed,” and “Years in the Ginseng Colony,” a collection of reveries about Sujin’s experiences of suffering as an activist and political prisoner during the revolutionary movement, the Kwangju Uprising, in which students and civilians protested the military coup take-over of Chun Du-Hwan in 1980. Often compared to the brutality of police violence against the peaceful demonstrators during the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 in China, the Kwangju Uprising was suppressed from news coverage and is still a largely unacknowledged event in the U.S. historical archive. The Guide Sujin’s testimony as a survivor of postcolonial violence during the Kwangju revolt and subsequent prison sentencing to hard labor in a Soviet-like gulag is all part of a rearticulation of Korean history that is ignored by mainstream American historical narratives. The U.S. government, instead of supporting the Korean resistance, 18 backed the Korean government’s brutal suppression of the protests in which 200,000 martial troops and special airborne commandos were sent in to beat, intimidate and arrest the students, teachers, factory workers, and other civilians. Of those arrested, an estimated 60,000 people were sent to “re-education” camps in hard labor following the five-day street protest (46). Hong’s representation of the protest through the mouthpiece of Sujin is an attempt to personalize an otherwise suppressed event—and she does so effectively through the inflected, elusive language that serves as a symbolic metaphor for the displaced, disjarring experiences of a survivor. While some of the language in Sujin’s vernacular can be sounded out to make sense, many of the words remain enigmatic and unspeakable—which shows that some emotions, some experiences cannot be comprehended and understood, and thus remain in the subaltern shadows. Sujin’s elegiac remembrance of Kwangju is told twice, the second poem, “Kwangju Replayed,” to intentionally defy closure and containment. Similar to the way that critic Anne Anlin Cheng interprets artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s use of unidentified collages of text and photographs and calligraphy in Dictee as “melancholic evidences—the kind of evidence that registers loss, even as it recognizes the unrecognizability of the content of loss” (147), the Creole language spoken by the Guide creates a distancing effect that draws attention to the problem of empathic identification as a natural transmission. The loss of Sujin’s lover, Sah, during the military backlash is alluded to, repeatedly, but never directly confronted, and remains unmourned. The unspeakability of neocolonial violence—by both the Korean and U.S. governments—can be contextualized by re-framing it in terms of a larger, pervasive anxiety to contain communism in the Asian transpacific that was triggered by Cold War 19 geopolitics. Critic Dong-Choon Kim argues that a vehement, anticommunist rationale was initially used during the eve of the Korean civil war as a deceptive rubric justifying the imprisonments and massacres of perceived anti-government activists and internal “enemies” within the nation; before the war even began, an estimated 200,000 Korean political prisoners, civilians and peasants were tortured and killed under the collaborative military forces of the ROK and US. Furthermore, Kim historicizes a larger continuum of violent dictatorial quelling of political dissidence that was repeatedly used to falsely label and demonize activists and civilians as “communists,” but who were actually fighting for national liberation from neocolonialism and American imperialism (91). Labor unions and political dissenters, who were mainly intellectuals and students, only continued to be silenced by the secret police KCIA under Park Chung Hee, and it was during these harsh years of Yushin rule in the 1970s to rebuild the Korean nation into an industrialized, competitive economy that a majority of underclass of Koreans suffered the worst labor conditions and sweatshop exploitation. In DDR, the struggles for freedom against structural state oppression and economic depression during the Yushin period are epitomized in the Guide Sujin’s own involvement in the democratization movement, as a college student and exploited factory worker, who becomes attracted to the ideals of Marxism and Western democracy as an alternative to Korean authoritarianism. Alluding to the historical waves of labor protests by factory workers that were harshly suppressed by the police, in DDR Sujin stages a protest with her fellow, vulnerable factory workers who toil away in a wig-making factory of deplorable conditions in the Cholla province. Sujin describes the dehumanizing conditions she and her peers endure: “hours killim workas, in window 20 black/paint room…bone cramp backs en airless room” (54). Protesting the conditions of the airless, cramped factory and slavish hours, the wig-makers stage a labor strike, only to be brutally blasted by water hoses by the riot police, referred to repeatedly in slang as “plis boi patos.” Stirred by translations of Marxism and her college teacher’s guidance, Sujin identifies with the larger, anti-government movement which became known as the minjung movement, but she quickly becomes disheartened by its overall powerlessness to enact change. Revolution and unrest form a thematic arc in DDR, yet the ironic political tone of the book implies that class struggle is ultimately a failure. Hong designates the symbolic birth of the Guide Sujin on the day of President Syngman Rhee’s forced resignation, a day of ecstatic celebration of the leftist activist students’ victory over the end of his repressive, authoritarian regime in 1960. However, in 1960 despite the forced resignation of Syngman Rhee and his monopolized regime of military and secret police, a similarly repressive, authoritarian rule was reinstituted with the military coup by Park Chung Hee, who was formerly trained in the Japanese Imperial Army in Manchuria in 1960, and who assigned many of his own military colleagues into government positions (129). Revolution by the democratization movement was thus rendered obsolete, again and again. Sujin’s attempts to initiate democratic change during the Kwangju Uprising, like the failure to initiate reform for factory workers are similarly defeated by the repressive government of Chun Du-Hwan. In Rey Chow’s view, protests against exploitation by the marginalized minority are scripted into the capitalist system, negating its potential to exact change; thus, any form of class consciousness is also commodified as a product and cannot exist as emancipatory thought because culture is inextricably contained within the 21 economic capitalist structure. She writes, “Ethnic struggles have become, in this manner, an indisputable symptom of the thoroughly and irrevocably mediatized relations of capitalism and its biopolitics. In the age of globalization, ethnics are first and foremost protesting ethnics, but this is not because they are possessed of some ‘soul’ and ‘humanity’ that cannot be changed into commodities. Rather, it is because protesting constitutes the economically logical and socially viable vocation for them to assume” (48). Chinese dissidents, for example, in Chow’s argument exemplify this unstable paradigm of the tension between capitalism and western democratic idealism, a model which is useful to consider in the broader, conceptual framework of class protest in DDR. However, to make the distinction clear, I see the political theme of protest within Hong’s imagined universe as more generalized and not specific to nationality or ethnicity in the way that Chow argues that such ethnic identification is bound up in discourses of political resistance. Since cultural ethnicity, like the creole of language, becomes ambiguous and deterritorialized in the Desert City, the acts of revolt happen on an individual basis, and not on a collective, organized level. As the Historian ironically notes in the book’s preface on the futility of revolutions in the past, “Back then, they were an act of propulsion, of anguished, woodcut masses marching in cohesion. Now in the Desert, the pulse of unrest works unpredictably, in canny acts of sabotage engineered by exiled natives who crave for time to stand still” (21). Here, the implication is not so much that these exiles are nostalgic for a common cause that unites them cohesively, but that political resistance itself has become a commodified spectacle, part and parcel of capitalism. Taken as a whole, I would argue that DDR takes a skeptical approach 22 towards the realization of individual freedom and change, because the idealized goals of capitalist economy and democratic ideals are inevitably always at odds. As the Guide Sujin’s melancholic reveries reveal about the “5-18,” or Kwangju Uprising that took place in May 1980 in the southern Cholla province, all of the idealistic hope for democratic change dissolved into quite different, and disillusioned ends: death of an estimated 200 people and over thousands of tortured and imprisoned Korean citizens forced into dehumanizing labor camps. Although the revolution did initiate an important transition from the repressive years of authoritarian rule to the eventual first democratic election in 1991, the quality and extent of democracy as a measurement of rights and freedoms is an issue still contested today in South Korea. The transition to a democratic government most visibly brought economic prosperity and wealth, but not an extensive reform of the repressive values of Confucian hierarchy and economic inequality in Korean culture. Sujin calls herself, self-deprecatingly, a puppet or mascot : “like lady liberty from Tinny-man, I was mascot/cos me ball head, me haole eyes” (108). Instead of becoming an idyllic icon for the Kwangju Uprising, she functions more as a parodic, clownish leader who is actually booed off-stage and pelted with rocks for her unfeminine appearance during a rallying speech for the Kwangju protestors. Ostracized by her fellow activists, she returns to the rallies, but unseen, channeling her voice through a transistor radio amidst the street riots of coal miners and housewives and streetwalkers. Disillusioned by the futility of activism, the Guide Sujin has herself changed so radically by mid-life, in 2016, that she has traded in her earlier ideals of Marxist communism and become a paid spy for the Desert government by turning in other protestors in hiding. Living in the material excesses of global capitalism, Sujin is a 23 hollow outline of the former Marxist activist role that she slipped into so easily as a younger sweatshop factory worker and leftist college student. In his literary review of new revolutionary figures in poetry, Gilbert notes that the Guide’s transformation takes on a historically universal character: At its heart is a bleakly dystopian vision of globalized wealth and power that nonetheless sees a place for scattered acts of resistance. Here again the Guide perfectly embodies this ambiguity; her voice, which now extols the opulent bathroom fixtures of the St. Petersburg Hotel, had once rallied protestors by pirate radio during the Kwangju uprising. As the details of her past are gradually disclosed, we come to see in her an especially poignant instance of the compromised, complicitous roles all former and would-be revolutionaries must play in order to survive (529). Indeed, many student activists during the Tianamen Square massacre who survived would later become venture-capitalists and entrepreneurs, an ironic cultural phenomenon that Cathy Park Hong researched for an article while she worked as a journalist (personal interview 4/9/2010). To return to the allegorical doubling of voices—the witness and the interpreter—this following section explores the role of the Historian in vexed relationship to his subject, Sujin. The Historian is a self-conscious, flawed narrator whose own fragmentary remembrances provide a melancholic counternarrative to the Guide’s voice. As a transnational “parachute” student growing up during the violent civil war in Sierra 24 Leone and then educated abroad in international boarding schools in the US, Hong Kong, and London, the Historian is both an individual of western cultural privilege, and an isolated, emotional exile without a home, and without any close ties to his father or extended family. Although his father, the Guide’s lover “Sah” during their college activism, features prominently in his excerpted memoirs, it is mostly in an elegiac cast and like the Guide’s refusal to dwell in loss, that aspect of his life becomes tangential. His reveries are lyrical in style, and seemingly transparent because they are the only sections of prose written in complete English sentences, and yet the content itself is self-referential and indeterminate in its implications, defying the presumed confessional disclosures of conventional autobiography. The personal and emotive surface indirectly, particularly in the first excerpt where he reveals his existential burden of possessing a consciousness as a “cursed, supernatural power that only I possessed and I had to keep it secret” (37). It is precisely his disclosure of his own perspective as a superior, privileged one that gives him the authority to write about others, to write about history even though he himself has no strong sense of self and personal history. Leaving out contextual details about the political and cultural pasts of the countries in which he travels for his education, these locales assume an abstract, indistinct background. In one particular allegorical fragment, he recounts going to a military school in a war-torn country, a “tiny city that dissolved in its own quagmire” (100). As a punishment for pulling a childish prank, he is forced to bow before five hundred flags, and yet he never gives any explanations, nor expressions of his emotional state. The lack of memory, or dispossession of memory, I argue, becomes a powerfully ominous warning of the 25 possible effects of a future world in which globalization erases cultural distinctions, dissolves individual identity. Furthermore, another way to interpret the Historian’s reticence to disclose his emotions is to acknowledge that he is indeed affected, but unwittingly, by the buried, transgenerational ghosts of his father’s past, a past which his father refuses to speak about and bring to light because his memories of being in Korea, and his loss of his lover Sujin, are too traumatic to acknowledge consciously. The psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok revise Freud’s initial conception of melancholia as an unconscious state of ambivalence of love and hate toward a loved object by instead emphasizing that the real loved object is in fact always kept secretive and unacknowledged. Through the concept of cryptophoria, they claim that the individual creates an unconscious fantasy world in which the loss takes on other forms, and is imagined as a ghostly person who can then reappear in one’s consciousness through haunting symptoms and sensations and signals. By keeping that crypt or tomb safe, one prevents melancholia from recurring, and instead can enact a false form of mourning by staging grief for a different object, all the while disguising the real secret. Thus, in their rearticulation, incorporation is the refusal to mourn by refusing to address loss and trauma. Similar to the succeeding generations of Holocaust victims and survivors who never directly experienced the horrific genocide but still exhibit post- traumatic symptoms of latent anguish and suffering, I interpret the melancholic tone of the Historian to be inextricably immersed within the silenced, repressed history of his father. Thus, in my reading of the fragments of the Historian’s recollections, many of which refer to his father as taciturn, these reconstructions of memories are hyperbolic, 26 refusing to be sentimental and poignant. Instead, his memories have an ironic, satirical tone as in the last prose poem when he imagines his father reminiscing about Sujin for exactly four minutes, “He had that gift, or neurosis, to set time limits on his daydreams, as if his reflections were naps” (120). Similarly, in a moment that seems to predicate intimacy between father and son, instead the exchange becomes impersonal, about maintaining dental hygiene. “He had something important to tell me. I leaned in and he began. When he was young, he could not afford the proper hygiene to care for his teeth. His teeth were so rotten, he had them capped. But he knew that beneath the white enamel sheath, his real teeth hibernated, crooked and stained. He sighed. He feels the deepest shame because of this. He waited for me to respond and when I didn’t, he continued” (47). Thus, deep loss that is not properly mourned and grieved inevitably reappears as an inexpressible inheritance, which informs the psychic state of the living family members, and in the Guide Sujin’s case, it resurfaces as deep shame. Embarrassed by her grandfather, a Japanese collaborator (“chinalpa”) who is stoned to death by his villagers for turning in underground nationalists to the Japanese colonists, and by her father, who served American soldiers by selling them liquor “Makkoli” and prostitute “war widows,” Sujin declares herself in opposition to their desertion to the Korean nation by joining the Korean independence movement. In her own language, she condemns her grandfather and father as weak “yes” men, and adamantly remarks that she will refuse to succumb to that shameful, cursed tradition in her own family: “to fightim me yesman lineage…I fight mine legacy, mine curse/dat pulsed en me aorta to say no…” (44). Yet, ironically, it is only a matter of time before Sujin herself will repeat the roles of desertion that her 27 grandfather and father used in order to survive, and take on a similar role in the Desert as a government spy paid to turn in traitors. As I framed earlier in the introduction to this chapter, the central motif of identification, and the incapability of complete identification of the Historian to faithfully translate the life stories of Sujin becomes an ideological paradigm of self-reflexivity that also implicates the reader’s hermeneutics. His explanation that the translation has been compromised due to his own desires to provide “clarification” and gloss over “technical glitches” when his tapes are damaged by rain provides another key or cue for the reader to question the veracity of the text, and by extension, the texture of history and recollection as always subjective. The missing aspects of emotional truth, or lived experiences, exist in the ellipses, in the spaces that are left unspoken and silent. The Historian’s anonymous and drifting sense of identity, which can also be seen as a homeless self, is mirrored by the trope of the fictionalized, globalized Desert city, which he describes in the preface as itself a hyperreal landscape, a “planned city of renewed wonders, city of state-of-the-art hotels modeled after the world’s greatest cities, city whose decree is there is difference only in degree” (20). His emphasis on the acute phrasing of partial difference perhaps makes an unintentional allusion to Homi Bhabha’s seminal essay in which he writes about the failure of colonial assimilation to fully incorporate and recognize the colonized Other, who becomes “a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually reproduce its slippage, its excess, its difference…” (349). In this fictive world, differences in nationality, ethnicity, and culture are treated as minimally as possible, in a 28 kind of contemporary gesture of universalizing or sweeping away difference and distinctive features of Otherness. As a cosmopolitan city reminiscent of international destinations like Abu Dhabi and Las Vegas, the Desert is comprised largely of diasporic individuals who are homeless—migrants, immigrants, tourists, and émigrés—but who must also leave behind cultural vestiges of their pasts in order to assume a more global, similar identity that is non-threatening to the order of the locale. Even though the Desert city can be considered to take on a deterritorialized space, without a specific national identity, it also serves as a contemporary reminder of every nation that struggles continually to define its borders and identity against the intrusion of those considered other, non-native citizens and outside threats, particularly in light of a dystopic, post-9/ll “terrorist” climate. Sujin’s refusal to speak in a western, standardized language—in the colonizer’s English lexicon—is a reflection of the subversive possibilities of indigenous, spoken language in order to preserve difference. In an earlier poem, “The Importance of Being English,” her father is accused of being a Communist spy for the North Koreans by American soldiers during the outbreak of the Korean Civil War, and is almost killed until a former school acquaintance intervenes and saves his life only because he is able to communicate to the soldiers in their mother tongue, English. Her father’s urgent advice to his daughter is to become fluent in English and all other dominant languages, to wield respect, but above all, power, over others: “You can be the best talker but no point if you can’t/speak the other man’s tongue. You can’t chisel, con, plead,/seduce, beg for your life, you can’t do anything, because you/know not their language. So learn them all” (46). In a larger sense, the Desert Creole is a confluence of these postcolonial languages, a 29 kind of weaponry against an assimilative monolinguism whereby English becomes the standard and litmus test for everyone else. In an ambivalent form of assimilation, according to critic Chungmoo Choi, South Koreans have historically privileged Western cultural tastes as admirable symbolic capital and prioritize the English language as the most powerful of colonial languages that one must become proficient in, perhaps without even realizing they are reproducing the hegemonic colonization by continuing to associate the US with superiority in their role as the “liberator-benefactor” (466). Choi goes on to argue that this internalization of western cultural standards as superior has “reproduced a colonial pathology of self-denigration and self-marginalization.” In DDR, a domino-effect pattern of shame runs throughout the narratives of the Guide, her father and grandfather, and Sah/the Historian’s father, who have all learned—through mimicry and assimilation—to survive by conformity to learn English. As the poet Adrienne Rich characterizes the subversive nature of the Guide’s argot in the prelude to the book, she writes: “The Guide speaks as one of those migrant people the world over whose past has been ruptured or erased by political violence, who plays whatever role she must in the world of the global economy, using language as subversion and disguise.” In other words, the Guide’s reveries and opinions gain a powerful agency by being channeled through a powerful, alternative conduit in which a layering of indirections and revelations resist being pinned down and categorized. In a similar way that some postcolonial critics argue that Caribbean creole symbolizes the subversive possibilities of indigenous, spoken language because it refuses standardization, the Guide’s dialect also flourishes in its own circular, unique referentiality. Furthermore, while oral dialect might be considered to be more culturally 30 authentic precisely because it resists assimilation to the dominant language, in the case of DDR, the Desert language isn’t so much authentic or native as it is ironic and resistant to English standardization, and deconstruction. As a whole, the Desert Creole is at turns playful, opaque, nonsensical, melancholic, and comical, and satirizes the formality of standardized English, eliciting double, contradictory meanings that points to the concept of language as living and vibrant. In her own words, in an essay entitled “Fabula Poetics,” Cathy Park Hong describes her language poetics as drawing on a recent tradition in experimental, aural poetry that reinvents language as a reaction to the inevitable hybridization of everyday vernacular: Why splice around syntax when your local spammer does it better than you? So as history dictates, perhaps the pendulum should swing wildly the other way and we should plunge back into the aural. Inject a kind of layered dynamism into poetry, a highly concentrated polyglot song where the voice is not a mimesis of the natural plain spoken but instead ‘speaks’ in a stylized invented language that reflects and ultimately synthesizes the careening sounds of a shrinking late capitalist world. Indeed, the dynamic lexicon that forms the landscape of DDR is a movement away from the received ways in which words perform a perfunctory role, and into a world of possibility, of imagining otherwise, and of imagining saying things differently. 31 In conclusion, I return to the geopolitical framework from which the chapter began—with the notion that the current relationship between the US and Korea is still marked by a post-Cold war anxiety against communism, which exhibits itself most strongly through a foreign policy of isolating North Korea, the remaining stronghold of Soviet-era communism. While the US military base in South Korea reduced its troops since the national partition following the end of the civil war, there still remain 48,000 servicemen and women stationed near the most heavily-militarized border in the world, under the rationale to protect the ROK from the perceived threat of an invasion by “red” communist North Korea. The actual or real imminence of an attack by North Korea continues to be contested by scholars and diplomats. The political project of Hong’s book, while not overtly stated, implicitly critiques the imposition of the US as a hegemonic, international empire within the state of transpacific Asian affairs, and as I have argued in my chapter, surfaces through the voices of the Guide and the Historian as haunting effects of displacement, irrevocable memory, and untranslatable loss and sorrow. 32 CHAPTER TWO: UNCOMFORTABLE SUBJECTS: COMFORT WOMEN, WAR BRIDES, AND ADOPTEES The siren-like phantasm of the kumiho, a fox-girl, in traditional Korean folklore who continues to fascinate and haunt both Korean and Korean-American consciousness, is a tale of irony. In the ancient tale, a young girl magically transforms nightly into a bloodthirsty fox who begins preying on her village, first devouring farm animals and eventually, cannibalizing each of her own family members. Each morning, she re- awakens as a girl, remembering nothing. Ironically, the kumiho operates as the fatal poison and source of violence within the family, an evil force to be contained and silenced. And like every happy ending, eventually she is destroyed—by none other than her brother, who restores the peace with good magic. The mythical female who masquerades as a fox— seducer, murderer, retaliator—is not just a swirling phantasm in archaic mythology, but emerges from a real cultural fear and anxiety of her as a virulent anti-mother, an aggressor and anything but a warm, maternal nurturer. The fear that there are other ways to be a woman—to not be defined by sexuality and motherhood —swirl behind the Neo-Confucianist principles that confine women to a complacent, domestic destiny to serve her father, husband, and by extension, her nation precisely because she constitutes the idealized, comfortable notions of home, safety, protection. 33 As my chapter will show, certain figurations of women become the convenient scapegoats and objects of rescue for the larger, less-spoken traumas of Japanese colonization, war and neo-imperialism in modern Korean history. The dominant ways in which these women have been represented vary from complex victims in literary novels to silenced, postcolonial subjects recuperated by academic scholarship, but these dominant narratives have not so far been questioned for their larger motives within the dialectic of trauma studies. What other ways, I ask theoretically, can we expand our dialogues around comfort women, war brides, and adoptees to generate discussion that complicates the current parameters of trauma and melancholic otherness? Tracing a legacy of domination of women’s bodies and subjectivities in the post-war novels by Chang-rae Lee, I explore the links and relationships in which women have been trafficked as enslaved military prostitutes, capitalized as enticing brides to Westerners, and assimilated as desirable, multicultural adoptees in the U.S. and Europe. The following chapter is a close analysis of Chang-rae Lee’s novels, A Gesture Life (1999), Aloft (2004) and The Surrendered (2010), focusing on the representations of his women characters as the tragic counterparts to the male protagonist; in my argument, I raise critiques of the racialized, gendered aspects that his work elicits, adding a new voice by criticizing his portrayals. In particular, both of Lee’s recent novels focus on the positionality or subjectivity of orphans, adoptees, and comfort women who are marked primarily, as I argue, by their problematic representations as traumatized victims, which serve as a convenient substitute for their primary identities as powerful, complex individuals. In my argument, the material and psychological circumstances of war and post-war trauma are, in fact, stronger catalysts in shaping the agency of Kkuteh, Sunny, 34 and June, who may be read as signifiers of that unresolvable tension that exists of testimony: the ineffability and unspeakability of memory co-existing with the vocality and speakability. To give a brief overview of the development and relevancy of trauma studies, it is necessary to acknowledge the influence of the 1970s and 1980s theories of poststructuralism and postcolonialism on the initial emergence of trauma studies in the 1990s. As Karyn Ball has pointed out, the emergence of the field was catalyzed by the support of parallel social movements for civil rights and identitarian groups in the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in the widespread recognition of post-traumatic survivors affected by the Vietnam war. The clinical study of post-traumatic effects of soldiers that led to the medicalization of trauma also helped validate the eventual academic institutionalization of it as a field in cultural studies and the humanities. However, as Ball argues, a critical contradiction emerged when the claims for identity politics and subjectivity clashed with the post-humanist, deconstructionist skepticism of the validity of the individual and personal experience, a gulf that she argues can be bridged by trauma theory. “Traumatic memory provides one answer to the question of how to talk about the affective aftermath of oppression without recourse to idealist notions of coherent identity and ‘authentic’ experience’” (7). Additionally, she argues that in the wake of the deconstruction era, “in focusing on memories rather than experiences of oppression, it becomes possible to validate the events that occasioned suffering while acknowledging the rhetorical function of memories as signs that are shaped by the contingencies of interpretation” (8). 35 For the purposes of my study, the aspects of unrepresentability and untranslatability that emerge from the overlapping areas of language, memory, and identity are as significant as the tangible signifiers that construct narratives and scripts. As Susannah Radstone has recently summarized the limits of representation and remembrance within theorization, she remarks “Trauma theory attempts to move through this position in a number of ways: through theories of testimony, as exemplified in the work of Felman and Laub (TC), through reaching modes of representation better suited to the ‘unrepresentability’ of trauma than realism (ME), and by deploying psychoanalytical understandings of trauma’s belatedness to reveal testimony to trauma’s traceless traces ‘after’ the event” (21). Thus, since the actual traumatic event remains beyond retrievability and recovery of coherent memory, the process for recuperation is one of “recovered referentiality” (reference to Elsaesser 12) and partial memory. In my theoretical framework for Chapter Two, I take up the current issues that are contentious within theories of trauma studies, particularly those explored by key critics such as Giorgio Agamben in the context of post-Holocaust survivors and Ruth Leys in light of her critiques of guilt and shame theories applied to survivors of war trauma. Arguing for a new set of ethics following the Holocaust, Agamben proposes that we consider recasting the Holocaust as a “grey zone,” in which the extreme, dehumanizing experiences of prisoners and prisoners-as-guards (otherwise known as the Sonderkommando) blurred their roles as victims and perpetrators; in other words, the concentration camp environment became an indeterminate zone operating under a different set of logics, thus a different rubric of ethics. Overall, the horrific, unspeakable nature of the mass extermination is such, he argues, that it continues to permeate 36 everyday living, haunting each successive generation through new forms of violence and wars. Ruth Leys, on the other hand, takes this popularly accepted notion of intergenerational trauma to task, as well as criticizes his interpretation of the indeterminate gray zone; ultimately, she finds those critics who use trauma theory to form identitarian claims to be egregious critics who misinterpret the dynamics of survivors to be far more complex and nuanced than acknowledged. In terms of Freud’s legacy of ‘working through’ a repressed experience through talk therapy, the general idea of narrating the past into comprehensible terms in order to understand the present is seen usually as a positive process, whereas absence of memory and suppression are generally marked as pejorative and characterized as repression and denial. Alternatively, I understand that both constructivist narrative and recollection along with fragmentation and absence of memory function together towards constructing a more authentic sense of historicity. Representation and unrepresentability are constantly overlapping, and in tension with each other, in other words. The two polarizing aspects of trauma studies—representation and linguistic narrative versus unrepresentability and non-narrative or unspeakability—are two aspects that Ruth Leys takes up in terms of trauma discourses theorized as mimetic and antimimetic. As such, she argues that psychoanalysis and other humanist discourses have used either forms of trauma theory within different social and historical contexts as methods of justification, and contends that neither poles are correct. Instead, she concludes that the problem of divergent trauma approaches is that there exists an unresolvable tension between these binary concepts of representation and unrepresentability. For the purposes of my paper, I focus on how Lee’s novels also are inconclusive about traumatic memory that affect his 37 characters, pointing to the aspects of ethical ambiguity and suspension of totalizing judgment. In other words, in the context of my literary analysis, I consider both critic’s polarized concepts as a way to frame the divergent, multiple readings that Lee’s post-war novels that center around the perspectives of Korean orphans and adoptees intentionally elicit. Overall, my chapter explores the notion of in-between spaces created by expanding the victim/perpetrator binary, spaces which become morally ambiguous and contestable when the sites of intimacy and family overlap. In addition, my argument goes in a new direction by adding a racialized, gendered critique of his portrayals of female characters, who are often melancholic objects. In particular, his representations of orphans, adoptees, and comfort women become tropes for traumatized victims instead of as powerful, complex individuals. A Gesture Life Most critical essays that analyze Lee’s ouevre tend to focus on the national, ethnic, and poststructural aspects of his male narrators, but for the purposes of my argument, I turn a critical eye to his treatment of women, who take up primary, melodramatic roles that are as significant as his protagonists are dramatic. In A Gesture Life, the role of Kkutaeh, who is signified simply by her first initial “K” throughout, becomes the symbolic figure equated to the wound of Korea itself—a Korea victimized by the successive imperialism and oppression by the Japanese government that becomes feminized as a historical trajectory and impetus for wide-spread, national shame. As feminist scholarship has pointed to the paternalistic reaction by Korean men to the 1990s 38 exposure by former comfort women’s testimony of the mass scale of rape and enslavement during the Pacific War as a masculinist response, the largely gendered discourse of blame tends to reduce female experience to victimhood and trauma while relegating the male experience into the powerful roles of actors and retaliators. In Lee’s fictionalized version of “K,” (whose initial also indicates she could stand for Korea itself), she is only given voice and substance through the eyes and words of another—by the man who is playing the ambivalent, chameleonic role as a Japanese aggressor and, by the nature of his job as a camp medic, a protector. His contradictory status, which is further complicated by his ethnic ambiguity as a Korean-Japanese adoptee comes to symbolize an important masking over of the essential otherness that is at the heart of the novel: the otherness is the feminine. By extension, in the imagined world of AGL and the Korean-American imaginary, the feminine is associated with a history of traumatic experience of silence, ineffability and consequent ghostly traces of unresolved sorrow and melancholia precisely because that traumatic event was the unspoken, unforgivable assault. “K” is not only a figure who died tragically and brutally by a beheading by the Japanese officer, but represents testimony, of irrefutable memory who functions to disturb and unsettle the middle-aged protagonist Doc Hata during his mid-life crisis. And yet, as Kandice Chuh has pointed out, the fact of exposure of sexual slavery does not signal closure and/or a satisfying solution, but instead the narrative of “K” points to continued irresolution and problematic history. “By simultaneously offering the story of “K” as insight into the reasons underlying Doc Hata’s contemporary problems and refusing to allow that story to facilitate a definitive narrative closure, AGL suggests that as powerful as past experiences may be to shaping self-identity, the act of narration, 39 of breaking silence alone can remedy neither the past nor the present” (16). In Chuh’s articulation, then, the act of narrativizing, or speaking out, or testifying is not a means to an end, but reinforces itself as simply a conduit that remains open-ended and indeterminant. Indeed, the simple admission of Hata’s past relationship with “K” in which he acknowledges he committed a sexual transgression does nothing to justify his behavior nor change the course of his present behavior. In fact, he represents the majority of violators surviving WWII who were never prosecuted for their war crimes but instead disappeared into safe civilian anonymity. In contrast, those women who survived brutal comfort station experiences often lived secretive, shameful lives in which voicing their pasts was damaging and negative, even after bringing their stories to light—the exact opposite of healing and reconciliation. Thus, while it is important to note that Lee succeeds in projecting his version of the colonial past as an ongoing wound in the Korean-American imaginary, I would also interject that his shaping of comfort women’s voices presents a critical limit. As critic Anne Anlin Cheng has highlighted that the amoralism of war itself prevents an easy assignation of culpability, it is certainly true that Hata’s perspective as a colonial subject makes him a sympathetic character as a victimized perpetrator. Yet, less attention has been focused on the idea that “K” actually identifies with Hata as her oppressor, and the resulting complication of her role is that of a victim internalizing the logics of violent colonialism by turning it against herself, not him. When Giorgio Agamben refers to the phenomenon of the Sonderkommando (Jewish-assigned prisoners) in the Nazi extermination camps, he describes this psychological reversal as an incomprehensible gray zone: “It is the zone in which the ‘long chain of conjunction between victim and 40 executioner’ comes loose, where the oppressed becomes oppressor and the executioner in turn appears as victim. A gray, incessant alchemy in which good and evil and, along, with them, all the metals of traditional ethics reach their point of fusion” (21). Cast in this light, victims are given more agency as survivors instead of passive objects or others acted upon. They survive precisely because they mimic the role of their oppressors, which will later manifest as guilt, as the situation with “K” will show when she stages her melodramatic soliloquy. While the premise of moral ambiguity during times of war certainly raises legitimate concerns of legal and juridical power, it is important to note that the oppressor in Agamben’s scenario is not stripped of power but only “appears” to be helpless. Hata begins to develop a romantic crush while guarding her in the infirmary, imagined as consensual in his solipsistic fantasy. Thus, as the traditional prisoner-guard boundary begins to break down, “K” is able to take advantage of Hata’s naiveté by projecting a feeling of intimacy and shared nationalism, even going so far as to call him by his secret Korean name that he had previously suppressed. Yet, as “K”s speech reveals, her position was always inferior, kept in place by the structural power that keeps them entrapped: ‘I don’t want your help!’ she shouted. ‘I never wanted your help. Can’t you heed me? Can’t you leave me be? You think you love me but what you really want you don’t yet know because you are young and decent. But I will tell you now, it is my sex. The thing of my sex. If you could cut it from me and keep it with you like a pelt or a favorite stone, that would be all. You are a decent man, Lieutenant, but really you are not any different from the 41 rest. I’m sorry I gave myself to you, not for me but for you. Perhaps it was a second’s hope. For that, I’ll be sorry to my death. But if you loved me, Lieutenant, if you truly loved me, you could not bear to be with me. You could not see me like this, you could not stand for one moment longer the thought of my even living (300). What is deeply troubling about this speech, ultimately, is the turn from the politicized language of collective exploitation to the inward self-victimization and martyrdom. Instead of indicting Hata, she sees herself to blame, an object of shame who needs to be mercifully killed. Offering herself up to Hata in a sacrificial gesture, she loses even agency to take her own life, by her own hands. In fact, the brutal murder of her sister was similarly carried out under the guise of a mercy killing by an unstable soldier, a scapegoat who is described by Hata as inviting her own death. Years later, as an American citizen in a suburban town in New York, Hata repeats his mistake of othering a female subject, this time through the adoption of a biracial, Korean adoptee Sunny. She becomes another kind of victim to his repression, this time within the domestic and private space of the family. Hata reproduces a similar psychosexual dynamics that is exploitative, out of an unacknowledged, compulsory desire to replace the racial and fictive kinship role that Kkutaeh once held for him. As such, Sunny comes to inhabit a kind of uncanny double within Hata’s imaginary, standing in as the next melancholic object in the fraught legacy of former militarized comfort women. As critic Mark C. Jerng reads their troubled father-daughter relationship as one primarily of psychoanalytical transference, “Sunny is placed at the intersection of 42 several latent histories and relationships, the site of the transitional space of transference” (56) in which she emerges as a product of U.S. neoimperialism, most visibly prevalent in the 48,000 military troops still stationed in South Korea since the unfinished war. In an interview, when asked about his characterization of Sunny, author Chang- rae Lee implied that the orphan prototype represents a psychological substitute, a displacement of love and kinship on the part of the adoptive family. Sunny is “the sort of character that keeps on popping up in everything that I write: a Korean orphan, someone who's taken in by a family or an adult who is not really thinking of her as a person, but as someone to fill out the house" (online interview, emphasis mine). Lee’s comment that the adoptee becomes provisional, in other words, a replaceable object, within the domestic space of the family can also be read as the failure to perform an idealized, affective role. I would argue that the adoptive relationship becomes an indeterminant space of differences that is often unspeakable and unspoken. Because it involves a critical examination of the family itself as cultural capital and as a space for racial dynamics to play out in uncomfortable ways, discussion around adoption often becomes polarized and rife with conflicts. Critic David L. Eng has explored the dimensions of race and racial difference of the transracial Asian adoptee within a Western white family, concluding that it forms an imbalanced kinship precisely because the adoptee identifies with the whiteness of her family members but her family does not mutually identify with the Asianness of her identity. The adoptee, in Eng’s central argument, performs affective labor or value that is not measurable, but instead manifests itself as psychological: “…exploitation of the transnational adoptee is largely an emotional affair. She helps to 43 consolidate the affective boundaries of the white, heteronormative, middle-class nuclear family” (109). While Eng’s central argument pivots on the failures of adoption as a multicultural project, Lee’s model of an interethnic Asian family, a single-father and daughter, brings up a different concern—that of a gendered, sexual dynamic and taboo attraction. Sunny’s sexuality as an adolescent becomes an uncomfortable tension for Hata, who is drawn toward comparing her, unconsciously, to “K”. Characterized for her fierce independence, Sunny becomes a subject of otherness who resists being folded into her adoptive family. Doc Hata will allude to the underlying threat of racial otherness that Sunny represents to him, a beauty erupting with danger: “She was beautiful, yes. Exceptionally so. But it was also the other character of her beauty, its dark and willful visage, and with it, the growing measure of independence she would exercise over her world and over me, that she had hoped to keep hidden a little longer” (62). The otherness that Hata projects onto her is a racial exoticism that eclipses the forbidden, sexual eroticism that he is not supposed to feel towards his daughter. Following her one night to the “wrong side” of town where she is partying with a group of older men in their twenties, Hata spies on her performing a striptease—a striptease that seems to fill him with a hypnotic longing at the same time that he condemns it as inordinately inappropriate. In fact, as other critics have aptly noted, the role that Sunny takes on is not as an innocent, non-sexual daughter but is the return of his fantasy of an earlier love-object, Kkutaeh. In his transgressive gazing of Sunny, I trace an implicit parallel between the sexualized comfort woman of the colonial past to the romanticized, abiding adoptee of the present—neither figures exist in themselves, but are objects. 44 And indeed, in AGL, the adoptive father Doc Hata, himself explicitly rationalizes his desire to the social worker that his is a natural longing of a father to bond intimately with a daughter, who carefully phrases it as, “I found myself speaking of a completeness, the unitary bond of a daughter and father. Of harmony and balance” (74). While the implication of Hata’s desire for closeness is that an adopted daughter will “fill” up the gap or absence of family in his life, he also recognizes his dire mistake in overdetermining her role because his real psychological reason is otherwise, namely, to fill or replace his past, unresolved relationship with a woman, Kkutaeh, a militarized “comfort” woman whom he failed to rescue from her situation under the brutality of the Japanese imperial military. Hata’s later attempt to also “rescue” Sunny from an institutionalized life in a Korean orphanage is a similar misdirection as his desire to save Kkutaeh’s life since his desire is narcissistic, not altruistic. Lee’s comment that the adoptee becomes provisional, in other words, a substitute within the domestic space of the family can also be read as an affective role, an emotional role which is impossible to fulfill and I would add, that in the case of Hata and Sunny, the issue of racial difference is more complex since neither Hata nor Sunny identify with their ethnic nationalities, and yet both are under the umbrella of Asian American raciality. Instead, both are ‘social orphans’, adopted out of circumstances of wartime and post-war, produced out of different, yet overlapping histories of imperialism and neoimperialism. The adoptee, in Eng’s central argument, performs affective labor or value that is not economically measurable, but instead manifests itself as largely psychological or psychic and thus becomes suppressed and unacknowledged within the intimate space of the family. In the case of Hata and Sunny’s relationship, they defy the 45 middle-class nuclear family structure. They are a family of two multiethnic adoptees who never address their feelings to each other surrounding their adoptions, with the exceptions of Sunny’s angry outbursts at her father, and his own admissions to the reader that never reach the level of revelation. Hata admits that he felt a sense of detachment to him and fierce independence from the very beginning of her arrival in the United States as a young child, “And the other truth was that even after several years, Sunny felt no more at home in this town, or in this house of mine, or perhaps even with me, than when she very first arrived at Kennedy Airport, accompanied by a woman from the agency….Whenever I looked around to acknowledge my new daughter, to try to catch her eye, she neatly tucked in her chin and pushed on, as if she were headed into a long and driving rain” (55). Characterizing her as fiercely independent and solitary, Doc Hata seems unaware that this projection of her as such is actually a reflection of his own aloofness and emotional sensibility towards self-reliance. What might have been a close relationship based on a mutual recognition and shared sympathy because they are both adoptees unfortunately turns into a failed relationship of eventual discord and estrangement when Sunny runs away from home and discontinues contact with her father into her young adulthood. By the end of the novel, Hata’s budding reconciliation with Sunny and her young son after thirteen years of estrangement, comes to represent his final gesture toward constructing a different version to this American middle-class nuclear family through a renewal of emotional or affective kinship. Hata’s equivocal language to describe his anxiety of failing others circles back to his fear that his relationships will lack authentic meaning and purpose: “I have feared this throughout my life, from the day I was adopted 46 by the family Kurohata to my induction into the Imperial Army …It must be the question of genuine sponsorship that has worried me most, and the associations following, whose bonds have always held value for me, if not so much human comfort or warmth” (229). Indeed, as his detached language of describing adoption as “genuine sponsorship” and “bonds” separate from feeling and love suggests, Hata’s circularity of identity, indefinability of selfhood, becomes the point at which the novel both begins and ends in uncertainty. The trauma of forced separation from his biological family in Korea is marginalized in his own memory, but never forgotten, and repeats when he is again left alone, this time by his adoptive daughter. As brought up earlier in the introduction to this chapter, my argument has tried to show that Hata performs a role as a victimized perpetrator, who abuses his role as a paramedical officer in the Japanese Imperial Army to objectify and sexualize the military comfort girl he is supposed to be caring for, Kkutaeh. While the brutal war circumstance in which he survives partially explains the reason for his emotional detachment to others, his aggressive behavior towards her is inexplicable and surfaces in the novel as a trace of guilt and denial of accountability, particularly when Kkutaeh reappears to him later in his mid-life adulthood in a dream as a haunting specter who has not forgiven him for his abject behavior. His own parental behavior of contradictory impulses toward Sunny to both protect and reject her when she reaches adolescence is another way of repeating his pattern to avoid becoming intimate with another; she remains Othered in his imaginary projections of her as an ungrateful, resistant adoptee. While Sunny could be seen, a secondary character in the novel, as an individuated figure, in my opinion the representation of her that emerges more strongly is as a detached adoptee who rebels 47 against her adoptive family through experimenting with promiscuity and running away. Overall, the novel raises the question about the real affective consequences of adoption on the adult lives of those who are adopted, pointing to the lack of a shared cultural language to describe these grey areas, these nuanced complexities. Furthermore, Sunny’s racial illegibility as an Amerasian provokes uneasiness in Hata, who is unwilling to engage in a frank discussion of race with her. Except for a brief admission that he fought in WWII when Sunny confronts him, Hata chooses to conceal his own race and adoption, as though ashamed. Indeed, Leys’ claim that the specular quality of shame occurs when one’s internal world is brought into view by the intruding gaze of another describes Hata’s turns of self-consciousness. Yet, Hata is still unable to perceive Sunny without projecting his own hopes and failures onto her, repeating the same mistake within the intimate space of a familial kinship as he did in his alleged “love” relationship. The intentional misrepresentation of his rape of a militarized comfort woman is unforgivable, not only because he rationalized it as a mutual act of love, but because he fails to take responsibility in the present. Kkutaeh’s premature death is of her own choosing, the only recourse to escaping the forced prostitution and abuse that an estimated 200,000 comfort women endured. The collective voices of these women should be given the space to exist as outcries of protest, and should not be condemned to the shadows of the past, or seen as ghosts because their traumas are material and real. While Kandice Chuh and Laura Hyun Yi Kang have rightfully raised the question of the ethical investments behind the popular resurgence of the issue of militarized comfort women as a specifically “Korean-American” political hot topic, I also 48 raise the question of how reductive portrayals of them as only melancholic objects can reiterate similar ethical problems of representation. Before my chapter turns to the problematic relationships portrayed in Aloft and The Surrendered, I want to point out that the largely metaphorical link that Lee establishes between comfort women and adoptees as exploited, sexualized subjects is a significant one. As scholars of adoption research have made claims that adoptees are another example of trafficked bodies, I want to be careful to remain skeptical of the presumptive link often made between the Japanese militarization of comfort women and international Korean adoption as one that conflates two distinctly separate historical events. The historical links between militarized comfort women, military war brides, and adoptees are largely traces of the powerful effects of successive movements of colonialism and postcolonialism in South Korea. Post-traumatic Passing: Brides and Housewives In Chang-rae Lee’s novel Aloft, Daisy enters the novel as a ghost, her death elusively intimated as an inglorious act of suicide that haunts the family. Just as the portrayals of “K” and Sunny function aesthetically and politically as victimized others, Daisy also lacks significant agency and will. Her husband and the protagonist of the novel, Jerry Battle, sardonically downplays his interracial desire for his Korean-American immigrant wife Daisy as “your basic sorry white dude afflicted with what Theresa refers to as ‘Saigon syndrome’ (Me so hor-ny, G.I. Joe!) and fetishizing,” (Aloft 113). Rejecting her thrust-upon role to perform as a dutiful, Americanized wife and mother, 49 Daisy acts out her rage in the quasi-comic forms of manic shopping sprees, neighborhood walks in the nude, and in a final act of defiance, an ending of her unhappy, suburban life by the only way she sees fit—by drowning herself in the backyard swimming pool. While Daisy’s demise into fits of inexplicable madness, and particularly in the pivotal incident in which she attacks Jerry with a kitchen knife, seemingly unprovoked, which could be seen as “hysterical,” most obviously casts her into a role as a tragic victim of the order of the feminine mystique, Chang-rae Lee’s specific articulation of her as a Korean- American woman who cannot “pass” and survive in suburban, white America in the 1970s is revealed in the slippages and intentional absences of the novel. The slippage of calling Daisy “Asian” or “Oriental,” as though the terms are equivalent, conflates the racism that Jerry performs when he appears to be indifferent or colorblind to racial difference. Jerry is the one who refuses to acknowledge his own racialization of Daisy as a foreign, “inscrutable” other, whom he would rather categorize as crazy than acknowledge his own role in infantalizing and hypersexualizing her. In his praise of the novel’s technique of subverting the usual discourses around ethnic identity, critic Mark C. Jerng points out that the novel instead displaces and disrupts the conventional markers of racism in order to make Jerry appear to be liberal and colorblind. By giving Jerry a detached, universal perspective, the overall novel “redistributes the contexts of racial meanings so as to show but not see race. Maintaining this universality requires a constant act of reordering the perception of race, displacing racial issues or racial conflicts into different domains so that they will both be there and not be there” (199). Thus, despite the claims to be indifferent and thus tolerant, Jerry’s overly- conscious attention to ethnic stereotypes surface in how he misrecognizes Daisy as 50 independent and individual; for him to perceive her as complex, and possessing a past history in “the old country” would require him to shift all of his beliefs about white privilege, and to de-center himself from his position of power. He would have to identify her as non-sexual being, as a woman who exists outside of his needs, and is as important as a white adult male. It is not Daisy who is mad, ultimately, but who serves as the socially convenient scapegoat that the fraudulent role of freedom that a “model minority” promises, and which society powerfully upholds as an illusion of autonomy. Exoticized, sexual power is the only form of agency that is available to Daisy within the confines of the novel, and reflects a domestic continuum of the already well-known militarized sexuality abroad that have proliferated in the multiply-constituted forms of comfort women, camptown prostitutes, war brides, and sex tourism workers. As long as she is still considered to be foreign and different, despite the postmodern recasting of the Asian American female as desirable, her racialization is still tied to earlier inferiorization of Asian corporeality. Arguing that the Korean sex workers are modern-day versions of comfort women, replacing the militarized sex slaves recruited and exploited by the Japanese, scholar Ji- Yeon Yuh portrays many of these women’s decisions to marry an American man as one of her few available forms of resistance against the dominant Korean culture. Paradoxically, she points to the misogynistic cultural attitude that belittles her role as a military “whore” at the same time that the nation—the government, primarily—needs her sexual services in order to ensure a good diplomatic relationship with the U.S. Between 1950 and 1989, there were approximately 100,000 marriages between Korean “war brides” and American servicemen, and every year, there are still high numbers of women 51 who immigrate from Korea to the U.S. with the fantasy of a “better life” in modern America. Yuh cites this phenomenon as a direct cause of the continued American military dominance in Korea, whose major military bases and surrounding camptown brothels provide and normalize the meeting-grounds for these romantic and sexual encounters to take place. Exploited by both the U.S. military and Korean government before emigrating, these women often suffer a different form of sexual and racial exploitation in America, one that figures largely in the private, intimate space of the family, in which they no longer have the authority, nor language to be independent. Cultural assimilation, or enculturation, of such women who relinquish their families of origin and national identities to become American citizens, presents a different problem of navigating gendered norms. As Susan Koshy sets up in her book Sexual Naturalization, the modern Asian American woman as representing a “sexual model minority” is caught in a crisis between two conflicting ideals for her to perform as a sexually desirable, powerful figure, and a subservient wife and mother, both idealizations which express a patriarchal vision of limited autonomy for a woman since both represent a kind of productive capital that is undervalued and dismissed. Contemporary racial passing for Asian American women, according to Koshy, involves not the impersonation of bourgeois whiteness, but their “acting out the dominant scripts of exotic otherness as an avenue to the American Dream” (133). As such, her role of performing as an Orientalized other who knowingly uses her sexual desirability to secure both cultural and economic capital seemingly elicits powerful agency, but as she points out, masks over the psychological losses of real feminine empowerment and identity as the high cost of assimilation. Daisy is, according to her husband Jerry, a “talented mimic 52 when she got the feeling” (128), a reflection of his own insecurities rather than a reliable perception about her character. Jerry’s aggressive attempts to silence and mute Daisy arise precisely because her acts of rage and refusal to be a “good” housewife threaten his own masculinity and sense of entitled authority as the patriarch of the family. Chastised by his father for failing to properly punish Daisy for excessively buying furniture and a fur coat, Jerry retaliates by taking away her access to credit cards, and confining her to the house until she conforms again as his “good” obedient wife and sexually available lover. However, Daisy never returns to her good behavior, and becomes depressed and insomniac, leaving the house in the early hours of the morning to amble around the neighborhood, half-dressed or naked, expressing her unhappiness through these temporary night-time escapes. Thus, while such acts of erratic behavior could be read as acts of rebellion to be acknowledged and respected by her family, they are limited forms of agency since she never actually leaves the domestic space. The domestic space of the white American suburb, in effect, drowns her and becomes the reason for her eventual mental collapse. Building on this idea of overdetermined notion of femininity, Anne Anlin Cheng suggests that assimilation produces impossible ideals and dreams of perfection of belonging for the minority subject. Haunted by these internalized ideals, he or she can only feel incomplete, sick, inferior; in Aloft, the persistence of symptoms of failing to be the perfect, white housewife and mother belies the trauma that is at the core of the novel. Daisy suffers, and suffers in complete visibility, ironically, of everyone’s gaze; no one in her family can see her for who she is, but only for what she represents to them. As Cheng writes, “For in the context of assimilation and racial difference, the symptom of 53 hypochondria is most revealing not in the mundane sense of imagined or unreal injury but in its sincerity—in its profound confusion between health and pathology, wholeness and disability. Cultural assimilation may thus be said to be a form of haunting, whereby the dream of the socially immaculate body simultaneously introjects itself and provokes a host of hypochondriacal responses” (72). Invoking a critique of the binary between racial (in)authenticity, she argues that self-identification involve more nuanced intersections and contradictions; in the case of Daisy, the pathologized representation by her husband can be read as a displacement for the larger conflicts of intercultural marriage that cannot be resolved. In writing about the Korean war bride as an illusion of a grateful immigrant, who “shows gratitude toward her hospitable new family and country,” Grace M. Cho argues that her stigma as a former prostitute is legitimized through marriage into the domestic realm, which erases the geopolitical violences. “What better place to bury a social trauma than in the closely guarded space of the family?” (14) she poses rhetorically. Additionally, she argues that the fantasy of Asian Americans as so assimilated into American life that they become “honorary whites” is a nationalist fantasy that upholds the U.S. as a nation of liberators and saviors while erasing the imperialism and militarized prostitution of the yangonggju, in which “the story of honorary whiteness is a facet of the American dream, the larger fantasy of how the United States imagines itself as a site of liberation and a nation of saviors, a fantasy that is mutually supported by both the producers of this knowledge and the subjects that inform it.” (131). The unacknowledged traumas are disavowed and proliferated within individual families themselves because of “familial desire and shame” and reinforced structurally by the 54 global hegemony of the U.S. Thus, marriage as a culturally legitimate institution plays the role of valorizing the interracial relationship between Korean bride and American GI by removing stigma of prostitution as sexual labor and putting a happy face over the exploitative relationship between the U.S.-Korea. War Brides and Adoptees as Substitutes Although their histories and trajectories are different, the transnational adoptee from Korea shares a similar route of immigration and assimilation into the American family as the war bride does, but her role as a model daughter is expected to be easier since she arrives as a “blank” screen without a previous history upon which her new American identity can be projected and imagined. Critic David L. Eng has persuasively linked the gendered exploitation of 3 rd world women’s sexuality and bodies as militarized comfort women, sex workers, military prostitutes and war brides to the lasting American colonial power embedded in western expansionism across Asia and Southeast Asia; they have all functioned as exploited sexual and economic capital. In contrast, he asserts that a newer, immeasurable form of emotional capital is found in the transformation of the transnational adoptee from foreign orphan to multicultural daughter. Similar to being made legitimately American through marriage as a wife, as the GI war bride is, the adoptee becomes valorized as American through adoption as a daughter. In both narratives, it is under the rubric of family and the familiar that attempts to naturalize these roles for the bride and adoptee, and yet, the intimate space of the family powerfully exposes the embedded, unacknowledged positions of power and racial differences. What 55 becomes exchanged, as the Korean subject moves from the “bad,” objectified country to the “better” modernized country, is a form of unrecognized, emotional capital that has psychological bearings within the newly-configured family. Psychologically, both the bride and adoptee perform a longed-for fantasy of completing the American family through their emotional and affective roles, in which their cultural and racial differences are largely unacknowledged, and buried within the domestic space of the family. In return for the “gifts” of a new life, both figures are expected to feel gratitude, and thus an obedience to resist questioning or resisting their role to acculturate to their new American lives. One could argue for a similar unstable condition for the transnational adoptee, whose losses of family and culture and language are repressed, and not regarded as material losses to be grieved over—the adoptee is expected to be grateful for her adoption into a “better” life filled with opportunities and cultural privilege. In The Surrendered, June is characterized as a traumatized, defiant war orphan who unsettles the cultural scripts of Neo-confucianist traditional gender roles. Defying the traditionally feminine passivity, June is not “good” enough to be adopted by the Tanners, and must wait until she gains independence as a legal adult, though she still must pass legally as a bride of an American G.I. to ensure successful immigration to the United States. Her two choices to become a good American citizen either through adoption or marriage reveals the entangled relationship between adoptee and bride by virtue of their converging histories and cultural myths surrounding them. It is the American GI, Hector, who emerges in the novel as an equivocal figure who first rescues her following the war, and leads her to the Christian-founded “New Hope” orphanage where other Korean orphans are prepared to be adopted by families from the US. and 56 who will eventually agree to marry her for the sole purpose of emigrating and gaining citizenship. June’s initial fear of him as an American soldier as the enemy and then ambivalence toward him as her own savior is also mirrored by her contradictory feelings of gratitude and hostility toward the American orphanage directors, Sylvie and Reverend Ames Tanner. The persistent structure of ambivalence toward Americans as both liberators and aggressors, particularly during the Korean war, is rooted in the real ethical contradictions of violent behavior by the military, in which the US troops were responsible for large- scale massacres and rapes of civilians. Following the war, the US government expanded its military bases in Korea and stationed 48,000 troops at the DMZ border in order to preserve the suspended peace treaty as a political ally to the ROK; the additional presence of American Christian missionaries who operated and sponsored orphanages under a humanitarian logic helped contribute to the image of the US as a paternalistic, benevolent force but also as a foreign invasion. “The Janus-faced nature of the American military operation—exploitative and humanitarian—has characterized the neocolonial relationship between American and Korea since the 1950s” (Kim 67). Additionally, the presence of “comfort” stations by the Japanese Imperial Army were replaced after WWII, almost seamlessly, by the camptown brothels owned and operated by the U.S. military stationed in South Korea following the national partition, marking the shared, but suppressed affinity between the militarized comfort women during colonialism and military prostitutes during the period of American neoimperialism (Cho 35). The melancholic language of gratitude, thus, becomes embedded in the historically fraught relationship between the U.S. and the ROK, with the neoimperialism 57 of the U.S. reproducing an ambivalent relationship of projection, fantasy, exclusion, loss, and unresolved mourning. In her preface, critic Anne Anlin Cheng succinctly describes her definition of “racial melancholia” as a paradoxical condition that affects whites and nonwhite minorities, in which dominant white culture both rejects and desires the racialized others, who exist as suspended ghosts who feel an inarticulated loss that informs their subjectivity as incomplete or imperfect (xi), and thus always lacking. “Racialization in America may be said to operate through the institutional process of producing a dominant, standard white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion- yet-retention of racialized others. The national topography of centrality and marginality legitimizes itself by retroactively positing the racial other as always Other and lost to the heart of the nation” (10). Thus, filling in the national space as the melancholic and victimized other, Korea uneasily vacillates between polarizing positions of both relying upon the U.S. for paternal protection and financial support, and rejecting its exploitative authority. In turn, America’s uneasy incorporation of the inferiorized, feminine nation produces feelings of pity and guilt for failing to treat the other as equivalent, ultimately embodying a superiority that is unwilling to accept difference. In The Surrendered, Hector’s attitudes towards the Koreans that he encounters during the war become exemplary of the national imaginary, split between alternating positions of pity toward, and superiority over the bodies marked as Korean. This includes not only his attitude toward June, who will become his temporary bride, but extends toward his Amerasian son, Nick, whose mixed-race hybridity will later cause him to feel shame, awe, and pity towards him. 58 Just as Daisy’s losses of her family and home in Aloft are never recognized and mourned as valid, June’s orphanhood and resulting displacement that results from the brutal slayings and deaths of her parents and siblings are never properly grieved. Characterized by an aloof coldness and aggressive temper, June becomes the feared scapegoat and “bad” model for adoption among the other war orphans, the only one who is ‘unadoptable’ precisely because she refuses to perform the scripted role as the needy, grateful orphan. In fact, Reverend Tanner rejects the possibility of adopting her into his own family because she is literally “grown up” and thus, impossible to mold into an ideal daughter, reveals the underlying logics of Christian American adoption as assimilation and honorary citizenship of children. In other words, June is not just a “pretty stone” or a desirable doll to shape, but in fact is already an experienced and hardened adolescent, with the foreshadowing threat of her sexuality as “razor sharp,” which presents an obstacle to adopting her as not a “blank” slate, but an already “haunted” slate. Also characterized for her fierce independence, Sunny in A Gesture Life, becomes a subject of otherness who resists being folded into her adoptive family. Doc Hata alludes to the underlying threat of racial otherness that his adoptive daughter, Sunny, as an Amerasian who is presumably the child of a taboo sexual liason between a Korean woman and African-American serviceman. As such, the specter of this relationship is mixed with Hata’s uneasy racialization and prejudice: “She was beautiful, yes. Exceptionally so. But it was also the other character of her beauty, its dark and willful visage, and with it, the growing measure of independence she would exercise over her world and over me, that she had hoped to keep hidden a little longer” (62). The otherness that Hata projects onto her is a racial exoticism that eclipses the forbidden, 59 sexual eroticism that he is not supposed to feel towards his daughter, yet still does. Following her one night to the “wrong side” of town where she is partying with a group of older men in their twenties, Hata spies on her performing a striptease—a striptease that seems to fill him with a hypnotic longing at the same time that he condemns his desire for being inordinately inappropriate. In fact, as other critics have aptly noted, the role that Sunny takes on is not as an innocent, non-sexual daughter but is the fantasy of an earlier love-object, Kkutaeh, the comfort woman who was under Hata’s care in his military service in Burma towards the end of the war in 1945. As critic Mark C. Jerng has pointed out, Sunny stands in as a kind of uncanny double, the site for unrequited feelings that Hata transfers from his feelings for Kkutaeh. In his transgressive gazing of Sunny, I trace an implicit parallel between the sexualized comfort woman of the colonial past to the romanticized, abiding adoptee of the present—neither figures exist in themselves, but are objects. By creating a literary register of vivid flashbacks between the present and past, the novel itself operates as if the past is the present, with Kkutaeh as a foreboding presence reminding him of his criminality as a soldier and now as a father. Hata’s crime, which he only reveals to the reader, is his sexual assault and rape of Kkutaeh during his guard over her, an act which he veils over in euphemistic language as an act of “love”. Comparably, he also veils over his paternal affection as a natural father’s love. In an uncanny echo of phrases by both women, neither Sunny nor Kkutaeh “need” nor desire Hata in any way; emphatically, they emphasize their distance from him, naming him as an aggressor and by extension, a perpetrator. “I don’t want your help! …I never wanted your help. Can’t you heed me? Can’t you leave me be?” Kkutaeh’s rejection of Hata is repeated by Sunny years later, 60 reinforcing his distorted sense of mutual love that he demands of her, but does not receive, “I don’t need you…I never needed you. I don’t know why, but you needed me. But it was never the other way” (96). In Comforting an Orphaned Nation, critic Tobias Hubinette elaborates on the postcolonial nature of adoption as the unacknowledged trafficking of bodies, arguing that militarized comfort women and adoptees are most closely aligned as examples of subalterns because of their status represents the “invisibility and unspeakability caused by feelings of shame and dishonour that surround these two stigmatized groups” (19). While it is important to distinguish between their explicit differences of disempowerment and agency, I see the potential to politicize their marginalization as more metaphorical than literal. As culturally privileged citizens after their immigration as infants and children, adoptees as adults become empowered to speak about the inequities of the adoption industry that has sought to erase the other, invisible subjects—the biological mothers— who are often members of the economic underclass, overlooked within the adoption triad. The undeniable link of adoption to other commodification of third-world female bodies for male consumption and pleasure is just a new articulation, David L. Eng argues, “Dissociating transnational adoption from the historical and economic legacy of war brides, mail-order brides, comfort women, and sex workers thus obscures an understanding of this practice as one of the more recent embodiments of gendered commodification…” (105). Additionally, what is usually hidden from open dialogue within adoptive families is the real presence of the biological family and the culture from which the adoptee has become estranged—the repressed origins. As Abraham and Torok’s framework of 61 intergenerational haunting suggests, the relatives of the past who haunt their survivors gain their power through their withholding of information, of harboring secrets that plague the second generation. These traumas are kept secretive within individual families themselves because of “familial desire and shame” that are reinforced structurally by the global hegemony of the US to keep a heroic, mythical narrative in place. Interracial marriages, as Cho has argued, become the illusionary face of colorblindness that masks the real inequities and racism of imperialism. By extension, I would contend that interracial adoptions fulfill a similar function of promoting a liberal, multicultural fantasy that is broken apart with the emergence of the repressed, biological family, which is concealed by the practices of adoption agencies. In her creative non- fiction book Fugitive Visions, Jane Jeong Trenka writes about her experiences as an adoptee who repatriates to Korea as an adult, “When I came to Korea to live, I could measure exactly how much had been not lost—but methodically destroyed. The destruction of the identities and histories of the adoptees wasn’t at all personal. It was just methodical” (89). What she is referring to is the systemic failings and falsifications by government-sponsored adoption agencies that change the documents and family registries of adoptees, making it nearly impossible for families to locate each other and reunite when the adoptees are adults. As the numbers of those adoptees who return to find biological family members in Korea have begun to match the number of almost 2,000 social orphans sent abroad from Korea each year into adoptive families in the U.S. and Western Europe, the transnational circuit of adoption becomes more clearly an issue of ethics and human rights. The erasures of one’s selfhood and identity through the 62 concealment of family history are not ghostly objects or traces, but are real, material losses that can be measured as significant losses. In the previous section that explored how adoptees are represented as complicated victims in Chang-rae Lee’s literary fiction, the issue of individual and collective trauma related to adoption was at the heart of both novels. I would add that the heightened issue of multicultural adoption in the age of accelerating globalization is one to be explored in greater depth, particularly now as more adult adoptee scholars contribute to the dialectic of ethical dimensions and the politics of transnational adoption. As one of the oldest and largest sending-countries of international adoption since the Korean civil war, Korea has been critiqued by western media and scholars for continuing to engage in a practice that seem not only unnecessary as an economic and social policy, but also an egregious one in terms of violating the rights for the birth mothers and children who often belong to a stigmatized underclass in Korea. Often a divisive and potentially polarizing topic because of its highly emotional and personal dimension, international adoption should be critiqued for not only the psychological consequences within the individual, intimate space of the family but for the ramifications it creates culturally and geopolitically. As raised by my introduction, the dangers of fictionalizing the experiences of cultural trauma are that the representations might result in reproducing victimization and a lack of complexity of individual trauma. While the authorial intention of Chang-rae Lee is clearly invested in raising consciousness about Korean-American history, questions of whose perspective of history must also be raised, and to what ends. Just as the mythical figure of the kumiho fox-girl provokes an uneasy cultural discomfort, so too 63 do the images of comfort women, war brides, and adoptees in the Korean and American imaginaries need to be worked, and re-worked. 64 CHAPTER THREE: ADOPTEES AS HAUNTED SLATES IN DOCUMENTARY FILMS In the previous chapter that explored how adoptees are represented as uncomplicated victims in Chang-rae Lee’s post-war literary fiction, the issue of individual and collective trauma related to adoption was at the heart of both novels. Building on the issues of otherness and ethical representation, I turn to the genre of documentary to analyze the interrelated themes of identity and family for adult adoptees that comes under closer scrutiny in several recent documentary films. The heightened issue of multicultural adoption in the age of accelerating globalization is one to be explored in greater depth, particularly now as more adult adoptee scholars contribute to the dialectic of ethical dimensions and the politics of transnational adoption. As one of the oldest and largest sending-countries of international adoption since the Korean civil war, Korea has been critiqued by western media and scholars for continuing to engage in a practice that seems not only unnecessary as an economic and social policy, but also an egregious one in terms of violating the rights for the birth mothers and children who often belong to a stigmatized underclass in Korea. Often a divisive and potentially polarizing topic because of its highly emotional and personal dimension, international adoption should be critiqued for not only the psychological consequences within the individual, intimate space of the family but for 65 the ramifications it creates geopolitically and culturally. In this chapter, my argument focuses on the ways in which adoption narratives represented in documentaries—produced by adoptees themselves and shaped by commentary by critics—raise critical questions about intimacy, racial identity, and belonging in adoptive and birth families. For my texts, I focus on adoptee-produced and non-adoptee films and documentaries: Deann Borshay Liem’s First Person Plural (2000) and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2010), and Barb Lee’s documentary Adopted (2010). Using natural realist modes of documentary, Liem and Lee offer critical counter-narratives that explore adoptee identity in nuanced ways, questioning the politics of adoption in an era of globalization. Critic David L. Eng raises an integral set of questions about how to categorize the adoptee according to diasporic and ethnic studies by posing: “Is the transnational adoptee an immigrant? Is she Korean? Is she Korean American? Are her adoptive parents, in turn, immigrants, Korean, or Korean American?”(149). Yet, I would argue that the hybrid status of the adoptee is a fluid construction, passing in-between these identities but hardly stable, reflecting of a variety of lived experiences of adoptees. Adoptees occupy an in-between space of indeterminant identity, and thus of marked ambivalence. In this chapter, I want to think about the myriad other possibilities of analyzing adoption as a structure of kinship that produces a critical set of unsettling questions around irresolvable notions of self, identity, memory, and history. Precisely because adoptions have historically reflected both altruistic and capitalist practices, the traces within the intimate spaces of the family become legible as places to reflect and contest. What follows in this essay is an attempt to address the difficult psychic, emotional and cultural crises through presenting other dimensions to narratives about adoption that expand from 66 questions of identity, race, and melancholia that have already been foregrounded. Weaving in anecdotes, documentary films, and cultural criticism, I want to explore other routes and detours, other languages to imagine this enigma of elephantine proportions called adoption. Adoptive and Fictive Families Towards the end of her documentary, First Person Plural (2000), Deann Borshay Liem says profoundly to the camera, “I was never able to mourn what I lost” when adopted by her American family in the 1960s. The losses refer not only to the real, measurable losses of her family of four siblings and mother in Korea, but are underwritten by the unspoken, intangible relinquishment of identity and memories tied to her native tongue and culture had she grown up in her biological family. Those absences are felt, repeatedly throughout her life growing up as an outsider in Fremont, California, but became deflected and repressed. As a child who was so eager to be “good enough” for her family, any negative emotions of grief or sadness became suppressed out of fear of being rejected by her second family. Her adoptive father, Arnold Borshay, is the only witness who vocalizes her struggles growing up to fit in and cope with her sadness over losing her Korean family, chronicling the otherness that can’t be absorbed by the fictive “happy” family through his camera lens. As many international adoptee narratives attest to the pressures of fitting in, and by extension, to the larger norms of enculturation and assimilation, adoption often involves a complex process of relegating the lost culture to foreignness, as Liem shows in her documentary. 67 As many critics have brought up the paradoxes of adoption, couching it in terms of gift/theft, gain/loss, joy/sorrow polarities, I would add that the contradictions inherent in adoption cause profound ambivalent feelings and tensions that elude resolution. In Adopted Territory, anthropologist Eleana J. Kim offers up a compelling metaphor of a double-layered hologram to represent the adoptee’s paradoxical condition, “Adoptees embody and expose the contradictions of the global. They are like holographs—turned one way, they appear to be among the most privileged of cosmopolitans, turned the other, they are the ultimate subalterns as ‘orphaned’ and ‘abandoned’ children” (184). In terms of situating the issue of framing the silences surrounding militarized comfort women and adoptees, Eleana J. Kim explains that the Korean government’s recent efforts to offer cultural citizenship to Korean adoptees is part of a larger movement of historical reckoning by activists and scholars to unearth and recuperate past injustices. In the 1990s, such marginalized, oppressed groups who had previously been silenced and repressed from speaking aloud became visible in the public sphere, most notably the conscripted sex workers, “comfort women,” during the Japanese imperialism but also civilian victims from the Korean war, the Cheju Island massacre and the 1980 Kwangju Uprising (Kim 2282). Adoptees have been included as a group within that silenced, stigmatized oppression, although their status as non-Korean citizens makes that a troubling categorization, as adoptees don’t fit into the normative diasporic and immigrant categorizations. As Tobias Hubinette has argued that adoptees and comfort women have been subalterns in the Korean imaginary, I would argue that it is important to distinguish adoptees as a separate category from the enslavement of comfort women and sex workers, although they are certainly related to the exploitation of gendered, trafficked bodies. Adoptees are in-between those 68 categories that Eng brought up earlier—and should be more accurately seen as straddling both roles as victims and agents—stripped of a choice in the primary act of being removed from their home and culture to be raised in a western family as children, but mobilized with education and cultural capital as adults. This dual status of the adoptee, as I see it, becomes embroiled in essentialist and constructivist divisions. The dual narratives in First Person Plural of the biological “real,” thus “good,” family and the “unreal” thus secondary adoptive family end up polarizing the issue into distracting concerns of what defines an “authentic” family. While Liem’s revelation is significant when she says that she can only become closer to her Korean mother and family by paradoxically distancing herself from them, I would argue that such an issue of re-creating intimacy can never be resolved. Far from endorsing closure and psychological catharsis by privileging one family over another, one life over another, the discussion needs to be more nuanced in order to imagine the other dimensions of the adoptive triad. Eng has psychoanalyzed the crisis that Liem faces as an oedipal dramatization of the “two mother” psychic conundrum, yet the issue suggests otherwise. As Hosu Kim has compellingly studied the effect of the invisibility of the birth mother who remerges during sensationalized reunions, she concludes that “the practice of intercountry adoption is a radical example of global inequality played out at the site of actual women’s bodies and often pits two women—the birth mother and the adoptive mother—against each other in a struggle to claim legitimate motherhood” (133). Furthermore, I would claim that the differences that are produced within the adoptive family itself—racial, cultural, and psychological—are also reproduced, to a certain degree, in the biological family during the reunion. Those differences are 69 irresolvable, and thus cannot be explained away. As the gulf of misunderstandings and rationalization between the Kangs and Borshays is captured so dramatically in Liem’s documentary, these issues belong to the realm of the uncomfortable and divisive. As the Kang’s underlying narrative emerges as one of poverty, the reasons for Korean adoptions are usually economic, keeping those families in the underclass ashamed to reveal their stories, which will create a pattern of secretive concealing, and fabrications that carry over into the newly-formed adoptive family, an inevitable trace. Earlier in my dissertation, I incorporated the concept of intergenerational haunting as one that took on political dimensions for silencing the discords and inequity between Korea and the U.S. In the case of the history of adoptions between Korean and the U.S., this imbalance overtly influences the families involved, particularly the birthmothers who are silenced or covered over as objects of shame. When Liem realizes that her nightmares and hallucinations about her ‘dead’ Korean father and family are actually real memories, and not ghosts and apparitions, she is propelled to uncover the truth for her adoption. She is haunted by the living, not the dead. In fact, her further investigation into her background reveals that she was switched at the orphanage in 1965 during severe postwar depression, and her documents were purposely falsified to represent her as an entirely different girl. But even more compellingly, Liem was not an orphan at all, but the daughter sacrificed—or saved— depending on the perspective, to help the family members survive through economic hardships. It is this ambivalence and ongoing tension that becomes impossible for both families to talk about, despite the reasons for Liem’s adoption, and one that I would claim creates an ethical barrier to identification, and compassion. 70 The issue of exchange becomes fraught not only because of monetary value, but also cultural capital and status, education and privilege. Although both Liem’s birthmother and brother will justify her relinquishment by saying that she would have a “better life” in America, they don’t openly acknowledge their own guilt or misgivings concerning the loss of their daughter and sister that is irrecoverable—and perhaps one considered incidental in the past. Instead, the documentary captures the two families attempting to make a reconciliation, a gesture towards forgiveness for the exchange of a daughter. The brother’s diplomatic speech that Liem should accept the circumstances now and forget the past, acknowledging that the cultural and linguistic barriers separate them is an apt one; these differences are not just cultural but amplified by the emotional, and psychological dimensions. Overall, the reunion with her Korean family represents not an emotional re- unifying and closure of the family into a tight-knit, intimate family but the direct opposite. Ironically, it becomes a kind of second abandonment. Liem’s brother tries to impose an explanation for his mother’s painful choice to relinquish her as a little girl by resorting to a narrative of gratitude and opportunity and yet never contextualizes his own perspective as steeped in prevailing patriarchal nationalism. It is far easier to blame the faceless nature of poverty and war circumstance than to subvert the narrative by pinpointing the Korean government’s biopolitics as responsible for facilitating overseas adoptions. In Liem’s sequel documentary, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, the notion of children as replaceable objects is revealed, over and over, in an unsentimental treatment of adoption as a practice of commerce and erasure. Compelled to search for the “real” Cha Jung Hee (mimicking the search for the “real” mother) or the real “orphan” that she represents, Liem discovers only more fictions and deceptions. After meeting several 71 women in their 50s –60s named “Cha Jung Hee,” but never positively identifying the orphan from her adoption records, Liem resigns to the conclusion that “Cha Jung Hee became a template for a perfect orphan. Once the template existed, any girl could step into it”. In other words, once the child is transformed, on paper, as an orphan with deceased parents and thus a devalued, anonymous status in Korea, she moves from being a subject to a less-threatening passive object, ready to be passed off culturally in an entirely new form, an amnesiac. Although the postwar depression and plight of finding homes for thousands of orphaned children necessitated this “template,” why has this practice of creating fictive orphans continued long after Korea recovered and became an industrial giant? The powerful gatekeepers—in this case, the adoption agency, social workers, and more individually Liem’s brother—encourage Liem to “forget” about the past, as though denial is a catalyst of progress and change. The Korean social worker who fabricated the adoption records later justifies her behavior by saying that she sent Liem abroad in the hope that she would be happy and have a better life, apologizing by saying, “I’m sorry if it’s still haunting you.” Forgetting is simply a euphemism for scripting the present as an idealized, whole narrative that is replete of violence, removal, and disruptive imperialism. When Liem speaks of her desire to reclaim her own life and its inherent impossibility, she says “I wish I had a picture for all the lost moments of the past so that I could string them together into one unbroken history. Instead, I invent stories of what might have been, inserting myself into spaces I never occupied.” The crux to which Liem returns to, again and again, is the question of her identity as a replaceable object, an object passed between countries and families under a happy rubric of completing a multicultural family. Related to the powerful agent of discourse wherein the practitioners are urging the adoptee to “forget” the 72 past and essentially erase history as too uncomfortable to digest, I see forgiveness as its unspoken counterpart. And in the larger discourse of adoption, what happens within this structure of forgiveness that is too uncomfortable to discuss? Forgiveness, however, goes neglected. As her documentary shows, instead of confirming the authenticity of a ‘real’ Cha Jung Hee, Liem unveils the inauthenticity—indeed, the true imposter—of the invention of the pitiable orphan Cha Jung Hee as a desirable object for the West. In contrast to the metaphor of the social orphan as a “blank slate” who arrives in the new family to be inscribed an identity and name, I argue that the social orphan arrives as a “haunted slate,” whose past is not distant and extinct, but whose identity lingers in the background as a subject of taboo, unspeakable and unspoken. As Hosu Kim has pointed out, the birth mother perpetually haunts the adoptive family, emphasized by the physical differences, and claims that “the present absence of the birth mother is culturally, psychologically, and racially always within an adoptive family” (142). In Barb Lee’s documentary Adopted (2010), the two contrasting narratives of a prospective infant adoptee as a “blank slate” and an adult adoptee’s crisis as a “haunted slate” brings up uncomfortable, divisive topics of how to deal with this other, unknown variable—the birthmother and cultural heritage irrevocably lost. In the film, two personal stories are interwoven, that of a 32-year old Korean adoptee Jennifer Fero in Oregon and that of an Anglo, American couple the Trainers as they embark on their adoption of a one-year-old female infant from China. Juxtaposing their dual perspectives, Fero struggles on-camera to come to terms with years of suppressing her anger and criticism about being adopted while the Trainers also express their misgivings and feelings of 73 excitement about their prospective adoptive daughter; indeed, the contradictory sides of the triad are presented here, but with the noticeable absence of the biological family. The film leaves so many questions, much more so than the redemptive end of Liem’s First Person Plural, about the continuing practices of adoption and the impending conflicts of adjustment that are not limited to the racial and cultural, but also individual and emotional. As the adoptive parents from New Hampshire, the Trainers, voice their excitement over their prospective adoption of Min Xin Pei, an infant abandoned for unknown reasons in China, they are eager to rename her “Roma” and to “pull her away from her temporary situation” by giving her a permanent American home, implied as the better alternative than her present situation. Jacqui’s statement that they will “give her the rest of her life and look beyond the bad time” signals a problematic denial in overlooking the traumatic separation as simply a temporary phase that will be resolved by time. Consciously choosing to adopt a baby of another race after going through a list of potential adopting-countries, the Trainers say they chose China because they “embrace diversity,” their phrasing of colorblindness eerily echoing Liem’s adoptive parents’ that love transcends race. This admission is followed by an intimate, frank dialogue between the adult adoptee Jennifer Fero and her adoptive mother Judy discussing how Jennifer learned to “fake” her emotions to hide over sadness and grief as a child, afraid to show her real emotions to her family, including her overcompensation for her racial difference as a minority. When Jennifer confides in her mother that it felt alienating to grow up different in a predominately white town in Oregon and internalized her racial difference as self-loathing, her mother Judy responds, “I have a hard time with the race thing. I was 74 taught to not see race.” Yet, the underlying layer beneath colorblindness is a deeply- rooted prejudice, whether to relegate certain races as the “good” or exceptional minorities or to uphold an attitude of false inclusionary liberalism. In adoptive, transracial families, race is hypervisible and the racial difference of the adoptee is experienced much differently, of course, than from his/her adoptive family members whose skin color is never addressed or highlighted in the same way. As a real and imagined specter, the birth mother becomes the divisive, uncomfortable topic for the adoptive parents precisely because her status is unequal. As the conversation between the Fero’s progresses to the more emotionally-explosive topic of Jennifer’s Korean birth mother, Jennifer pressures her adoptive mother to think about why her biological mother relinquished her, concluding that she is participating in “dehumanizing her” by refusing to acknowledge her existence. Her mother responds by saying, “I don’t want to be curious about it because I want you all to myself,” a possessive stance that belittles the years of repressed loss that Jennifer is trying to express as significant in her life, and reveals a perceived threat to her own status as the only valid mother. Yet, the erasure of the birthmother from visibility—to not see her, to render her invisible—stems from a psychological motive to protect the adoptive parents from feeling potential guilt. John Trainer remarks how well the one-year-old Min Xin Pei/Roma has acclimated to her new life with them, before introducing her to their extended, Anglo relatives, saying “I think people will be surprised to how well she’s adapted.” Naturalizing her adjustment as quickly successful within a matter of weeks since her arrival, the Trainers overlook the more complicated layers of development in 75 selfhood for an adoptee, a critical divergence in perspectives that Jennifer Fero sums up as “families adopt and adoptees adapt.” The semantics of “adapting” and accommodating signify assimilation, rather than an intercultural blending or a true multicultural exchange. The expectation for adoptees to adapt to their environment without question has unintended effects of producing feelings of an inauthentic self, which leads to an instability of selfhood. Jennifer’s explanation for the phenomenon of adoptee’s accommodation to their families’ desires to be a happy family is that “adoptees are chameleons because they don’t want to be abandoned again.” Liem relays a similar sentiment of feeling disconnected from herself after scanning through family photos and videos of herself in which she always appears to be a smiling, happy child, belying the sadness felt alongside the outwardly expressed joy. She feels that this younger self is a stranger, dissociating herself from the knowledge she has as an adult. Reflecting, “If I can find Cha Jung Hee, perhaps I can locate myself within these frames,” Liem expresses the hope for self-recognition since her own memories have become unreliable to her and her father’s point-of-view footage provides stand-in imagery for her own latent emotions. She says, reflecting on her process of assimilating/adapting as an eight-year-old adoptee, “Over time, I became one of them. I learned to change the way I smiled and carried my body to match theirs…soon, I no longer saw a difference between us and when I looked into the mirror, it was not my face I saw but their bodies, their beauty reflected back at me…I forgot everything about Korea, including my own name.” As her critique shows, the repercussions of not being able to talk about her Korean family are haunting effects that manifest themselves by an inauthentic, or inferior self. Mark Hagland has effectively used the term, “cognitive 76 dissonance” for the gap between his own self-identification as a Korean adoptee and the mistaken identity that others assume based on his outward Korean face and Americanized surname (Outsiders Within 41). Cognitive dissonance can also aptly refer to the racial fabrication of identity that governs American culture, the essentialist assumptions that one’s race determines selfhood, preferences, and to a larger extent, one’s destiny. Adoptees in transracial families grow up living with that dissonance, not as a concept but as a material experience rife with contradictions and false idealizations. In her essay, “Embodying Chinese Culture,” adoptive mother and anthropologist Toby Alice Volkman makes a compelling claim that adoptive parents’ investments in homeland trips to China and Chinese culture with their Chinese adoptees are displaced desires to know their childrens’ origins and birthmothers, which usually are inaccessible and unknowable. Other critics have made similar claims that Korean adoptees fetishize their desires for biological roots by cultural tours, conflating their searches for the birthmother with the lost but more accessible motherland of Korea. In both cases, I see the curiosity to know more about the “other” culture that is separated from one’s intimate, insider knowledge as a natural instinct to imagine collapsing that distance into the familiar. “Celebratory multiculturalism” by way of only highlighting superficial aspects of another culture, of course, through glamorizing or exoticizing, is the risk that adoptive parents make trying to “melt the pot” to be inclusive. Volkman’s argument is that some adoptive parents go to deeper levels of cultural engagement by activism and charitable involvement in the adoption agencies in China, actions which she sees as altruistic. 77 However, as the viewer is shown the journey of Min Xin Pei as she becomes “Roma” being handed over by the tearful Chinese fostermother to the Trainer couple at the orphanage in China, one wonders at the latent absences and lack of explanations that her adoption conceals, particularly the reasons for her relinquishment. Although the Trainers assure the documentary interviewer that they will provide their daughter with a more liberal side because they have a few Asian-American friends as well as two other Chinese adoptees in their extended family, at the same time they admit to living in a state that is over 90% white, a suburban town in Nashua, New Hampshire and do not address their daughter’s isolation as a racial minority. Additionally, Jacqui Trainer only superficially addresses the potential problems that her daughter will face, admitting there is a possibility she will have “lasting scars” but veers to the more positivist, reductive side, concluding that she believes that Min Xin Pei/Roma did “most of her grieving in China.” Juxtaposed with Jennifer’s disclosures of feeling racially isolated and unable to express her ambivalent feelings about her adoption, the story of the Trainers presents a renewed crisis, and represents a larger, ongoing crisis continued by the exponential rates of overseas adoption by parents unaware of these deeply-entangled conflicts that unfold over time and not just in a short spurt of difficulty in a child’s adjustment. In reiteration of the themes that these documentaries raise, I want to emphasize the powerful contradictions that reside in the longings, regrets, accommodations, and desires for belonging that contour many adoptee narratives—they are marked by profound ambivalences and dislocations. As subjects who are haunted by the specters of their biological families who are not extinct but may remain inaccessible, adoptees should be given the space to acknowledge them as valid, and essential to their self- 78 actualization and not repress them to their pasts or as obscure, shameful memories. Adoption resists easy closure and containment, because these relationships in the triad unfold as ongoing dialogues that disrupt racial coherence, nuclear kinship, and intimacy. In Fugitive Visions, Jane Jeong Trenka writes about the alternative fantasy to a fairytale, in which the orphan is not abandoned as in Hansel and Gretel, but the girl grows up in her family, as an ordinary girl, who lives her life as an average Korean woman who never desires more than what she has. Trenka momentarily imagines what life would have been like if she had not been adopted—a fantasy that is a fairytale for its impossibility but has potential for its emotive power. It is the desire for self-actualization or realization that is difficult to name and locate, instead, that Trenka is trying to explore alternatively by her return to fairytale mythology to describe the desire to belong. She writes of the woman, the orphan and tiger, who are driven by an insatiable hunger, “They eat and they eat, they eat everything they can, even eat paper covered with words, the ocean and its ships, the yellow dust of the sky and the red clay of the earth, yet nothing can cure their insatiable, ferocious hunger (119). That hunger is the desire to contain what can’t be contained, to understand what can’t be understood, to feel complete when completion and fulfillment is illusionary. Adoptees, in her articulation of a primal similarity, represent “fugitives of ourselves or of our pasts, or memories we can’t remember, looking for something we can’t name, not necessarily our mothers” (emphasis mine 9). What is interesting in her assertion is the disqualification of the desire in the particular and concrete; instead, that desire eludes being named and pinpointed. In Trenka’s blurring together of stock fairytale characters, a wife, an orphan, and tiger are rich metaphors for the instability of identity, and indeed, the possibility 79 embedded within those characters for imagining more for their roles. The woman who gives birth to the orphan who may not be able to feed her and raise her, may also be an orphan herself—but she could also be a tiger, a tiger who is powerful and filled with the knowledge of the past, with the knowledge to change the fairytale of the past into different myths beyond the stereotypes of “orphans,” “stepmothers,” and birthmothers. She can be all of these things, not just limited to her biology as a woman, or her status as a citizen or a dual citizen or as an immigrant, but as a figure who represents both the silenced traumas of the past and the future of change and social justice. In conclusion, my argument has focused on the ways in which adoption narratives represented in documentaries—produced by adoptees themselves and shaped by commentary by critics—raise a critical ambivalence about intimacy, racial identity, and belonging in adoptive and birth families. As more current films and scholarship by adoptees have begun to explore the cultural and historical context for Korean adoption as embedded in colonialism and neocolonialism, the issues of biological lineage and “authentic” selfhood become parallel concerns. As I raised in the beginning of this chapter, it is imperative to criticize not only the modes of production involved in international, transracial adoption but also the modes of cultural production of adoption. 80 CHAPTER FOUR: THE DIVISION OF LOSS: TOWARDS A POETICS Near dusk, waiting outside a friend’s acupuncture clinic in Echo Park, I watch a middle-aged woman in a flowing, summer dress pacing about, lighting up a cigarette and jangling beads between her palms. She has smooth, pale skin and pointy, yellowish teeth, and must be close to the age of my mother. An elderly couple and nurse settle down on the bamboo mats, several feet away from the make-shift altar surrounded by burning incense, bags of rice, bottles of soju, platters of dried-up fish with dull, copper scales. As the rite begins, the woman—her name is Sun in English—begins chanting in a frenzy, bowing, and saying other things in a stream of low, guttural Korean. When she finishes and the guests have discreetly bowed and tucked twenty-dollar bills into the altarpiece, Sun asks the guests for their slips of paper that identify them by their surnames and dates of birth. She’s going to offer readings of our pasts and futures, using an ancient Shamanist tradition of praying to mountain-gods and listening to otherworld spirits. When it is my turn, one of the nurses who is bilingual, explains to Sun the reason for two birthdates and two different names on my slip of paper— I am an ibyangin, an adopted person. Sun peers at me, curiously, leaning forward and then without a beat, presents her visions of my past and future, rattling off a checklist that the nurse rapidly translates for me in a similar, smoker’s hoarse English. One, she says in Korean, your 81 eyes carry bad luck. Two, your family gave you up, after bad luck, and your adopted family had to give you up, too. You ran away from home, didn’t you? Three, she predicts, looking into the sprawling distance of blue-black cityscape beyond my head, you will see your mother in two or three years. Shaded by the oncoming nightfall, her face assumes a ghostly glow, her native Korean drowning over my ears in a buzz of familiar and unfamiliar sounds. Off and on, throughout that evening—as throughout my life—my mind returns to the glowing of hope, like a refracting lantern that needs constantly to be re-lit, because the wind keeps blowing through the holes. My parents are dead, I would often tell myself as a child and teenager, but whenever the occaison for making a wish occurred, I wish I knew them. Driving back home that night, I feel an odd sensation spreading like a sticky warmth from the bottom of my stomach, filling my lungs and throat with a strange air. I agree, in this lapse of the night, to suspend my critical disbelief. * In the film, Air Doll, a modern fairytale about alienation and love in Tokyo, an inflatable doll named Kozumi suddenly comes to life, stumbling around like an awkward puppet as she slowly learns to become human. Following people around, and learning to desire what they desire, she assumes a self, step by step, through mimicry. In one of the final scenes, she imagines a roomful of people singing happy birthday to her, symbolic because she doesn’t know her origins, nor her actual birthdate. In a series of poems I wrote that revolve around this concept of being trapped in-between being a subject and an 82 other, I saw a metaphor for an adoptee, suspended between cultures. I also saw the thematic possibility of using dolls as a metaphor for a darker condition reserved for women who have been objectified as war brides, comfort women recruited for the military, and camptown prostitutes for the military and tourists. Far from being victims without voices, their legacy and outcry is chronicled by survivors, feminist scholars and artists, their stories haunting the living with distinct voices that outweigh their bodies. In my poems, I also try to write about desire, the lighter, intangible qualities of love and living that are the underside of the shadow. In contrast to the spiritual desolation and emptiness of modernity, language fills its place. Like the nymph Echo in Greek mythology, Kozumi embodies desire not only by her namesake but also seeks to find a mirror in others around her. She finds this, in some measure, reflected in the friendship with a wise man she meets by chance, or illuminated in the colorful glass bottles and shiny objects scavenged from the streets. She finds it in the brief encounter of falling in love. In life as in poetry, the pleasure is in finding the unexpected detail, the slant of light. In his awards acceptance speech, “The Meridian,” the poet Paul Celan gestures towards an aesthetics of poetry as enigmatic and open-ended, associating it with the image and literary trope of the meridian, “I find something that binds and that leads to encounter, like a poem. I find something—like language—immaterial yet earthly, terrestrial, something circular, returning upon itself by way of both poles and thereby—happily—even crossing the tropics (and tropes): I find … a meridian” (413). He defines art, in a circular way, as a “certain direction” or path, a “homecoming” and writing as a paradoxical search for oneself that requires a distance from oneself, an 83 estrangement from self and by implication, one’s origins. In other words, detachment from self necessarily leads to an imaginative world, a limitless space not circumscribed by biography or circumstance. As the only survivor of the Holocaust in his family, Celan would turn, again and again, to the escape of writing, leaving behind the traces of his unresolved grief. Before leaping into the River Seine, he left behind a small trace of his despair, the partially underlined phrase in Holderlin’s biography that begins, “Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart” (Felstiner, Poet Survivor, Jew). Celan’s poetry cannot be read as a text to be decoded or demystified, but exists rightfully in its own meridian or sphere, that resists interpretation that is totalizing. His repetition of the use of “uncanny” to describe poetry seems to be an unintended reflection of his own distinct style that refuses to be directly autobiographical lyric and instead, is opaque, circular, half-lit. In critic Georgio Agamben’s chapter on “Witness” concerning survivors of the Holocaust, he quotes from critics Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s views of an “aesthetic possibility” of art to generate meaning through a similar concept of the untranslatability of one’s own experience through the pathos of song which goes beyond language: “What makes the power of the testimony in the film and what constitutes in general the impact of the film is not the words but the equivocal, puzzling relation between words and voice, the interaction, that is, between words, voice, rhythm, melody, images, writing, and silence. Each testimony speaks to us beyond its words, beyond its melody, like the unique performance of a singing” (36, emphasis mine). As different genres, film and poetry might be best described in terms of containing a surplus of meaning, or unexpected effect, that exceeds the medium itself. 84 To me, it is precisely the unknowable within himself that Celan was fueled to write, and not an intention to write in order to become legible or understood, perhaps, making his work so difficult to comprehend. He was not trying to be obscure simply to be “avant-garde,” but his obscurity of expression arises out of his own situation as a survivor who experienced the insufferable, making his poetry so “dark and maimed” as Primo Levi has called it. For me, his poem “Invariable Key” or “With a Variable Key” from his book Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold) serves as an exemplar for his perspective that language cannot always convey or signify the secret of experience, of what is unsaid and unsayable. It is, in Celan’s words, “the snow of the unsaid” that preserves the lyric. * A leitmotif in W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz is a recurrence of images of flight and returning home—birds on migratory paths guided back by the electric currents of magnetic fields, and moths emerging towards light from crevices. Animals, like their human counterparts, are driven by instinct to return to their origins. The main character Austerlitz, the surviving son of parents killed in the Holocaust, returns to Prague to trace any remnants of his parents’ lives, becoming transfixed by old film reel images of his actress mother, who played the part of Olympia in a rendition of the Tales of Hoffmann opera. An uncanny symbol in literature who became central to Freud’s concept of the return of repressed origins, Olympia haunts Austerlitz as a phantasm, an unreal figure of a mother who can never be recovered. What is striking to me in the novel, as well as in 85 pyschoanalysis, is the continual circling around the figure of the mother as that site of longing, nostalgia, loss. And conversely, she just as quickly becomes that dreaded, feared, loathed object that is the flip side of all that is good and nurturing. It is why, in some ways, it was unsurprising and almost predictable when the fortune-reader Sun told me she could only visualize my mother’s face, not my father’s. It was similar to when I would scan anonymous Korean faces in the subway or at restaurants during my first trip back to Korea, scanning only the faces of women who might pass as my mother. She is the paradox and the impossible. “I was always especially entranced, Austerlitz says, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long” (77 emphasis mine). I can identify with Austerlitz’s desire to navigate the past for clues to his origins, to want real images of the past to not only surface out of the blankness, but to emerge with specific faces and expressions that resemble his own. Although I am an outsider without access to hearing my grandparents’ experiences of the Korean war, nor my parents’ living during the political unrest during the democratization era, that legacy still feels real to me, part of my belonging to a nation from which I was separated as a young child. To understand oneself is to recognize that one is enmeshed in a larger history of individuals that extends beyond the family, into the political realm. At a cross-cultural panel for Korean/American writers, one of the Korean authors asked me why I focus on historical Korean subjects instead of more “American” themes in my work. I responded, “because I’m adopted from Korea,” and not so 86 eloquently tried to explain that my reading knowledge of a cultural history fills in for the unknowability of my personal history and lack of a family tree. It is why, is some part, Sebald has written so compellingly about the destruction of memory related to history. In his essays collected in A Natural History of Destruction, he writes about a sense of responsibility and ethics he feels he has inherited as a writer, refusing to be part of a second generation of post-WWII cultural amnesia: “Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me, and one from which I shall never entirely emerge” (71). The national division of Korea in 1948, and post-war military fortification that split the country into two parts, has casts its shadow in many visible, melancholic ways of other separations: families who have been prevented from reuniting because of North Korea’s isolationist policy is not unsimilar to the tragic separations of biological parents and their children, now adults, who were relinquished for adoptions abroad, scattered across the globe. Instead of a militarized border, there abound invisible cultural barriers, stigmas, and a failure of reliable family records. For most adult adoptees, the paths to trace their original surnames and family registry are obfuscated because of falsified, secretive or missing documentation at adoption agencies. The fewer than one percent of reunited families, sensationalized and broadcast popularly by Korean television shows, gives a false impression that finding one’s blood relatives is common, and automatically leads to happiness. To the contrary, finding one’s family is akin to releasing a Pandora’s box of confusion, cultural misunderstandings, disappointment and disillusionment. In 87 short, the search for identity is more like a fantasy to find completeness, love, and ideal happiness along one distinct path, but that target is always moving, circuitously, away. On that same trip to Korea, as I witnessed other adoptees joined with their biological relatives and fathers for the first time, surprisingly none of them were mothers. As I scanned their emotionally-wrought faces, noting the resemblances of facial features among these family members, my jaw felt numb, a sensation that spread throughout the rest of my body. My voice disappeared into a mute box below the table, spiraling out of view as though every surface of my skin had become invisible. Although finding one’s family can be its own catch-22, not finding and never knowing one’s past is a different kind of in-between. That in-between is akin to a suspension, and a stasis. It is never openly mourning for someone that you can’t remember, and never grieving for a family you left behind. And it is never becoming a person in that life, in that culture, speaking in a language that is foreign, because that person is fictional. The fiction of being singular. * Sun’s apartment, on the upper floor of a busy street of high-rise apartments in Koreatown, is half-work space, a giant Buddha figurine on her mantelpiece, in front of a shiny, red wall that separates the living-room from the bedroom. A pot of stinky, red stew has been boiling away on a small stove when we enter and kick our shoes off, the small room filling with the smell of garlic. The purpose of this second visit is to get an 88 even closer reading, this time with an astrology chart and coins, as if there’s a precise science behind it. Yet, it’s not so much what she has to say, necessarily, but what Sun stands in for as belief, or self- deception, or possibility. What can she tell me about my other, early life in Korea that hasn’t already been made up out of thin air? A day later, a skepticism has begun to set in. “I can’t see your real father,” she says, “but I can see your mother’s face, clearly, and two siblings. One of each, a brother and sister.” Next, to my shock, she tells me that it would help my chances of finding a future husband quicker if I do a little minor plastic surgery. Touching her nose and ears, she indicates that I should alter the bridge of my nose, as well as get silicone injections to make my earlobes plump like the golden Buddha’s grinning down from the wall. “Your face carries bad luck,” she says, and I’m half-prepared to see her whip out a business card with the name of a cosmetic surgeon in K-town. In the end, I will stare back at her face, incredulous that she’s suggested such a superficial antidote of surgery to improve my life, but also so typically Korean and American. Since I’ve lived in L.A., almost every Korean-American who could be my mother’s age has suggested that I change my face, unnaturally. Sun could even resemble the face of the missing Korean mother she visualizes, the one who is not my mother, but the one she has conjured up to make me feel assured. Her name is probably not even Sun, I realize with irony. 89 It’s a different kind of loss, to never know. And even if those origins are obscured, the drive to search still remains like a lantern sending a fractured pattern of shapes against the wall at dusk, half-shadows, half-light. 90 REFERENCES Primary sources: Hong, Cathy Park. Dance Dance Revolution: Poems. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. Lee, Barb. Adopted. Produced by Barb Lee and Alston Gardner and directed by Barb Lee. Point Made Films, 2009. Lee, Chang-rae. The Surrendered. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010. ________. Aloft. New York: Riverhead Books, 2004. ________. A Gesture Life. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999. Liem, Deann Borshay. In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee. Written and directed by Liem; produced by Liem & Charlotte Lagarde. USA: Mu Films, 2010. ________. First Person Plural. Written, produced and directed by Liem; edited and co- written by Vivien Hillgrove. San Francisco: National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA) Distribution, 2000. Sebald, W.G. On the Natural History of Destruction. New York: The Modern Library 2004. ________. Austerlitz. New York: Anthea Bell, 2001. Trenka, Jane Jeong. Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea. Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2009. Secondary sources: Abraham, Nicholas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Vol. 1: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. 91 Agamben, Giorgio. 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New York: An East Gate Book, 2000. Shin, Gi-Wook and Michael Robinson, eds. Colonial Modernity in Korea. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Asia Center and Harvard Univ Press, 1999. Shin, Gi-wook and Kyung Moon Hwang, eds. Contentious Kwangju: The May 18 Uprising in Korea’s Past and Present. UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Volkman, ‘Embodying Chinese Culture.” Cultures of Transnational Adoption. Ed. Toby Alice Volkman. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 95 SECTION II. POETRY COLLECTION: MAGNETIC REFRAIN TABLE OF CONTENTS I. The Unfilial Daughter 98 The Filial Son 99 The Unmarried Woman 100 The Lucky Bastard 101 Family History 102 II. Dear Other 104 Flight From Seoul 105 Famine 106 Dear Other 107 Third-Person Plural 108 The Defector 109 The Other Mother 110 The Tourist 111 Family Romance 112 Oedipal 113 DMZ 114 III. Rehearsing Loss 116 96 Venus and the Martian 118 Dear Other 120 Air Doll 121 Candy Doll 122 Love Doll 123 Rivalry 124 Comfort Girl 125 Chigop Yosong: Fallen Woman 126 War Bride 127 Archival 128 Singular 129 IV. Ars Poetica 131 After Love, Dream Sequences 132 Confessional Proverbs 133 The Twin She Never Knew 134 Echo 135 Cloudspin 136 Eurydice’s Refrain 137 Dear Other 138 V. Vaguely Asian 140 Notes 144 97 I. 98 THE UNFILIAL DAUGHTER She resembled an animal, but he couldn’t tell which. I’m a fox, she said. Of course, he said, in disbelief. Tell me what you can do, he challenged, but she never remembered. At night, she became someone else, and by dawn, returned hungry. And so he began to watch her, following her shadow until he became full. In the darkness, he saw her wild tail growing longer, tearing up the lake into waves, and felt envious that she could swim away while he would drown. I need you to catch that yellow fish, he ordered her. She needs to eat that poisononous tail in order to be cured. She had dreamt of them before, her family stirring inside a soup of feathers and fur before she devoured them completely. Aren’t you hungry, too? her mother would say, and she would always answer, yes, tearfully, but I’d rather not remember. 99 THE FILIAL SON It wasn’t hard pretending to be human. He had several disguises: veterinarian, teacher, father. It was harder to be a perfect son, taking care of his mother who kept pushing him to capture another animal for her to devour, to cure her of a terminal mental illness. At night, he became a tiger, prowling the city for something domestic to chase—water snakes and alligators were too predictable as prey, his mother would complain, pushing him farther into high-rise apartments where the sleeping curled in caves, like pets around pets, poodles and dozing cats that he carried back in nets. I need you to bring just one more, his mother would say, and I’ll be cured, at last. 100 THE UNMARRIED WOMAN looked out across the hooks of waves and watched the women diving from fishing-boats, tethered to ropes releasing them into the sea. A clairvoyant once warned her she would never be happy if she married. You’ll only become lonely. Outside her door, men staggered by drunk from the bar while she photographed them, pissing trails of yellow water. In a folktale, she would be a flattened grave, the virgin buried in gossip—gold unspent, spinster old. Yet every night, she knew that flesh was just flesh, a thick shell parted by the slicing of muscle burrowed away, and brined in a dream of being opened and eaten. No more fish and hooks to weave together, the sea whispered. 101 THE LUCKY BASTARD did not know that he should feel grateful for having grown up in a family not bled by the old country called poverty. Luckily, he never had to eat the same meal everyday, a rice porridge his sister watered with sweat and tears, while his parents fought and his brothers ran away, hungry and torn. He lived here, not over there. Since he was taught that real love often went unspoken, he had always fallen in love without listening. And after his father disappeared, and all the children called him a bastard, suddenly he grew a third ear. You should be lucky you remember having a father, they said but he never felt that glad. He only felt himself multiplying instead of living— once long ago, he never used to know a family called guilty. 102 FAMILY HISTORY They took turns becoming invisible. Their mother broke the scale, blaming the weight of grief, and kept eating. Their brothers disappeared in a fog of guerillas and only one returned home, at once forgetting everyone’s names. It was the middle of a civil war no one could remember. Older soldiers warned them that nothing was new and that everything was recurring like old wives’ tales. Ghosts returned as animals to teach them how to be inhuman. Women were pots of gold or salt, traded between old and young men who still believed rainbows came only after rain. They took turns telling stories since the rest of their family was silent, and sometimes a relative abruptly appeared like fog to tell them what they’d dreamt, what still haunted them though they were no longer living ordinary lives. They longed for extraordinary revenge, happiness with sorrow, love that could be measured by a scale, or by color— they longed to become visible, again. 103 II. 104 DEAR OTHER, You never signed your name, either. Like me, you ran away from home to escape from being noticed. Like you, I also wanted to know the inside of love, the cloudiness of no, yes, yes, no when a boy thumbs your soft body until you forget why he came. Life has never been that beautiful, has it? Doors open but no one seems to be at home, air stirring with vacant sunlight, as you wait by the window for his visit that never comes. I, too, waited for years in solitude for a man who never once translated me. Instead, I write to you. 105 FLIGHT FROM SEOUL June 1979 Each time, I forgive myself for weeping when I read your letter and invent you in June as a tall, pale foreigner burning in the sun as you step from the train on your way to school, crossing the market of steaming vendor’s carts of silk worms and rice cakes, pausing by the monk outside the temple who trails his long, silver sleeves along the ground, the metal cloud gong thrumming through you shrill as sunlight. But what is stronger than memory? A two-year-old girl with slanting eyes and shorn scalp, I picked at the scrap of paper pinned to my shirt, in the photograph. In the airplane, I kindled the air with cries of "O-ma, o-ma, o-ma!" The heat was enough to make anyone sob, you wrote. You were the missionary who left me an oblation in an aging, yellow letter. What I want to know, I ask from years ahead— What do I do with all of this? 106 FAMINE Above the cracked billboard that reads, We are happy and have nothing to envy, the sun starves the weeds we scavenge in the lots of rusting factories. Like currents of smoke, we weave through the wrists of trees, laughing and blasting apart in wind. Knees scraped, we dig for nuts and roots and drive them from soil we’ll boil in our urn until soft enough to eat. We’ll salt these things with stubborn prayers: Let only one or two of us nod off into the fire, or let us blaze in woods of snowy bark, instead of sit in the clement dark, no relief. 107 DEAR OTHER, Many times, I convinced myself you were dead by accident. Carried away by a drunk driver, or cancer— completely faultless. Not the negligent taxi driver sweeping through traffic, staring at every pretty teenager, nor the foreign soldier who couldn’t forgive his lover. You were less simple, yet so ready to be exchanged. I used to imagine standing by your grave, a souvenir of engraved stone with a name underwater. 108 THIRD-PERSON A boy hurries to the grocery for fresh bread but finds it already closed. Returning home, his father spanks him. The moral of the story is: It doesn’t matter if you hurry. In communism, things just close. A teenager takes pills, reason unknown, and falls into a deep sleep in the driver’s seat of her car, next to a worn copy of The Bell Jar. She wakes to medics shouting at her, demanding her name. The moral of the story is: Dying is not an art. An old man in a communist country boards the government bus after seeing his brothers and sisters for the first time in fifty years. Even the translator is confused, hired for a different event, and haltingly curses the capitalists like a ventriloquist. Afterwards, it begins raining outside so heavily that when the man reaches up to wave from his bus seat, he fails to see his distant relatives clustered on the street, weeping as the camera just halts. The moral of the story is: You understand only so much. 109 THE DEFECTOR After the only tractor in the village died and the last weeds were gathered for dinner, she fled across the frozen Tumen river across the border into yet another border. A lonely widower in a crushed paper tent waited for her, creasing her picture between the stubs of his fingers, this beautiful, fugitive bride. They will never leave you, these girls will die over and over, just to be with you, the drunken men confessed, their newly-arrived wives kept shackled to wooden doors of huts or kept outside by the town’s bar, mending slacks torn from the fields. How they love Chinese men. Just wait and see what she’ll do for you. The widow had been in mourning for so long, he knew the strength of a muted lake. An excruciating lapse in which a skinned mule had talked him out of leaping. The bride would turn her inscrutable face slightly towards him and listen to the private water roiling between them. One night, she crept out through a hole in the paper, leaving him crippled in the darkness. Against her back, beneath the ragged shawl, her secret baby was sleeping. 110 THE OTHER MOTHER They said to write, I gave you up, out of love. Next door, the washer thumped in heat, and the other girls were embroidering in the kitchen, god god god. Your father was miles away, in a town fishing for what would not bite, even though his lure was patient silver, and every night he wrote me letters that he never sent. He hung the long, wrinkled squid along the clothes- line to dry in the sun, their inverted, black eyes and tongue- less mouths. They dripped tears of darkest ink that trickled down my legs at night, and turned to sweat as I woke to you crying in my belly, my cave. To know was to name what I could not have, so I refused. I lay in the white cloth and did not pray, but cursed your father’s name, the one who left without heart. If you are reading this now, it is impossible to hear through a window lightning strokes to brush against your cheek, my heat. 111 THE TOURIST Nothing was written down, only burned. She returned to the country of origin like a missing person, trying to find the posters of the grainy face of a child that resembled the other grainy faces of her family, lost in the crowd. She traveled to the town where she’d been found, wandering aimlessly until the police brought her to an orphanage. She played with many toys at once, disinterested in the other children, according to the caretaker’s report. Her mother says she fell in love with her photograph, the one that shows her in black-and-white staring into the camera, her head shaved, her lip curled into a scowl. She hates this picture of the miniature foreigner, the placard with name and date of birth made up out of thin air. She burns because the climate has changed from hot to drastically cold. At night, her mother sings her to sleep, into a dream of clutching a doll with a rubber smile, a doll whose arms melt around her arms, and weakly calls her mama. 112 FAMILY ROMANCE I. Each happy family is alike: a spring bulb firmly averted underground like a fossil. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way: beyond seasonal. II. The son said, I dislike her, too. The daughter said, her? He pointed to the field painted by their mother. Somehow, he was right about the color. Stubborn red they could rub in their eyes to stop the sting. She’s too surreal, no one is that tonal or fertile. The girl disagreed. Of course she’s oil and water. That’s how she made me. III. She asked him once, were you in love? He said, yes, I was lonely. In the margins, her father once scrawled emotions are better than reason beside the romantic lyric “kisses are a better fate than wisdom.” You would have fallen in love just then, too. IV. Of course, they betrayed each other. The psychoanalyst said we will never recover from feeling too wet. Throw them down from the window, watch them melt into drift. It’s normal to recycle sleet in winter. V. I, too, wanted the dark ending: lightning and palm tree shaking, violently, but we all simply separated as the sun waned to a pale aspirin in the sky. 113 OEDIPAL I am found, invariably, among the chicken eggs, and go in search of missing water. Terrible things happen along the way: self- pity, self-destruction, and finally, revelation when I reach the end of the dark woods, blinded. Yet, I was being misleading because I never left the nest. I left the country in devastating, summer heat so ripe the locusts dropped off, dying. When I return years later, they’re clacking like toy drums, dulled by the monsoon rain. I wander through the sanctuary of the abandoned children and old cripples whose parents left them for orphaned. They form a choir, in black-and-white garments, singing off-key, though charmingly swaying together, singing Arirang. I could have been one of them, or one of the tired girls I saw fidgeting her slippered feet under the table, rubbing her alien, swelling belly as the translator said these girls are giving them up out of love, for strangers in a foreign country. 114 DMZ Joint Security Area, Korea Warning: Travel lightly, take no pictures until the tour guide signals by firing with one finger, from the rear of the bus. Repeat tourism: Buy the barbed wire on sale in chipped, cardboard boxes but don’t buy the camoflauged army cap on the skull of the mannequin child dressed as a Pyongyang soldier by the entrance to the gift shop, the last stop after the plain, white sign that says: The Bridge of No Return. Purchase your binoculars so that you can hunt for spies buried in wavering, green meadows, explosives secretly ticking beneath the grass, but try not to feign disappointment when it’s merely clouds flowering above a motionless plateau, and nothing occurs. Subject: Separation. Reason: Family eviction. Suspect: Civil War. Parallel: The train that doesn’t run, tracks backfiring in the sun. 115 III. 116 REHEARSING LOSS Act I: Hansel Naughty boy, you would corner your heart until he relented with a wicked smile, you can have this one for now, you tell him but not forever. And your heart never grows, his voice erupting in tiny sounds that never form into words. And each time you fell in love, he watched with envy, peering from the cage. This one I mean to keep, you would always say, but then let another one go. And when you feed him, crumb after crumb, his voice becomes plump with want. What happens in the end when no one wants you? How will it end? 117 Act II: Gretel It never ends. Only repeats. You ask again, what doors will our keys open? Empty window, after window, you stay while the rain lifts birds murmuring tropical sunlight through a cage: heat is not enough to keep him inside you. It always begins the same way— with a magnetic refrain Our bodies felt like one, fused together, but was that only love? Is it enough, just to love? 118 VENUS AND THE MARTIAN 1. What do you want to be when you grow up? adults always asked Venus when she was young. She always replied earnestly, I want to be a woman. If he was there, her little brother the Martian would chime in, Me, too! toting his boy doll around wherever they went. I want the same as you! he would say, and grew his hair long and wavy at the shoulders like her’s. No, you can’t be me. I’m me. She would try to explain but he couldn’t stop following her around, a shadow nagging with a squeaky, higher voice, repeating I’m me, I’m me! and erupting into giggling. Her parents wouldn’t listen to her protests. Oh, honey, he just admires you so much! He’ll grow out of it. Except, it grew worse until she was so used to being mimicked that only other people noticed it as odd. She caught him impersonating her so uncannily, she was both impressed and thoroughly disturbed. You’ve gone too far! She shouted to him. No, YOU’VE gone too far, he said, pointing his finger at her. Can’t you say anything original?, he shouted. Can’t YOU say anything original?, he repeated, shouting. This isn’t a game!, she wailed. What isn’t a game?, he asked, looking bewildered. Just leave me alone! she finally said, backing out of her room. YOU leave me alone!, he said, and began to laugh, very inappropriately. 2. Is it always going to be this hard? the little Martian asked the guard who was swirling a key chain around his finger, and whistling as he paced. Oh, no, the guard smiled, it only gets worse! The boy laughed because it felt appropriate, but his stomach began to stir, uneasily. How did you make it outside? he asked. The guard leaned in towards the iron bars of the cage and whispered, I told a lie every day. And sometimes people died. But if it wasn’t me, someone else would’ve told. The ugliest ones are the ones who survive. He stood up straight again and laughed so cunningly, the other prisoners trembled. The boy looked inside the huge mouth of the guard that was filled with glinting, gold teeth and in one, a diamond. Are you happy with yourself? the Martian asked, even though it 119 felt inappropriate, and he shivered. The guard didn’t show surprise, but only narrowed his eyes. 3. Am I always going to be one? Venus asked the mirror. I’m afraid so, the witch inside the mirror replied, but you’ll still marry the prince, and he has eyes only for himself. Sorry, kiddo. Venus already knew what she would have to do to escape. The little prince was still a frog huddled in the bottom of a jar in her room. She overturned the jar so he plopped onto her pink rug. He was so plump his legs could barely stir when she nudged him with her toe. His eyes didn’t even look up at her which made her shout, Even you! Even you don’t see me! She was about to cry, but something made her stop, and scoop him up in the cup of her hand. What’s wrong? she asked. Did I hurt you? He didn’t reply, but he croaked in an ugly, loud way, and she could see it wasn’t his fault that he was trapped inside that body. He belonged in a pond, she thought as she swiftly hurled him, in one swoop, against the wall beside her mirror, which had already started to cackle. She stood in front of the mirror- witch, I think you’re wrong. I’m always going to be two. 4. Are you always going to go away? the grown-up Martian asked the teacher, who had seduced him quite quickly, despite the many obstacles. Of course, but you’ll be more than ready to go beyond me, she replied, reassuringly. He had already begun to teach her how to be slightly rough, and when to be aloof. She taught him how to leave, gently, with a kiss and a fingerprint like powder, and when to linger longer. It was inevitable that they would catch each other, over and over, in spare moments staring at each other, furtively. Who would you love, if not me? she asked, defiantly. The Martian remembered once, a long time ago, someone else plaintively asking that question, but this time he lacked an answer. 120 DEAR OTHER, I hate you, as I hate myself for being private. No more locked jaw, told key. Phrases cannot begin to wear us away. Conjoined at the hip, we could only pretend to be aligned but really were so frantic to separate. You tried to saw us in half, after I’d fallen asleep, then I’d woken to what you’d done, brilliantly. You’d bandaged the sopping blood at the split bone and medicated me, but still, I was pleased by our most recent attempt at sovereignty. I could not complain for lack of dishonesty. It has never been that easy, keeping you secret, when you keep dividing me. 121 AIR DOLL You found a mouth, before you found a heart you weren’t supposed to have. Kirei, you spoke to the open window, touching the rain, beautiful. He asks, “Were you lonely without me?” returning from work, impatiently flicking the buttons off your costume, a french-maid’s frills, his fingers ironing over your skin, plastic bending but not giving. He slides himself in-between, your legs opening effortlessly, like wings. I need to find a heart as lopsided as mine, you say when he’s gone, and wander around the city, awed by everything. You enter a rental shop that says, Carnival. Inside, you long to swing from a trapeeze, to finally fly from ceiling to ceiling, and you try— but at the top of the ladder, you catch your wrist and pop!, your air is pouring out from this cut, your body falling, and collapsing into a heap. And then he comes, kneeling beside you, and presses his lips to your plastic belly, exhaling, filling your ache again, and again with his salty, hot air. He smiles at you, finally seeing you and asks you, what does it feel like, to be empty before you are full? 122 CANDY DOLL You knew before you knew, this has no words. You felt your legs lifting into wings but without feathers, falling open as his breath filled you with a white-hot flame. This is what it means to be named. And afterwards, you could mark the beginning. A shadow grew shimmery in his place. And you found that there were others like you, except many had never been loved or adored, but returned with eyes missing, limbs crushed, human- like hair torn away. Yanggalbo. Whore. This is where you return, to see where you came from. A variation of the same cotton candy, inflatable breasts and thighs, lips drawn sweet, each one without a name, without a birthday, factory-born. But you know this, even if you don’t remember: once, there was a woman who suffered to release you into the world, who gave you a mouth, and a button, and sometimes, a variable heart that you didn’t know how to return. 123 LOVE DOLL What does it feel like to be full before you are empty?, you ask every stranger. You felt a quiver passing through his chest-cage, an arrow lopsiding his heart, and you say, is this how it feels to want to be the same? Kneeling before him, you rehearse, I’ll do anything for you, spreading your palms open like wings. He echoes you, I’ll do everything to you, And then, there was shadow. He smiled, as you watched the hook of his fingers ripping away the button to your belly, the air pouring, as if from a cut wrist, the nets of carnival lights circling, and encircling. Is this how it feels to have your heart? But he laughs, filling you with his cold, salty air, and your flesh feels like a cloud, an unheard volume of color. I want us to be the same, you raise scissor blades above his belly, straddling him, and slice open the button. We were never the same. 124 RIVALRY “Who gets the whip and who gets the hoop of flames?” -Richard Siken 1. My twin brother says, I’m going to kill you, now. Are you ready? He holds me underwater, under the chlorine-green while I count backwards, ready for lift-off. The water sprained my little spine. Later, I shot vanilla milkshake out my nose, laughing. He called me little Houdini. 2. Above us, the hotel mirrors yawned great white teeth and the ceiling fan spun. It was better than the zoo, this vacation to the coast. We made puppets shake on the wall, their silhouettes of jagged birds and jaguars. 3. Now, I’m going to make you disappear. Voilá! I climb into the box with the rusty hinge and his breath blows over me, a tropical scarf. The lid of darkness creaks closed, a cobweb roof. Say a fake prayer. I do, but so he can’t hear. 4. I wake, confused. He’s gone, and the box has dissolved into crumbs. In a small span of time, my body has grown plump and wobbly. Feathered, not silk. If only I could, I would laugh, inconsolably. 125 COMFORT GIRL That first time, you were too afraid to cry out loud. When you were young, papa reassured you, in a bad dream, just lift your arms and fly away. And sometimes, you escaped, soaring through tree-tops, like Icarus or a bird until gravity returned, hardening your arms to lead. And there you are, with arms pinned, trying not to wake up, looking up at the ceiling of a make-shift tent, searching the rain-stains for a pattern as his hands shake and tug away your buttons, exposing the sandy, unwashed skin beneath, the field of your chest still smooth and flat. For twelve years, you have never touched yourself there. He flushes, averts his eyes like your brother, except he is a soldier, and you watch the bones of your legs splitting apart from the hips, like they are no longer attached to your body, but seem like animal parts. And here you are, at the base, kijich’on, watching the others gathering in a pit as their bodies fuck and split apart, and fuck again, and you are falling down into the heap of naked, writhing bodies. Ashamed, you cover your body up with someone else’s skin, and slabs of meat, the blood already drying. Kozumi, he called you, desire. 126 CHIGOP YOSONG: FALLEN WOMAN She had fled the border, into a different border. The professor referred to her as his only power, the flower of her torso spreading a stemmed shadow across his floor. They were many, indistinct sounds, ribbons reverberating in the bar in rainbow shapes, girls, snacks, girls. Mushrooms, or unearthed silk worms, or butterflies who flitted from one man to another, trailing the perfume of whiskey or pussy. It didn’t matter. As long as they were silky in their silence, giggled at their obscene jokes, lapped miles as the strobe light flickered, and the music jolted. She watched from a distance, the others who knew how to flutter the cards, trick bills into their hands. Dream: the basket of woven grass and bead-like seeds scattering into wind from her daughter’s hand, the wrist so slim she could break a strand of hair against the skin. The graves, the bones that would pierce through dirt against the relentless sun, the farmers glued to broken radios under tarpaper flaps, the parades for the joyless Sun, the cartoons of American troops with devil’s horns, the hours she lost count as her stomach repelled hard grains of unripe corn or whatever her daughter had scavenged that day. She turned to his face, and erased. 127 WAR BRIDE Atomic bomb, shocking every body to blistering meat, paralyzing every clock, this is what it means to be unnamed. You watched the death-cloud as it bloomed into a smoke-mushroom across the sky, paused on a screen, while your daughter’s classmates oooh-ed and awww-ed. You don’t blame them for being too young, for not knowing. This is what it means to have, and not have. And after the war, with other tearless widows soon to be American wives, in bridal class: this is how you bake a cheesecake, in between basting a thanksgiving turkey. Lingerie nightie: This is how you keep your husband happy—by always looking fresh, and never, ever angry. You learn how to leave behind the puzzles of ash, crowns of burnt teeth, and then you learned how to write new recipes to keep him hungry. Roast chicken: plump breasts, full thighs. Steak and potatoes: rump and creamy starch. Tossed salad: iceberg crunching between teeth, dissolving into water, as you swallow your tongue, as if in a dream, this is what it means to have another name. 128 ARCHIVAL she was all tornado before she was root ripped from a rose garden a mother brought her son on his wedding night—he slept with her briar of hair that crowned his head that was already turning bitter white. She was ash before she was flame, licking the edge of a roof while her family slept in fallen hay, and the sun turned lunar. She was wet, before she was water filling the crevice as he peered into the mirror of his face, which she did not love enough to change. With love, she shaved the roots around her face and watched them hiss and recoil before falling to stone. Before this, she was bone, buried in fever. 129 SINGULAR He says, I love you so much, you are double: both my subject and object. At the carnival, where you twirled as flame-thrower, catching hoops of fire, he mouthed, I want you to set me on fire. From the tightrope, he jumped and dove through and through your hoop, aflame. Even if we are different, I want us to feel the same, you exhaled through the button of his belly, where the flame had opened him, all this dark red suddenly gushing, to your shock as you tried again, and again, to fill him with air. Underwater you felt the same: inside or outside, you still swam in an acquarium, in red sequins, and slip-on fins among the lukewarm fish, coral floor— happy resort, love motel. And afterwards, in the pink bathwater feeling yourself dissolve, you imagine him hovering above your soapy body, kissing the space between your lips opening to smile. Sexy, you pull him inside you, where nobody has ever been. Now, we’re no longer lonely. Now, we have the same invariable key. 130 IV. 131 ARS POETICA why can’t you write a beautiful poem, for a change? a poem about a scarlet sunrise thicker than water, stronger than the last dynasty, or the rose-tipped fingers of dawn, the odyssey of the wayfarer? Why don’t you write about the fate of a bolted heart, the peasant marrying the merchant, the seas parting in revolt? Instead, you take the body apart, as if each part betrays the other: the eye blurs, the ear deafens, the tongue disappears. What happens, then, to the fervor of the heart, when the amphibion divides his life into desire by night? Write the history that you couldn’t bear to hear, but saw bursting in dream, blood thinned by water. 132 AFTER LOVE, DREAM SEQUENCES “Can I have this, too?” He asks, and looks boyish, holding up a pencil. “Yes, of course,” you say, even though it’s your last one. You find him later in another room, drawing in a room crowded with too many noisy people. “You should close this door,” you say, but he doesn’t hear you. Outside, someone you tells you he’ll eventually grow forgetful, that’s why he needed a pencil. “Will he remember me?” you think to ask, but don’t say aloud. * You see him in a bath-house, the steam like smoke hiding his face, a woman at his knees washing him with long, pale arms as you watch them, unnoticed. “I can’t remember your name,” he says, and his hair is snow-white. “I’m anonymous,” she says, and her skin softens with soapy bubbles. “I wish that were true,” he says, and then he turns and sees you. * You cry, but no tears emerge. You’re hungry, but there’s no food to eat. Yesterday, you were happy. Today, empty. “I love you,” he says, “I want to eat you until I’m hungry again,” and you let him start with your neck. The salt begins to flow, and he asks you, “why now?” The blood is beginning to turn blue. He cracks his head against your head, to make you laugh, which you do. You laugh, without sound. You turn away, to leave, but fall, because you no longer have knees, the flesh chewed away. He laughs, saying, “you always feed me.” 133 CONFESSIONAL PROVERBS Always sleep with your hand on a doorknob or near a key, in case a thief comes rifling through your dream. When he enters, pretend you don’t know him and offer him the key, or else the door— and if he takes the easy way, choosing the door, turn the lock and let him free. But if he sees the hand that holds a key, the key inside your hand, let him answer you with a question. If you can’t remember how to answer, take ink to paper, and draw the spaces in between the thunder you saw and the lightning you heard. And if you can make the sound visible, make the invisible crash aloud, offering him the flight and paper of your body, unraveling. 134 THE TWIN SHE NEVER KNEW still grew beside her, rode a bicycle faster, had darker hair, but liked to play with dolls while she played with the boys. Already knowing, she cut her hair so short her mother slapped her over and over, ‘would your sister have done this?’ The twin she would never see was always better at cooking, smiling when older sister tossed the bowls of bean porridge day after day, never complaining. And after she moved to dream country, her sisters all following her, the one who was her invisible twin helping her speak that fiery language although she never spoke herself, grew less demanding. And as she fell in love with various young women, always protecting them as she would a sister, her twin didn’t question her as their mother always had, but simply held up a mirror, ‘the love they ignite in you is the love you forgot.’ Years ago, their mother had told her how her father had turned to look at a woman passing by, the hours-old baby slipping from his arms and falling to the floor, the twin sister she had always known from the beginning pulling her in half. 135 ECHO All the things I cannot change in myself, you would never love in yourself: I stare too long and turn away when it starts to be fun. You like long sentences twisting in a marathon, changing lanes. You like hard pressure of teeth against teeth as though we were all bone. I spent the night ranging, fielding everywhere we’d ever gone, hunting for the dropped note, as though it were real enough to see. I found you locked to the mirror, lips pasted to your one silver face, and you were speechless, for once, speechless, for once. You’d fallen into the river of yourself. 136 CLOUDSPIN Come be my fugitive and dance the bomb on the roof of our church until it breaks, and all the bells soar through the sky with sound. Come live with me and we will ice the cake with sugar from a lonely tangerine. Spill into the tide until we surge, free. Collapse on me and write your name across my hands that drift like a promising threat. Forgive me for lapsing into blossom. Come be my fugitive and soldier me. We’ll be all cloudspin and throwing laughter. We’ll be the ocean drift, unraveling wind. 137 EURYDICE’S REFRAIN I. Because it burned, I kept returning. It was the same house, a desert white with gaping windows and trees within. And from inside, an alluring music that turned sleepy, then strong. And inside, from where he strummed, his fingers were strangely familiar and his notes were old, and slightly strained as if he’d been away for long. And from inside my throat, the flames began to uncoil, and recoil in bursts of song. II. And even though it hurt to always follow, to always echo, I loved being a shadow that grew larger and radiant as he skipped across stage, bringing me with him out into the open. And when he laughed, I cracked a smile of relief, and when he ached I made it storm with violent rain, and when he wandered back to save the city from burning down, I didn’t hesitate to follow and spread myself into a salty wave crushing, soundlessly, in his wake. 138 DEAR OTHER, I saw you the other day, holding up a blouse for your mother to wear, scolding her for being self-conscious of its scarlet red. Then, I watched you hold it up to yourself, and with one movement, doubled in the dressing-room mirrors, you lifted off your shirt. I noticed how unlined and pale your skin was, like a bar of ivory soap and I wondered if your mother was envious, too. I looked at myself looking at you, who could have been my twin but a more cautious one. We were wearing a similar shade of red. 139 V. 140 VAGUELY ASIAN Near dusk, waiting outside a friend’s acupuncture clinic in Echo Park, I watch a middle-aged woman in a flowy, summer dress pacing about, lighting up a cigarette and jangling beads between her palms. She has smooth, pale skin and pointy, yellowish teeth, and must be close to the age of my mother. An elderly couple and nurse settle down on the bamboo mats, several feet away from the make-shift altar surrounded by burning incense, bags of rice, bottles of soju, platters of dried-up fish with dull, copper scales. As the rite begins, the woman—her name is Sun in English—begins chanting in a frenzy, bowing, and saying other things in a stream of low, guttural Korean. When she finishes and the guests have discreetly bowed and tucked twenty-dollar bills into the altarpiece, Sun asks the guests for their slips of paper that identify them by their surnames and dates of birth. She’s going to offer readings of our pasts and futures, using an ancient Shamanist tradition of praying to mountain-gods and listening to otherworld spirits. When it is my turn, one of the nurses who is bilingual, explains to Sun the reason for two birthdates and two different names on my slip of paper— I am an ibyang, an adoptee. Sun peers at me, curiously, leaning forward and then without a beat, presents her visions of my past and future, rattling off a checklist that the nurse rapidly translates for me in a similar, smoker’s hoarse English. One, she says in Korean, your eyes carry bad luck. Two, your family gave you up, after bad luck, and your adopted family had to give you up, too. You ran away from home, didn’t you? Three, she predicts, looking into the sprawling distance of blue- black cityscape beyond my head, you will see your mother in two or three years. Shaded by the oncoming nightfall, her face assumes a ghostly glow, her native Korean drowning over my ears in a buzz of familiar and unfamiliar sounds. Off and on, throughout that evening—as throughout my life—my mind returns to the glowing of hope, like a refracting lantern that needs constantly to be re-lit, because the wind keeps blowing through the holes. My parents are dead, I would often tell myself as a child and teenager, but whenever the occaison for making a wish occurred, I wish I knew them. Driving back home that night, I feel an odd sensation spreading like a sticky warmth from the bottom of my stomach, filling my lungs and throat with a strange air. 141 * Cleveland, Ohio family reunion in the late 1980s: I’m eight or nine years old, playing with cousins on a hotel lawn in the full blast of the hot, summer day, shy but armed with a camera that will capture the squinting faces of relatives I’ve never met. After some of the adults retire upstairs inside the hotel, I ask my aunt what they’re doing as she takes out a dull, white egg from the carton and taps it with her long, painted fingernail. “Watching some Holocaust video,” she says, and tightens her blonde ponytail, preparing for the innocent game of egg toss that the rest of the kids have gathered to play. Holocaust, egg toss. Both are new to me. Laughter, egg yolk. I never see it coming. Shell, crispy against forehead, dripping gooey against scalp, glueing my hair like a thick, yellow grease, as my aunt mouthes in slow-motion, “s-o-r-r-y!” from across the impossibly green lawn. And as the water creaks out from the old-fashioned pump that my aunt is cranking above my stinky egghead, I feel overwhelmed by a sense of guilt, of having done or thought something wrong, something horribly bad. But, what? * What is your earliest memory? A question which can only answered by more questions, if one is being honest. Scratching at the lowest corner of my bedroom wall where the door is closed, I am trying to slowly pick away the rosy pattern of faint, antique roses and curlique leaves that decorates the wallpaper of my parents’ old house—trying, childishly, to scratch away at this newfound home, which still doesn’t feel like mine, not yet. In the calm, afternoon shade of a huge oak tree, swinging on a bench with my tiny legs kicking up in the air, for a moment I lose my breath, a plum pit stuck in the back of my throat. No, my mother says later, it was a peach. Rice, cheerios, grapes in my mother’s curly script under Favorite Foods As A Baby, the pastel pink It’s A Baby Girl! scrapbook album. The pages for early memories from birth to early childhood, date and time of birth, are all left blank. * 142 On the day of my high school graduation, my parents will present a small, but crucial relic from my past that was missing from that baby book, a letter from a man named J.B., a teacher who once worked at an English-language school near Holt orphanage in Seoul. In that letter, typewritten on crisp, yellowing paper, he will tell me that the day he took me from the foster mothers’ arms, crying at the airport gate, was a hot, humid day in Korea… in June 1979. “By the time you are old enough to read this we will both be a lot older. I think of you now as a Korean child—you can say ‘mom, mister, lady, toilet, bread, car, etc.’ in Korean. If you have a chance, learn some Korean again. Always be proud that you are, or were Korean.” * Vaguely Asian: the description of the man fleeing from the scene of a botched robbery near an elite college campus. Chinese or Japanese, maybe part Latino or Mexican. Seen by several bystanders across from the Village Mart, a shady fellow, with squinty eyes and plenty of inky tattooes. “Hey, sister, what tribe are you from?” an Indian jeweler calls out across his blanket sprawling with silver and turquoise bracelets. We’re in the plaza in Santa Fe. “The Korean tribe!” I answer back cheerfully. His puzzled face breaks into a grin. The tribe of one. * Sun’s apartment, on the upper floor of a busy street of high-rise apartments in Koreatown, is half-work space, a giant Buddha figurine on her mantelpiece, in front of a shiny, red wall that separates the living- room from the bedroom. A pot of stinky, red stew has been boiling away on a small stove when we enter and kick our shoes off, the small room filling with the smell of garlic. The purpose of this second visit is to get an even closer reading, this time with an astrology chart and coins, as if there’s a precise science behind it. Yet, it’s not so much what she has to say, necessarily, but what Sun stands in for as belief, or self- deception, or possibility. What can she tell me about my other, early life in Korea that hasn’t already been made up out of thin air? A day later, a skepticism has begun to set in. “I can’t see your real father,” she says, “but I can see your mother’s face, clearly, and two siblings. One of each, a brother and sister.” Next, to my shock, she tells me that it would help my chances of finding a future husband quicker if I do a little minor plastic surgery. Touching her nose and ears, she indicates that I should alter the bridge of my nose, as well as get silicone injections to make my earlobes plump 143 like the golden Buddha’s grinning down from the wall. “Your face carries bad luck,” she says, and I’m half-prepared to see her whip out a business card with the name of a cosmetic surgeon in K-town. In the end, I will stare back at her face, incredulous that she’s suggested such a superficial antidote of surgery to improve my life, but also so typically Korean and American. Since I’ve lived in L.A., almost every Korean-American ajumma who could be my mother’s age has suggested that I change my face, unnaturally. Sun could even resemble the face of the missing Korean mother she visualizes, the one who is not my mother, but the one she has conjured up to make me feel assured. Her name is probably not even Sun, I realize with irony. * It’s a different kind of loss, to never know. It is never openly mourning for someone that you can’t remember, and never grieving for a family you left behind. And it is never becoming a person in that life, in that culture, speaking in a language that is foreign, because that person is fictional. The fiction of being singular. And even if those origins are obscured, the drive to search still remains like a lantern sending a fractured pattern of shapes against the wall at dusk, half-shadows, half-light. 144 NOTES 1. “Flight From Seoul” is written for J.B., the escort who brought me over from Korea, and wrote me a letter about our two-day travel together. 2. The epistolary series “Dear Other” was published in Asian American Poetry & Writing: Literary Arts Project Online Journal. Fall 2009. < http://www.aapw- la.org/>. 3. “Famine” was inspired by a communist billboard slogan “We are happy and have nothing to envy,” allegedly still standing in North Korea. Since Kim Jong Il’s authoritarian policies in the 1990s, an estimated up to 2 and a half million North Koreans have died from starvation and preventable diseases from the successions of food shortages and famines in N.K. that is currently ongoing. 4. In Section I, “Third-Person” refers to a family separated during the military partition into pro-communist North Korea and the Democratic Republic of Korea in 1954 following the civil war. Their reunion was captured in the 2008 documentary Tiger Spirit. “The Defector” and “Chigop Yosong: Fallen Woman” are based on the phenomenon of political refugees seeking asylum in China and other Asian countries after defecting from North Korea, illegally, many of whom are women. Defectors are often arranged to be married, for a fee by a broker, to Chinese men and often endure harsh living conditions and restricted freedom because of their marginalized status as immigrants. Selections of poems were published in the March 2010 The Avocado Jungle. <http://avocadojungle.com/> and The Offending Adam. February 2010. http://theoffendingadam.com. 5. “Family Romance” refers to Freud’s 1909 essay entitled “Family Romances,” collected in The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Books, 2003 and quotes from Tolstoy’s famous beginning chapter in Anna Karenina. 6. The series of poems beginning with “Air Doll” are inspired by Hirokazu Kore- eda’s film that is about an inflatable sex doll who learns to become human, and is reminscent of cultural tropes that contemplate the existential conditions of a half- human/half-doll being similar to figures like Pinnochio, cyborgs, robots, and clones. 145 7. The series of poems based on oral Korean folkore are creative adaptations from translations by Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Korean Folktales (2008) and Zong In-Sob’s Folk Tales from Korea (1982). “the filial son,” is inspired by “Hong Do-Ryong, The Filial Tiger,” (Zong); “the unfilial daughter,” is based on the legend of the kumiho, a mythical fox-demon of a female who transforms into a fox from the tale, “The Fox Sister” (Fenkl); “the unmarried woman’s grave” is loosely based on the tale, “the Unmarried Girl’s Grave” (Zong).

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Asset Metadata

Creator Schildkraut, Nicky Sa-eun (author)

Core Title Refrains of memory: poetics of loss and the Korean diaspora

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 08/06/2014

Defense Date 04/10/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Asian-American literature,avant-garde poetry,Cathy Park Hong,Chang-rae Lee,Korean adoption,Korean diaspora,OAI-PMH Harvest,Poetry,transnational adoption

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee chair), Park, Sunyoung (committee member)

Creator Email nschildkraut@gmail.com,schildkr@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-87890

Unique identifier UC11288988

Identifier usctheses-c3-87890 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Schildkrau-1144.pdf

Dmrecord 87890

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Schildkraut, Nicky Sa-eun

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA