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The anxiety of interrupted kinship: Transpacific cultures of Korean historical trauma

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THE ANXIETY OF INTERRUPTED KINSHIP
TRANSPACIFIC CULTURES OF KOREAN HISTORICAL TRAUMA

by

SANDRA SO HEE CHI KIM

Dissertation
Ph.D. Program in Comparative Literature
The University of Southern California

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)
The University of Southern California

August 2017

Committee Members: Akira Mizuta Lippit, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Youngmin Choe

Copyright 2017 Sandra So Hee Chi Kim

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................... i
Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ ii
Introduction: Interrupted Kinship and Transpacific Korean Cultures ............................................. 1
Chapter 1: Korean Han and the Postcolonial Afterlives of the “Beauty of Sorrow” .................... 33
Chapter 2: Generations of Separations: Toward a Phenomenological Theory of Diaspora .......... 70
Chapter 3: Forbidden Relations: South Korean Incest Dramas and the Crisis of Interrupted
Kinship ........................................................................................................................................ 112
Chapter 4: A Different Inheritance through Ex-orbitant Belonging ............................................ 160
Conclusion: The Infinity Mirror Effect of Anxiety and Kinship ................................................ 206
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 216

i

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the people who contributed in some way to this project. I could not have
written this dissertation without the help of my brilliant committee members. My advisor, Akira
Lippit, offered me invaluable critiques and insights concerning everything from the theoretical
bones of my project to the travails of the job market. Viet Nguyen constantly pushed me toward
greater depth of analysis while inspiring me to embrace the emergent methodologies of
transpacific studies. Youngmin Choe was my compass and my guide in understanding how my
work could be situated within Korean Studies. Aki, Viet, and Youngmin—thank you for
believing in me and in the importance of my research.

I am also grateful to the funding sources that made my Ph.D. work possible. Without them, I
would not have been able to afford the time, travel, and resources required to pursue this research
project. I am thankful to the CSLC department for nominating me for the USC Russell Endowed
Fellowship, and to the USC Graduate School for granting it to me. My department’s support of
my research and conference activity through travel grants was also helpful. I am deeply grateful
to the Korea Foundation for awarding me the Graduate Studies Fellowship in North America for
two years in a row, which gave me the focused time I needed to finish my dissertation.

To my parents, Chung Eun Chi and Mhi Khi Chi, thank you for your love and support all these
years. One of the greatest perks of graduate school was that it brought me back to Los Angeles,
where I could be close to you again. I am grateful to my siblings, Monica Chi and John Chi.
From the time I was a kid climbing trees to the time I walked on the stage recently to receive my
Ph.D. hood, you are always cheering me on. Special thanks to my dear friends and fellow
intellectuals who made graduate school not only bearable, but downright enjoyable: Nada Ayad,
Monica Cure, Emilie Garrigou-Kempton, Shaoling Ma, and Sam Solomon. I also thank my
friends outside of graduate school who frequently gave me a welcome reprieve from the world of
academia: Jessica Chen-Feng, Andre Chen-Feng, Grace Lee, Julie Suh, Joyce Thompson,
Carmen Holmes, Esther Lee, and Tamara Gagnolet.

And last but not least, I thank the three greatest loves of my life: Isaac, Selia, and Scott. Isaac
and Selia: thank you for bringing me joy every single day with your beautiful hearts and your
sweet little faces. To my love and my light, Scott: thank you for being by my side through all the
ups and downs of graduate school. I could not have done any of this without you. You inspire the
best in me.

Parts of Chapter 2, “Generations of Separations: Toward a Phenomenological Theory of
Diaspora,” were published in the journals Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies and
positions: asia critique.

ii

Abstract

This dissertation explores how the sustained and serial nature of collective traumas that
mark Korea’s history has produced cultural effects in Korea and the United States. Important
work has been done on the key historical events of modern Korea: the Japanese colonial period,
Korea’s triangulation in the Cold War, national division, the Korean War, and the current
indefinite state of militarized armistice. However my project is the first to examine the
accumulated psychosocial consequences of such a persistent state of national precarity within a
transpacific context. Transpiring in relentless succession, Korea’s historical traumas produced a
metanarrative of ethnonational victimhood that is rooted in ideals of kinship. I demonstrate how
discourses preoccupied with family, bloodline, heritage, and racial identity originated and
evolved in reaction to Korea’s serial traumas, which caused paradigmatic “interruptions” within
social life. The idea of kinship “interrupted”— a word with etymological roots meaning
“breaking between”—connects, for example, experiences as seemingly different as the country’s
partition and Korean diasporic migration. I apply the lens of “interrupted kinship” to describe
how history registers within the social imaginary as a collective trauma that has formed avenues
for both shared mourning and ethnonational/racial subjectivizations.
My project is framed by a theoretical reflection on the psychosocial effects of Korea’s
history through the lens of precarity, which focuses on the traumatic experience of bodily and
psychic vulnerability imposed on those endangered by colonization and war. I pay particular
attention to Korea’s unique context of unending war within a peninsular division system that
reflects the global geopolitics of power. The chief questions I investigate are: What are the
effects of colonization, war, and national division on psychical formations and social

iii

identifications? When these psychosocial effects get passed on to the Korean-American diaspora,
how do they evolve in new social, political, and historical contexts? What role does memory
(individual and collective) have in kinship identifications? How are identifications complicated
by the forgettings, silences, and hauntings caused by trauma? How do state discourses of
division, reunification, and ethnonationalism relate to notions of kinship and to apparatuses of
historical memory? How are kinship-related cultural concepts like han and chŏng
connected to Korea’s sustained state of national precarity, and how are they experienced in the
Korean-American diaspora?

1

INTRODUCTION

INTERRUPTED KINSHIP AND TRANSPACIFIC KOREAN CULTURES

Korea is remarkable in the sustained and serial nature of collective traumas that mark its
recent history: the Japanese colonial period, Korea’s triangulation in the Cold War, national
division, the Korean War, and the current indefinite state of militarized armistice all happened in
relentless succession. While important work has been done on each of these key historical events
of modern Korea, this study traces something more diffuse and tropic in nature: how has this
seriality of historical upheavals produced accumulated psychosocial consequences, and what
kinds of social constructs and cultural productions have emerged in such a context of persistent
national precarity? When there is suffering on such a broad scale, how is it narrativized and how
are the effects mediated through symbolic representation and other cultural processes?
The collective process of making meaning of these historical traumas in Korea overlaps
with the concomitant spread of the social construct of the nation. Benedict Anderson has traced
the birth of the construct of nation-state to the effects of print capitalism on creating a common
vernacular discourse, and the decline of beliefs in divine rule and monarchy during the Industrial
Revolution. Anderson maintains that idea of “nation” took root at the end of the 18
th
century. He
defined a nation as “an imagined political community.” It is imagined because members of “even
the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of
them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”. Korea is a great example of
a small nation, exhibiting a conception of community based on what Anderson calls “a deep,
horizontal comradeship” and sense of “fraternity”, regardless of the actual inequality and

2

exploitation that prevails.
1
While Anderson describes the process by which Europe invented the
idea of the nation-state, the case of Korea demonstrates how the nation-state spread into a global
paradigm via imperialism. The formative years of Korea’s nation-oriented consciousness is
coeval with its position as a Japanese colony in the 1900s, after the Japanese themselves
imported the idea of nation from the “West.”
2
Japan, modeling itself on Western imperialisms
and a Eurocentric view of modernity,
3
launched its own imperialistic project to seize control of
East Asia. Nayoung Aimee Kwon observes that, by the 1930s, a “China-centered world order
gave way to a Western-centric one led locally by Japan.”
4
Scholars have shown that the Japanese
were motivated by an uncritical acceptance of a developmentalist history rooted in the West as
the standard.
5
Korea was therefore “doubly subjected,” by both Japanese and Western style
imperialisms.
6
The whole notion of “prehistoric Korea” was, according to archeologist Hyung Il
Pai, a colonial product originating with Japanese studies in the Korean peninsula. Despite the
vehemently anti-Japanese stance and patriotic efforts of Korean historians and archeologists to
write a new racial history of Korea’s past, “their theories continue to mirror the main tenets and
methodology of Japanese colonial racial paradigms.”
7

As a result of World War 2, Korea gained liberation from Japan on August 15, 1945

1
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London; New York: Verso, 1983), 6-7.

2
See Anderson, 1983; N. Kwon, 2015; G. Shin, 2006.

3
Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Intimate Empire (Durham: Duke University, 2015), 11.

4
Ibid., 38.

5
Ibid., 39.

6
Ibid., 40.

7
Hyung Il Pai, Constructing “Korean” Origins (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000),
261.

3

when Japan surrendered and accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. However, the Soviet
Union and the United States were unconvinced that Korea was prepared after such a long period
of Japanese colonial rule, and installed a partition the peninsula at the 38
th
parallel. The north
was occupied by the Soviet Union, and the south by the United States.
8
A violent, intense civil
conflict of cross-border attacks, political repression, peasant rebellions, and guerilla warfare
ensued as the left-wing and right-wing groups sought to unify their country under their terms of
decolonization.
9
However, these local civil conflicts and decolonization efforts attracted the Cold
War superpowers on June 25, 1950, when North Korean forces crossed the 38
th
parallel to seize
power in the South. According to Jodi Kim, President Truman saw the North’s offensive as a
direct Soviet challenge to American power not only in Asia, but in the world. Korea became “a
Cold War proxy and metonymic example of what could happen to the rest of the world.”
10
Via a
UN “police action” resolution, the United States intervened in the war by aiding South Korea.
The Chinese entered the war on the side of North Korea when, on September 11, 1950, General
MacArthur crossed the 38
th
parallel in order to seize control of the North. After the UN/U.S.
forces were pushed back south, a bloody, protracted stalemate along the 38
th
parallel lasted for
nearly three years, an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. The Korean War Armistice
Agreement was intended to be only a temporary military ceasefire agreement, pending
negotiations for a permanent peace treaty. However, those treaty talks devolved in Geneva in
1954, making the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) the de facto border between the two Koreas.
Without a peace treaty, North and South Korea have effectively remained in an indefinite state of

8
Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 147.

9
Marilyn B. Young, “Korea: The Post-War War,” History Workshop Journal 51 (2001): 113.

10
Kim, Ends of Empire, 148.

4

hostile brinkmanship and unending war, and despite its name, the DMZ is most heavily
militarized border in the world.
The war left the peninsula decimated. Indiscriminate napalm raids and combat strategies
of “saturation” and “area” bombing were a form of unrestrained psychological and social
warfare. General Curtis LeMay admits that they “burned down every town in North Korea and
South Korea,” with an intentional disregard for the lives of non-combatants.
11
General Emmett
O'Donnell, chief of Bomber Command, reported to the 1951 Senate hearings that “the entire,
almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is
nothing standing worthy of the name.”
12
Three and a half to four million soldiers and civilians
were killed on both sides; the ethnic Koreans who died constituted 10–15 percent of the entire
national population at the time.
13
In February 1952, the U.N. released figures estimating that
“one out of every nine men, women and children in North Korea had been killed. In the South,
5,000,000 people had been displaced and 100,000 children were described as
‘unaccompanied’.”
14
In 1951, U.N. officials estimated that five million Koreans had become
refugees because their homes and villages had been destroyed. That same year, another U.N.
report estimated that one million of the nine million people originally from the northern half of
the Korean peninsula were dead, while over half of those who had survived became refugees in

11
Ibid., 149.

12
Walter Sullivan, quoted in Marilyn B. Young, “Korea: The Post-war War,” History Workshop Journal
51 (2001): 113.

13
Tobias Hübinette, “The Orphaned Nation: Korea Imagined as an Overseas Adopted Child in Clon’s
Abandoned Child and Park Kwang-su’s Berlin Report,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6, no. 2
(2005): 231.

14
Young, “Korea,” 116.

5

the south.
15
Families were literally separated by these conditions: those who could not cross the
38th parallel together, those who got separated within the seas of refugees, siblings who were
orphaned and then not adopted together, and so on.
And the war continues to this day. There was no peace treaty—only a military armistice
signed in 1953 that established the Korean Demilitarized Zone. The DMZ became the de facto
new border between North and South Korea and is today the most heavily militarized border in
the world. The untold numbers of families who were separated during the chaos of massive
internal migration—which was complicated further by the closed, impenetrable DMZ border and
by considerable international refugee migration and adoption—created a remarkable situation of
sociocultural trauma. In 1983 the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) in South Korea hosted a
televised “campaign to reunite ten million divided families,”
16
which attracted so much interest
that what began as a ninety-five-minute program turned into more than 453 hours of live
broadcasts in which 100,952 applicants participated, resulting in as many as 10,189 reunited
relatives, of whom some were international adoptees.
17

These experiences of separation are on such a large scale and have been ongoing for such
a prolonged period of time that they have created on the peninsula the shared experience of a
crisis of what I call interrupted kinship. Korean film director Park Chan-wook has noted the
widespread sociocultural impact of the tragedy of division on everyday life:

15
Grace Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 76.

16
Foley (2002) disputes the widely accepted number of “ten million” separated families in Korea. He
shows that it is nearly impossible to calculate the precise number given the sheer chaos on the
Korean peninsula from 1945 to1953. See James A. Foley, Korea’s Divided Families: Fifty Years
of Separation (London; New York: Routledge-Curzon, 2003).

17
Ibid., 85–86. This program was recently dramatized in the film the 2014 film Ode to My Father
( 국제시장, literally International Market).

6

Right, it happens everywhere in daily life. So when we live our lives without a care in the
world, we can always encounter someone directly related to that tragedy, and through the
relationship with that person, the tragedy touches us, too. In that way, I come to take on
what someone else used to carry by himself. The tragedy of the Korean division, which
seemed to have nothing to do with [the film] Geumja (Lady Vengeance), comes down to
her with the gun the old [North Korean] spy hands her. This is the network that makes up
society.
18

There are several aspects of Park’s statement that are significant for understanding how the
plague of separations created by the war’s devastation on the peninsula has had long-lasting
consequences that are experienced on the everyday scale. In a small, densely populated country
like South Korea—which is about one-fifth the size of California but with a current population of
over fifty million—it was impossible not to “always encounter someone directly related to that
tragedy” of separated families in the decades following the Korean War. For the first generations
after the war, it was entirely typical for a Korean to have several relatives missing or in North
Korea and to have no idea where they were and whether they were alive or not. Compound this
experience with the also typical experience of knowing many other families in the same
situation. This brief mental exercise reveals the phenomenology of how the interpersonal nature
of tragedy on such a massive scale, through exponential multiplication, becomes a thoroughly
collective experience of historical trauma. It is the lived experience of a collective crisis of
interrupted kinship. This project is invested in tracing how such a collective tragedy manifests
itself in culture, and how the anxiety of interrupted kinship that resulted from it forms a social
imaginary that not only shapes many narratives of the present, but also anachronistically in

18
Interview with Park Chan-wook, “Sympathy for the Old Boy,” trans. Steffen Hantke and Aryong
Choi-Hantke, June 8, 2008, http://www.ikonenmagazin.de/interview/Park.htm (emphasis mine).

7

remembering the past, and utopically, in imagining the future. In other words, the division of the
Korean peninsula was a traumatic historical nodal point from which its collective impact on
intersubjective memory and culture radiates out temporally; the result is a dominant discourse
fixated on the idea of kinship interrupted in narratives as wide-ranging as history, nation, race,
and personal identity. The chapters in The Anxiety of Interrupted Kinship cover the terrain of this
discourse—not comprehensively, but curated carefully so as to show the depth and extent of its
reach across time and space.
Before describing the chapters, I will give an overview of some of the key terms and
methodological concerns that have given shape to this project.

KINSHIP, INTERRUPTED
A fundamental principle of this study is that kinship is a social construct, and that an
analysis of discourses concerning kinship reveals more about culture and society than about
biology. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has aggregated the scholarship on this topic in his book
What Kinship Is—And Is Not. In it, he pushes against the common understanding of kinship as a
biological connection by “blood,” biogenetic relationships established by birth and extended
through genealogy.
19
Sahlins argues instead that this biological understanding kinship falls under
a broader definition of kinship as “a mutuality of being,” in which kin are considered “members
of one another.” Kinship is a symbolic notion of belonging that is shaped by culture. Rather than
thinking of kinship categories as metaphorical extensions of birth relations, Sahlins considers
birth a metaphor of kinship relations. Kinship may function as a complement to sexual
reproduction rather than necessarily being an extension of it. He presents a wide array of

19
Marshall Sahlins, What Kinship is - and is Not (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 63.

8

ethnographic examples of postnatal, performative modes of kinship formations from around the
world, which emerge from connection of “commensality, sharing food, reincarnation, co-
residence, shared memories, working together, blood brotherhood, adoption, friendship, shared
suffering, and so on.”
20
The variations are indefinitely many, as they are predicated on
“particular cultural logics of relatedness”. For example, in certain Inuit groups, people born on
the same day are kin, as are “brothers” whose parents once had a sexual relationship even though
neither of the brothers was born of their union.
21

This project examines how the cultural logics of relatedness that predicate contemporary
Korean discourses involving tropes of kinship have been forged in reaction to the collective
traumas of colonization and continuous war. I am interested in the enmeshment of these
sociocultural expressions of kinship with identity and nation in Korea and how they travel via the
Korean diaspora. How do kinship ideals organize not only sexuality, gender, and reproduction,
but also power structures built upon related categories such as race, nation, and capital? Émile
Durkheim asserted that kinship “expresses something completely different than genealogical
relations,” that it is a social bond that essentially conveys “juridical and moral relations
sanctioned by society.”
22
Along similar lines, my research investigates how the intersubjective
anxiety of interrupted kinship both reflects and shapes social structures, political discourse,
national identity, historical narratives, and cultural production. Korea’s historical traumas and the
continuing war, which literally divided families indefinitely from one another and from their
homes, have both amplified Korean-specific kinship ideals and spawned new ones concerned

20
Ibid., 9.

21
Ibid., 9.

22
Émile Durkheim quoted in Sahlins, What Kinship is - and is Not (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 2012), 17.

9

with race and nation.
Many Koreanist scholars in fields as diverse as anthropology, communications, business,
and sociology describe Korea as a “familist” society. In a general sense, “familism” is family-
oriented perceptions and behavior.
23
In South Korea, patriarchal familism has had a close
ideological affinity and genealogical connection with Confucianism. The traditional Korean
family structure is patrilineal, which stems from the late 17
th
century Joseon period when
Confucianism became the ruling ideology. In this familial model, the oldest son is given priority
and responsibility in the succession of estate, caring for elderly parents, and directing yearly
ancestral rites after they die.
24
Virtues of filial piety as well as rigid hierarchical relationships
based on gender, age, and class composed the Confucian ethical code of the family, which was
applied further to social relations and the state. Confucianism assumes that the family is the
fundamental and essential element of society, and that this ethic should be extended to other
human relations. The same loyalty one should feel to family should extend to workplaces,
communities, and ultimately the state. The state is a family, or a family-state.
25

In response to scarcity of resources in the late Joseon era, families integrated
organizationally. Social practices such as primogeniture, ancestral rites, consanguineous villages,
and the publication of ancestral writings and genealogy records all contributed to the production
of a hierarchical unity of family. This sort of familism has been interpreted as a strategy for

23
Seok-Choon Lew, Woo-Young Choi, and Hye Suk Wang, “Confucian Ethics and the Spirit of
Capitalism in Korea: The Significance of Filial Piety,” Journal of East Asian Studies 11, no. 2
(2011): 178.

24
Hye Kyung Kim, “Familist Individualization of Ever-single Korean Youths in Their Late 30s:
Individualization and Transformed Familism in the Neoliberal Era,” Korea Journal, Vol. 56,
no.1 (2016): 36.

25
Tong Hee Park, “The Influences of Familism on Interpersonal Trust of Korean Public Officials,”
International Review of Public Administration, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2004): 125.

10

concentrating resources in the competition to survive. Sociologists Lew, Choi, and Wang, in
their article “Confucian Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism in Korea: The Significance of Filial
Piety,” observe that through such strategic practices, individuals’ immersion in and devotion to
the family were dramatically heightened as a means for survival under competitive conditions:
The imperative endowed upon the family by Confucianism in the normative domain was
intensified by the politico-economic reality. The dismantling of the Confucian state by
the Japanese, the liberation of Korea by US forces, and the devastating Korean War that
divided the country only reinforced the trend. Through experience and learning about
competition to survive, family became the supreme value as well as practical reference
point for every Korean. This is the historical origin of familism in Korea…subsequent
developmental processes in modern Korean history only served to strengthen, rather than
weaken these trends.
26

The familist culture is embedded in the Korean language itself, in which friends refer to
one another as “brother” or “sister” (e.g. oppa, ŏnni, tongsaeng) and elder strangers can be
“uncles,”“aunties,” “grandma,” and “grandpa” (ajŏssi, ajumma, harabŏji, halmŏni). It can be
seen in the culture at large in group-oriented attitudes, hierarchical relations between old and
young and between men and women, subordination to one’s seniors, etc. In the public sphere, a
kind of quasi-familism structures social networks and economic opportunities due to alliances
based on kinship, school ties, and regional identifications.
The political economy built in the postwar period very much incorporated patriarchal
familism, even being elevated to the status of national “tradition” by the Park Chung Hee regime

26
Lew, Choi, Wang, “Confucian Ethics,” 179-180.

11

of the 1970s.
27
Park Chung Hee needed to legitimate his authoritarian regime and did so in part
through the discourse of “modernization of the fatherland” (choguk geundaehwa). In this
framework, cultural policy mobilized selective cultural traditions and legacies to introduce a
paternalist-nationalist sentiment that centered on an ideology of economic nationalism. The Park
regime’s idiom of the “modernization of the fatherland” discursively propped up the state as the
embodiment of universal, national interest and the state head as the father leading his family-
nation into prosperity. Workers were encouraged to view loyalty to firms as analogous with
loyalty to family, and this culture contributed to economic development. In the workplace,
emphasis on devotion, order, intimacy, and affective elements of familism promotes self-identity
of workers within the organization and produces voluntary work participation so as to increase
productivity.
28
While increased productivity in itself is not a negative consequence, one group of
researchers has observed how this has led to the rise of a unique form of labor control through
electronic surveillance, in which the culture of patriarchal familism takes for granted restricting
worker autonomy and ignoring workers’ privacy.
29
On a larger scale, the culture of patriarchal
familism and nepotism has encouraged the dominance of chaebŏl—family-run conglomerates.
With subsidies and protections from the government, the first postwar generation entrepreneurs
eventually became big corporate empires that still control most of the wealth in South Korea and
are highly influential in national matters. Kim Dong-Choon identifies “national security, labor

27
Kim, “Familist Individualization,” 36.

28
Wang-bae Kim and Young Eon Ham, “From boot camp to bu-bu? IT surveillance, patriarchal
familism, and labor control: a South Korean case study,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 10, no.1
(2009): 35.

29
Ibid., 37.

12

control, and familism” as the three pillars on which modern Korean capitalism rests.
30

In addition to changes in the political economy, the Confucian notion of the family-state
evolved as the construct of “nation” increasingly became globalized. Gi-Wook Shin has traced
how the idea of national identity based on shared bloodlines and the myth of ethnic homogeneity
grew out of a syncretism of the ideal of the Confucian family-state and the spread of biologistic
understandings of race and ethnicity under Social Darwinism in the late 19
th
century. This led to
a strongly racialized/ethnicized notion of nation in which the categories of race, ethnicity, and
nation have become conflated; Shin observes that this is reflected “in the multiple uses of the
term minjok, the most widely used term for “nation”, which can also refer to ‘ethnie’ or ‘race’.”
31

The penetration of multinational globalizing has only served to intensify Koreans’ ethnic
national identity in response.
32

Ethnonationalism in Korea is marked by a racialized sentimentality in which all ethnic
Koreans are seen as one dispersed family—an image that has become a powerful metaphor of the
Korean nation itself. This traces back to the pervasive myth of Korea as a homogenous and
“pure-blooded” nation, which originally formed in reaction to Japanese colonialism. Activists
during that period promoted a “we consciousness” that has since evolved into ethnonationalism
that takes for granted shared ancestry, ethnic purity and a familial type of belonging. With the
devastating partition of the peninsula, the metaphor of the family-nation took on an even greater

30
Dong Choon Kim, The Unending Korean War: A Social History (Larkspur, California: Tamal Vista
Publications, 2009), xi.

31
Gi-wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2006), 4.

32
Ibid., 17.

13

significance. Roy Grinker picks up on the role that Korean reunification discourse plays in the
idea of the nation as family:
Koreans often construe division not only as the separation of the nation but also as the
separation of families, and as a result unification is construed as the reunion of separated
family members. The nation is the family writ large. Thus, although Korean division is
sometimes represented in terms of land, or more literally the ancestors’ lands
(pundandoen choguk), the more conventional and primary representation is the division
of people.
33

Unsurprisingly, discourses concerning both the Korean War (1950-1953) and the partition at the
38
th
parallel have been predominantly framed in terms of “brothers at war” and “divided
families.”
34
In schoolbooks, films, novels, television shows, and everyday conversation, Tobias
Hubinette notes how the division is often symbolized as “a sundered body, a fractured mind or a
separated couple or family,” and reunification is represented as a reunion of families.
35
The
earliest nationalist novels personalized the tragedy of Korean history by writing about political
struggles in terms of family drama.
36
Canonical old Confucian romance narrative of separating
and reuniting couples were retold and reinterpreted into stories of national self-enlightenment

33
Roy Richard Grinker, Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1998), 102-103.

34
See Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea (First edition. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), and James A. Foley, Korea’s Divided Families: Fifty Years
of Separation (London; New York: Routledge-Curzon, 2003).

35
Hubinette, “The Orphaned Nation,” 233.

36
Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Narratives of Nation Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism (Armonk,
N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 104.

14

and reunification.
37
Overseas adopted Koreans are regularly figured as symbols of a divided and
dispersed national family. Their individual traumas of separation and orphanhood stand in
metonymically for the national trauma of all Koreans.
38

Sheila Miyoshi Jager’s study on the constructions of manhood and womanhood in
Korean nationalist narratives, Narratives of Nation Building in Korea: A Genealogy of
Patriotism, repeatedly shows how these gendered discourses relied on concepts of kinship. She
shows, for example, how both North and South Korean nationalist discourses often expressed the
crisis of nationhood as a crisis of fatherhood. They perseverate on the generational link between
father and son, “patriotic” genealogy, and ancestral piety. Underlying these concerns are an
“anxiety about paternity.”
39
The loss of fatherhood/manhood of the state and its idealized
“recovery” have been dominant themes that ultimately provide a vision of patriarchal succession
that contribute to strengthening a family-state ideology.
40
Similarly, “woman” as a signifier in
nationalist discourses was rooted in kinship ideals; the repeated trope of loyal wife/enlightened
woman revolved around women’s happiness in marriage and family life as a matter of national
concern as well as a stage for politicizing national desire.
41

Korean familism does not exist in a fossilized state; rather it has evolved in tandem with
the changes brought on by the complex web of historical events, social upheavals, economic
change, and geopolitical forces. It adapts further as it gets selectively and unevenly incorporated

37
Ibid., xv.

38
Hubinette, “The Orphaned Nation,” 227.

39
Miyoshi Jager, Narratives, xiv.

40
Ibid., 115.

41
Ibid., 44.

15

in diasporic contexts. In the United States, intergenerational solidarity has thrived on multiple
levels, ranging from emotional solidarity to functional exchanged in assistance.
42
Moreover,
these ethnofamilist connections are mobile and transnational. An important survey shows that
Koreans feel a “stronger attachment to ethnic Koreans living in foreign countries” than to “ethnic
non-Koreans living in Korea.”
43
I focus on the construct of kinship because it is key not only in
how Korea has historically represented itself, but also in tracking the transnational,
transgenerational flows of the effects of trauma across time and space.
My use of the word “interrupted” is inspired by its derivation from interrumpere, which
in Latin means “to break between.” The scene that “breaking between” brings to mind is that of a
whole object being forcibly broken into two, where one thing suddenly transforms into two parts
that bear the disfigurements of the act of rending. I have chosen this particular word as a key
trope in this project because of how it perfectly captures the arbitrary and devastating division of
the Korean peninsula. Furthermore, it captures how Korea’s serial traumas caused paradigmatic
interruptions within social life that incited the origin and evolution of discourses preoccupied
with family, bloodline, heritage, and racial identity. The idea of kinship “interrupted”
encapsulates how experiences as seemingly different as the country’s partition and Korean
diasporic migration have been discursively linked in the transcultural Korean social imaginary.
Interruption is also fittingly complex in this context in how it evokes eruption in its sense
as a psychoanalytic term. Julia Kristeva has written about the “eruption of the real” as the abject,
or the excluded and the unrepresentable, disrupting the smooth veneer of everyday life in

42
Kim, “Familist Individualization,” 37

43
Shin, Ethnic Nationalism, 234.

16

moments that communicate the horror of “death infecting life.”
44
Slavoj Zizek has discussed the
“irruption of the Real” as the moments when the extradiscursive, traumatic void of the Real
pokes out from under the inadequate covering of ideological fictions, revealing some central
impossibility.
45
In more general psychotherapeutic contexts, eruption is associated with trauma,
when the traumatic event returns to haunt the victim in explosive episodes of psychological
distress.

TRAUMA
Using trauma as a key term in a cultural study concerning the accumulated psychosocial
effects of modern Korea’s key historical events is not a mere analogy or metaphor. Individuals
and families experienced actual trauma that had devastating material and psychological
consequences. When the individual traumas of colonization, war, and national partition are as
ubiquitous as they were on the Korean peninsula, there is also a kind of intersubjective escalation
and exponentiality that quite literally amounts to large-scale, collective trauma with significant
sociocultural consequences.
Trauma, like interruption, has an etymological origin that fittingly captures aspects of the
Korean collective experience of history. Trauma derives comes from an ancient Greek word that
means “wound”. The wound is an apt analogy for the psychological and social effects of the
repeated collective tragedies of modern Korea on individual and social life. One could also
describe the 38
th
parallel as a kind of wound that tore apart the Korean peninsula, the pain of
which has not healed and persists to this day.

44
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York:
Columbia UP, 1982), 4.

45
Slavoj Zizek. The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, New York: Verso, 1989), 146-147, 173.

17

In its most general definition, trauma describes “an overwhelming experience of sudden
or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed,
uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.”
46
The
diagnostic criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) indicates that traumatic events are
“persistently re-experienced” as “recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event”
including dreams, flashbacks, hallucinations, illusions, and the “feeling of detachment or
estrangement from others.”
47
These symptoms indicate the collapse of mastery over one’s sense
of self and one’s past for the trauma victim as the traumatic event takes over the mind both
psychically and neurobiologically. The “failure” of memory—misremembering or the inability
to remember or articulate memory—is one of the key characteristics of PTSD. Cognitive
psychologists have identified it as a failure of information encoding, a reversion from linguistic
coding to sensorimotor and iconic coding.
48
As Judith Herman describes, “traumatic memories
lack verbal narrative and context; rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and
images.”
49
This non-narrational nature of trauma has led scholars like Cathy Caruth to make the
argument that trauma is the ultimate limit of representation since it is an encounter that is
inaccessible to understanding and imagery. The traumatic experience is essentially a reference
that can never be anything more than indirect. Caruth proposes that trauma is not locatable in the

46
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996), 11.

47
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth edition (DSM-IV) Washington DC:
American Psychiatric Association 1994), 428.

48
Bessel A. Van der Kolk and Onno Van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and
the Engraving of Trauma” (in Cathy Caruth ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory Baltimore
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 172.

49
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 38.

18

original event in the past, but rather in the way that “its very unassimilated nature—the way it
was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.”
50
The
traumatic experience returns, again and again, to repeatedly “address” the survivor in the attempt
to communicate a reality or “truth” that is not otherwise comprehensible. The peculiar mode of
representation in traumatic narratives, then, is linked as much to what is known as to what is
unknown because of the intrinsically deferred nature of this “truth”. The experience of trauma
demands expression but also eludes expression. It demands to be repeated again and again. It
circulates in language but is never truly inherent in language, and remains fundamentally
inassimilable.
On the level of collective trauma, I argue that traces of collective trauma are not only to
be found embedded in narratives directly concerning the historical events. While stories of
colonization, war, and national division abound in Korean culture, I am also interested in the
diffuse tropic effects of these historical traumas and how they show up in unexpected places and
in unexpected ways. My choice of texts for analysis deal not only with texts that directly refer to
historical traumas, but also with ones that have historical trauma as a referent that is not
necessarily directly addressed within the text itself. My concern is with the interiorization of the
state of “being broken between,” extracted from and accumulative of the experiences of
colonization, national division, and constant war. Culture, rather than history or sociology or
ethnography, is my focus here because I am interested in how historical trauma is not merely a
geopolitical event, but also the inauguration of tropes that express that trauma.
The seriality of historical trauma in Korea has produced a state of collective precarity. In
Frames of War, Judith Butler analyzes visual and discursive dimensions of war to examine how

50
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.

19

popular assent to war is fostered and upheld as something inevitable, and even good. The
framing of war involves “giving an account of whose life is a life, and whose life is effectively
transformed into an instrument, a target, or a number, or is effaced with only a trace remaining or
none at all.”
51
Butler defines precarity as “a politically induced condition” in which certain
populations are exposed to arbitrary state violence without protection.
52
People living in Korea
since the turn of the twenthieth century have experienced being colonized by Japan, families torn
asunder by the Korean War, brutalized by postwar military dictatorships, and always yet on the
edge of another outbreak of war; they have repeatedly experienced the politically induced
condition of precarity. They have born the traumatic experiences of bodily and psychic
vulnerability on a sweeping scale, with no relent, for over a century.
The state of precarity is sustained indefinitely by what Kim Dong-Choon calls “unending
war”. In his book, The Unending War (2009), Kim aims to show “how the Korean War had been
internalized by Korea’s sociopolitical order as part of everyday life.”
53
He reveals the war’s
continuity and continued reproduction in the postwar social structure, in which aspects of Korean
social life are an extension of war. He argues that the formation of modern civil society was
created in relation to the Korean War. The subsequent ruling order of the 1950s inherited the
militaristic order established during the war. This militarism still infiltrates the fundamental logic
of society. While the act of fighting has ended, the state of war has not, and “the war still
continues by other means.”
54

51
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2009), ix-x.

52
Butler, Frames, 25-26.

53
Kim, The Unending War, xii.

54
Ibid., 8.

20

My study is inspired in part by Kim Dong-Choon’s work. Whereas he analyzes the social
history of the Korean War, I examine the cultural effects of the internalization of the Korean War
into the sociopolitical order, and how this gets passed on both in Korea and the Korean diaspora.
I am not looking so much at the cultural productions specifically about the war, but how tropes
and conceptual paradigms were produced out of the crucible of ongoing collective traumas of
colonialism and war and national division.
Kim asks an important question: “How have the things that happened during the war been
repeated and reproduced in Korean politics and society since the war’s end?”
55
I would extend it
and complicate it further back: how have the things that happened during both colonialism and
the war been repeated, reproduced, and modified in Korean politics and society since the war’s
end? How do they get passed on into the diaspora in a neo-metropole?
I choose to focus specifically on texts from South Korea and the Korean diaspora in the
United States because of the neoimperial relationship between these countries. Kuan-Hsing
Chen, in his book Asia as Method, points out that the modern history of East Asia shows that the
decolonization movements following World War 2 were interrupted by the entrenchment of a
cold-war structure. As such, he argues that decolonization, deimperialization, and what he terms
“de-cold war” have to proceed in concert because colonization, imperialization, and the cold war
“have become one and the same historical process.”
56
The subtext of Chen’s statement is that the
United States is currently a neo-empire. South Korea is therefore what Chen might call a
“subimperial power.” Chen uses the term to describe Taiwan, but the term is fitting for South
Korea as well. South Korea falls into “the postcolonial trajectory” in the third world, a pattern in

55
Kim, The Unending War, 23.

56
Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham [NC]: Duke University
Press, 2010), 4.

21

which decolonization is followed by recolonization or neocolonization.
57
As we shall see in
Chapter 1, Korean ethnonationalism itself was conditioned and delimited by the Japanese
imperialist cultural imaginary constructed during the colonial era. Immediately following
liberation, Korea’s relationship with the United States too has been one marked by a
phenomenon that Chen describes as “subimperial desire”—a lower-level empire’s desire to be
like the higher-level empire on which it is dependent.
Thomas J. McCormick writes that the Korean War inaugurated a two decade period
(1950-73) that has been known by several names: the Second Cold War, the Vietnam Era, and
the Long Boom. What these names show is an increased militarization and globalization of the
Cold War during this period, which helped usher in “the most sustained and profitable period of
economic growth in the history of world capitalism.”
58
Jodi Kim argues that this period exhibits
a shift from political, military, and economic power centered on Europe to the global hegemony
of the United States. It constituted a change from European territorial colonialism to American
neoimperialism that professed to contain the threat of Soviet communism while also spreading
capitalism and “democracy.”
59
Power was no longer visible and measured in territorial
possessions in this new form of colonization. South Korea became a part of the US collective
security system created in the late 1940s and the 1950s that Naoki Sakai and Hyun Joo Yoo see
as “one of the essential conditions for US hegemony in East Asia” and which continues to

57
Ibid., 63.

58
Thomas J. McCormick quoted in Kim, Ends of Empire, 26.

59
Kim, Ends of Empire, 26-27.

22

structure the region’s geopolitics along the lines of Cold War antagonism.
60
Jodi Kim also points
out that South Korea’s army was itself “interpellated and inducted in to America’s imperial
violence” in Vietnam.
61
Charles Armstrong writes of the huge financial rewards that South Korea
gained from sending troops to Vietnam. South Korean troops far exceed the number sent by all
other Allied nations combined, and Vietnam was responsible, “in no small measure, for the
economic ‘miracle’ of the 1960s to the 1990s.”
62
Following the war, the United States poured
four billion dollars of aid into South Korea in the first decade and supported a series of military
dictatorships. American military presence is still strong in South Korea today, which arguable
sustains a situation of hostile brinkmanship with North Korea.
63

One might say that the current world system, in fact, is invested in a state of unending
war between the two Koreas. This is in fact what Paik Nak-Chung argues. Paik writes about how
the partition of the Korean peninsula is a “division system” that emerged from and remains
invested in the world system at large. Pushing against the assumption that North and South
Korea are self-complete systems in which there is a rivalry between a socialist bloc and a
capitalist bloc, Paik argues that “there is a peninsula-wide structure that exerts a more
fundamental determining power on North and South Korea alike, mobilizing even that
antagonism and opposition for the solidification of the division system.”
64

60
Naoki Sakai and Hyun Joo Yoo (eds.), Trans-Pacific Imagination: Re-thinking Boundary, Culture and
Society (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co, 2012), 1.

61
Ibid., 164.

62
Charles Armstrong quoted in Kim, Ends of Empire, 164.

63
Kim, Ends of Empire, 149.

64
Nak-Chung Paik, The Division System in Crisis: Essays on Contemporary Korea. (Berkeley: Global,
Area and International Archive, University Of California Press, 2011), 7.

23

The determining power of the world system on the two Koreas is mediated by a solidified
structure constructed by a geopolitical division that is paradoxically “one as well as two, or two
as well as one.”
65
The division system’s confrontations, conflicts, and divergences subtly operate
to maintain and reproduce the state of division. Neither North nor South Korea constitutes a full-
fledged system on its own, but only a subsystem of the division system, which is itself a
subsystem of the world system. According to Paik, the division therefore must be dialectically
overcome with a world-historical vision and international solidarity, rather than a simplistic
reunification approach that dismantles one government in favor of the other.
66

TRANSPACIFIC METHODOLOGY
In a research landscape where Korean studies and American studies historically have had
little interaction between the two cultural and historical archives, this project reflects a
transnational, transcultural approach to Korean/American studies. The Korean and Korean-
American texts that I analyze together index a transpacific geopolitical context that follows the
effects of Korea’s collective traumas through generations and displacements across an ocean.
My methodology is influenced by the emerging field of Transpacific Studies, a field that
brings together the scholarship in Asian studies, Asian-American Studies, and American studies
into a newly configured dynamic. A transpacific methodology inherently assumes a more global
view of Asia and the U.S, and is invested in critiquing the constructed binarism of “East” versus
“West.” Naoki Sakai and Hyun Joo Yoo, in their volume The Trans-pacific Imagination, note the
peculiar relationship between American Studies and “Area Studies”; while places like Latin

65
Ibid., 43.

66
Ibid., 68.

24

American, East Asia, Southeast Asia, etc. are marked as “areas”, the United States is not.
67
In my
view, transpacific methodology seeks to provincialize the U.S. and the “West” at the same time
that it refuses to see the United States as somehow separate from Asia. The transpacific probes
both the workings of American hegemony and empire in Asia as well as the pressures of the flow
of people, cultures, ideas, and capital from Asia into the U.S.
In their introduction to Transpacific Studies: Framing An Emerging Field, Viet Thanh
Nguyen and Janet Hoskins describe transpacific studies as a field that can illuminate the diverse
and complex traffic in “peoples, cultures, capital, and ideas” between the ideas of “America” and
“Asia,” as well as the “Pacific.”
68
It is in the triangulated relationship of these three tropes of
place that I situate this study of Korean historical trauma. This is important for understanding the
long range of traumatic effects and the genealogies of culture and memory across time and space.
My research in this regard is also an effort to deconstruct the nationalist frame of Korean Studies
and to confront the entanglement of issues on the peninsula with the dynamics of geopolitical
forces. At the same time, through a project like this I also aim to help push Asian American and
American studies to be less U.S.-centric by reframing discourses in ways that acknowledge their
migrations and evolutions.
Research using transpacific methodologies are important for both Korean and Asian
American studies. “Korean studies” as a field was originally conceived of and defined by non-
Koreans—first by intellectuals in the colonial apparatus during the Japanese colonial period
(1910-1945) who were complicit in discursively constructing Koreans as the other, and then by
academics in the United States from the 1940s and on as American involvement in East Asia

67
Sakai and Yoo, The Trans-pacific Imagination, vii.

68
Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins (eds.), Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field
(Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014), 2.

25

increased. Korean studies in South Korea historically has been instrumentalized by the state
and/or ethnonationalist frameworks. Up until the late 1990s, nationalism, developmentalism, and
modernization were the dominant research paradigms. In the past two decades or so, more
critical frameworks such as postcolonialism, postmodernity, and postnationalism have been
proliferating; notably these critical frameworks almost always examine Korean issues from a
more transnational and global perspective.
69
The transpacific puts pressure on both to
acknowledge the complicity in American and Korean nationalisms, and how they contribute to
US hegemony in East Asia.
In the United States, Asian Studies and Asian American Studies have very different, even
opposing origins. Dorinne Kondo has pointed out that one emerged from an Orientalist paradigm
with an older history anchored in colonial history, the other from the struggles of disenfranchised
groups organizing in the 1960s and 70s as a political movement. Asian-American as a category
was formed in reaction to white supremacist racial othering that grouped very diverse
populations with distinct migrant histories into one “yellow” category.
70
A transpacific
methodology in many ways addresses issues of essentialism that have plagued Asian American
studies from the very beginning. Kandice Chuh argues that we need to move away from Asian-
American as describing subjects or objects, and to employ it first and foremost as category of
critique that draws attention to its own constructedness.
71
The transpacific approach offers
lessons on the instability and mutability of identities which, as Paul Gilroy puts it, “are always

69
See Kim Baek Yung, “Korean Studies between the Social Sciences and Historical Studies: Debates
Over Modern and Contemporary Korean History,” Korea Journal 51, no. 3 (2011).

70
Dorinne Kondo, “(Un)Disciplined Subjects,” in Orientations, eds. Kandice Chuh and Karen
Shimakawa (Durham: Duke University Press), 35.

71
Kandice Chuh, Imagining Otherwise, (Durham: Duke University Press), 90.

26

unfinished, always being remade.”
72

A transpacific approach strives to open up the categories constructed by the boundaries of
nation states and area studies. Paul Gilroy, in his work on the Black transatlantic, suggests that
the Atlantic can be one single, complex unit of analysis in discussions of the modern world and
use it to produce explicitly transnational and intercultural perspectives. This is in opposition to
nationalist and ethnically absolute approaches.
73
Gilroy proposed that we need new
chronotopes—Bhaktin’s term for the fusion of the temporal and spatial aspects of a cultural
text—that emerge from a theory that “is less intimidated by and respectful of the boundaries and
integrity of modern nation states.”
74
Gilroy offers the image of a sailing ship as a fitting
chronotope that envelops key aspects of the Black transatlantic, including transnational travel
and the middle passage of the slave trade. In the context of the Korean transpacific, I propose
that the dominant chronotope that emerges is the image of a family, and specifically a divided
family marked by the trauma of separation. In tracing the transpacific cultures of Korean
historical trauma, like Gilroy, I am concerned with uncovering the constructed nature of national
and racial identities. Equally important is understanding how subjects become invested in and
attached to these very categories as a result of their lived experiences. As such, I am trying to
rethink concepts that we take for granted in both Korean and American cultural studies. For
example, my chapter on Korean-American poet Suji Kwock Kim’s work reminds us that, while it
is important to think about how racial identity is forged in a uniquely American context, or a
uniquely Korean context, it easy to forget that those contexts are always already marked by the

72
Paul, Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993), xi.

73
Ibid., 15.

74
Ibid., 4.

27

transcultural and the global through avenues such as empire and capital. Similarly, my chapter on
the ubiquitous Korean ethnocentric concept of han reveals its constructedness by situating it in a
transpacific context of its triangulation and migrations between Japan, South Korea, and the
United States.
Some of the chief questions I investigate in this study are: What are the effects of
colonization, war, and national division on psychical formations and social identifications?
When these psychosocial effects get passed on to the Korean diaspora, how do they evolve in
new social, political, and historical contexts? What role does memory (individual and collective)
have in kinship identifications? How are identifications complicated by the forgettings, silences,
and hauntings caused by trauma? How do state discourses of division, reunification, and
ethnonationalism relate to notions of kinship and to apparatuses of historical memory? How are
kinship-related cultural concepts like han ( 한) and chŏng ( 정) connected to Korea’s sustained
state of national precarity, and how are they experienced in the Korean diaspora?

CHAPTER SUMMARIES
The relentless onslaught of historical traumas in Korea produced a metanarrative of
ethnonational victimhood. One manifestation of this sense of ethnic victimhood is the racialized
idea of Korean sorrow called han. Chapter 1, “Korean Han and the Postcolonial Afterlives of
‘The Beauty of Sorrow,’” focuses on how han is rooted in ideals of blood-based kinship that
were formed in reaction to racist colonial discourse.
Scholars, artists, writers, and critics frequently characterize han as “the Korean ethos”
and the soul of Korean art, literature, and film. It is said to be unique to Koreans and
incomprehensible to Westerners. I suggest, however, that its contemporary biologistic-

28

oriented meaning emerged first during the Japanese colonial period as a colonial stereotype, and
that tracing the transcultural afterlives of han gives us a postcolonial understanding of its
deployment in culture. I examine how han originated under the contradictions of coloniality,
how it evolved from a colonial construct to its adoption into Korean ethnonationalism, and how
it travels into completely new contexts through the Korean diaspora. Rather than dismissing han
as nothing more than a social construct, I instead define han as an affect that encapsulates the
grief of historical memory- the memory of past collective traumas—and that renders itself
racialized, ethnicized, and attached to nation. Drawing from Teresa Brennan’s theory of the
transmission of affect, I suggest how han can transmit among individuals within Korean society,
where phenotypical racialized resemblance synergizes with historical grief to produce a racial
sense of affect. At the same time, it also applies in the context of diaspora, where han passes
through the atmospheres of kinship structures (whether biological or adoptive, via positive or
negative influences) and in interaction with a sociocultural and political milieu that largely
alienates them. Han thus emerges differently in postcolonial/neocolonial Korea and the Korean
American diaspora as the exigencies of identity embedded in a history of persistent collective
traumas influence ideas of kinship, nation, and race. Han is an example of how history becomes
internalized in individuals while at the same time creating horizontal connections of empathy and
identification.
“Diaspora” is another significant term that I redefine as an experience of perceived
interrupted kinship in a chapter called “Generations of Separations: Toward a Phenomenological
Theory of Diaspora.” This chapter makes an intervention in the debates about the definition of
diaspora by attending to the way in which it is a phenomenon, rooted in a particular kind of
experience and consciousness. The approach I take moves beyond ontological definitions based

29

on categorical criteria toward a more phenomenological definition that can help us better
understand the lived experience of diasporic subjects and the formation of diasporic
communities. While these groups do not exist as entities that have some common essence, I
insist that they do exist phenomenologically. Rather than an “objective,” prescriptive definition
of diaspora, this paper explores the subjective quality of diaspora when approached from the
inside of it as an experience. Such a phenomenological approach can rescue the term “diaspora”
from its over-extensions and case-specific limitations. In particular, I stress the role of
postmemory in creating the phenomenon of diaspora; it is through postmemorial mechanisms
that displaced subjects who experience the loss of an “origin” (whether literal or symbolic)
perpetuate identifications associated with those places of origin in subsequent generations.
I then turn to the work of Korean-American poet Suji Kwock Kim, both to probe the
dynamics of diasporic, postmemorial processes and to reveal the inherent ethics of memory at
the core of diasporic relationality. Kim’s Notes from the Divided Country is a volume of poetry
that shows a compelling relationship between the dynamics of postmemory and the ethics of
memory. In this article, I focus on the first poem of the volume called “Generation.” The poem
simultaneously implies that the “divided country” referred to in the volume’s title is not only
Korea (which was indefinitely divided at the 38th parallel by the 1953 armistice that called a
truce to the Korean War), but also a “divided country” of the mind- a diasporic subjectivity that
is always already fragmented and unstable. The poem is emblematic of how the diasporic
postgeneration(s) of collective trauma must grapple with the ghostly, unsettling absence of their
parents’ traumatic losses—material, familial, psychical—from a war they only know about
second-hand. I suggest that the paradigm that Kim sets up in “Generation” is one of a diasporic
identity that resists surrogate victimization, paving the way for an approach to ethical memory

30

founded on a comparative, transnational notion of justice. This first poem thus sets the stage for
how the varied personas featured in Notes from the Divided Country bind together different
temporal, spatial, and cultural sites- connecting diverse private and collective traumas while still
retaining their specificities. This is a move away from identity politics to a vision of justice that
cuts across nation, ethnicity, received identities and official histories; it is an act of solidarity that
aims to create new communal and political identities.
Chapter 3, “Forbidden Relations: South Korean Incest Dramas and the Crisis of
Interrupted Kinship,” explores the narrative trope of incest as another manifestation of the
anxiety of interrupted kinship. There is a peculiar prevalence of incest dramas in South Korean
popular culture. More than twenty South Korean television dramas and films in the past fourteen
years alone involve the possibility of an incestuous relationship as a subtext. Autumn Tale
(가을동화, 2000) and Winter Sonata (겨울연가, 2002), the television serials that ostensibly
launched the “Korean Wave” in broader Asia, as well the cult classic and critically acclaimed
film Oldboy (2003), are among the numerous productions in which key characters who at one
point or another are thought to be biologically related fall in love. In popular television serials,
the incest scare is usually between a man and a woman presumed to be siblings or half-siblings,
one or both of whom are single-parent children, orphaned, or émigrés who have returned to
Korea. There is also typically a key loss of memory that creates the possibility that one wouldn’t
recognize one’s sibling or even know that one had a sibling. At the very end of these series, of
course, the assumed sibling relationship in fact turns out to be false and all ends happily ever
after. We witness in these shows the convergence of the suspense-inducing narrative strategy of
the incest scare with anxieties about biological kinship and lost memory. This chapter traces how
the now familiar incest trope in South Korean cultural productions has roots in the historical

31

traumas of the Korean War and national division, which literally disrupted lines of “descent” on
the Korean peninsula. I look at how the circulation of the contemporary incest trope is related to
interrupted kinship as the imbrication of the collective experience of national division with the
individual-intersubjective experience of literal separation from family members. My analysis
begins with a kind of literary precursor to these more recent incest dramas: The Other Side of
Dark Remembrance (어두운 기억의 저편 ), an award-winning 1983 novella by Lee Kyun-Young. I
hypothesize that this particular novella demonstrates how the current iteration of the incest trope,
and the anxiety about biological kinship that it provokes, has roots in Korea’s prolonged
conditions of war and national division. I build on my analysis of the novella to develop new
insights into Im Kwon-Taek’s 1993 film Sopyonje (서편제), and its source text, Yi Cheong-jun’s
novella, as well as Park Chan-wook’s iconic 2003 film Oldboy (올드보이), focusing on how the
logic of the incest taboo deployed in South Korean cultural productions corresponds to
psychosocial effects stemming from the traumatic experiences of interrupted kinship relations.
Finally, a chapter entitled “A Different Inheritance through Ex-orbitant Belonging”
analyzes Cho Sehŭi’s 1978 novella The Dwarf (난장이가 쏘아올린 작은 공) in depth. I pay
particular attention to how the text repeatedly turns to the themes of the alien and the
extraterrestrial in ways that disrupt an otherwise socialist realist narrative that critiques the
processes of rapid industrialization in 1970s South Korea. The title character himself is obsessed
with a utopic vision of moving to the moon and starting humankind over again. The Dwarf was
confusing for early critics because it both engaged in and undermined the favored norms of
“labor fiction” (nodong sosŏl), which sought to create a counterhegemonic discourse by
emphasizing contemporary social reality. One scholar criticized Cho of “indulg[ing] in a fantasy
that is ultimately just an expression of despair, rather than offering a concrete vision of the future

32

based on a scientific understanding of the existing social structure.”
75
While I agree that The
Dwarf does not offer a “scientific” understanding of existing social structures, I disagree that the
fantasy element is a mere authorial indulgence. Far from being simply an expression of despair,
this chapter shows how the repeated extraterrestrial and planetary indexing that the novella
performs is part and parcel of its critique as well as its vision of the future.
By examining the figure of the alien in The Dwarf, I show how the text implicitly
undermines hegemonic notions of inheritance as well as a canonical idea of love in the history of
nationalist Korean literature. I argue that the novella ultimately encourages its readers to sees the
world through a planetary lens that regards all life as interconnected. Through extraterrestrial and
deep history allusions, The Dwarf reframes the Korean concepts of sa-rang (사랑) and chŏng (정),
calling for a revolutionary move toward planetary love and an ethic of ex-orbitant belonging.
In the conclusion, I reflect on the content of the previous chapters by discussing the last
key term of the project—anxiety—and its relationship to Korean collective trauma and the trope
of interrupted kinship. I then discuss the future direction of this project, and the extra chapters
that the book manuscript will include.

75
Hwang Kwang-su quoted in Youngju Ryu, Writers of the Winter Republic (University of Hawaii
Press, 2016), 108.

33

1

KOREAN HAN AND THE POSTCOLONIAL AFTERLIVES OF “THE BEAUTY OF
SORROW”

If we lived in paradise, there would be no tears, no separation, no hunger, no waiting, no suffering, no
oppression, no war, no death. We would no longer need either hope or despair. We would lose those
hopes so dear to us all. We Koreans call these hopes Han. It is not an easy word to understand. It has
generally been understood as a sort of resentment. But I think it means both sadness and hope at the same
time. You can think of Han as the core of life, the pathway leading from birth to death. Literature, it
seems to me, is an act of Han and a representation of it… Han, which comprises both sadness and hope, is
a feeling unique to the Korean people…
PARK KYONG-NI (1994)

[The] terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The
representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits
set in the fixed tablet of tradition.”
HOMI BHABHA (1994)

When South Korean figure skating champion Kim Yuna was passed over for the gold
medal at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics despite her flawless, moving performance, Koreans
were up in arms at the seeming injustice. More than two million people signed an online petition
objecting to the result and representatives in South Korea sent a protest letter to the International
Olympics Committee. The event triggered a so-called collective state of resentment and national
mourning that was frequently referred to in public and social media as an experience of Korean
han.
1
Lee Hee-kyeong, a psychiatrist in Kyŏnggi province, explained han in an interview with a

1
For example, see Chŏng Ch’ŏlu”s article: “[soch'iollimp'ik]p'yŏngch'angsŏ kimyŏnaŭi hanŭl p'ul su
issnŭn pangpŏp”
http://starin.edaily.co.kr/news/NewsRead.edy?SCD=EB33&newsid=01521926605992816&DC
D=A20402

34

foreign news outlet: “Here, the suffering becomes a part of you, a part of your blood, and there is
a big emphasis on the sadness more than Western countries.”
2

Dr. Lee’s response encapsulates several aspects of the discourse of han that historically
have been prominent. Han ( 한 恨) is an essentialist Korean sociocultural concept that is popularly
understood as a uniquely Korean collective feeling of unresolved resentment, pain, grief, and
anger. Han is often described as running in the blood of all Koreans, and the quality of Korean
sorrow as being different from anything Westerners have experienced or can understand. One
American scholar of Korean studies tells the story of how he once received a message from an
elderly Korean gentleman, stating, “I am so happy to hear about an American professor who
wants to learn about my country. I can teach you what you need to know. It is a word called han
and the soul of Korean art, literature, and film.”
3
Though one can certainly find people—
particularly among the youth on the one hand, and scholars on the other—who do not relate to
han and dismiss it as an outdated construct, many academics, artists, writers, and critics continue
to characterize han as a characteristic of Koreans and the root of Korean culture. In 2015 alone,
Korean rapper Tablo released a song (“Hood”) that makes han its central theme; researchers
published a cinema studies monograph
4
on how han (along with chŏng) captures “the Korean

2
Geoffrey Cain, 2014, February 24. Kim Yuna and the Art of Suffering. Global Post. Retrieved from
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/south-korea/140224/skating-kim-
yuna-korean-suffering-han-sochi

3
Roy Grinker, Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1998), 78.

4
Keumsil Kim Yoon and Bruce Williams, Two Lenses on the Korean Ethos: Key Cultural Concepts and
their Appearance in Cinema (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Company Publishers, 2015)

35

ethos;” writer Patricia Park debuted with a novel
5
in which a key chapter is entitled Han. Han
continues to circulate widely, both in Korea and in Korean-America.
The concept of han indexes an affective complex that is so wide-ranging, adaptive, and
invested with cultural and nationalistic significance, that defining it precisely has been difficult
for scholars. It has been understood not only as the deep-rooted grief, bitterness, and longings
that Koreans experience as the result of a long history of oppression and injustice, but also as the
pain that Koreans experience from their individual life circumstances. Nancy Abelmann suggests
that han connotes “both the collective and the individual genealogical sense of the hardship of
historical experience.”
6
As such, the concept of han harbors a tension between the word’s social
and individual referents. Roy Grinker observes that, “if the symbolic contours of han are
undefinable, so too are the sociological contours, for it can be contained within individuals and
within collectivities.”
7
While a nation does not go through the same psychological processes as
an individual, the Korean concept of han encapsulates how collective trauma and individual
hardship can create a complex feedback loop within the social imaginary. At the individual level,
Choe Gil-seong describes han as a kind of mental state of giving up, resulting from an extensive
experience of frustrating and tragic life-events.
8
At the collective level, Korean-American
novelist Richard E. Kim’s view is representative in his insistence that han is one of the most

5
Patricia Park, Re-Jane (New York, New York: Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 2015).

6
Nancy Abelmann, Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 36-37.

7
Grinker, Korea and Its Futures, 79.

8
Choe Gil-seong, Hanguginŭi han [Han of the korean people] (Seoul: Dosŏch’ulp’an yejin, 1991)

36

important elements in understanding Korean and diasporic Korean cultural texts psychologically
and philosophically.
9

The insistence on the uniqueness of han to the Korean people has a biologistic element to
it— if one is Korean, one is born with han and cannot escape it. The poet Ko Un famously wrote,
“We cannot deny that we were born from the womb of han and raised in the bosom of han.”
10

Korean poet Kim Chiha elaborates a biologistic idea of han when he writes that “accumulated
han is inherited and transmitted, boiling in the blood of the people.” Kim Chiha focuses on the
deep negativity of han, even describing it as “a people eating monster.” For Kim, han is a
“ghostly creature” that “appears as a concrete substance with enormous ugly and evil energy.”
11

Han’s destructive and haunting potential is, not only widely accepted in popular culture and
urban legends, but also by Korean medical professionals. As the Korean psychiatrist I mentioned
implied, suffering is believed to be a part of the blood of Koreans, passed on from one generation
to the next, individual and collective suffering accumulating as time moves on. In Korea, one can
even die of han, from the associated clinically diagnosable disease called hwabyŏng. Hwabyŏng
is cited in Kaplan and Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry as an example of the
“intergenerational transmission of emotions”: “In Korea, there is even a specific culture-bound
diagnosis known as hwabyŏng that translates as anger syndrome complete with identifiable
physical symptoms such as insomnia, fatigue, panic, fear of impending death, indigestion, loss of

9
Richard E. Kim “Plenary lecture” in Asian Voices in English (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 1991), 25.

10
Ko Un, “Hanŭi kŭkpokŭl wihayŏ [For Overcoming Han],” in David Kwang-sun Suh (ed.), Hanŭi
Iyagi [The Story of Han] (Seoul: Borhee, 1988), 306, my translation.

11
Kim Chiha as cited in Nam-dong Suh, “Towards a Theology of Han” in Minjung Theology: People as
the Subjects of History, ed. Committee on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of
Asia (London: Zed Press, 1983), 63-64.

37

appetite, difficulty breathing, palpitations, generalized aches and pains, and a feeling of fullness
in the abdominal region.”
12
A research article found in the PubMed Central database of the
National Center for Biotechnology information describes hwabyŏng as “a cultural syndrome
specific to Koreans and Korean immigrant.”
13
Han and hwabyŏng have even been hypothesized
by Korean-American media correspondents as the possible cause of “two of the six bloodiest
school shootings in American history [carried] out by Korean gunmen,” Seung-hui Cho and One
Go.
14
The medicalization of hwabyŏng is the biologism of han taken to a logical extreme.
Despite the deeply negative and destructive quality of han, it is not a one-dimensional
“bad” affect. It historically has been characterized as also creating complex beauty. In fact, han
not only refers to a consciousness of ongoing trauma and a lack of resolution, but also the means
to its own resolution. Han has an important place in culture because it has become associated
with what makes Korean cultural productions—such as visual art, folk music, traditional
ceramics, literature, and film, among others—uniquely and beautifully Korean. Countless
articles have been written about how the Korean experience of han has a peculiar and distinct
manifestation in cultural forms. Anthropologist Roy Grinker observes that han conceptually
provides “a path for the movement of the present into the past, for a fresh and creative movement

12
Harold I. Kaplan et al., Kaplan and Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 9th ed.
(Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2009).

13
Jieun Lee et al., “A Review of the Korean Cultural Syndrome Hwa-Byung: Suggestions for Theory
and Intervention,” Asia Taepyongyang Sangdam Yongu 4, no. 1 (2014): 49.

14
See Jay Caspian Kang, March 28, 2013. “That Other School Shooting,” The New York Times
Magazine; and Winston Chung, April 10, 2012. “Korean Rage: Stereotype or Real Issue,”
SFGate.

38

from the past and present into the future.”
15
Similarly, literary scholar Cheon I-du insists that
“han has both negativity and transcendence nested within it.”
16
Park Kyong-ni, one of Korea’s
most famous novelists, gave a keynote address in 1994 called “The Feelings and Thoughts of the
Korean People in Literature” at a colloquium at the University of Paris. A quote from it is the
opening epigraph of this chapter. In it she emphasizes how the concept of han subsumes the
feeling of hope as integral to the Korean experience of suffering. It is “the core of life”, from
which are born “acts of han” such as Korean literature. For Park, “Han, which comprises both
sadness and hope, is a feeling unique to the Korean people,” and therefore the soul of Korean
cultural productions.
17

In order to emphasize how integral han is to Korean identity, many scholars have focused
on what they claim is han’s long history. In this particular discourse, the origins of Korean han
have been attributed to every experience of injustice that the country has experienced: Korea’s
purported long history of foreign invasions; colonization; prolonged poverty and starvation under
oppression; the tyranny of ruling classes, first in the feudal caste system as well as later, during
the period of rapid industrialization; the abuses of power by one authoritarian military regime
after another in the postwar period; oppressions of religious ideologies.
18
Though it is true that
han itself is a Sino-Korean character that has been in the Korean language for a long time, it is

15
Roy Grinker, Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1998), 78.

16
Cheon I-du, Hanguk’ munhakkwahan [Han and korean literature] (Seoul: Iuch’ulp’ansa, 1985), 15.

17
Park Kyong-ni, “The Feelings and Thoughts of the Korean People in Literature,” 1994. Retrieved
from
http://www.koreantranslation.com/REPOSITORY/HanTheSoulofKoreanLiterature/tabid/1557/D
efault.aspx

18
see Suh, 1983; Park, 1993, 1996; Lee, 1994; Kim and Choi, 1995; Son, 2000; Joh, 2006; Park, 2008;
Kim Yoon and Williams, 2015.

39

arguably not a specifically Korean characteristic. In fact, according to a Chinese-English
dictionary, the Chinese character han is hen (“hate”) in Chinese, kon (“to bear a grudge”) in
Japanese, han (“frustration”) in Vietnamese, horosul (“sorrowfulness”) in Mongolian, and
korsocuka (“grief”) in Manchurian.
19
While han appears in similar manifestations in other Asian
languages and cultures that incorporate Chinese script, it has taken on decidedly ethnonationalist
and essentialist tones in the Korean context.
My research suggests that its contemporary nationalist, biologistic-oriented meaning
emerged first during the Japanese colonial period as a colonial stereotype.
20
In this chapter, I will
draw out a genealogy of the usage of han within the broader history of the development of
Korean ethnonationalism. I depart from the typical discussion of han as a uniquely Korean
collective feeling of suffering that runs in the blood of all Koreans. I examine how han
originated under the contradictions of coloniality, how it evolved from a colonial construct to its
adoption into Korean ethnonationalism, and how it travels into completely new contexts through
the Korean diaspora. I suggest that tracing the afterlives of the colonial origins of han gives us
a postcolonial understanding of its deployment in culture. Finally, rather than dismissing han as

19
Andrew S. Park, Racial Conflict & Healing: An Asian-American Theological Perspective.
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 10-11.

20
I agree with a small subset of writers and scholars who have suggested that its current usage and
meaning has colonial origins, though none have developed the theory fully. Heather Willoughby
(2000), Andrew Killick (2010), Michael Breen (2004), Hwajoon Joo (2008), and Sunghee Choi
(2011) mention only briefly the possibility that han has more recent origins than is commonly
assumed. The most thorough treatment of this topic in English is a more niche Christian pastoral
care approach by theologian Hellena Moon (2014). Moon problematizes the essentialist
application of the concept of han in the discourse of Korean liberation theology, arguing that it
“conveys the opinions of the Japanese colonialists about Korean subjects during the colonial
period” (p. 420). Moon maintains that accepting han is the equivalent of reinforcing colonialist
opinions about colonized subjects. While Moon’s piece inspired some of the research questions
that led to this article, my focus here is transcultural Korean studies and my conclusions are not
the same.

40

nothing more than a social construct, I instead define han as an affect that encapsulates the grief
of historical memory- the memory of past collective trauma—and that renders itself
racialized/ethnicized and attached to nation.

THE COLONIAL ORIGINS OF HAN
To take han at face value as some kind of originary Korean subjectivity is problematic
from a postcolonial perspective. The idea of nation itself is a recent social construct, and the
formative years of Korea’s nation-oriented consciousness is coeval with its position as a
Japanese colony in the 1900s, after the Japanese themselves imported the idea of nation from the
“West.”
21
The whole notion of “prehistoric Korea” was, according to archeologist Hyung Il Pai,
a colonial product originating with Japanese studies in the Korean peninsula. Despite the
vehemently anti-Japanese stance and patriotic efforts of Korean historians and archeologists to
write a new racial history of Korea’s past, “their theories continue to mirror the main tenets and
methodology of Japanese colonial racial paradigms.”
22
I would like instead to focus on the
processes that produced such an articulation of cultural difference as han. How do these
processes elaborate what Homi Bhabha calls “strategies of selfhood”, both singular and
communal, that initiate new structures of identity as well as processes of collaboration and
contestation? Bhabha warns that the representation of difference “must not be hastily read as the
reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition.”
23
I want to

21
See Anderson, 1983; N. Kwon, 2015; G. Shin; 2006.

22
Hyung-il Pai, Constructing “Korean” Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography,
and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia
Center, 2000), 261.

23
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 2-3.

41

suggest that han is an example of a social construct produced in the colonial articulation of
cultural difference, which has since become naturalized by ethnonational forces.
Scholars often note that the term han itself emerged as a significant ideological concept
during the 1970s, in service of the minjung “people’s” democratic movement as well as other
economic and political activities.
24
Reclaiming authentic Koreanness and traditional culture was
a large part of this discourse. The development of national culture also has been very important
in government policy, from the first republic with President Rhee Syngman and onward with
every administration after that, establishing a practice of heavy government subsidy in the
cultural sector.
25
Some contend that it was during the Park Chung Hee regime that the idea of
han transformed from a personal sense of sorrow and resentment to a broader, national
experience of unrelenting suffering and injustice.
26
In general, the desire for cultural reclamation
was universally championed by the powerful and the powerless alike, and the embrace of han as
Korea’s national ethos served even opposing political discourses.
As a national phenomenon or specifically Korean characteristic, han did not exist in
ancient Korea but was an idea anachronistically imposed on Koreans during the Japanese
colonial period. At the height of Japanese empire flourished a period of enthusiasm for Korean
colonial exotica, known as “the Korea Boom.” The collections of colonial exotica emerged from
a nostalgia for a bygone culture and imperial desires for exotic Koreanness. While it appeared as
genuine appreciation for Korean culture, the Korea Boom and its discourses in fact veiled

24
See Eckert et al.,1990; Abelmann, 1996; Ng, 2013; Moon, 2014.

25
Haksoon Yim, “Cultural identity and cultural policy in South Korea,” International Journal of
Cultural Policy 8, no. 1 (2002): 37-48.

26
See Willoughby, 2000; Killick, 2003.

42

collusion with its domination and destruction. Such colonial contradictions can be detected in the
Japanese “expert” critical commentary. In Intimate Empire, Nayoung Aimee Kwon shows how
this critical commentary was at its core an Orientalist discourse, which Orientalized Koreans
while making the Japanese seem more Western.
27
Kwon focuses on “the colonial modern
subject” such as Korean and Japanese novelists at the colonial contact zones under the shadows
of Western standards of value and developmentalist history.
28
For example, the Korean colonial
writer Kim Saryang, who was a finalist for a Japanese literary award, was praised for capturing
“the peculiar ambience of Koreans.”
29
This “peculiar ambience of Koreans” was in fact part and
parcel of a broader cultural discourse that sought to distinguish Koreans from Japanese. I suggest
that this search for a “peculiar” Korean quality can likewise be detected in Japanese critical
discourse on the Korean “beauty of sorrow” that emerged during the Korea Boom with reference
to Korean ceramics. It bears a remarkable similarity to the concept of han.
The writings of Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889-1961), the foremost “expert” on Korean
ceramics during the colonial period, reveal how apparent admiration of Korean culture is
nevertheless framed in terms of Korea’s inferior racial otherness. Regarding Chosŏn dynasty
pottery, he suggests that the “designs drawn on them are sometimes so crude and primitive that
they might have been done by children. Indeed, one may rightly call them childish- but, strangely
or not, they are beautiful just as they are.”
30
In an essay on the Korean Kizaemon tea bowl, he

27
Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 40-41.

28
Ibid., 11.

29
Ibid., 51.

30
Yanagi Muneyoshi, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty, 1st ed. (Tokyo, Palo
Alto, Calif.: Kodansha International, 1972), 142.

43

writes, “It is impossible to believe that those Korean workmen possessed intellectual
consciousness. It was precisely because they are not intellectuals that they were able to produce
this natural beauty.”
31
Thus, because Koreans are childish, primitive, and lacking in intellect and
taste, Yanagi claims that Japanese artists, try as they might, cannot simulate Korean pottery. In
his role as Korean pottery expert, he appears to praise Korean pottery while also upholding
qualities like ambition, taste, strength and cleverness as essentially Japanese traits.
In addition to describing Koreans as childish and primitive, throughout The Unknown
Craftsman, a collection of Yanagi’s essays spanning Korea’s colonial and early postwar periods,
Yanagi repeatedly employs descriptives for Koreans like, “clumsy,” “plain,” “unagitated,”
“uncalculated”, “harmless,” and “meek.” The discourse of Korean cultural objects relied on
othering Koreans as essentially different from the Japanese. Experts in all fields of Korean
colonial exotica translated cultural objects into figuring Koreans as docile, ignorant, naïve, and
complacent subjects of empire. In a particularly revealing moment in Yanagi’s text, he writes,
“The pieces assume no pretensions, they are simply there, in all their naturalness, looking as if
they would like to say to ingenious modern artists, ‘There is nothing we want. Come and join us.
Everybody will be saved’.”
32
The message here is that Koreans are completely unthreatening and
even invite domination. Koreans require the Japanese interpreter and critic to protect them and to
make the naïve and helpless “unknown craftsmen” known to the world.
After his first trip to Korea in 1916, Yanagi developed a keen interest in Korean art and
defined the nature of the Korean aesthetic as an “aesthetics of sorrow” in 1920. Japanese scholar
Soji Takasaki has written about Yanagi: “Regarding the Korean aesthetic, he defines it as an

31
Ibid., 194.

32
Ibid., 142.

44

‘aesthetics of sorrow,’ or ‘beauty of familiarity,’ and notes the ‘painful history’ behind it.”
33

Yanagi contended that the prevalence of white in Choson ceramics and Korean clothing was
evidence of a national despondency, which he aestheticized as “sorrowful beauty” (hiai no bi)
and “the beauty of that which perishes” (hirobite yukitsutsu aru mono no utsukushisa). In 1922,
Yanagi wrote: “The people, by wearing white clothing, are mourning for eternity…Is not the
paucity of color true proof of the absence of pleasure in life?”
34
He claimed that the art of any
country reflects the psychology of its people, as formed by the natural environment and its
history. Korea’s geographic condition as a peninsula combined with its history of foreign
aggressions has created a Korean essence that is lonely, sorrowful, and superstitious. By contrast,
Japan’s security and comfort created art that was essentially optimistic and playful.
35
Kim Brandt
has written extensively on Yanagi’s discourse of the Korean “beauty of sorrow.” While Yanagi
was very much considered a champion of Korean art, Brandt suggests that a consideration of
Yanagi’s early period of “Korean activism” reveals the process by which Japanese colonialism
reinvented Korean art in Japan in a way that reproduced colonial power.
36
In general, the
writings of Japanese “experts” on Korean cultural objects contributed to a larger body of colonial

33
Soji Takasaki, “Yanagi Muneyoshi-wa Asak’awa T'ak’umi-ŭi hanguk’ mihak’” [Conceptions of the
Korean Aesthetic by Yanagi Muneyoshi and Asakawa Takumi] in Amudo Gaji Anŭn Kil [A
Road No One Has Taken], ed. Incheon Foundation for Arts and Culture (Incheon: Incheon
Foundation for Arts and Culture, 2006), 74.

34
E. Taylor Atkins, Colonialisms: Primitive Selves : Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-
1945 (University of California Press, 2010), 167.

35
Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007), 30-31.

36
Ibid., 713.

45

knowledge about Koreans “in terms that made Korea’s status as a colonial possession of Japan
seem both natural and inevitable.”
37

This characterization of Koreans as perpetually sad spread through the discourse of other
Korean arts. Kitahara Shiroaki, writing in the preface for Kim So-un’s 1929 anthology of Korean
folk songs, wrote: “For several reasons having to do with national conditions and national
character, Korean folk songs are blessed with a bitter irony and sardonic wit, more so than
Japanese folk songs.”
38
Koga Masao, a prominent Japanese composer who was a champion of
Korean folk music, claimed that “an eerie, overarching pathos” was the defining characteristic of
Korean folk songs. Korean folk music did not historically rely on many instruments, therefore
“the peasants sing when they meet for work, they sing when they are sad, and they sing if happy.
It is through songs that they express and console themselves.”
39
We see the influence of this
particular colonial discourse in the contemporary characterization of pansori. Pansori, a popular
Korean art of musical storytelling that originated in seventeenth-century Korea, has come to be
considered a “national” art and symbol of a supposed pure Korean essence. It is frequently
referred to as “the sound of han.”
40

Such characterizations of Koreans served colonial purposes in several ways. First, by
implying that melancholy as a national attribute preceded the Japanese occupation, it naturalized
the suffering of the colonized as something inherent and inevitable. Secondly, insofar as the
melancholy was linked to an idea of Korean helplessness and naïveté, the discourse of the

37
Ibid., 714.

38
Atkins, Colonialisms: Primitive Selves, 167.

39
Ibid.,166.

40
Heather Willoughby, “The sound of han: P’ansori, timbre and a Korean ethos of pain and suffering,”
Yearbook for Traditional Music 0, no. 32 (2000): 17-30.

46

Korean “aesthetics of sorrow” also supported a rationalization of Japan’s position of authority.
Sociologist Gi-Wook Shin indicates that the Japanese believed that “the yellow race together
possessed superior elements, and the only reasons for the present Korean racial decline were bad
government and confining geographical factors.”
41
The innate melancholy of Koreans was just
another sign of their racial decline, justifying the need for Japan’s superior leadership.
On a fundamental level, the characterization of Koreans as a sorrowful people served to
provide a racialized essence that helped support a larger endeavor to categorize the ways in
which Koreans were different from the Japanese. Yanagi’s, Koga’s and Kitahara’s
characterizations of Koreans reflected and helped proliferate the stereotype of malcontent
Koreans (futei senjin). Jinhee Lee’s research on the genealogy of “malcontent Koreans” reveals
the stereotype’s roots in the contradictions of colonial constructions of difference, especially
when Koreans in the metropole increasingly looked more and more like the Japanese in dress
and language and education.
42
This indistinguishability of the colonized from the colonizer led to
increased colonial anxiety of the invisible enemy within, or as Homi Bhabha might describe it,
“almost the same but not quite.”
43
In 1913, Japan’s Ministry of Home Affairs even published a
confidential document to aid the police force in distinguishing Koreans from Japanese. The
Source Material to Distinguish Koreans (Chōsenjin shikibetsu shiryō) pored over meticulous
detail of so-called Korean facial and body features, including things like straighter posture, less

41
Gi-wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press. 2006), 44.

42
Jinhee Lee, “Malcontent koreans (futei senjin): Towards a genealogy of colonial representation of
koreans in the japanese empire,” Studies on Asia, Series IV 3, no. 1 (2013): 117-187.

43
Bhabha, Location of Culture, 127.

47

facial hair, flatter faces, flatter skulls.
44
These stereotypes of malcontent, “bad” Koreans, along
with their contradictory characterizations as sorrowful, hopeless, clownish, and naïve, illustrate
what Homi Bhabha calls “the incalculable colonized subject- half acquiescent, half oppositional,
always untrustworthy.”
45
This highlights the unresolvable problem of cultural difference within
so-called racial sameness for the Japanese colonial authority. Colonial discourse thus
simultaneously produces the colonized as a social reality that is at once “other” and yet entirely
knowable and visible.
The Korea Boom, the discourse of experts on Korean objects/subjects, and the
categorization of Korean racial features all worked hand in hand as types of knowledge that both
supported and were supported by the colonial racialization of Koreans.
Han emerged in a colonial context in which the Japanese colonial authorities, writers,
scholars, critics, etc. were simultaneously and contradictorily trying to both essentialize Koreans
as different from Japanese, yet appeal to their similarities for peaceful assimilation into empire.
Bhabha points out that the enunciation of cultural difference is produced in the colonizer’s
attempt to dominate in the name of cultural superiority, and that such an enunciation often
exhibits the problematic of how, “in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated,
relocated and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily
a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the
artifice of the archaic.”
46
In the colonial Korean context, the discourse of “the beauty of sorrow”
maps onto the artifice of the archaic as unsophisticated, naïve, sad, and hopeless. It is a

44
Lee, “Malcontent Koreans,” 132-133.

45
Bhabha, Location of Culture, 49.

46
Bhabha, Location of Culture, 51.

48

manifestation of the objective of colonial discourse, which is to render the colonized as a
population of racial degenerates in order to justify conquest.

HAN AS ETHNONATIONAL TRANSLATION
This article began with an introduction to an established cultural discourse in Korea that
describes Koreans as a peculiarly sad people. This discourse evokes han as a national
characteristic and attributes the collective misery of Koreans to a history in which they have been
persistently oppressed by external powers. How did the Japanese imposition of “the beauty of
sorrow” translate into han as the so-called “Korean ethos”?
Many Koreans saw Yanagi’s “beauty of sorrow” theory as colonial praise, and the vetting
of their artistic worth and uniqueness. Yanagi succeeded in gaining significant public support in
both Japan and Korea for his various projects to improve Japan-Korea relations through the
cultural preservation and revival of Korea. The Korean intellectual community immediately
showed great interest in Yanagi’s work, resulting in Korean specialists in his theory.
47
The
proliferation of Yanagi’s ideas in Korean academic discourse solidified its place in the
knowledge apparatus, eventually trickling down through the entire education system.
Sunghee Choi, an art education scholar educated in Korea and later, in the United States,
describes the inculcation of the identity of “Korean sorrow.”
48
As a young elementary school
student, she remembers being taught that “the artistic essence of Korean artefacts [sic] lies in

47
Young-pil Kwon, “‘The aesthetic’ in traditional korean art and its influence on modern life,” Korea
Journal 47, no. 3 (2007): 9-34.

48
Sunghee Choi, “Rethinking Korean cultural identities at the National Museum of Korea,” in National
Museums: New Studies from around the World, ed. S.J. Knell (London; New York: Routledge,
2011), 290-301.

49

their embodiment of sorrow- ‘han’.”
49
In college, she frequently heard iterations of the same
discourse, and specifically recalls how Korean ceramics were taught:
I was taught that the aesthetic essence of sorrow is crystallized in the form of Korean
white porcelain known as “Bakja”[sic]. Initially, I believed this idea was common
knowledge: everybody knows what ‘Han’ means to Koreans and how ‘Bakja’ represents
the aesthetic beauty of Korea. I later found that this discourse of sorrow had been
developed by a Japanese art critic, Muneyoshi Yanagi, in 1920, during the Japanese
colonization of Korea and that it had been supported by many colonialists and the Korean
public until quite recently…
50

Choi’s depiction of the inculcation of han onto her consciousness is that it began as soon as she
started schooling, that it was presented to her as a universal truth, so much so that she believed
the idea was common knowledge even to Westerners
51
. What is also noteworthy is that in her
discussion of Yanagi, Sunghee Choi cites Kim Brandt as her source.
52
Interestingly, Kim Brandt,
in all her work on the Japanese colonial construction of the Korean “aesthetic of sorrow,” does
not actually explicitly connect it to the Korean concept of han. Sunghee Choi intuitively
connects it to han herself, because the connection is clear from her own experience of the
discourse within the Korean education system.

49
Ibid., 292.

50
Ibid., 292.

51
I too have had this experience. When I was a college student visiting Korea for a summer “cultural
immersion” program in 1998, an art history professor likewise taught us that traditional Korean
white porcelain ceramics embodied the essence of han. I was also taught that the source of han
was Korea’s position as a vulnerable peninsula, which purportedly has subjected it to a long
history of foreign invasions and colonization.

52
Ibid., 232.

50

The picture we see here, of the colonial racialization of “the beauty of sorrow” becoming
han as the essential “Korean ethos”, is one of Koreans incorporating the logic of dominant power
in order to define themselves. They defined themselves with colonizers’ words. Han illustrates
what Nayoung Aimee Kwon refers to as “the labor of the colonized” to translate themselves into
the imperial language in an attempt to participate in the imperial discursive space. She suggests
that colonial subjects were entrenched in translated, self-divided representations, “compelled to
borrow the language of the hegemonic imperial other.”
53

The anxiety of contamination of culture across colonial borders went both ways. A
pregnant contradiction in the discourse of Japan’s colonial self-legitimization was the idea that
Japanese and Koreans were actually one race. This is evident in the colonial slogan of “Naisen
ittai”, which means “Japan and Korea, One Body”. Japanese media frequently referred to
Koreans as “doho”, or “our brethren.”
54
The colonial policy of “kominka,” or “unified oneness”,
was a politically and culturally targeted imperialization that sought to transform the colonized
into loyal imperial subjects. Not only were Koreans stripped of land and of all economic means
of survival, kominka further threatened them with total erasure when the colonizers rewrote
Korean history, outlawed the Korean language, substituted worship of the Japanese emperor for
native religious practices, and demanded that they adopt Japanese names.

One of the results of
these cultural annihilation policies was Koreans’ fierce insistence on the sanctity of Korean
national identity that persists to this day. Nationalist Koreans, in reaction to these contradictory
discourses, latched onto the racialized differences that were already available in the colonial
sphere as symbols of identity that pushed against the pressures of assimilation and ethnic erasure.

53
Kwon, Intimate Empire, 10.

54
Ibid., 158.

51

Consequently, while the idea of the Korean aesthetic of sorrow helped to legitimize the Japanese
colonial project of helping a sorrowful, naïve people, han is the Korean word that translates this
colonial construct, which Koreans themselves embraced as a special and unique racial essence.
Kwon urges us to remain mindful of how “such an ambivalent and melancholy nostalgic turn in
the colony toward a perceived and actual loss of its culture” fed a desire to construct and
maintain symbols of Koreanness as “a fetishistic placeholder for the absent nation.”
55
Kwon
points to the kind of psychical dynamic that I believe would have primed Koreans’ incorporation
of han into ethnonational discourse. I would add that colonial modern subjects not only desired
to construct symbols of Korean tradition, but to also authenticate their feelings as part and parcel
of a racial imaginary that distinguished Koreans from Japanese in an essential, biologistic way.
The idea of han then translated itself into the discourse of ethnonationalism within a pervasively
biologistic understanding of the Korean people as a nation.
Jinhee Lee’s work on the “malcontent Koreans” colonial stereotype and Nayoung Aimee
Kwon’s work on colonial Korean writers have been pathbreaking for Korean postcolonial
studies. Yet both Lee and Kwon tell a story of unidirectional influence of colonial constructs, of
how the Japanese imposed them against the will of Koreans. I want to emphasize here, in the
context of the concept of han, that the act of translation is often created together between the
colonizer and the colonized, initiating a string of translations across time that can bury the
genealogical traces of a colonial construct. The colonized coopted the language of the colonizer.
Reading Franz Fanon’s claim that the mastery of the colonizer’s language brings the colonized
“closer to being a real human being,” Rey Chow suggests that this is a biosemiotics “in which

55
Kwon, Intimate Empire, 108.

52

language possession is translated into and receives its value as skin color.”
56
The affects of loss
need to be examined in light of how postcolonial languages and cultures are in “the translational
process of being dismantled, abandoned, reorganized, and/or reclaimed.”
57
The “sorrowful
beauty” discourse was a racialized languaging encounter. The very racialized differences that
were constructed to validate the colonial hierarchy were used by the colonized as a badge of
honor of their uniqueness and right to nationhood. The meanings and symbols of culture have no
primordial unity or fixity because of the very deconstructive conditions of enunciation to begin
with. Han is an example of how the colonized worked with the contradiction inherent in the
colonial enterprise.
Gi-Wook Shin’s research in his book Ethnic Nationalism in Korea in many ways picks
up from the point in history where Nayoung Aimee Kwon and Jinhee Lee leave off.
58
Kwon’s
and Lee’s works illustrate how Japanese ethnicized Koreans as part of the machinery of colonial
racism at the same time that they tried to argue that they were the same racial group. Shin’s work
shows how Koreans ethnicized themselves in reaction to this colonial racism. Read together, we
see a larger picture of how strategies of colonial culture like the “aesthetics of sorrow” were
appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew by the colonized as han.
In Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, Shin argues that “the articulation of the Korean nation
through such ethnicization or racialization was no doubt a reaction to Japanese colonial racism
that sought to subsume the Korean identity under the rubric of the transnational notion of

56
Rey Chow, Not like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014), 3.

57
Ibid., 11.

58
Shin, Ethnic Nationalism.

53

empire.”
59
Korean nationalists grasped on to essential qualities that distinguished Koreans from
Japanese in reaction to the debates regarding whether Korean and Japanese were of the same
racial group, shared ancestry, and also Koreans’ place in the Japanese social hierarchy. The
biologistic understandings of race/ethnicity and nation emerged under the influence of social
Darwinism, which was in wide circulation at that time amongst colonial Japanese and Koreans.
Kato Hiroyuki (1836-1916) was highly influential in shaping East Asian understandings of social
Darwinism. His work was introduced to Korea in the 1880s.
60
Ideas of social Darwinism,
coupled with traditional Confucian notions of kinship, in which the state-nation is a family, or a
family state, set up Korean nationalists to see Japanese racial theory as simply a justification of
their assimilation policy; they pointed to the colonial reality of inequality and discrimination and
“insisted on the purity and uniqueness of the Korean race through notions of distinct blood and
ancestry”.
61
Shin specifies that colonialism alone did not lead to Korean ethnonationalism. The
specific style of colonial racism shaped its development to emphasize the uniqueness of Koreans
as a race.
62

Shin traces the development of national identity based on a shared bloodline and how
South Koreans have come to harbor a racialized image of the nation that centers on the belief of
common blood and ancestry. In Korea, the most formative years of nation-oriented
consciousness developed within the crucible of colonialism such that ethnic nationalism

59
Ibid., 22.

60
Ibid., 29.

61
Ibid., 22.

62
Ibid., 42.

54

expressed itself as anticolonialism.
63
“It was not until the late 1920s when the Korean nation was
ethnicized,” Shin points out.
64
The late 1800s saw the rise of Japan and the decline of China,
alongside the increasing presence of the West in the East Asian region. The discourse of
modernity was always linked with the emergence of nationalisms. As the concept of nation
increasingly became the dominant global categorical identity in the 1900s, in Korea the idea of
nation itself took on a specifically racialized, ethnicized valence. “Race, ethnicity, and nation
were conflated, and this is reflective in the multiple uses of the term minjok, the most widely
used term for “nation”, which can also refer to “ethnie” and “race”.”
65
Perceived ethnic
homogeneity contributed greatly to how nationalism developed with a strongly biologistically
ethnic orientation.
Ethnic nationalism’s processes took the colonial origin of “the beauty of sorrow” and
produced han as an ethnonational, biologistic badge of Korean uniqueness. Korean historian
Paek Namun believed that Korea had a long history of ethnic unity unprecedented in world
history that became “objective elements” in the formation of the modern nation. He agreed with
writer Yi Kwangsu’s concept of the Korean nation as a “unitary nation with common blood,
territory, language, culture, historical destiny for a thousand years, which is exceptional in world
history.”
66
Examination of the nationalist rhetoric of both North Korea’s president Kim Il Sung
and South Korea’s president Syngman Rhee emphasizes that the Korean people belong to the
same ethnic nation, or minjok, and share a single bloodline (p. 152). Ethnic homogeneity is itself

63
Ibid., 18.

64
Ibid., 125.

65
Ibid., 4.

66
Ibid., 76.

55

often implied as the raison d’etre of unification proposals in both Koreas. Korea’s famous
intellectual Paik Nak-Chung has stressed that ethnic forces in Korea can serve to overcome
divisions and achieve national unification. He claims that the experience with U.S. and Japanese
empire instilled on both sides “a relatively progressive national consciousness” among Koreans
and inflicted “shared suffering” (a clear reference to han, which Paik translated into English) that
can potentially produce “a peninsula-wide solidarity movement in which national and democratic
forces coincide.”
67
Shin’s research findings show that Koreans have a “stronger attachment to
ethnic Koreans living in foreign countries” than to “ethnic non-Koreans living in Korea.”
68
Shin
attributes this to the strongly blood-based notion of citizenship that developed in response to
colonial racism.

HAN IN THE DIASPORA
The work of Korean-American artists and writers likewise communicate a strong
attachment to Korea. Han is a concept that is frequently invoked with regard to Koreans in
America, with an added emphasis on its untranslatability. In a Los Angeles Times review of
Park Kyong-ni’s book Land, Korean-American writer K. Connie Kang centers her description of
the novel on the idea of han: “Park explores the Korean soul. Central to “Land” is han, which has
no English equivalent. Han, the Korean tenet of an eternal woe, unrequited love and unending
hope, lives in all Park's characters.”
69
Kang’s review perpetuates not only the idea of han as the

67
Paik Nak-Chung, “Habermas on national unification in Germany and Korea,” New Left Review 0, no.
219 (1996): 14-21.

68
Shin, Ethnic Nationalism, 234.
69
K. Connie Kang, “Trapped by Han : LAND,” Los Angeles Times (1996, September 15), emphasis
mine. Retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/1996-09-15/books/bk-43990_1_park-kyong-ni

56

collective “soul” of Koreans, but also its uniqueness and complete otherness to Westerners. In an
episode of the television show The West Wing entitled “Han”, a visiting North Korean pianist
teaches President Bartlet the word while requesting asylum in the United States. Bartlet reflects
on what could have been written by Park Kyong-ni herself: “There is no literal English
translation. It’s a state of mind. Of soul, really. A sadness. A sadness so deep no tears will come.
And yet still there’s hope.” D. Bannon, a professional Korean-English translator, discusses the
difficulty of translating han into English, citing it as one example of “how not all concepts can be
translated” and that it is often preferable to leave the foreign word as-is in an English
translation.
70
Bannon relies on the description of han by Korean film critic Ahn Byung-Sup, who
in a 1987 article about humor in Korean film, writes that “Han is frequently translated as sorrow,
spite, rancor, regret, resentment or grief, among many other attempts to explain a concept that
has no English equivalent” (emphasis mine).
This idea of untranslatability and the claim to a unique racial “state of mind” or “Korean
soul” brings up the question: How does han travel and get translated into a completely new
context in the Korean diaspora, where ethnonationalism is not so straightforward, where Korean-
Americans are a minority group, where the Korean language and culture itself is again made into
the other, as it was in the Japanese imperial context?
Returning to Ahn Byung-Sup’s description of han can give us some insight into these
questions. Addressing a non-Korean or “Western” audience for an English-language publication,
Ahn describes han with the typical sweeping generalizations: “Han is an inherent characteristic
of the Korean character and as such finds expression, implied or explicit, in nearly every aspect

70
D. Bannon, “Unique korean cultural concepts in interpersonal relations,” Translation Journal 12, no.
1 (2008), emphasis mine. Retrieved from http://translationjournal.net/journal/43korean.htm

57

of Korean life and culture…Han is held close to the heart, hoping and patient but never
aggressive. It becomes part of the blood and breath of a person.”
71
He presents han in a
biologistic way that implies an inescapable racial essence. It is important to him to emphasize
again and again that han is an inherent trait in all Koreans, to the extent that it even flows in their
blood. Because Ahn himself is a South Korean academic, his description of han is deemed
authentic and credible by non-Korean scholars of the Korean language like D. Bannon. Bannon
cites Ahn in a translation journal, others cite Bannon’s citation of Ahn, and the idea proliferates,
even ending up as a citation in the Wikipedia entry on “Han (cultural).” These examples are a
small window into the larger picture of how the discourse of han gets passed on into American
contexts. The different ways in which the idea of han circulates show not only how Koreans and
Korean-Americans see themselves racially, but also how they present Koreanness on the world
stage. In the American context, where Korean immigrants and their children are regarded as
perpetual foreigners, the biologistic uniqueness of han is expressed as untranslatable. I see this as
a postcolonial recapitulation and legacy of the dynamic of han that began in the era of Japanese
occupation, when Koreans then too embraced signs of essential racial difference in order to be
seen within a dominant culture that threatened to erase them.
Putting aside the problems of racial essentialism for just a moment, I would like instead
to examine how han has been employed in the Korean-American diasporic context in order to
better grasp what it is as a phenomenon. Korean-American studies scholars tend to define han
with a political angle that calls out racial and neocolonial injustices. Grace Cho, in Haunting the
Korean Diaspora, defines han as “accumulated grief and rage” and “the knot of emotional

71
Ahn Byung-Sup, “Humor in Korean film,” East-West Film Journal 2, no. 1 (1987): 90-98.

58

residue” of Korean history.
72
She circles around the concept of han in order to connect the far-
reaching, haunting legacies of the abuse of Korean women under occupation, first as “comfort
women” prostitutes for the Japanese Imperial Army, and then later as “yangongju” prostitutes for
American military camptowns after World War II. For Cho, han has to do with how the trauma
and silencing of exploited Korean women continues to haunt their lives and, by extension, the
lives of those around them. The yangongju’s han affects both those who know about her trauma,
and those who don’t; han is the ghostly excess remains of trauma that cannot be assimilated.
73

Likewise, in “Home is Where the Han is” Elaine Kim defines han as “a Korean word that means,
loosely translated, the sorrow and anger that grow from the accumulated experiences of
oppression.”
74
She uses han as a starting point from which to discuss the “psychic damage” of
the 1992 Los Angeles upheavals (commonly referred to as the “Rodney King Riots”) on the
Korean-American community that it devastated. Kim argues that the news media attention on
Korean-Americans during the so-called “riots”, and on the tension between African-Americans
and Korean-Americans served to divert attention from the roots of racial violence in the U.S. She
attributes interethnic tensions to the fact that “Koreans and African Americans were kept
ignorant about each other by educational and media institutions that erase or distort their
experiences and perspectives.”
75
She insists on transnational solidarities and in remembering

72
Grace Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 25, 191.

73
Ibid., 160-161.

74
Elaine Kim, “Home is where the han is: A Korean American perspective on the Los Angeles
upheavals,” Social Justice 20, no. 1-2 (1993): 1.

75
Ibid., 8.

59

global histories of oppression together so that “our han might be released and we might be freed
to dream fiercely of different possibilities.”
76

Korean-American literature often invokes han thematically as an expression both of the
experience of perpetual foreignness as well as the psychic impact of Korean history on individual
lives. In Re Jane by Patricia Park, the main character Jane frequently invokes han as integral to
her experience of life as a Korean orphan and misfit in America: “My han. It was always the first
emotion that leaped from my gut and licked the back of my throat, although life…had taught me
to swallow it back down.”
77
She describes it as “utterly untranslatable…a fiery anguish roiling in
the blood, the result of being wronged.”
78
Re Jane grapples with issues of identity, race and
culture from transnational and transhistorical perspectives, and han seems to encapsulate these
struggles as a failure to translate her identity into any culture, whether American or Korean.
There are similar themes in Jane Jeong Trenka’s memoir, The Language of Blood.
79

Trenka describes the painful experience of being a Korean adoptee in white America, where her
American family unconsciously imposes a strict management of her affect. In a domestic sphere
in which racial difference and the racial past remain unaffirmed by those closest to her, Trenka
feels han all the more deeply:
What were my parents to know of the inescapable voice of generational memory, of
racial memory, of landscape—if they had never been separated from their own people?
…They did not know this emotion or the word for it—han—but nevertheless it climbed

76
Ibid., 17.

77
Patricia Park, Re Jane (New York, New York: Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 2015), 242-243.

78
Ibid., 229.

79
Jane Trenka, The Language of Blood: A Memoir (St. Paul, Minn: Graywolf Press, 2005).

60

from the other side of the earth, through the bottoms of her feet, through her legs and
body like the columns of a building, and was crystallized in sadness at an impasse in the
throat, where a new and forgetful life became a tourniquet.
80

Trenka elegiacally biologizes han in her attempt to express her profound experience of
alienation, likening it to an inescapable blood-based inheritance that she was born with:
I absorbed things from you while in your womb, Umma. How else can I explain it? …
Through the amniotic fluid and the faint light coming through the walls of your belly, I
understood the brute emotions of fear and hunger. I absorbed them, made them part of
my body, made them part of my life's fabric.
81

Trenka felt that she absorbed both the sense of Korea as her homeland as well as the collective
han of the Korean people involuntarily from her mother’s womb, and that her place in the United
States will always be that of an outsider.
In Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman
82
, the Korean American protagonist, Beccah,
listens to a tape her mother Akiko had recorded for her as a last message before she died. As a
girl, Akiko had been sold into prostitution for the Japanese Imperial Army as a “comfort
woman.” She escaped and was taken in by American missionaries, one of whom married her and
took her to the United States. Upon her first hearing of the tape, Beccah can only understand a
few words: “I scribbled words I recognized— kok, han, chesa, chudang, Saja, poji.”
83
This scene

80
Ibid., 237-238.

81
Ibid., 187-188.

82
Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman (New York: Viking, 1997).

83
Ibid., 92. Kok: wailing, chesa: ancestral rites, chudang: evil spirit, Saja: Death messenger, poji:
“pussy” (obscenity)

61

highlights the multiple layers of othering that Beccah comes up against in her apprehension—
apprehension in both the sense of “anxiety regarding” as well as “understanding”—of her
mother. Akiko speaks a language that is Other and struggles in the dominant tongue. Beccah not
only feels the effects of this linguistic barrier whenever her childhood friends mocked Akiko’s
accent, but also whenever she cannot understand the full extent of Akiko’s speech. It is
noteworthy that the words she does understand, which include han among them, are all
connected to blood and death. These moments, in which Beccah struggles with her mother’s
Other language, is an example of what Rey Chow calls “languaging as a postcolonial
experience.”
84
There is a relationship between language and the racial objectification of Akiko,
which then becomes important in Beccah’s own racial subjectivization as an Asian American.
The experience of these Korean American characters with the idea of han is a picture of the
lingering historical, postcolonial experience of being caught among unequal languages. Chow
calls this the “lingualepidermal” link, challenging us to remember that language can be used not
only for building one’s own personal identity but also for injuring or destroying the identity of
others.
Having laid out how han originated as a social construct that racialized Koreans in the
service of legitimizing colonial domination, and how it was co-opted and translated into Korean
ethnonationalistic cultural and political discourses, what does tracing its afterlives in both Korea
and the Korean diaspora reveal about what it actually represents today? Is it simply a social
construct, or has it come to represent something that Koreans alone experience?

84
Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker, 192.

62

ON THE KOREANNESS OF HAN
This essay has shown already the widespread tendency to claim that han is uniquely
Korean. There also have been claims, however, that han is not uniquely Korean. Hellena Moon,
for example, suggests that han “is transcultural, intercultural, and extant in all human
communities.”
85
She claims that it is not the uniqueness of han that makes it untranslatable, but
the unique experience of suffering that in and of itself is always untranslatable, and that
melancholy marks any colonial and postcolonial context.
86

I would like to suggest that there is truth in both claims. Han is an affect, a habit, a
practice, and an imaginary based within the sounds and scripts of colonial and postcolonial
historical experience. Such historical experiences are not unique to Korea, and the affect that han
analogically indexes is one that is experienced by multiple groups around the world. Richard
Wright once wrote a description of African Americans that sounds uncannily like Korean han:
“most Negroes had embedded in their flesh and bones some peculiar propensity towards
lamenting and complaining.”
87
One journalist suggests that “an entire genre of American music
arguably coalesced around the notion [of han]: the Blues, sung by African-Americans in the
Deep South”.
88

Han has been invoked in contexts of interracial solidarity by Korean American and non-
Korean American academics and blogger activists alike, following tragic events like the Rodney

85
Hellena Moon, “Genealogy of the modern theological understanding of han,” Pastoral Psychology 63,
no. 4 (2014): 420.

86
Ibid., 432. See also Joh, 2006; Chung, 2005; Lee, 2002 for other examples of this type of argument.

87
Richard Wright as quoted in Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford; New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 14.

88
C. Volle. “Behind the Myth: Is “Han” Uniquely Korean?” Gwangju News (2015, March 27).
http://www.gwangjunewsgic.com/online/behind-the-myth-is-han-uniquely-korean/2015

63

King upheaval
89
,

the Trayvon Martin case
90
, Freddie Gray’s death
91
, Ferguson
92
. In all these
situations, han is described as a collective sense of grief in the face of injustice that both Korean-
Americans and African-Americans have experienced in different ways. The Huffington Post even
discusses the idea of han in its analysis of international Korean pop star Psy’s collaboration with
Snoop Dogg in the song “Hangover”; the journalist invokes han as the lynchpin from which to
suggest that the collaboration “could be understood as a metaphor for African American and
Asian American relations.”
93

Han is certainly more obviously central to the song “Hood”, a collaboration between
Korean rapper Tablo and African-American hip hop artist Joey Bada$$. Tablo begins the song
declaring, “Where I’m from/ han is the name we gave to struggle and pain/ This river runs
through our city like it runs through our veins/ To us it’s the one thing above all things…”
Playing with Korean homonyms, han not only is the name of “our struggle and pain” but also the
name of the main river than runs through Seoul. He also plays on Korean words and their

89
Kim, “Home is Where the Han Is.”

90
K. Ellis, “Undercurrents: A Perspective on Why the Trayvon Case Aches,” Prophets of Culture (2013,
July 18). Retrieved from http://drcarlellisjr.blogspot.com/2013/07/undercurrents-perspective-on-
why.html

91
J.W. Dominick. “Collective Han: A Framework for Understanding Race Riots and the
White Response” (2015, April 27). Retrieved from
http://lifereconsidered.com/2015/04/27/collective-han-a-framework-for-understanding-race-
riots-and-the-white-response/

92
S. Jung, “Why Ferguson Matters to Asian Americans,” Race Files (2014, August 20). Retrieved from
http://www.racefiles.com/2014/08/20/why-ferguson-matters-to-asian-americans/

93
G. J. Kim, “Psy’s “Hangover:” Challenging Asian American and African American Relations,”
Huffington Post (2014, July 17). Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/grace-jisun-
kim/psys-hangover-challenging_b_5592655.html

64

homonyms in English: “And that’s that shit right there, what you call “Soul” is a city right here/
From Hongdae to Bedstuy/ we’re born from the same pain, shed alike tears, yeah.” He declares
the city of Seoul a city of “soul”, with “soul” here invoking a meaning and usage historically
used to indicate “the emotional or spiritual quality of African American life and culture,
especially as manifested in music.”
94
The Oxford English Dictionary traces this particular
meaning’s origins to references describing late 1940s Black jazz. In just a couple of words, this
lyrical move suddenly aligns Korean and Black experiences and cultures.
The song is about the struggle to make money in different parts of the world. From the
point of view of Korean han, making money is experienced as a win or lose situation: “For the
money, we fight, fall but overcome, that’s why we call it ‘won’.” Tablo plays with the English
homonym of the Korean word “won”, which indicates the Korean currency at the same time that
it is the past tense of the English word “win”. He paints images of his mother (ŏm-ma) and father
(a-ppa) struggling to get food on the table and working graveyard shifts—images that could just
as easily be seen from “Hongdae to Bedstuy”, neighborhoods in Seoul and Brooklyn
respectively. Koreans and Blacks are “born from the same pain, shed alike tears,” referring to the
transmission of han across generations and in different cultures. The song ends with the refrain,
this time with Joey Bada$$ voice layered beneath Tablo’s. Together they chant: “And that’s that
shit right there, what you call “Soul” is a city right here/ From Hongdae to Bedstuy, we’re born
from the same pain, shed alike tears, yeah/ Some call it pain, we call it sarang man/ Middle
finger to the hate and the broken minds that can’t relate.” When Tablo and Joey Bada$$ say
these lyrics together, the threads of the song that hint at the common experience of han for
Koreans and Blacks weave together at the lines “some call it pain, we call it sarang”. Sarang is

94
Oxford English Dictionary, “soul,” definition 3c.

65

the Korean word for love. Their experience of han opens into a brotherly love that takes a stand
against “haters” and “broken minds that can’t relate”.
Tablo’s song illustrates how “racial wounds” can be inherited across time and even
across racial groups. In The Melancholy of Race, Anne Anlin Cheng asserts that “the social and
subjective formations of the so-called racialized or minority subject are intimately tied to the
psychical experience of grief.”
95
Han is not just a social construct; it names an embodied
experience of shared grief. While Cheng focuses on how racial melancholia helps us comprehend
aspects of American racial culture, here I adapt her work in American studies to a broader
transnational scope. Following Cheng’s framework, the Korean American position would be the
racial other whom white culture contradictorily rejects at the same time that it attaches to it. This
leaves the racial other in a suspended position of paradox.
96
I would add that the Korean
diasporic position of paradoxical suspension is further complicated and aggravated by its
position as a racial other with an “other” racialized history that haunts it. That “other” history
itself has made a transpacific crossing from a nation that has its own form of racial melancholia;
Korea may not be white-dominant, but it has been beset with persistent collective traumas from
both within and without that have produced forms of racial grief and loss, of which I believe han
is one exemplar.
Cheng’s psychoanalytic model of melancholia also helps us understand han not only as a
symptom, but also as a “dynamic process with both coercive and transformative potentials for a
political imagination.”
97
Cheng points out that, while much energy has been devoted to

95
Cheng, Melancholy of Race, x.

96
Ibid., xi.

97
Ibid., xi.

66

deconstructing categories such as gender and race, much less attention has been directed toward
the ways in which individuals and communities “remain invested in maintaining such categories,
even when such identities prove to be prohibitive or debilitating.”
98
Jenny Wills makes a similar
point when, from the perspective of adoption studies, she problematizes the ubiquitous tendency
of scholars to dismiss any phenomenon that is essentialist.
99
The dominant predisposition of
everyday people to fixate on origins and biological understandings of self is in itself worth
critical examination. Wills argues that this typical academic “anti-essentialist” posture is enabled
by “an invisible privileging of certain bodies in certain atmospheres of power.”
100
Her point is
that the discourse of anti-essentialism has its own elitist blind spot: it assumes a neutral, default
subject for whom “ancestry and origins are both coherent and reliable.”
101
Regarding han, the
anti-essentialist perhaps would assert that we should work to erase the word from everyday
language because it only perpetuates racial stereotypes. I do agree that essentialist notions of han
are harmful; we have seen how uncritical, essentialist uses of han can work to maintain racial
othering, systemic injustices, and state power. However I argue that a critical han is different.

98
Ibid., 7.

99
Jenny Wills, “Paradoxical essentialism: reading race and origins in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Asian
adoption memoirs,” The Canadian Review of American Studies 46, no. 2 (2016): 202-222.

100
Ibid., 204.

101
Ibid.

67

CRITICAL HAN
Han is not uniquely Korean as an affect of postcolonial sorrow and mourning. Neither is
han uniquely Korean in the sense of racial or biological essence. However I argue that a critical
han must recognize how han is also absolutely uniquely Korean: it is a Korean word in which its
current usage is a postcolonial translation of a Japanese colonial construct. Critical han aims to
repeatedly emphasize how the term itself is embedded in a specific history that we should not
forget. The word han carries within it a history of unmitigated collective traumas in Korea,
which have created a very specific social and national imaginary in Korea and Korean diasporas.
While han is not transmitted by mechanisms of blood inheritance, it is still evidently
transmitted through generations and collectively. Teresa Brennan, in The Transmission of Affect,
shows how the emotions and affects of one person or group can be absorbed by another. Her
research demonstrates the ability to borrow or share states of mind through affective transfer
based on constant interaction between individuals and their physical, social, and cultural
milieus.
102
Brennan defines feelings “as sensations that have found the right match in words.”
103

Han is the word for sorrow in reaction to historical injustice against those who identify as
Korean. Han is an example of how history becomes internalized in individuals while at the same
time creating horizontal connections of empathy and identification. For Brennan, affects are “in
the flesh” and manifest themselves as sensations as well as thoughts. Affects can pass through
the atmosphere of a place from one body to another, psychic incursions that weaken the
boundary of the self. Brennan’s theory is a multidimensional and interactive model of
subjectivity that describes how han can be transmitted among individuals within Korean society,

102
Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004).

103
Ibid., 5.

68

where phenotypical racialized resemblance synergizes with historical grief to produce a racial
sense of affect.
At the same time, affect theory also applies in the context of diaspora, where han passes
through the atmospheres of kinship structures (whether biological or adoptive, via positive or
negative influences) and in interaction with a sociocultural and political milieu that largely
alienates them. Diasporas carve out, as David Eng argues, “other psychic pathways of
displacement and affiliation, by demarcating alternative material structures and psychic
formations that demand a new language for family and kinship.”
104
Han is one such pathway of
psychic formation that shows our need to move beyond structuralist accounts of kinship that
emphasize the Oedipus complex as the primary psychic structure regulating the emergence of the
social. Han emerges differently in postcolonial/neocolonial Korea and Korean diasporas as the
exigencies of identity embedded in a history of persistent collective traumas influence ideas of
kinship, nation, and race. The inter-ethnic discourse of han is an example of how racial
identification can be an expression of mourning and solidarity, even as it continues to evolve
from its origin as a biologistic racial colonial construct. Critical han is one nexus in which we
see how collective grief can play a constitutive role in transnational racial-ethnic subject
formations.
Although the current meaning of han certainly originated as a colonial construct of the
Korean “beauty of sorrow,” I argue that today it is an affect that encapsulates the grief of
historical memory- the memory of past collective trauma—and that renders itself
racialized/ethnicized and attached to the imagined community of nation. The “beauty of sorrow”
was a construct imposed on Koreans, but its translation into han described then and describes

104
David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham
[N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2010), 16.

69

now an actual affect that is an experience of history. Even though han, let alone race itself, are
social constructs, critical han turns a magnifying glass on to the ways in which race and racial
difference continue to saturate our material and psychic lives.

70

2

GENERATIONS OF SEPARATIONS:
TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEORY OF DIASPORA

This chapter reconceptualizes the significant term diaspora as an experience of perceived
interrupted kinship. It makes an intervention in the debates about the definition of diaspora by
attending to the way in which it is a phenomenon, rooted in a particular kind of experience and
consciousness. I argue that a phenomenology of postmemory—the “transmission” of one’s
memories to others—can rescue the term diaspora from its over-extensions and case-specific
limitations. I turn to the work of Korean-American poet Suji Kwock Kim, both to probe the
dynamics of diasporic, postmemorial processes and to reveal the inherent ethics of memory at
the core of diasporic relationality. In my view, Kim’s work moves away from identity politics
toward a vision of justice that cuts across nation, ethnicity, received identities, and official
histories.
In common usage, diaspora typically refers to those who sustain a sense of connection to
both where one is from and where one is, both one’s “homeland” and one’s “nation of
residence.”
1
A second-generation “Korean-American”, for example, is typically regarded (and
often regards oneself) as being originally “from” Korea even though he or she was born and
raised in the United States. Among Korean-Americans, Korea is often referred to as the
“motherland”. This particular notion of diaspora is problematic, however, for a couple of
reasons. First of all, it poses as a universalizing category founded on the assumption of unified,

1
Lok C.D. Siu, Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 4.

71

“authentic” ethnicity as well as on myths of origin. Secondly, the postgenerations of immigrant
families cannot unproblematically be considered diasporic in the sense of where one “is from”
and where one is, since what constitutes their “homeland” is disputable. There is no doubt,
however, that many second-generation children of parents who have migrated from a different
place feel a sense of affinity and affective attachment to their parents’ cultures and places of
origin. In my view, what makes for this affinity, however, is not so much race or ethnicity in
itself as it is feelings of kinship. Diaspora is at its core an experience of what a subject perceives
as interrupted kinship, as refracted through intersubjective practices of memory. Constructs of
race and ethnicity reinforce and provide shape for such diasporic formations.
What link, is there, if any, between diaspora and memory? I suggest that memory can
help us reformulate what we mean when we speak of diaspora. There has been much debate over
the definition of diaspora in an effort to curb the explosive proliferation of meanings it has taken
on in the last couple of decades. Once its use expanded beyond its application to “dispersed”
Jewish and Armenian communities, the term “diaspora” evolved from being a proper noun to a
common noun synonymous with “dispersion” in general. Scholars like Khachig Tölölyan
2
have
rightly called attention to how the ease with which diaspora is used as a synonym for a myriad of
related phenomena blurs significant distinctions that should be addressed. What is at stake is the
potential for “diaspora” to continue to be an enabling and productive critical term that connects
histories of displacements with questions of power, identification, race/ethnicity and citizenship,
among others.

2
Khachig Tölölyan, “The Contemporary Discourse of Diaspora Studies,” Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 3 (2007): 647–55.

72

One typical approach to this problem has been to develop a list of characteristics which
are intrinsic to the dynamics of diaspora and which transcend each and every individual case.
3

The problem with this approach is that most existing definitions formed along these lines are too
categorical and reductive. They are too often informed by teleological and idealist
understandings of the nation-state as well as by an essentialist tendency to see diasporas as
unitary actors and “bona fide actual entities.”
4

On the other end of the spectrum, postcolonial critics like Stuart Hall and James Clifford
avoid a definition altogether in favor of an emphasis on the “necessary heterogeneity and
diversity”
5
of diasporic identity and the hybridity, fluidity, and constantly changing nature of
diasporic experience. Rogers Brubaker argues that we should think of diaspora as primarily
linguistic—“an idiom, a stance, a claim”—and as such, a category of practice rather than
substance.
6
Stéphane Dufoix goes so far as to suggest that the term diaspora is “theoretically
lifeless” and not in the least useful for any role other than as “a rallying cry” that tries to give
coherence and visibility to a group.
7
The problem with the kinds of definitions on this end of the
spectrum is that they are so open and abstract that they lack any specificity or relevance to
diaspora as an actual social phenomenon of connections between communities often born of
displacement, loss and mourning. I find Lily Cho’s formulation of diaspora helpful, as she very
eloquently observes: “Diaspora brings together communities not quite nation, not quite race, not

3
Kim Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora 10, no. 2 (2001): 189–219.

4
Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 1 (2005): 10.

5
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed.
Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 235.

6
Brubaker, “Diaspora,” 12.

7
Stéphane Dufoix, Diasporas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 107.

73

quite religion, not quite homesickness, yet they still have something to do with nation, race,
religion, longings for homes which may not exist. There are collectivities and communities that
extend across geographical spaces and historical experiences. There are vast numbers of people
who exist in one place and yet feel intimately related to another.”
8
There are. How diasporas
become indexical and observable in this way is what concerns me in this chapter.
Whether too categorical or too open, a common issue is that current definitions ignore the
way in which diaspora is a phenomenon and a lived experience. I agree with Lily Cho that
diasporas are “not just there”, that they are not simply “collections of people” or “objects of
analysis” to be identified and classified.
9
I do, however, want to take her thesis that “diaspora is
a condition of subjectivity”, and push it further. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that to
be diasporic is a condition of subjectivity, and that diaspora as a social phenomenon emerges
from such conditions of subjectivity. In this essay I would like to focus on what creates both
diasporic subjectivity and its passage through inter-subjectivity to the formation of “diasporas”.
An important concept that has not been adequately explored in this respect is that of the role of
memory, and specifically postmemory.
This chapter explores the key role of postmemory in creating the phenomenon of
diaspora, which I argue must be understood as a phenomenon that emerges when displaced
subjects who experience the loss of an “ origin” (whether literal or symbolic)
perpetuate identifications associated with those places of origin in subsequent generations
through the mechanisms of postmemory. We will first turn to the work of Korean-American
poet Suji Kwock Kim in order to illustrate the profound force and complexity of postmemory in

8
Lily Cho, “The Turn to Diaspora,” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (2007): 13,
emphasis mine.

9
Ibid., 14.

74

creating a diasporic consciousness. I will then move from my analysis of her work toward
elaborating a new theory of diaspora.

GENERATIONS OF POSTMEMORY AND DIASPORA
The poems in Suji Kwock Kim’s Notes from the Undivided Country
10
represent an array
of voices, vast geographies and multiple historical conjunctures, addressing topics as complex
and varied as colonialism, war, rape, love, family, migration and race. Despite such diverse
content, the poems are unified in a noteworthy way: all the poems
11
use either the first-person
(“I”, “my”, “we”, “our”) or the second person (“you”, “your”) perspective. The effect of this
poetic choice is that, taken together and in light of one another, the poems create the impression
of a patchwork oral history passed down through generations. Poems dedicated to the author’s
mother (“Translations from the Mother Tongue”), father (“Fragments of the Forgotten War”),
grandmother (“Borderlands”), and her great-grandparents (“Resistance”), or with the indication
of specific dates, like “(August, 1950)” in “Chasm” give the impression that the poems represent
actual events that have been passed down to the author through family narratives. The “I” in the
poems switches from one persona to another, including a diasporic contemporary “I” who is the
receiver of these passed-down memories.

10
Suji Kwock Kim, Notes from the Divided Country (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2003).

11
One might point to the poem “Occupation” as an exception since it seems to be mostly written in the
third person; however the “You” that abruptly interjects (starting in the twenty-fifth line near the
end of the brief poem) confuses this perspective, making the whole poem suddenly sound like
free indirect speech, which combines characteristics of third-person along with the essence of
first-person direct speech.

75

The notion that memories can be passed down or transmitted to subsequent generations
has been termed postmemory by cultural critic Marianne Hirsch. In her writings on the
photography and visual art of the Holocaust, Hirsch uses postmemory to describe “the
relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded
their births but were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute
memories in their own right.”
12
The second generation cannot literally, of course, “remember”
the experiences of those who came before, but postmemory describes the way in which a
categorically different kind of memory is constructed by means of the stories, images, and
behaviors among which the second generation grew up. Hirsch argues that “these experiences
were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their
own right.”
13
Postmemory is not identical to memory: it is “post”—after, second-hand—but at
the same time, it approximates memory in having a kind of affective force.
14
Postmemory is
distinguished from memory in at least two ways: 1) the discontinuous subjective attachment to
what one has not experienced, and 2) in the mediation of generational distance. It is different
from history by the emphasis on profound personal connection to individuated histories.
Interestingly enough, even as I will show how Kim’s Notes links postmemory and
diaspora thematically, Hirsch’s work has always linked the two terms conceptually. Hirsch
observes that although the children of exiled survivors have not themselves lived through the
trauma of separation from home and the destruction of that home, they nevertheless remain

12
Marianne Hirsch, "The Generation of Postmemory," Poetics Today 29, no.1 (2008): 103.

13
Ibid., 106.

14
This affective force is by no means necessarily as strong as the original memory or trauma, but what
makes it postmemory is the retaining of some residue of the affect associated with the original
memory, even as it evolves or transforms in the post-generation.

76

deeply marked by their parents’ experiences. Her work shows how postmemory is deeply
involved in diasporic subject-formation and subjectivity. She focuses on survivors of the
Holocaust who have been exiled from their places of origin and for whom memory is not only an
act of active recollection, but also of mourning, “mourning often tempered by anger, rage, and
despair.”
15
Hirsch argues that the children of exiled Holocaust survivors, although they
themselves have not lived through the trauma of forced separation from home, remain deeply
marked by their parents’ experiences: “always marginal or exiled, always in the diaspora.”
16

Both postmemory and diaspora infer the experience (whether real or imagined) of spatial and
temporal exile. What Hirsch is describing is not only the creation, dynamics, and effects of
postmemory, but also a diasporic experience.
While I find Hirsch’s term valuable, I find her almost exclusive application of it to the
second generation limiting. Hirsch perhaps focuses on the second generation because the level of
identification with the original Holocaust survivor generation is stronger than with subsequent
generations. Her tendency to formulate postmemory in this way largely stems from her focus on
collective trauma as the sole point of “origin” for postmemory. If we however attend to the
phenomenon of postmemory in and of itself, apart from experiences of collective trauma (though
trauma is certainly a valid and intimately related issue), we quickly see that the intergenerational
transmission of memory is always happening on some level within kinship structures. Moreover
each generation, each family, and each individual experiences its own form of postmemory,
which is always already marked by the previous generations’ postmemory and which will also
influence the generations after. The workings of postmemory can thus be used as a lens through

15
Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1997), 243.

16
Ibid.

77

which to analyze the effects of certain historical events or collective phenomena, whether it is the
effects of the Holocaust in Hirsch’s study, or the effects of displacement or migration in this
one.
17
But to say that postmemory is constructed out of trauma is to limit the concept too
narrowly. This is especially evident when Hirsch speaks of diaspora and postmemory together. I
understand statements like the following as actually reversed in logic: “[the] condition of exile
from the space of identity, [the] diasporic experience, is a characteristic aspect of
postmemory.”
18
Postmemory is, I suggest, a characteristic aspect of diaspora and not the other
way around. Again, Hirsh reverses the relation of postmemory to diaspora when she suggests
that “the aesthetics of postmemory is a diasporic aesthetics of temporal and spatial exile that
needs simultaneously to (re)build and to mourn.”
19
The “aesthetics” of diaspora, marked by
feelings of loss and processes akin to mourning, is actually born of the dynamics of postmemory.
What Hirsch refers to as the “aesthetics of postmemory” is not always a “diasporic aesthetics”; a
diasporic aesthetics, however, is always an aesthetics of the kind of postmemory that is marked
by temporal and spatial exile. Since the workings of postmemory can occur within a
sociocultural context that does not involve migration or displacement
20
, it is not that postmemory

17
Of course these cases are not mutually exclusive. One can be traumatized by forceful displacement,
for instance. Or a collective trauma can involve the massive displacement of a group of people,
the Holocaust being an obvious example. Hirsch’s own work constantly links the experience of
trauma with exile/diaspora in postmemory. However in my view, it is important to separate out
the terms clearly before analyzing them together.

18
Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1997), 243.

19
Ibid., 245.

20
A case in point is how postmemory has been usefully applied to the aftermath of the “Dirty War” in
Argentina. See Nouzeilles 2005 and Kaiser 2006 for examples.

78

is characterized in some essential way by diaspora. Rather the phenomenon of diaspora emerges
from the psychical and sociocultural dynamics of postmemory.
I find in Notes from the Divided Country a compelling illustration of the dynamics of
postmemory and its relationship to the experience of diaspora. The poem “Generation” in
particular illuminates diaspora as a phenomenon of postmemory. The poem significantly was
written for the volume last even though it is the first poem in the book.
21
“Generation” could be
read, then, as setting the stage for the dominant themes and tropes of the book.
The title of the poem “Generation” has at least two meanings: 1) “generation” as in the
sense of procreation, the process of bringing into being, and 2) “generation” in the genealogical
sense of a set of members of a family regarded as a single stage in descent, usually marked by
and counted from a historical event, such as immigration (as in “second-generation Korean-
American”) or war (as in “third-generation Holocaust survivor”). The poem “Generation” is
quite evidently about “generation” in the sense of procreation, as the overarching conceit is the
journey of the pre-born lyric speaker toward her own birth against her will. This essay will also
show how the poem is about “generation” in the other sense. Based on the Latin generatio
meaning “creation” and “origin”, this sense of the word “generation” represents a structural
transition between the idea of origin and its continuation. It further implies an intrinsic,
unbridgeable separation and distance from the origin, since the question of beginning arises only
after a history of some sort has been established. As such, history can be said to interpellate
“generations” into being. Kim’s poem “Generation” dwells on the painful transmission of

21
Suji Kwock Kim stated this before reading “Generation” at one of the “Lunch Poems” series at the
University of California at Berkeley. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHON6gFvLKs
(accessed January 17, 2013).

79

historical trauma to a subject of the diasporic postgeneration
22
, for whom the origin of that
trauma is distant and inaccessible and yet so formative to her subjectivity.
The poem is numbered into sections from 0-5, with each section getting increasingly
longer. The only line under “0” is “Once I was nothing: once we were one”. While the poem
starts with a lyric “I” as the speaker, it immediately switches to “we”. The “I” does not return
until midway through section 4, after which it continues through all of section 5. Who is the
“we” that the “I” sees herself as once having been a part of?
0
Once I was nothing: once we were one
1
In the unborn world we heard the years hurtling past,
whirring like gears in a giant factory—time, time, time—
2
We heard human breathing,
thoughts coming and going like bamboo leaves hissing in wind,
doubts swarming like reconnaissance planes over forests of sleep,
we heard words murmured in love.
3
We felt naked bodies climb each other,
cleaving, cleaving,
as if they could ride each other to a country that can’t be named.

22
“Postgeneration” is a term frequently used by Marianne Hirsch to indicate the “generation after” the
first-generation of Holocaust survivors, but in my view should not be limited to the second-
generation. It can be used in the broader sense of any generation that follows the first-generation
survivors of collective trauma.

80

We felt bedsprings creak, felt the rough sailcloth of sheet dampen,
felt wet skin hold them together and apart.
What borders they cross? What more did they want?
Bittersweet the sweat we tasted, the swollen lips we touched, the chafe of
separate loins:
bittersweet the wine of one flesh they drank and drank.
The parallel grammatical structure of the line, “Once I was nothing : once we were one” reflects
a mirror-like structure, with the colon in the middle visually standing in for a mirror. At the same
time, the colon invokes an analogy between a subjectivity constituted by “nothing” and one
constituted by a “we” that is founded on oneness. This first line most immediately suggests a
psychoanalytic reading in which the nascent ego emerges through a misidentification of the
infant subject with her own mirror image. In what Jacques Lacan calls “the mirror stage”, the
infant sees in her mirrored reflection an image of wholeness that does not correspond with the
bodily fragmentation she experiences. This dynamic of misidentification extends to a kind of
fusional identification of the self with the mother as well; in both cases, an external image of the
body produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an ideal “I”
toward which the subject will perpetually strive throughout her life. According to Lacan, the
process by which the ego is conceived and born in the Imaginary remains the part of the subject
that is always pursuing wholeness and unity, trying to overcome the division that created it in the
first place.
23

In Kim’s poem, the simultaneous psychic attachment and alienation of the child in
relation to her mother is taken farther back, before infancy, to even before birth. Despite this

23
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in
Écrits, transl. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006).

81

difference, the dimension of an interminable questing for wholeness or oneness with the Other
remains resonant with a Lacanian kind of subject—lines like “We felt naked bodies climb each
other,/ cleaving, cleaving,/ as if they could ride each other to a country that can’t be named”
rhythmically express something like desperation between two bodies that want to penetrate each
other. Likewise the lines “wet skin hold[ing] them together and apart/...[bittersweet] the chafe of
separate loins:/ bittersweet the wine of one flesh they drank and drank” illustrate vividly the
dynamic of a deep attachment always attended by alienation and separation.
Besides the psychic implications of the poem, there is also a deeply biological sense of
“generation” that influences our reading of the first person plural subject. The “we” seems also
to refer to pre-zygotic sex cells
24
, which the speaker describes as being outside of time (“we
heard the years hurtling past”) and pre-human. In section 4, the we-cells run and hide as entities
referred to as “they” attempt to catch them.
4
They called us over oceans of dream-salt,
their voices moving over the face of the waters like searchlights from a
guardtower.
We hid, and refused to come out.
Their cries followed like police dogs snarling from a leash.
We ran through benzene rain, flew through clouds of jet-fuel.
We swam through hydrogen spume, scudded among stars numberless as
sands.
We didn’t want to be born we didn’t want.

24
I owe this insight to Seo-Young Chu. See Seo-Young Chu, “Science Fiction and Postmemory Han in
Contemporary Korean American Literature,” MELUS 33, no. 4 (2008): 106.

82

Blindly their hands groped for us like dragnets trawling for corpses,
blindly their hands hauled me like grappling hooks from the waves,
the foaming scalps of ghost-children laughing, seaweed-hair dripping,
the driftwood of other children who might have been.
Out of chromosomes and dust,
cells of hope, cells of history,
out of refugees running from mortar shells, immigrants driving to power
plants in Jersey,
out of meadowsweet and oil, the chaff of unlived lives blowing endlessly,
out of wishes known and unknown they reeled me in.
The “they” seems to refer to a God-like figure “calling” them into being, as the phrase “moving
over the face of the waters” is nearly a direct quote of Genesis 1:2: “And the earth was without
form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon
the face of the waters.”
25
The traumas of war seem to structure the consciousness of the speaker
before she is born. The references to swarming “reconnaissance planes”, “searchlights from a
guardtower”, “police dogs snarling from a leash”, “benzene rain” and “hydrogen spume”
(alluding to the use of the chemical warfare agents) vividly reproduce the scenes of war from the
perspective of refugees or dissidents in hiding. In a sense, the structure of the traumatic memory
of the speaker’s parents is symmetrical to, though distinct from, the speaker’s own postmemory.
The fact that the speaker and “other children who might have been” didn’t want to be born
suggests the horror of the world they would be born into, where such images of war are not

25
Bible, King James Version.

83

analogies—“like searchlights from a guardtower”, “like police dogs”, “like reconnaissance
planes”, etc.—but a reality that people like the speaker’s parents endured.
Section 5 depicts not only the generation of the speaker as a fetus, but also the contours
of intergenerational, intersubjective alienations as well as entanglements. The first line marks the
moment of conception: “I entered the labyrinth of my mother’s body.” From there the speaker
explores the internal landscape of her mother’s body
I wandered through nerve-forests branching in every direction,
towering trees fired by feeling, crackling and smoldering.
I rowed through vein-rivers .
I splashed in lymph-creeks between islands of glands
I leaped rib to rib, rung to rung on the spine,
I swung from the ropes of entrails.
I played on organs, leaped through a fog of sweet oxygen in the lungs.
All these actions begin with the word “I”, stressing the speaker’s now individual consciousness
and almost-human composition. She is inside of her mother’s body, and yet separate, so that her
mother’s body becomes a vast internal world that the zygotic “I” explores and wonders at. The
speaker is simultaneously at one with and irreducibly distinct from her mother’s body. This is
especially evident when she describes her mother’s brain and heart:
I clambered over tectonic plates of the skull, scrambling not to fall
down the chasms between, the mind-mountains where I could see no bottom.
I peered through sockets at the brain brewing in cliffs of bone
like a gigantic volcano, with its magma of memories, magma of tomorrows,

84

I could have played there forever, watching, wondering at the vast expanses
inside,
wondering at the great chambers in the heart.
What machine made me move into the womb-cave, made me
a grave of flesh, now the engine of beginning driving forwards,
cells dividing, cells dividing:
The “chasms” are so great and so deep that they fill the speaker with both fear and awe,
suggesting the kind of unrepresentable trauma that the second-generation subject of postmemory
inherits from the first-generation. The brain that the speaker sees is overflowing with and nearly
exploding from “its magma of memories, magma of tomorrows.” The implication is that the
speaker will never fully know these memories and tomorrows, the “vast expanses inside”; she
can only “watch”, and “wonder.”
After she finally drops into the “womb-cave” and undergoes the process of “cells
dividing, cells dividing” and all her body parts coming together, her birth into the world is
marked by violence, division, and confusion:
then cold metal tongs clamped my forehead and temples,
then forceps plucked me from my mother’s body like fruit torn from a tree
then I heard a cry of pain—mine? not mine?—
then a scalpel’s snip snip against the umbilical cord, like razors scraping a leather strop:
soon I felt sticky with blood and matted fur, surgical lights blinding,
soon I felt tears burning my skin—Why are you crying? Why am I?—
I didn’t know who or what I was, only that I was,
each question answered by the echo of my voice alone: I, I, I.

85

This passage depicts the speaker being unwillingly and forcibly removed from her mother’s
body, with cold metal forceps and the surgical scalpel being the first objects touching her newly
birthed body. The rhythms of biopower affecting the formation of the speaker’s body, its forcible
removal, and its displacement, are metaphorically congruous with those surrounding her parents’
experience of war—the homelessness, wandering, hiding and psychical violence of refugee life
(“benzene rain”, “hydrogen spume”, “running from mortar shells”, etc.) and its aftereffects
(“immigrants driving to power plants in Jersey”). Since the speaker clearly can have no memory
of her birth, the memory depicted here is a willful act of narrative, of reconstruction presumably
based on sources that the speaker encountered over the course of her life. This aspect of the
reconstruction of war memory by way of a postmemorial, intersubjective creative act is seen
throughout Kim’s book, in poems like “Resistance”, “Fragments of the Forgotten War”, “Flight”,
and “Transit Car”, among others. The reconstructive aspect of such poems is analogous to
postmemory—the creation of a memory one does not have, rather than the recollection of the
memory of an experience one had at one time. These poems of oral witness imply a structural
element of dual creation, which involves both the person who creates a story as he/she speaks
about his/her past experience, as well as the poet-listener who creates the form of the poem
which exhibits overlapping affective listening qualities. At once both listener and speaker, the
subject of postmemory in “Generation” acts out the remoteness of the “original” memories at the
same time that she feels them deeply woven into her own existence.
The passage further foreshadows the speaker’s now human-to-human relationship with
her mother as one vexed by the crisis of identity and traumatized subjectivity. The “cry of pain”
is her mother’s, but the speaker is confused and wonders whether the cry is “mine? not mine?”
While the “cry of pain” is almost certainly referring to the pain a woman endures in giving birth,

86

it also has the connotation of the pain of the traumatic effects of war that the mother has
experienced and will deal with for the rest of her life. In this sense, the “mine? not mine?”
question of the speaker will be one that she too must deal with under the psychic weight of
postmemory. The question too, of knowing “who or what [she is]” foreshadows the fragmented
and incoherent sense of identity that the speaker will struggle with as not only the inheritor of a
second-hand memory of trauma, but also as a diasporic subject who is exiled from the time and
place of that trauma.
The cry of pain could also invoke the idea of the poet and the figure of the mother as
common figures for national voice in times of social and political upheaval. The separation of
mother and child in such a reading would take on an allegorical dimension that calls to mind the
simultaneous death and birth pains involved in the process and effects of national division.
However, Kim plays with these familiar tropes in a way that ultimately destabilizes them. The
child is forever separated from the maternal landscape she has just described once she enters the
external world. She can never go back to “the labyrinth of mother’s body”, forced instead to be
born through a violence reminiscent of war:
now neurons sizzling, dendrites buzzing,
now arteries tunneling tissue like tubes hooked to an IV;
now organs pumping, hammers of hunger and thirst pounding,
now sinews cleaving, tendons lashing meat to bone:
meanwhile my skeleton welding, scalp cementing like mortar,
meanwhile my face soldered on, hardening like a mask of molten steel,
meanwhile my blood churning like a furnace of wanting,
meanwhile my heart ticking like a bomb—is-was, is-was:

87

Significantly, the images in these lines will find echoes in other poems in Notes from the Divided
Country like “The Chasm” and “Fragments of the Forgotten War”— poems that depict the
violence and trauma of the Korean War. The insides of bodies in these poems are described not
in the process of generation, but degeneration—after they have been blown apart by bombs or
guns, or eaten by vultures. The echoes between “Generation” and these other poems suggest that
Kim is connecting the psychic not only to the individual and the familial, but also to the
inheritance of the idea of the “national”. This is not an inheritance that is nostalgic for a once-
unified Korea however. While Kim’s poems uncover the trauma that the Korean War and
national division has caused, she does so without invoking or glorifying a national identity.
Furthermore the juxtaposition of the Korean War poems with other poems set in the United
States serve to metaphorize what one could mean by a “divided country.” The poem “Transit
Car”, for example, is a re-imagining of the experience of a Japanese-American woman
photographed in a transit car, face pressed against the window, traveling from relocation center
to relocation center, one after another, during the Japanese internment in the United States. When
one reads this poem alongside poems depicting the suffering of Koreans during the Japanese
occupation, or during the Korean War, in Kim’s book the “divided country” becomes any
country divided against itself, degenerating from power struggles, injustice and dehumanization.
Thus, while “Generation” plays with the typically nationalistic figures of the child and its
motherland, they are ultimately refigured in Kim’s work as unbound by national identity under a
broader vision of justice and solidarity.
In the end, the speaker states that “each question [is] answered by the echo of my voice
alone: I, I, I”. Kim is perhaps highlighting the fact that those who experienced the trauma of the
Korean War have a different memory from those who couldn’t have experienced it. In an

88

interview, Kim once said that she sees her writing as “the responsibility that one has, in terms of
using the imagination as a means of compassion, and understanding things one couldn’t have
experienced.” Kim is seeking to empathize with the suffering of those who have survived the
Korean War, while acknowledging at the same time that she herself, or any other postgeneration
children, couldn’t have experienced it.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL SKETCH OF DIASPORIC POSTMEMORY
This analysis of Kim’s “Generation” illustrates how diasporic identities are consolidated
and constructed primarily via mechanisms of postmemory. To move now into a more theoretical
direction, I want to suggest that what is essential in defining diaspora by way of postmemory is
the emphasis within the concept of postmemory on 1) the inter/trans-generational transmission of
memory and 2) the identifications forged within familial space. In order to grasp more deeply
how displacement from a place of origin (whether literal or symbolic) affects subsequent
generations, we will now turn our attention to formulating a phenomenological sketch of
diasporic postmemory.
In order to appreciate the distinctive experience of postmemory, it is useful to compare
and contrast it to the experience of memory. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur has contributed
significantly to the development of a phenomenology of memory in his important book Memory,
History, and Forgetting.
26
I will build upon his conclusions to formulate more specifically a
phenomenology of postmemory, which is distinct from, yet intertwined with, the phenomenology
of memory. The main differences between the experience of postmemory and the experience of
memory concern: 1) the subjective relationship between the objects of memory (memories) and

26
Paul Riceour, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).

89

the work of memory, 2) the role of the imagination and 3) the significance of affect in relation to
the Other.
Ricoeur relies on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological procedure
27
in his formulation of
the experience of memory. This procedure involves identifying the phases of every intentional
experience, which Husserl terms noesis and noema. Noesis refers to the process of intention that
assigns meaning to intentional objects, while noema stands for the intentional object, i.e. that
which is intended or meant by an act. They are related such that every noetic phase of
consciousness corresponds to a noematic phase of consciousness. Ricoeur observes that for the
phenomenon of memory, the noesis is the act of remembering and the noema are the memories
themselves. But who is doing the remembering? While Riceour’s discussion of the reciprocal
constitution of personal and collective memory
28
complicates a simple answer to this question,
the presupposition is nevertheless that the noesis-noema of memory is attached under one
individual consciousness: One’s memory is of one’s own memories. Yet Ricoeur emphasizes,
along with Maurice Halbwachs, that “one never remembers alone”, that the social framework is a
dimension inherent in the work of recollection. The memories the ego searches for are the result
of the confluence of internal and external influences that are often imperceptible.
29
I want to
suggest that postmemory further complicates the mutual implication of individual and collective
memory by the structural mechanism, which drives it: the idea that one’s past can be passed on
to another. The focus is not only one’s memory of one’s own memories, but also one’s memory

27
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1931).

28
Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 95.

29
Ibid., 122.

90

of another’s memories. In postmemory, the consciousnesses involved in the intentional act
multiplies, making the subjectivity behind the noesis and the noema plural and discontinuous.
This subjective discontinuity leads to other key differences between a phenomenology of
memory and a phenomenology of postmemory, the role of the imagination being a fundamental
one. Ricoeur traces the debate about the difference between memories and images, or memory
and the imagination, back to the writings of Plato and Aristotle. For Plato, memory is
fundamentally a form of re-presentation, in which faithfulness to a memory object depends on
the strength of the initial impression it made. The image or icon that is formed in the
representation erases the difference between the memory and its correlate. Aristotle, however,
distinguishes between two kinds of memory: mnēmē and anamnēsis. The former refers to
passive, simple memory, which arises spontaneously in the manner of an affection.
30
The latter
refers to recollection, which consists in an active search and an “effort to recall.”
31
The
connection between the two is the role played by temporal distance. The act of remembering
only occurs after time has elapsed. Time remains the common factor to both memory as simple
evocation and to recollection as action. Following Aristotle, Ricoeur argues that “the notion of
temporal distance is inherent in the essence of memory and assures the distinction in principle

30
Ibid., 17.

31
Ibid., 19. Husserl made a similar distinction: primary memory (retention) vs. secondary memory
(reproduction). Primary memory as retention is “not now”; it is necessary that a corresponding
perception precede the retention. But retention hangs onto the perception of the moment. The
perception is “just past”; so retention is a temporal extension of that experience. Secondary
memory, however, entails reproduction, which assumes that the primary memory of a temporal
object has “disappeared” and that it comes back. It is still different from imagination because of
the positional dimension of recollection: “Recollection...posits what is reproduced and in this
positing gives it a position in relation to the actually present now and to the sphere of the original
temporal field to which the recollection itself belongs”. The reproduction then is now, but it
coincides with the real past. (Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 31-36)

91

between memory and imagination.”
32
The temporal mark—the mark of pastness—is key to
understanding the distinctiveness of memory. Memory is, more than anything else, the
experience of temporal distance. However, the two extremes of the spectrum are connected.
Ricoeur quotes Henri Bergson: “to imagine is not to remember. No doubt a recollection, as it
becomes actual, tends to live in an image; but the converse is not true, and the image, pure and
simple, will not be referred to the past unless, indeed, it was in the past that I sought it.”
33

Disentangling imagination from memory then, requires focusing on the difference in
intentionality: while imagination is directed toward the fantastic, the unreal, and the fictional,
memory is directed toward prior reality such that “the thing remembered” is always constituted
by the temporal mark. The estimation of time intervals, whether precise or indeterminate, is part
and parcel of what makes memory different from imagination.
With this schema of memory vs. the imagination in mind, I understand postmemory as
being something in-between: while still being directed toward a prior reality, because the subject
of postmemory has not experienced that reality, the work of recalling it entails significant use of
the imagination. It is from the first instance recollection, and therefore secondary in being a
form of re-production; it is never primary in the sense of “simple memory” since the reference
point is never to the experience of an initial perception. The reference point is however tied to
the perception of another person’s experience, and thus still grounded in a past reality.
Postmemory therefore retains the object-oriented character and temporal mark of memory, but
from the standpoint of another person’s consciousness. The effort to recall then, is creative; it is
a practice of citation, mediation, and I would argue, imagination.

32
Ibid., 18.

33
Henri Bergson quoted in ibid., 52.

92

While Ricoeur argues that “the world of experience” and the “world of fantasy” are
irreducible to one another
34
, and that memories belong to the former, postmemory seems in fact
to be a hybrid of both. With memory, one does not simply remember oneself, seeing,
experiencing, learning; rather one recalls the situations in the world in which one has had such
experiences. Every situation implies one’s own body and the bodies of others in lived space, and
the view of a world within which something has occurred. Remembering manifests the presence
of the absent world, not just the experience of the prior self. Places that have been inhabited,
where corporeal memory
35
was practiced day in and day out, in addition to the experiences of
seeing, interacting, speaking, learning, etc., are “memorable par excellence.”
36
The places persist
as inscriptions for memory and can in turn offer support for failing memory.
37
But for the
subject of postmemory, that “presence” of the absent world manifests itself differently than for
the subject of memory. Ricoeur himself emphasizes the kinship between memories and place
when he says that “memories transmitted only along the oral path fly away as do the words
themselves.”
38
Postmemory, however, is precisely such a form of memorial transmission that is
produced along paths of communication that are detached from the places of memories.
Postmemory, in fact, must imagine worlds. Diasporic postmemory in particular must actively
conjure up places, situations, and bodies from which it is not only temporally discontinuous, but

34
Ibid., 49.

35
Corporeal memory refers to habits of the body, or sensual knowledge, enacted repeatedly in lived
space. It bears similarities to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in its emphasis on
embodiment and unconscious inculcation.

36
Ibid., 42.

37
Ibid., 41.

38
Ibid., 41.

93

also spatially, culturally, and/or linguistically so. Instead of reconstructing a memory-image
from “pure memory”
39
, diasporic postmemory relies on a kind of analogical imaging that takes
the memories communicated by another person and translates them through an existing visual
archive of private and public images. This process clearly involves more than the use of the
visualizing function of the imagination; it uses imagination in the way we think of the making of
fiction. And yet there still exists an “objective” correlate of the experiences postmemory tries to
recall, from a past that actually occurred.
Ricoeur perhaps treads onto the problematic of postmemory without naming it as such in
his discussion of hallucination, memory, and history. On the one hand, Ricoeur very much pits
memory against imagination, using hallucination as the example of imagination’s negative effect
of the processes of memory. He points out that recollection involves the construction of
memory-images that refer back to prior reality, carrying “memory back…into a region of
presence similar to that of perception”. While one could argue that this is a kind of use of the
imagination, Ricoeur insists that it differs from the imagination’s function of “derealization,
[which] culminat[es] in a fiction exiled to the margins of reality.”
40
If one were to move from
pure memory to pure memory-image, Ricoeur maintains that memory then moves into the pole
of hallucination, which he deems the “pitfall of the imaginary for memory”
41
in that it
“constitutes a sort of weakness, a discredit, a loss of reliability for memory.”
42
While this might

39
“Pure memory” refers to memory that has not yet been put into images. It aligns with the unconscious
and is an existence “comparable to that [sic] we attribute to external things when we do not
perceive them.” (Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 51, 431)

40
Ibid., 52.

41
Ibid., 53.

42
Ibid., 54.

94

be true for a single subject of memory , the memory vs. imagination distinction becomes less
clear-cut when we consider the subjects of diasporic postmemory who are always already
searching for a prior reality that requires the active use of their faculties of imagination.
“Memory is on the side of perception”
43
according to Ricoeur, but postmemory is decidedly not
since it has no traffic with “pure memory”—and yet postmemory retains the same thesis of
reality that grounds memory.
Interestingly enough, Ricoeur acknowledges that even though hallucination is antithetical
to memory as “a pathology of the imagination”, it seems nonetheless related to collective
memory. Drawing from the conclusions of Jean Paul Sartre’s The Psychology of Imagination,
Ricoeur observes that hallucination is marked by an obsession with “that which is forbidden”, in
which every effort “not to think about [something] anymore” is spontaneously transformed into
“obsessive thinking.”
44
In something of a tangent, Ricoeur makes the connection to collective
memory:
Confronting the phenomenon of fascination with the forbidden object, how can we help
but leap to the plane of the collective memory and evoke the sort of hauntedness,
described by historians of the present day, which stigmatizes this “past that does not
pass”? Hauntedness is to collective memory what hallucination is to private memory, a
pathological modality of the incrustation of the past at the heart of the present…
45

Ricoeur dichotomizes collective memory and private memory here, but what happens when we
consider postmemory, where collective memory and private memory intersect? Postmemory is

43
Ibid., 53

44
Jean Paul Sartre qtd. in ibid., 54.

45
Ibid., 54.

95

at once haunted by the collective and yet undeniably individual and private. It is often
characterized by a haunting and a longing for something that has been irrevocably lost (if not
“forbidden”).
Postmemory shares an important feature with hallucination: it uses imagination “to
produce the object of one’s thought, the thing one desires, in a manner that one can take
possession of it.”
46
To say that postmemory is a type of hallucination however would be risible.
Perhaps it would be more convincing to consider postmemory in connection to another activity
that Ricoeur likens to quasi-hallucination-- the writing of history. Ricoeur does not fail to
observe that, despite his schema, which uncouples memory from the imagination, the writing of
history employs memory and imagination together. He uses Michelet as an example of “a certain
way of writing history…in which the ‘resurrection’ of the past also tends to take on quasi-
hallucinatory forms” and asserts that, in this way, “writing history shares the adventures of
memories put-into-images under the aegis of the ostensive function of imagination.”
47

Postmemory, like the writing of history, is the imaginative recollection of a(nother’s) prior
reality. This is not an empty similarity or coincidental parallel. When Ricoeur assures us that the
“theory of memory passes on to the theory of history,”
48
he is setting up the paradigm by which
he develops an ethics of memory (which he goes into in depth in the last part of Memory,
History, Forgetting). The theory of memory passes on to the theory of history because
postmemory is the hinge between them.

46
Ibid., 53.

47
Ibid., 54.

48
Ibid., 54.

96

THE ROLE OF POSTMEMORY IN DIASPORIC CONSCIOUSNESS AND GROUP FORMATION
How do we characterize the passage from individual diasporic consciousness to the
formation of diasporic groups? Related to this question is another, more fundamental question:
“is memory primordially personal or collective”?
49
The response does not have to be either/or,
although the tendency has been to fall on one side or the other, with Sigmund Freud perhaps
being on one end and Maurice Halbwachs on the other. I follow Ricoeur, however, in the idea of
a “distinct, yet reciprocal and interconnected, constitution of individual memory and collective
memory.”
50
The collective is already in “individual” memory from the outset. Memories are
always situated with respect to other people and to places. When we look at a photograph of
ourselves, it sends us back to the milieu in which we were situated at the time. The external is
always present, but we tend to think of memories as essentially internal and unified only because
the influence of the social setting becomes imperceptible to us. Thus the sole attribution of
memories to the individual who remembers is a faulty claim; one never remembers alone. The
social framework is a dimension inherent in the work of recollection. Alfred Schutz has argued
that “the experience of others is a given as primal as the experience of the self.”
51
We act with
others, we affect others, and we are affected by others. Life is always in one way or another life
that is lived-together; subjects are from the outset members of a community or collectivity.
Individuals are part of social groups with shared belief systems that frame memories and shape
them into narratives.

49
Ibid., 93.

50
Ibid., 95.

51
Ibid., 130.

97

Following Ricoeur’s schema, individual consciousness necessarily involves an analogical
transfer to the Other, which leads to the intersubjectivity that is ultimately the foundation for the
phenomenological existence of collectives or groups like “diasporas.” Husserlian
phenomenology proposes that the Other is constituted from “the sphere of ownness”, a reduction
in which one abstracts everything in one’s experience that is an experience of otherness, leaving
only what is “mine.” And yet the ego forms intentionalities that transcend one’s own being. The
objective world is statically constituted as already finished and alien to the ego, and the
possibility of experiencing the world as alien comes, first, from the possibility of experiencing
the alter ego as other: “On the one hand, it is indeed as foreign, that is as not-me, that the other
is constituted, but is “in” me that he is constituted.”
52
The sphere of ownness, and the analogical
apperception that follows from it, leads to what Ricoeur (improvising on Husserl’s concept of
“social communalization”) calls the “communalization of subjective experience.”
53
From alter
egos we get a community of “others”; and then the world as “there” for any member of this
community. From this starting point with Husserl
54
, Ricoeur argues that intersubjectivity bears
the weight of the constitution of collective identities (like diaspora) according to the analogical
transfer that Husserl ascribes to every alter ego in relation to one’s own ego. This is how the

52
Ibid., 118.

53
Ibid., 119.

54
Ricoeur is careful, however, to distance himself from the transcendental idealism implied in Husserl’s
method. He asks: “in order to reach the notion of common experience, must we begin with the
idea of ownness, pass through the experience of the other, and finally proceed to a third
operation, said to the communalization of subjective experience? Is this chain truly irreversible?
Is it not the speculative presupposition of transcendental idealism that imposes this
irreversibility, rather than any constraint characteristic of phenomenological description?” (119)
In my view, a non-transcendental idealist approach to Husserl’s ideas leaves open the possibility
that the chain is not irreversible nor even necessarily a “chain” with discrete or sequential phases.
Simultaneity and mutual constitution would not change the thesis of analogical transfer.
Husserl’s schema is thus valuable as a heuristic for understanding intersubjectivity.

98

first person can become the first person plural and still “retain” the features of memory:
“mineness”, “continuity”, and “the past-future polarity”. It is only by analogy—in relation to
individual consciousness and its memory—that “collective memory is held to be a collection of
traces left by the events that have affected the course of history of the groups concerned.”
55
The
analogical transfer allows us to extend the “mineness” of memories analogically to the idea of
“our” possessing of “our” collective memories. Ricoeur shows how “this is enough to give
written history a point of anchorage in the phenomenological existence of groups.”
56

“Diasporas” are just such these kinds of groups, ones that exist phenomenologically in relation to
a collection of traces passed on from individuals of the displaced generation to the postmemory
of generations after.
Ricoeur suggests that “the level of our close relations”, which he defines as “privileged
others” who “approve of my existence and whose existence I approve of in the reciprocity and
equality of esteem,”
57
is an intermediate level of reference between the poles of individual
memory and collective memory. Close relations occupy the middle-ground between the self and
the “they”, and is the plane where “concrete exchanges operate between the living memory of
individual persons and the public memory of the communities to which we belong.”
58
The
memory exchange that happens on the level of close relations, which he calls a “memory of a
distinct kind”, is in fact what I have been referring to as postmemory. I would argue that the

55
Ibid., 119.

56
Ibid., 120.

57
Ibid., 132.

58
Ibid., 131, emphasis mine.

99

level of familial close relations
59
in particular is a crucial conduit for the formation of diasporic
consciousness precisely because of the concreteness, the embodied force, of its exchanges. The
phenomenon of diaspora demonstrates the production of the social bond within the framework of
interactive relations in familial space.
Diaspora is only interesting as a phenomenon when collective identifications with a
“homeland” are maintained by second, third, and subsequent generations. That migrants
themselves invest in the preservation of a distinctive identity and community is only to be
expected.
60
What characterizes and explains the passage from dislocated subjects to diaspora, I
argue, are the processes of postmemory and intersubjectivity, in which the familial structure of
inheritance is significant. The family becomes a crucial unit of transmission of an embodied
form of memory that encompasses bodily and affective connections. For memory studies scholar
Aleida Assman
61
, the family is the privileged site of memorial transmission because memories
are first and foremost linked between individuals. “Group memory” begins from the point of
familial transfer of embodied experience to the next generation. Various forms of public
memory, on the other hand (national, political, cultural, archival, etc.), are primarily mediated
not through embodied practice but instead through symbolic systems.

59
Although this word is problematic in that it strikes of a kind of biologism, a paradigm of the “familial”
can be extended to analogous relationships of both formal and informal “adoption”, as well as, to
a lesser degree, broader social relations dispersed according to multiple orders of belonging. It is
important to note that diasporic consciousness can also be formed in these contexts via feelings
of difference and dis-identification.

60
Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no.1 (2005): 7.

61
Aleida Assman quoted in Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no.
1 (2008): 110.

100

Critical race scholar Sara Ahmed similarly emphasizes the importance of the familial
space in producing phenomenological orientations and subjectivity in her essay, “A
Phenomenology of Whiteness”. Building from Marx’s insight that although human beings
“make their own history, but they do not make it as they please”, Ahmed suggests that that
process of “making” is delimited by the conditions they inherit from the past. She observes that
“if the conditions in which we live are inherited from the past, they are ‘passed down’ not only in
blood and genes, but also through the work or labour of generations.”
62
This inheritance would
include the social, cultural, and psychical orientations that a person encounters from the moment
of entry into the world as a dependent child, not to mention the work of memory that is
performed in these familial spaces. Ahmed suggests that orientations put certain things within
reach, such as “styles, capacities, aspirations, techniques, habits” in addition to physical
objects.
63
Though her essay refers to the orientation of “whiteness”, we can also see diasporic
postmemory as creating another such orientation.
One way in which diasporic postmemory orients a subject is through its function as a
form of family resemblance. Ahmed notes how whiteness becomes a form of family
resemblance, which explains how race has been understood through familial metaphors: “Race in
this model ‘extends’ the family form; other members of the race are ‘like a family’, just as the
family is defined in racial terms.”
64
This relates to diasporic consciousness in that the same
extension of the family metaphor occurs in the related discourse of the nation; both race and
nation are deeply entangled with diasporic discourse. The analogy that members of the nation or

62
Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 154.

63
Ibid., 154.

64
Ibid., 154.

101

race are “like a family” works powerfully to produce not only a particular rendering of race
and/or nation, but also a particular rendering of family that is based on likeness as a sign of
inheritance. The discourse of “family resemblance”, in Ahmed’s view, has a powerful function
as a legislative device. She reflects on the saying “like two peas in a pod”:
Anyone who has shelled peas would know of course that peas are not only alike and that
seeing them as being alike is already to overlook some important differences. But it’s the
pod and not the peas that interests me here. This saying suggests for me that likeness is an
effect of the proximity of shared residence. This is not just an argument about nurture
over nature (that the pod is a nurturing device), as this way of thinking relies on an overly
simple logic of causality (the pod causes the peas). Rather the very proximity of pea-to-
pea, as well as the intimacy of the dwelling, which surrounds them like a skin, shapes the
very form of the peas. Likeness is not then ‘in’ the peas, let alone ‘in’ the pod, but is an
effect of their contiguity, of how they are touched by each other and envelop each other.
65

The familial is like the ‘pod’, as a shared space of dwelling, in which things are shaped
by their proximity to other things. Bodies come to be seen alike, as for instance sharing a race, or
a “homeland”, as a “characteristic”. Such “characteristics” are an effect of proximities where
certain memories, experiences, and “truths” are already in place. Ahmed suggests that such
proximities are inherited, which means that “[the] past that is ‘behind’ our arrival restricts as well
as enables human action: if we are shaped by ‘what’ we come into contact with, then we are also
shaped by what we inherit, which de-limits the objects that we might come into contact with.”
66

The postgeneration subjects of the Holocaust note that the legacy of the survivors’ traumatic

65
Ibid., 155.

66
Ibid., 155.

102

experiences on the subjectivities of their children does not depend on the verbal transmission of
“memories”. Postmemory can be just as powerfully shaped by the absence of such speech acts,
by the careful silences and nonverbal states of mourning that saturate the environment of a
home.
67
Eva Hoffman suggests that the “language” of the family encompasses more than the
verbal: “in my home, as in so many others, the past broke through in the sounds of nightmares,
the idioms of sighs and illness, of tears and acute aches that were the legacy of the damp attic
and of the conditions my parents endured during their hiding.”
68
What Hoffman is describing is
the language of the body, of symptoms that are often unconscious, that are nevertheless
forcefully communicated within familial space. Other features, such as certain cultural objects
(family photographs, keepsakes from the abandoned world), “old world” rituals and social
conventions, and the experience of a language barrier between generations, are examples of other
elements in familial space that can contribute to the shaping of postmemory.
Diasporic consciousness forms out of the “foreignness” of the multiple worlds that one
has inherited, such that the world that the diasporic subject inhabits is perpetually haunted by the
absence of another, distant world. For the second generation of self-identified “diaspora”, the
world they inherit is one in which their parents experienced varying types and degrees of
alienation, loss, and nostalgia for a “homeland”. But the chain of inheritance often does not stop
with the second generation. The transfer of diasporic postmemory and identification to
subsequent generations can occur vis-à-vis a variety of “inheritances” of proximity, such as the

67
Nadine Fresco conducted a series of interviews with others of her generation whose parents never
spoke of their lives in their home countries or of their experiences of war. She argues that these
repressed stories nevertheless shaped them as a diaspora des cendres [“diaspora of the ashes”].
Fresco referred to this experience as “absent memory”, which Hirsch recasts as postmemory,
emphasizing that such a memory is not “empty” or “absent”, but full, present, and invested in its
own right.

68
Eva Hoffman quoted in Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” 112.

103

effects of racial and ethnic categorizations circulating in larger society, marginalization as an
“other”, social and cultural practices of “boundary maintenance”, identification with already-
formed parental identities/ideologies, the affect and practices of long-distance nationalism, etc.,
that are passed onto the subject of postmemory. Diasporic postmemory reproduces and evolves
when buttressed by reinforcements of external exclusion as well as internal “likeness”. The
passage from postmemory to diaspora happens when an individual’s consciousness coheres to
cultures, values, bodies and places from the familial past as properties of itself. Diasporic
identification thus is “an effect of what coheres, rather than the origin of coherence.”
69

THE ETHICS OF DIASPORIC POSTMEMORY
Diaspora is better understood phenomenologically than ontologically. Diaspora does not
refer to a static, homogeneous entity bound together by some common essence or purity. Nor
does it refer to a mere flourish of language, strategic practice, or oppositional stance employed
by the marginalized and disenfranchised. Diaspora instead refers to a certain experience, or as
Stuart Hall describes it, a becoming:
Cultural identity . . . is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the
future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending
place, time, history, and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have
histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation.
Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the
continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power . . . identities are the names we give to

69
Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 159, emphasis mine.

104

the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of
the past.
70

A definition of diaspora that emphasizes the experience of diaspora—diaspora as becoming—
allows us to move away from universalizing generalizations and the pitfalls of essentialism and
assimilationist teleologism. Anchoring it to a phenomenology of postmemory compels us to
attend to how collective histories and individual narratives of the past produce diasporic
experience in complex relation to the relentless play of history, culture, and power in larger
society. As such, redefining diaspora through a phenomenology of postmemory more adequately
accounts for the realms of heterogeneity, hybridity, discontinuity, and evolution in diasporic
experience without denying its “reality”. Redefining diaspora as such also highlights the way in
which the phenomenon of diaspora is originally relational, and in the last instance, ethical.
Postmemory is very much shaped by its production under the context of affect in relation
to the Other. As we observed at the beginning of this phenomenological sketch, postmemory
radically departs from the noesis-noema of memory by virtue of the subjective discontinuity
between the two phases of intentionality. As such, the relationship between the subject of
postmemory and the Other whose consciousness envelops the intentional object of memory is
key to a phenomenological understanding of (diasporic) postmemory.
In distinguishing between the two kinds of memory, we recall that Aristotle characterizes
simple memory as a pathos, as an affection, which distinguishes it from recollection, which is an
action. Postmemory has characteristics of both simple memory and recollection: it is more like
recollection in that it is a more laborious, effortful act, but it is like simple memory in that it can
very much be characterized as an affection. The affection is different from that of simple

70
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed.
Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 225.

105

memory, however, in that postmemory is directed not only toward the self-subject of the noesis,
but also toward the other-subject of the noema. It involves a relational, embodied encounter with
the Other that incites empathic identifications. As such, the index of postmemory, unlike
memory, is “shaped more and more by affect, need, and desire as time and distance attenuate the
links to authenticity and truth.”
71
Time and distance is even further complicated and inaccessible
in diasporic consciousness.
As a form of recollection, postmemory is the active search of another’s past. Regarding
recollection in memory, Ricoeur suggests that “the initiative of the search stems from our
‘capacity for searching’. The starting point remains under the command of the explorer of the
past, whether the connection that follows is the result of necessity or of habit.”
72
This is not true
of recollection in postmemory, where there is no choice for the “explorer of the past”—the past
is passed onto them regardless of initiative or intentionality. What then is the “capacity for
searching” for the subject of postmemory? Is there such a capacity? I would propose that there is,
but that the capacity is different in an important way: it is constituted by a reliance on the one—
the other—who remembers. Postmemory thus intrinsically implies a relationship of trust, as one
listening to the testimony of a witness. Postmemory entails a “capacity of searching” the other,
which in the intimate context of familial relations also becomes a matter of searching the self.
This is especially important in diasporic consciousness, as the way in which family members
have been othered in a society in which they might be marginalized for their racial features, or
their cultural practices, or their lack of linguistic fluency in the dominant tongue, gets passed
onto the diasporic subject through the affections of postmemory.

71
Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory, ”124.

72
Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 18.

106

Emmanuel Lévinas
73
has elaborated on the profound significance of the face-to-face
encounter with the Other as the core element of intersubjective life. The other person addresses
me, calls to me, simply by presenting her face to me. This lived immediacy is essentially an
affective encounter that does not need language for a call-and-response dynamic between two
people. Lévinas not surprisingly focuses on the universal ‘moments’ of the family as constituent
of both intersubjectivity and the formation of ethics. Beginning with “fecundity,”
74
in which the
limits of time for the individual (one’s lifespan) are extended and opened up by the child, who is
both of the parent and other than the parent, the life of the family continues through interactions
of election and responsibility between parents and offspring, and between siblings. The family
in this way mediates the passage from the individual to the collective; the structure of
postmemory functions within and is dependent on this familial face-to-face dynamic and, in my
view, shapes the kind of intersubjectivity that leads to the phenomenological existence of groups
like diasporas.
As stated earlier, the theory of memory passes on to the theory of history because
postmemory is the hinge between them. The working of postmemory implies an ethical exercise
in its nature as a specific search for the truth (implied in the intentional, active search of the past)
of an Other. The most compelling aspect of Suji Kwock Kim’s Notes from the Divided Country
is the ethics of diasporic postmemory that emerges from the volume as a whole.
We recall that Kim considers the representation of the traumatic experiences of the
Korean War as “the responsibility that one has, in terms of using the imagination as a means of

73
Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Vol. 1. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff,
1979).

74
See note 59 for a caveat concerning the concept of the “familial.”

107

compassion, and understanding things one couldn’t have experienced.”
75
If Notes from the
Divided Country is a work created from a sense of ethical responsibility, we could perhaps also
see it more specifically as a project of ethical memory and ask, along with ethnic studies scholar
Jodi Kim, “What does it mean to want to represent or “remember” a war that has been
“forgotten” and erased in the U.S. popular imaginary, but has been transgenerationally seared
into the memories of Koreans and Korean Americans, and experienced anew everyday in a still-
divided Korea”?
76
Notes in many ways grapples with this very question, and can be seen as an
effort to remember the “Forgotten War” through vivid, moving, sometimes chilling poems that
depict the enduring trauma of war through the lens of a diasporic subjectivity that connects
people, places and events in unexpected ways.
The “divided country” referred to in the title of the volume most immediately and
strongly suggests Korea, which was permanently divided at the 38th parallel in 1953, when the
armistice was signed that called a truce to the Korean War.
77
The 38th parallel remains the
official territorial borderline between the two Koreas to this day. The indiscriminate military
strikes of the Korean War set into motion a massive migration in which millions of people lost
their land and their homes and fled in search of safety.
78
The official partition of the Korean
peninsula subsequently displaced and separated families permanently, generating also large-scale

75
Robert Siegel, interview with Suji Kwock Kim, National Public Radio, October 13, 2003.

76
Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010), 34.

77
Korea was divided at the 38th parallel in 1945 after World War II, but the signing of the armistice
after the Korean War made that division permanent.

78
Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 68-69.

108

diasporic movements to places like the United States.
79
Upon reading through Kim’s book,
however, “the divided country” takes on more of a metaphorical sense that invokes any
community divided against itself due to various kinds of injustices and power struggles, as well
as the “divided country” of the mind—a divided and fragmented subjectivity. The first poem,
“Generation”, engages on some level with all these senses of the “divided country”, but most
deeply with the latter sense of a subjectivity that is always already fragmented, divided, and
dividing. This approach to the broken, deconstructing subjectivity of the postgenerations of
trauma lays the groundwork for the ethics of diasporic memory that structures her book as a
whole. It shows how trauma travels across generations, languages, cultures, and geographies
through affective, postmemorial (af)filiations that link them; however even within such
dynamics, the subject of postmemory in her book resists full identification with victimhood and
trauma.
Dominick LaCapra, in his essay “Trauma, Absence, and Loss” argues that the distinction
between loss and absence is crucial when representing trauma. Losses are specific and involve
particular events while with absence “one cannot lose what one never had.”
80
He further suggests
that absence applies to ultimate foundations in general, and that when absence becomes conflated
with loss, the absence becomes fetishized and absorbs or obscures the significance of particular
historical losses (as with certain renditions of both Christian and oedipal stories). The
affirmation of absence as absence rather than loss or lack, according to LaCapra, “opens up
different possibilities and requires different modes of coming to terms with problems.”
81

79
Ibid., 9.

80
Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (1999): 701.

81
Ibid., 706.

109

Regarding “secondary witnesses” (who in the context of this essay would be the diasporic
Korean postgeneration), LaCapra observes that a difficulty arises when the virtual experience
involved in empathy “gives way to vicarious victimhood, and empathy with the victim seems to
become an identity.”
82
He proposes instead that the secondary witness who resists full
identification and the dubious appropriation of the status of victim may nonetheless undergo
“empathic unsettlement or even muted trauma.”
83
Since it acknowledges that it is dubious to
make oneself a surrogate victim, the role of empathic unsettlement in the attentive secondary
witness does not entail identity; it involves “a kind of virtual experience through which one puts
oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not
taking the other’s place.”
84
The paradigm of empathic unsettlement sets in relief the problem of
how to address traumatic events involving victimization, including the problem of composing
narratives that neither confuse one’s position with the victim’s nor “seek facile uplift,
harmonization, or closure but allow the unsettlement that they address to affect the narrative’s
own movement....”
85
Empathy that resists full identification with, and appropriation of, the
experience of another would depend on one’s recognition that another’s loss in not identical to
one’s own loss or experiences of absence.
In light of LaCapra’s analysis, the diasporic postgeneration(s) of collective trauma must
grapple with the ghostly, unsettling absence of their parents’ traumatic losses—material,
familial, psychical—from a war they only know about second-hand. The speaker in

82
Ibid., 699.

83
Ibid., 717.

84
Ibid., 722.

85
Ibid., 723.

110

“Generation”, while affectively engaged with the burden of historical trauma, resists not only
surrogate identification with her parents’ experiences, but also troubles the question of a stable
“I” altogether. The poem ends with the repetition of the word “I” three times—“I, I, I.”—which
visually resonates with and “echoes” the line “cells dividing, cells dividing” that came before it.
The effect of this association is the suggestion of a never whole or stable consciousness,
repeatedly dividing and fragmenting itself even as it “driv[es] forwards”. The specific loss that
the poem deals with is the experience of a baby losing its “home” in its mother’s body, but the
absences that haunt the poem are the unfathomable traumatic experiences of the child’s parents
before the child was born, as well an “affirmation of absence as absence” at the end of the
poem—what one could argue is a critique of foundational, unified identity. These distinctive
registers of loss and absence contribute to how the poem both performs empathic unsettlement
and produces it in the reader.
The paradigm that Kim sets up in “Generation” of a fragmented, unstable identity that
resists surrogate victimization paves the way for an approach to ethical memory founded on a
comparative, transnational notion of justice. The varied internal and external focalizers featured
in Notes from the Divided Country binds together different temporal, spatial, and cultural sites,
connecting diverse private and collective traumas while still retaining their specificities. This is
a move away from identity politics to a vision of justice that cuts across nation, ethnicity,
received identities and official histories; it is an act of solidarity that aims to create new
communal and political identities.
The ethical dimension of Kim’s book that shapes “Generation” is perhaps best
encapsulated in a line of one of the later poems. In the poem “Montage with Neon, Bok Choi,
Gasoline, Lovers & Strangers”, the lyric speaker observes old men on the streets of Seoul “with

111

hair the color of scallion root…old enough to have stolen overcoats & shoes from corpses” who
seem to say:
after things turned to their worst, we began again,
but may you never see what we saw,
may you never do what we’ve done,
may you never remember & may you never forget.
May you never remember and may you never forget. This enigmatic, subjunctive statement
resonates with a lesson that LaCapra has stressed: that simultaneously remembering and actively
taking leave or “forgetting” is what distinguishes healthy mourning from debilitating, endless
melancholy.
86
In other words, forgetting and remembering must happen together. Notes from the
Divided Country puts a twist on this counsel to “remember and forget” by couching it in the
negative: “never remember and never forget”. One must remember that one can never remember
another’s memory. And yet, sometimes, one must not allow for the forgetting of that other’s
memory. Postmemory entails a different kind of remembering that is, in the first instance,
relational, non-identitarian, and ethical.

86
Ibid., 716.

112

3

FORBIDDEN RELATIONS:
SOUTH KOREAN INCEST DRAMAS AND THE CRISIS OF INTERRUPTED KINSHIP

There is a peculiar prevalence of incest dramas in South Korean popular culture. More
than twenty South Korean television dramas and films in the past fifteen years alone involve the
possibility of an incestuous relationship as a subtext. Autumn Tale (2000) and Winter Sonata
(2002), the television serials that ostensibly launched the “Korean Wave” in broader Asia, as
well the cult classic and critically acclaimed film Oldboy (2003), are among the numerous
productions in which key characters who at one point or another are thought to be biologically
related fall in love.
1
An Internet search of the terms “Korean incest drama” yields numerous K-
drama (Korean drama) discussion boards and blog posts devoted to the topic. A Google search
yields results such as “K-dramas in Which the Lovers Might Be Siblings,” “I love my oppa/ge
ge: the charm of incest dramas,” “Fauxcest Is the Best!” “Tree of Heaven: Tears, heartbreak,
yakuza, doom, incestuous siblings. All in a day's work for Korea.” Fans repeatedly ask, “Incest
scares are very, very common in Korean drama—why?”
2
In this chapter I will attempt to answer
this question from a historical point of view that takes into account how tropes originate,

1
Along with Autumn Tale, Winter Sonata, and Oldboy, other television shows and films that feature
incest subtexts (to varying degrees) are My Girl, Tree of Heaven, What Star Are You From?,
Snowman, Stairway to Heaven, Bad Love, Autumn in My Heart, Damo, Ireland, 90 Days: Time
to Love, That Winter the Wind Blows, Hotel King, You’re Beautiful, One Fine Day, Sopyonje,
The Petal, Mother, Pietà, and Moebius. I do not believe that this is an exhaustive list, as there
may be others of which I am not aware.

2
http://mihansa.net/obstacles-love-romance-korean-drama/

113

circulate, and evolve. I will show how the now familiar incest trope in South Korean cultural
productions has roots in the historical material conditions created by war and national division.
Geopolitical and civil conflicts devastated the Korean peninsula—destroying homes,
displacing masses of people, and separating family members from one another. Though Korea
was freed from Japanese rule as one result of World War II, national independence was
complicated by American and Russian occupations on either side of an arbitrary partition at the
38th parallel. In 1948 the division was formalized along Cold War ideological lines, setting into
motion the systematic purging of political dissidents, mass killings, and floods of refugees. By
the time of the Korean War (1950–1953), the “civil war” had very much become a gruesome
international conflict between Cold War superpowers. The peninsula was thoroughly decimated
by relentless, ruthless warfare. Indiscriminate napalm raids and combat strategies of “saturation”
and “area” bombing were so destructive that one reporter described “the countless ruined
villages” as “the most terrible and universal mark of the war on the Korean landscape”
3
. General
Emmett O’Donnell, chief of Bomber Command, reported to the 1951 Senate hearings that “the
entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There
is nothing standing worthy of the name.”
4
Three and a half to four million soldiers and civilians
were killed on both sides; the ethnic Koreans who died constituted 10–15 percent of the entire
national population at the time.
5
In February 1952 the UN released figures estimating that “one
out of every nine men, women and children in North Korea had been killed. In the South,

3
Walter Sullivan, quoted in Marilyn B. Young, “Korea: The Post-war War,” History Workshop Journal
51 (2001): 116.

4
Ibid., 113.

5
Tobias Hübinette, “The Orphaned Nation: Korea Imagined as an Overseas Adopted Child in Clon’s
Abandoned Child and Park Kwang-su’s Berlin Report,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6, no. 2
(2005): 231.

114

5,000,000 people had been displaced and 100,000 children were described as
‘unaccompanied’.”
6
Families were literally separated by these conditions: those who could not
cross the 38th parallel together, those who got separated within the seas of refugees, siblings who
were orphaned and then not adopted together, and so on.
And the war continues to this day. There was no peace treaty—only a military armistice
signed in 1953 that established the Korean Demilitarized Zone. The DMZ became the de facto
new border between North and South Korea and is today the most heavily militarized border in
the world. The untold numbers of families who were separated during the chaos of massive
internal migration—which was complicated further by the closed, impenetrable DMZ border and
by considerable international refugee migration and adoption—created a remarkable situation of
sociocultural trauma. In 1983 the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) in South Korea hosted a
televised “campaign to reunite ten million divided families,”
7
which attracted so much interest
that what began as a ninety-five-minute program turned into more than 453 hours of live
broadcasts in which 100,952 applicants participated, resulting in as many as 10,189 reunited
relatives of whom some were international adoptees.
8

These experiences of separation are on such a large scale and have been ongoing for such
a prolonged period of time that they have created on the peninsula the shared experience of a

6
Young, “Korea,” 116.

7
Foley (2002) disputes the widely accepted number of “ten million” separated families in Korea. He
shows that it is nearly impossible to calculate the precise number given the sheer chaos on the
Korean peninsula from 1945 to1953. See Foley, James A. Korea’s Divided Families: Fifty Years
of Separation. London; New York: Routledge-Curzon, 2003.

8
Ibid., 85–86. This program was recently dramatized in the film the 2014 film Ode to My Father
( 국제시장, literally International Market).

115

crisis of interrupted kinship. Korean film director Park Chan-wook has noted the widespread
sociocultural impact of the tragedy of division on everyday life:
Right, it happens everywhere in daily life. So when we live our lives without a care in the
world, we can always encounter someone directly related to that tragedy, and through the
relationship with that person, the tragedy touches us, too. In that way, I come to take on
what someone else used to carry by himself. The tragedy of the Korean division, which
seemed to have nothing to do with [the film] Geumja (Lady Vengeance), comes down to
her with the gun the old [North Korean] spy hands her. This is the network that makes up
society.
9

There are several aspects of Park’s statement that are significant for understanding how the
plague of separations created by the war’s devastation on the peninsula has had long-lasting
consequences that are experienced on the everyday scale. In a small, densely populated country
like South Korea—which is about one-fifth the size of California but with a current population of
over fifty million—it was impossible not to “always encounter someone directly related to that
tragedy” of separated families in the decades following the Korean War. For the first generations
after the war, it was entirely typical for a Korean to have several relatives missing or in North
Korea and to have no idea where they were and whether they were alive or not. Compound this
experience with the also typical experience of knowing many other families in the same
situation. This brief mental exercise reveals the phenomenology of how the interpersonal nature
of tragedy on such a massive scale, through exponential multiplication, becomes a thoroughly
collective experience of historical trauma. It is the lived experience of a collective crisis of

9
Interview with Park Chan-wook, “Sympathy for the Old Boy,” trans. Steffen Hantke and Aryong Choi-
Hantke, June 8, 2008, http://www.ikonenmagazin.de/interview/Park.htm (emphasis mine).

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interrupted kinship. How does such a collective tragedy manifest itself in culture? The recurring
trope of the incest scare in cultural productions is, in my view, one manifestation of the crisis of
interrupted kinship in the social imaginary. The mass displacements of war and the installation of
the 38th parallel’s DMZ literally created social conditions in which relatives were separated from
or lost to each other, making possible the kind of trope that hinges on what could happen if one
met a long-lost relative without knowing him or her as such. The circulation of the incest trope in
South Korea is the imbrication of the collective experience of national division with the
individual-intersubjective experience of literal separation from family members.

THE OTHER SIDE OF DARK REMEMBRANCE: FORCED SEPARATION AND FORBIDDEN RELATIONS
My analysis centers on an award-winning 1983 novella written by Lee Kyun-Young: The
Other Side of Dark Remembrance (TOSODR). I see this text as a literary precursor
10
to the more
recent and familiar incest dramas in South Korean popular culture. I suggest that this particular
story demonstrates how the trope of incest, and the anxiety about biological kinship that it
provokes, emerged from and evolved under prolonged traumatic conditions that literally

10
To clarify, I am not asserting that TOSODR is the first example of the use of the incest motif in
Korean literature, or even in postwar literature. Stories involving incestuous relationships date as
far back as oral-origin Korean folklore. However, my argument is that TOSODR shows how the
current iterations of the incest trope in contemporary popular culture have more recent roots in
the conditions of war that created mass displacement and divided families. In the postwar period,
Jang Yonghak wrote The Legend of Origin (1962), an incest drama that very much fits within the
thesis of this essay but that I did not choose for analysis because it is not translated into English
and is therefore not readily accessible the way TOSODR is. Kim Dongni (1913–95) wrote a
number of stories with characters involved in incest, but Heo Ryeonhwa has shown convincingly
that Kim’s fixation with incest in his stories stems from his own unfulfilled romantic love for an
older female cousin who died when he was eleven years old. See Heo Ryeonhwa, “Kimdongni
Sosŏrŭi Kŭnch'insanggan Mot'ip'ŭ Yŏn'gu” [“The Study of Incest in Kim Dongni’s Novels”].
The Journal of Modern Korean Literature, 34 (2011): 159-184.] Kim Dongni’s specific use of
the incest trope is more of an outlier rather than a support for or a contradiction of my argument
here.

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disrupted lines of biological descent on the Korean peninsula.
TOSODR brings together how the
narrative strategies of incest anxiety in Korean cultural productions seem to be tied to biological
aspects of the past that indirectly index war, national division, and lost memory. I will build on
my analysis of the novella to give new insights into the films Sopyonje (1993) and Oldboy
(2003), focusing on how the logic of the incest taboo deployed in Korean cultural productions
corresponds to psychosocial effects stemming from the traumatic experiences of interrupted
kinship relations.
TOSODR follows a relatively simple plotline: a Seoul salaryman, who remains unnamed,
misplaces a satchel containing important work documents after a night of drinking with his
friend. He had gotten so drunk that he wakes up in the morning not knowing where he is or what
had happened the night before. The novella follows him as he attempts to retrace his steps from
that evening in order to find his satchel. The protagonist ends up confronting what emerged from
his unconscious when he was not in full control of it: his memories of a long-lost sister. They
had become orphaned during the war but were so young that he does not remember much
clearly; he cannot be sure of how old he is, of how old she is, or even if they might be twins. He
knows that they were briefly together in an orphanage before she disappeared one day. Over the
course of the novella, the reader discovers that this abrupt separation had left a deep wound in
the protagonist’s psyche, one that has affected his life profoundly despite his attempt to forget
about it.
Even though there is nothing in the storyline of TOSODR itself that references the
partitioning of the peninsula, the story has been understood as a metaphor of the divided nation
as separated, orphaned siblings. The protagonist’s sister is his lost half and he is an incomplete,
fractured self without her. This divided nation metaphor has been obvious to South Korean

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readers since the novella was published in 1983, officially situating it within the classification of
the “division novel” (pundansosŏl) in Korean literary history.
11
The division novel became a
recognizable literary trend beginning in the late 1970s with novels like Kim Won-il’s Evening
Glow (Noŭl, 1978) and Jeon Sang-guk’s Ah-be’s Family (Abeŭi Kajok, 1980), which critically
examined the psychological impact of national division on the people of Korea. In TOSODR, the
metaphor of the siblings works as a stand-in for the divided Korean nation on both literal and
symbolic levels. It literally describes the kinds of separations that occurred all over the peninsula,
including those involving orphaned children, who were the most vulnerable. But it also
symbolically taps into a kind of ethnonationalistic and racialized sentimentality in which all
ethnic Koreans are seen as one dispersed family—an image that has become a powerful
metaphor of the Korean nation itself. This can be traced back to the pervasive myth of Korea as a
homogeneous and “pure-blooded” nation, a self-description that arose in reaction to Japanese
colonialism. Activists during that period promoted a “we consciousness” that has since evolved
into an ethnonationalism that takes for granted shared ancestry, ethnic purity and a familial type
of belonging. Roy Grinker picks up on the role that Korean reunification discourse plays in the
idea of the nation as family: “Koreans often construe division not only as the separation of the
nation but also as the separation of families, and as a result unification is construed as the
reunion of separated family members. The nation is the family writ large. Thus, although Korean
division is sometimes represented in terms of land, or more literally the ancestors’ lands
(pundandoen choguk), the more conventional and primary representation is the division of

11
Even the description of the book on the back cover of the English translation says, “This novella falls
into the fiction genre dealing with the division of North and South Korea.”

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people.”
12
For this reason, discourses concerning both the Korean War and the partition at the
38th parallel have been predominantly framed in terms of “brothers at war” and “divided
families.”
13

With this context of audience reception in mind, I want to show how this story
illuminates the enmeshment of Korean memory and identity with constructs of kinship. What
interests me is how this novella’s central metaphor—the trauma of a divided nation being like the
forced separation of brother and sister—takes on the twist of a possibly incestuous kind of
reunion on the level of plot. At a very young age, the central character lost his family through
circumstances caused by the war, leaving him with a series of unanswered questions that haunt
him: Where is he from? How old is he? Where is his sister? Is she even his real sister? Try as he
might to ignore them, he is persistently haunted by the questions of his biological origins and the
possibility of having a living blood relative. The story depicts the psychic and social effects of
the trauma of interrupted kinship that had occurred as a result of war and national division. In the
story’s overarching conceit, there is a sense of forbidden relations that grew out of the
circumstances of war: certain relations were made “forbidden” because war and national division
interrupted existing configurations of kinship relations for many people, such as orphans,
international adoptees, and families split by the geopolitical partition that bars them from one
another. Could it be that this sense of forbidden relations, rooted in historical trauma and in
geopolitically enforced prohibitions, slides into another sense of forbidden relations, one that

12
Roy Grinker, Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1998) 102-3.

13
See Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea, 1
st
ed. (New York: W.
W. Norton & Company, 2013) and James A. Foley, Korea’s Divided Families: Fifty Years of
Separation (London; New York: Routledge-Curzon, 2003).

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connotes incest? I argue that this incest “scare” is a narrative strategy that signals a confluence of
the traumatic effects of forced separation, the desire for reunion, and the problem of forgetting.

THE LONG-LOST SIBLING: TRAUMA AND DESIRE
The potential long-lost sister figure in the story is Miss Min, a hostess-prostitute at a
hostess bar
14
the protagonist visited on the night he lost his satchel. Since he can’t remember
even visiting that particular bar, the mystery that ends up preoccupying his search for the satchel
is the question of who had taken care of him that night. Having pieced together aspects of what
had happened that evening after interviewing various people with whom he had interacted, he
learns that a woman had been with him when the cab driver dropped them off at the inn. He
learns that he had fallen “asleep with [his] head resting on her chest”
15
in the cab, that she had
escorted him to the inn, undressed and cleaned his body of the dirt and blood from a street brawl,
hung up his clothes, and tucked him into bed before leaving—all without seeking any thanks or
compensation for her efforts. He wonders to himself: “she looked after this drunken man as if
she were his wife or sister, but was not after anything he had, and then vanished before daybreak
without leaving any trace so that he would not know of her good deed, like a chaste woman who
had a brief illicit love but immediately came back to her senses” (92, emphasis mine). In this
passage, we see the confluence of both romantic and sibling love in how the protagonist
imagines the woman’s type of care for him—as that of a wife, a sister, or a lover. The woman
had clearly spent most of the night with him, and the question of whether they had had sex

14
A hostess bar caters to men seeking female servers and companions as they drink. These female
servers also often provide sexual services. By the 1980s, the terms “hostess” (hosŭt’esŭ) and “bar
girl” (sulchipyŏcha) were thus often euphemisms for prostitutes.

15
Kyun-young Lee, The Other Side of Dark Remembrance, trans. Jung-hyo Ahn (Seoul: Jimoondang,
2001), 40. All subsequent page references to this work will be given in parentheses in the text.

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crosses his mind more than once throughout the story, though in the end he highly doubts it
because of how drunk he had been. It seems likely, however, that they had been quite intimate
even if it had not been completely sexual.
The link between sibling love and Miss Min also emerges through the protagonist’s
unconscious in a dreaming state. While waiting at the taxi company office to speak to the cab
driver who dropped him off at the inn, he dozes off and has a dream that at first seems
incongruous with the satchel situation occupying his waking moments. This dream is the first
reference to the Korean War in the story, and a clue that his odd subconscious actions of the
night before had something to do with the contents of the dream.
The dream begins with a little boy and a little girl playing and laughing together in an
idyllic field of flowers. Abruptly, the mood of the scene turns: the flowers begin screaming, the
boy becomes tangled and bloody in a bramble of thorny branches, and the children start crying
and calling for “Mommy”:
“My children! My children!” a woman’s voice called from afar. “Where are you,
my children?” the woman’s voice called again. Oh, oh, blood spurted from the boy’s arm
and drenched him all over. Blood! It’s blood!...There was a flying machine in the sky,
and it looked like a dragonfly. “Children! Children!” the woman called more urgently.
The flowers that had been screaming hurled themselves to the ground. And then an
explosion engulfed the woman’s shriek.
Hold each other’s hands, children, you mustn’t let go! The woman’s voice was
screaming its last words…The boy held the girl’s hand. Deafening gun reports ensued.
The girl let go of his hand. Countless refugees passed through the widening gap between
them.

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My hand! Hold my hand! (35-36)
The dream and the mystery woman seem to have an underlying connection in his subconscious,
as it is moments after he wakes up from this dream that the protagonist learns from the cabbie the
previously mentioned crucial information: that a woman had escorted him to the inn, that he had
fallen asleep with his head on her chest, that this woman had taken care of him “as if she were
his wife or sister.”
This dream abruptly punctuates the narrative early on, but we learn that this dream
cobbled together bits and pieces of the protagonist’s memories of traumatic experiences during
the Korean War. Later in the story, he recounts not as a dream but as a memory (“the things he
remembered now”) the “endless procession of people, the noise, the airplane that looked like a
dragonfly, smoke and flames, gun reports, cold, whimpering children, hunger” (67). The little
girl is his sister, whom he calls Hye-Su, and the woman is their mother. He could remember his
mother suddenly falling down among the crowd of people on the road, and “the distinct color of
the blood that had stained his hand when he had touched her chest and the voice of his mother
crying out something desperately for the last time. . . . Mother said he and Hye-su had to keep
holding each other’s hands” (67). She implores him to hold on to Hye-su’s hand with the hand
stained by her own blood. That blood—metonymically standing in for the loss of their mother’s
life and, by extension, the advent of their orphanhood—binds the two children to each other. It
symbolizes the link of blood that unites them and that gives them an identity to hold on to. But
despite desperately trying to stay together, they later end up becoming separated when Hye-Su

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disappears from the orphanage one day. The mother’s last words to the children—her injunction
to “hold each other’s hands,” to not let go—haunt the protagonist well into his adult life.
16

These elements of the dream-memory make a return in the protagonist’s interaction with
Miss Min. Even after the lost satchel turns up at work on Monday morning after having been
returned by someone who happened to find it, “a sudden obsession naggingly depressed him”
(88). He makes an excuse to leave work, and the following sequence of his actions again seems
to align Miss Min in his subconscious with the long-lost sister. First, he goes back to the
neighborhood he went to when he was drunk—Imun-dong, which he realized at one point was in
search of his sister who was rumored to have been adopted by “a dentist in Imun-dong.” This
time, he inquires at the district office and a realtor office about any dental clinics in the area
around 1955. Everyone is eager to help him, but the search tellingly seems to indicate that the
rumor of her adoption was false: “They could not find any such clinic” (90). Immediately after
following this possible lead to his sister, he heads straight to the bar where Miss Min works, as if
an internal logic pushes him there.
The end of the story makes it impossible not to speculate that Miss Min could be his
sister, at the same time that she becomes his potential lover. Miss Min admits that she had taken
care of him that night because she felt compelled by the similarity of their fates. The
protagonist’s drunken state had disinhibited him enough that he had told her his life story—about
how he was orphaned so young that he doesn’t know his age, about his experiences in the
orphanage, and about his sister. Miss Min explains, “I listened to your story till the end. . . . I
simply could not leave. Do you know why? . . . I don’t know my age either. . . . I was an orphan

16
The image of family members desperately holding hands for fear of losing one another during the
mass displacement and chaos of the war has become a repeatedly circulated trope in and of itself,
most recently exemplified in the opening scenes of the 2014 film Ode to My Father.

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too” (101). He notes that she is about his own age, around thirty years old (97), which is within
the age range his sister would be. She also recognizes and remembers all the minute details of
life at the orphanage that he remembers (102).
This last scene also evokes their possible blood relation by subtly echoing the
protagonist’s mother’s last words to “hold each other’s hands.” The story ends, quite fittingly,
with the pair holding hands: “He clasped her hand in his palm. Her hand was warm, but it was no
longer a strange woman’s hand to him.” This gesture of holding hands destroys the barrier that
had previously demarcated their relationship as strangers. Holding hands in the protagonist’s
traumatic dream-memory was a gesture of desperate grasping under threat of separation, but in
this last scene it morphs into a gesture of affection and the prelude to a long embrace: “She put
her head on his chest. He felt some warm and salty moisture, like tears, slowly filling him up
from the bottom of his heart. He put his arm around her and drew her closer to him. Placing her
hands softly on his chest, she snuggled in his arms. His heart pounded mysteriously. Her hand
gently stroking his chest, she remained in his arms like that for a long, long time” (103). Miss
Min’s embrace, and her tears, have the effect of filling up the void in his heart that has plagued
him since his kinless youth. And this is how the book ends, with the two embracing as lovers
more than siblings.
This journey of the gesture of holding hands is marked by a trail of blood, which also
moves through conceptual permutations: from the blood of war, encapsulated in the memory of
his bloody, dying mother, to the blood on his hands from holding her, to the blood relation
between the siblings, to Miss Min’s desire to share her blood with another human being through
procreation. When faced with this man who was too drunk to care for himself, Miss Min
instinctively took on a mothering role. She says that she tended to him like a “big urchin boy,”

125

washing every part of him carefully with what in Korean is called sunjŏng—a feeling of pure,
self-sacrificing devotion. This leads the protagonist to ask her if she has any children from
prostituting. She confesses to him that she had had an abortion even though she had wanted to
keep the baby: “She had wanted to have the child and raise him. She wanted to share her blood
with another being.” The protagonist makes the connection, responding, “So I was your baby the
other night.” Her longing for a baby brings together the literal blood that she washed off the
protagonist’s body with the blood connection of biological kinship she yearns for. The different
registers of the meaning of blood in the story converge in the figure of the long-lost sister. She is
a layering of relationships—sister, mother, lover—condensed into one figure that psychically
attempts to recuperate all that was lost.
The trauma of separation produced both a void and a desire: the void created by
interrupted kinship relations and the desire to fill that void. Compounding this dynamic of lack
and desire is the problem of forgetting, which threatens to turn desire for kinship into a taboo
desire for a long-lost relation. The protagonist’s memory of his sister is so hazy, with none of the
details of her name, age, or circumstances of leaving the orphanage clear, that nearly any woman
of a certain age range who was also orphaned during the Korean War could be his sister. These
are the children who were orphaned at such a young age that it was impossible for them to
remember anything accurately later when they became adults. Hence, the possibility of an
incestuous attraction in this story is ultimately rooted in the trauma of forced separation coupled
with a problem of memory.

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TRAUMA AND THE PROBLEM OF FORGETTING
As already mentioned, the protagonist’s dream seems to be based on the underlying
memory of a real-life traumatic experience. As we read on, however, we realize that the
protagonist himself doubts the accuracy of his own memory of the events. He doesn’t know what
his mother’s name was or where she lived; he doesn’t remember what she looked like.
Whenever he thinks of his mother, he remembers her last words, “Hold each other’s hands,” but
he is not entirely sure that she said them at all or if “she might be a person of whom he had no
memory at all from the beginning.” It occurred to him that “those words might have been some
sort of autosuggestion” (68).
His memory of his sister is similarly unstable. He declares that “his memory of Hye-su
was always clear and accurate,” and he remembers details like the fact that Hye-su was a pretty
girl, that everyone at the orphanage seemed to believe that they were siblings, that Hye-su had
called him “big brother” (oppa) (68). At one moment, he declares, “There was no doubt that
Hye-su was his sister,” but in the next moment, the idea that he and Hye-su were siblings strikes
him as “an absurdity” (72). He may have remembered that she was pretty, but paradoxically he
“could not remember her face” (66) or how old she was or whether Hye-su was her real name:
“Hye-su was his younger sister. Or she could have been his older sister. Or they might even be
twins. He could not remember her face, but her name was Hye-su. . . . He was not sure if Bak
Hye-su was her own name, or a new name given to her by someone at the orphanage” (66). As
much as he “remembers,” he also questions that very memory.
The instability of his memory is undoubtedly an effect of early childhood trauma: the
trauma of witnessing massive upheaval and destruction during the war, of his mother’s death, of
being displaced and homeless, of forced separation from his sister. The protagonist’s dream and

127

his drunken search for his sister, followed by a fugue state, indicate that he could be suffering
from post-traumatic stress. The diagnostic criteria for PTSD as defined in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders indicate that traumatic events are persistently
reexperienced as “intrusive distressing recollections of the event,” including dreams, flashbacks,
hallucinations, and illusions.
17
Moreover, the failure of memory—misremembering or the
inability to remember or articulate memory—is one of the key characteristics of PTSD. This is in
large part because traumatic memories, according to trauma researcher Dr. Judith Herman, “lack
verbal narrative and context; rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and
images.”
18
The traumatic experience is essentially a reference that can never be anything more
than indirect. Cathy Caruth insists that trauma cannot be traced back to a locatable event in an
individual’s past. Instead, what we witness is “its very unassimilated nature—the way it was
precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.”
19
The traumatic
experience returns, again and again, to repeatedly address the survivor in the attempt to
communicate a reality or truth that is not otherwise comprehensible. The peculiar mode of
representation in traumatic narratives is linked as much to what is known as to what is unknown
because of the intrinsically deferred nature of this “truth.” Our protagonist in TOSODR is
doggedly haunted by what is unknown—the question of what happened to his sister—even as he
tries desperately to move on from the past.

17
American Psychiatric Association and American Psychiatric Association Task Force on DSM-IV,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV (Washington, DC: American
Psychiatric Association, 1994), 428.

18
Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to
Political Terror (Basic Books, New York, 2015), 38.

19
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996), 4.

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Another reason for the instability of his memories is that he was orphaned so young that
it is difficult to ascertain the “origin” of his memories. Twice he likens the visual and thematic
content of his memories to scenes from movies: “In the turmoil of the war, nothing maintained
accuracy. . . . A few broken pieces of faint remembrance flickering in his mind like some
disconnected sequences chipped from old movie films—that was all he knew about his
experiences in the war” (66). “[H]e could not tell for sure whether they were experiences he had
actually gone through, or those he had read or seen in the movies about a hundred thousand war
orphans and had somehow decided to believe had happened to him” (67). My own translation of
the original Korean here would be slightly different: “he could not tell for sure whether those
memories were memories of his own experiences or those of one hundred thousand war orphans
in books he has read, or movies he has seen, whose reality had become his own memory” (51,
emphasis mine). The emphasis in the original text is on the repeated word kiyŏk, “memory,”
which seems to indicate his preoccupation with what constitutes memory itself. He uses kiyŏk
interchangeably for the idea of personal memory (his own) and cultural memory (books and
movies).
His confusion over whether his memory is of real events or of scenes from movies or
books resonates with his telling of the dream. The dream-memory has a cinematic quality to it; it
is visually dynamic, like a series of camera shots edited together to create a scene. Audiovisual
“effects” coalesce into a kind of surrealistic perspective in which dragonflies turn into warplanes
and flowers scream and “[hurl] themselves to the ground.” Altogether these effects compellingly
evoke a bomb explosion experienced from the perspective of a fallen child. The dream is also
cinematic in its limited third-person perspective. The protagonist-dreamer is not the boy in the

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dream, experiencing the scene from the first-person perspective. Rather, he is on the outside,
looking in, from a perspective that is analogous to that of a film spectator.
What the protagonist’s predicament indexes in part is an existing visual archive of private
and public images that, when coupled with a faltering memory, become confused in his mind as
one and the same. Sharing narratives, whether historical or fictional, is one of the ways that the
individual aligns with society. Cinema and television, as well as fiction, can have the effect of
socially calibrating individuals. The individual’s memory thus ends up being constituted in part
by collectivity. As such, the protagonist’s dream-memory brings up the role of collective
memory and, specifically, cultural memory in identity formation. Alison Landsberg has
suggested that public cultural memory, particularly in the form of cinema, can function as a
“prosthetic” to private memory.
20
The technologies of mass culture make it possible for anyone
to absorb collective memories and to assimilate historical events through which they did not live
as “personal experience.” TOSODR shows how prosthetic memory via culture can have
ambiguous implications: memory can be revised to the point of confusion between one’s own
memory and the public memory created by the cultural circulation of images and narratives
about the past. Our protagonist shows how the inability to distinguish between real and
prosthetic memories compounds the problem of remembering when dealing with the aftermath of
lived historical traumas.
The protagonist’s persistent problem of forgetting directly contributes to a crisis of
identity. He seems lost in relation to both his own sense of self and his place in society. The
narrative captures the anxiety that such questions generate by never referring to the protagonist
by name. His namelessness stresses the significance of names in the intertwining of biology with

20
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of
Mass Culture (Columbia University Press, New York, 2004).

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identity. Traditional Korean naming culture has built into it a method of genealogical tracing by
clan, such that one’s name indicates not only one’s father’s line over centuries but also things
like order of birth, place of clan origin, and generational level.
21
Orphans and other displaced
individuals were stripped of these identifying markers, which became inaccessible for various
reasons, such as never being able to return to one’s home or the destruction of family records
during the war. Our protagonist is one of these individuals, in a sense rendered without history
and, by extension, without identity. He does not remember his mother’s name; he does not
remember his sister’s name. He refers to his sister as “Hye-Su,” but he does not know if Hye-su
was his sister’s own name or a new name given to her by the orphanage. Moreover, he refers to
her several times as “Bak Hye-su”—Bak being the last name of a dentist in the neighborhood of
Imun-dong who supposedly adopted her. His usage of “Bak Hye-Su” subtly indicates that he
probably doesn’t know his own surname, since he cobbles together the name he remembers
calling his sister with the last name of a stranger who may or may not exist. The people who
populate his memories and who are attached to his sense of identity are essentially nameless
individuals. His own namelessness in the book encapsulates the inaccessibility of his past and his
lack of identity. The protagonist’s namelessness also depicts him as an everyman kind of figure;
he is the typical salaryman in early 1980s Seoul and could be any man one encounters on the
street. It reminds the reader that the traumatic consequences of war and national division have
affected not just a handful but masses of people. But the effects of these traumatic events are
hidden under the trappings and pressures of everyday life, so that on the surface, everyone looks
the same as the next person.

21
This information built into names is possible if families over many generations maintain the jokbo
(family lineage book) and the practice of dollimja (circulating characters).

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The pressures of everyday life also encourage forgetting. If it is true, as Maurice
Halbwachs declared, that “one cannot remember alone,” then it is also true that our own
memories weaken for lack of external supports. Individual and collective forgetting happens as
social frameworks inevitably change from one period to another. The protagonist witnessed in
his own lifetime one Korea becoming two countries: North Korea and South Korea. He
witnessed South Korea’s transition from a war-torn and impoverished country to a rapidly
industrialized country dominated by the culture of late capitalism. In this context of rapid
change, forgetting becomes treated as the equivalent to “moving on.” According to Halbwachs,
collective memory evolves in large part as “society represents the past to itself” in different ways
by modifying its conventions. Individuals come to accept these conventions as the new normal,
inflecting their own recollections in the same manner.
22
In my view, this is a framed process of
forgetting that is shaped by social change and the desire for progress. Everyone wants the
protagonist to forget about Hye-Su. Everyone wants to believe that she is not actually his sister.
The superintendent of the orphanage laughs at him, saying, “You’re wrong, boy. . . . She is no
relative of yours,” insisting that the protagonist was too young when he entered the orphanage to
have remembered his mother’s last words to not let go of his sister’s hand (71). His own adopted
mother preferred that he forget about Hye-su too, saying, “Why don’t you forget her? . . . Now
you have me. I will do everything for you. You can forget her and go on living with me” (77).
What the protagonist does remember is met with skepticism, while forgetting is socially
approved as evidence of moving forward.
“Grandmother” of the orphanage recalls that she had taken in both the protagonist and
Hye-su from the army barracks because she could not separate them—the boy refused to let go

22
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 172–73.

132

of Hye-su’s hand. While this may seem to constitute evidence that the protagonist and Hye-su
were siblings, Grandmother herself, on the basis of a kind of biologistic reasoning, was hesitant
to believe it. She avers, “I really can’t believe you’re brother and sister [because] I can’t tell
which one of you two had been born first.” When the protagonist speculates that they may be
twins in that case, Grandmother further protests, “Siblings must have some resemblance in their
physical features, however young they might be, but you two just didn’t have that resembling
look” (74). Her pseudobiologistic logic evaluates their phenotypical appearances in order to
dismiss the possibility of consanguinity. This logic haunts the protagonist—the very value of
biological kinship that compels him to look for his sister is the one thing he cannot prove beyond
a shadow of a doubt. After many years, he eventually despairs over finding Hye-Su because of
all the potential problems—even if she did recognize him and remember him, “how could he
prove the fact that they were siblings? Maybe there was some medical way to confirm it, but he
would never resort to such a method” (77). This questioning of whether or not Hye-Su is the
protagonist’s sister is repeated at the level of the reader. We too ask, “Were they or weren’t they
siblings?” But does it matter so much, when they certainly felt and acted like siblings? Would his
loss of Hye-Su mean anything less saddening if she weren’t his biological sister? It is not until
the end—when we realize that Miss Min could be his sister—that the question of their biological
relationship suddenly confronts us with a taboo that brings out the complexity of the problem of
memory at the crossroads of the individual and the social.
In TOSODR, the incestuous subtext functions as a kind of discursive ellipsis: it captures
the displaced anxieties, yearnings, and effects of the trauma of national division. Incest is a
multiplication of kinship relations condensed on to one body, which in this story psychically
attempts to recuperate what was lost. The trope of desire for the forbidden incestuous object

133

stands in for a yearning for a mythic prior unity, for an overcoming of a traumatic forced
separation. Incest dares to confront, perform, and live out the forbidden. The figuration of incest
signifies a retreat inward, a refusal to circulate one’s body, one’s blood, and one’s care outside
one’s family. In this sense, one can see TOSODR as a reaction to the Cold War demands of a
kind of exogamy that compelled Korea to be split and manipulated by competing interests. It
signifies a return to figurative “endogamy” in which a reunited Korea opts out of geopolitical
power struggles.
I suggest that structural similarities between the incest taboo and the DMZ can create a
slippage of meaning between them in a cultural text like TOSODR. Claude Levi-Strauss of
course argued that the incest taboo guarantees the promotion of circulation and exchange among
communities via exogamy. The traditional rigid familial structure is thus predicated on the incest
taboo. Judith Butler
23
argues further that the foreclosures of the incest taboo not only produce
normative kinship, but also gender differentiations and heteronormativity. The DMZ is
structurally similar to the incest taboo; it inaugurated and legitimized an ideological forbidden
relation by installing a fundamental boundary that should not be crossed. And like the incest
taboo, at the same time that the DMZ bars certain relations, it produces others. It is a prohibition
founded upon the demands of another kind of “exogamy”- one that is ideological and
geopolitical. Cold War superpowers took over the peninsula and divided it for their special
interests in the region, effectively creating opposing regimes and political economies. And like
the incest taboo, the DMZ generated hegemonic norms out of that prohibition. By splitting
Korea into a “North Korea” and a “South Korea” at war with each other, it essentially created a
new other, a new opposition where there was not one before. TOSODR dwells on how this

23
Judith Butler, “Quandaries of the Incest Taboo” in Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in
Contemporary Culture, ed. Peter Brooks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 39-46.

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alterity was forcefully constructed out of a previous “unity”, such that “the other” on the other
side of the partition is somehow still “the self”.
The incest scare trope betrays an anxiety that emerges from this other-self paradox. In
his seminar on anxiety, Jacques Lacan contends that what attracts the kleptomaniac to the
forbidden object to be stolen is that it actually stands in for a more primal desire that comes from
a constitutive lack, which Lacan calls the objet a. The kleptomaniac says through stealing: “I’m
showing you an object I’ve stolen, by hook or by crook, because somewhere else there is another
object of mine, the a, which deserves to be considered, to be allowed to emerge for a moment.”
24

Following a similar logic, could it be that the trope of desire for the forbidden incestuous object
actually stands in for a yearning for a mythic prior unity, for an overcoming of a traumatic forced
separation? The figuration of incest signifies a retreat inward, a refusal to circulate one’s body,
one’s blood, and one’s care outside of one’s family. In this sense, one can see TOSODR as a
reaction to the Cold War demands of a kind of exogamy that compelled Korea to be split and
manipulated by competing interests. It signifies a return to figurative “endogamy” in which a
reunited Korea opts out of geopolitical power struggles.
The protagonist of TOSODR is “moved” by the hazy memories of his sister, and his
mother “in ways that disconcert, displace, and dispossess [him]”; he does not know precisely
who he is, or by what he is driven. In Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Judith
Butler and Athena Athanasiou reformulate the idea of “dispossession” (forced displacement,
homelessness, colonialism, etc.) outside the neoliberal logic of possession (property, ownership).
They argue that self-sufficiency has a limit, a threshold beyond which we discover ourselves as
fundamentally relational beings, always already “dispossessed” of self, and interdependent in

24
Jacques Lacan, Anxiety, English ed. (Cambridge, UK; Malde, MA: Polity, 2014), 145.

135

constitutive self-displacement. Alterity “dispossesses” us and moves us precisely because the
other is in us: “we are dispossessed of ourselves by virtue of being moved and even surprised or
disconcerted by that encounter with alterity. The experience . . . does reveal one basis of
relationality- we do not simply move ourselves, but are ourselves moved by what is outside us,
by others, but also by whatever “outside” resides in us.”
25
Dispossession, in this sense, describes
also the anxiety of interrupted kinship, when biological kin become unlocatable and
unidentifiable due to the circumstances of war and partition. TOSODR’s protagonist experiences
kinship as both this encounter of dispossession in the face of the other, and the inevitable search
for oneself. Butler interestingly observes that “one can be dispossessed in grief or in passion—
unable to find oneself.”
26
The incest trope, in a sense, expresses dispossession by both grief and
passion. It is a multiplication of kinship relations condensed onto one body, which in this story
psychically attempts to recuperate what was lost. It dares to confront, perform, and live out the
forbidden.

FROM TEXT TO SCREEN AND THE UNDERCURRENT OF INCEST IN SOPYONJE
As the recipient of the coveted Yi Sang Literary Prize in 1984, The Other Side of Dark
Remembrance has undoubtedly been an influential piece of literature in Korea. Nearly ten years
later, in 1993, Yi Cheong-jun published Sopyonje, another novella about an unnamed brother
searching for his sister, also with incestuous undertones, that film director Im Kwon-Taek turned
into a film that same year. The film enjoyed unprecedented domestic box-office success and is
commonly acknowledged as a landmark in Korea’s cultural history. Im’s film, in fact, is far

25
Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Malden, MA:
Polity, 2013), 3.

26
Ibid., 3-4.

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better known than Yi’s book, and the wide scholarship on Sopyonje the film rarely compares it to
its literary source text. Yi Cheong-jun’s Sopyonje was first published serially as short stories
before being published as a novel. The first story in the novella is “Sopyonje”, and was published
in 1976, pre-dating Lee’s TOSODR. The last story in the novella was published in 1981, before
all five stories were published in a novella format in 1993. Yi Cheong-jun was also a Yi Sang
Literary Award recipient in 1978, six years before Lee Kyun-young received his prize for
TOSODR. It is not a stretch to believe that these two authors were familiar with, and possibly
influenced by, each other’s works. And even if they were not, the fact that Sopyonje the novella,
TOSODR, and Sopyonje the film were all circulating at the same time is significant for
understanding how these overlapping tropes were circulating.
There are of course many important differences between these works, but let us dwell for
a moment on their marked similarities. Both novellas center on an unnamed brother figure who,
in his adult life, searches for his long-lost sister. The time periods of both stories also overlap, the
plots mainly unfolding during the postwar era of rapid industrialization in South Korea.
27
And
Sopyonje, like TOSODR, betrays a deep anxiety about kinship and seems unable to escape the
taboo of forbidden relations. In the film, a man named Dongho roams the countryside in search
of his long-lost adoptive sister Songhwa. Both orphans, they were adopted and apprenticed by
the pansori master Yubong who pressured them to sacrifice everything for the art. The anxieties

27
In TOSODR, the periodization comes through in the exigencies and alienation of the culture of late
capitalism that the protagonist experiences: he finds his desk job utterly meaningless yet
inescapable; he feels alienated from both his labor and from society. The culture of rapid
industrialization is occurring outside the frame in the film Sopyonje, which focuses instead on
what remains of the unadulterated countryside as the pansori family roams through it, struggling
to eke out a living by practicing a traditional art that is dying as American cultural forms like
jazz begin to take over in popularity. They squat in abandoned, dilapidated rural homes that
subtly remind the viewer of the war’s mass displacement of families.

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of kinship come through in several ways: Yubong’s demanding approach to constructing worthy
successors to whom he can pass down his art, since he has no biological heirs who can carry on
his name; Songhwa’s and Dongho’s orphan status and the cobbled-together nature of their
family; the tenuous boundary between romantic and familial love that emerges as the children
grow into adults and the family dynamics shift.
In Yi Cheong-jun’s original text, however, the pansori family’s members remain
unnamed, and the brother and sister are not adoptive siblings. They are in fact half-siblings who
share the same mother, and the daughter is the pansori master’s biological daughter. The
brother’s mother dies in giving birth to his half-sister, which sets the stage for the brother’s
hatred of his stepfather, whom he blames for his mother’s death. This eventually drives him to
run away from the family. In his adult years however, he longs to be reunited with his younger
sister and begins relentlessly searching for her. The brother’s search and longing for his sister has
decidedly incestuous undertones. When they finally play together again after years of separation,
the music they create is described with seductive and sexual undertones: “the duet of the song
and drum was an exquisite, perfect embrace in which one never touched the other, like a
courtesan’s tantalizing art of giving pleasure without a caress.”
28
The brother “panted from the
heat” he felt while playing and “struggled to stifle the heavy sound of his breathing.” The sister
sang “as though she so passionately desired to intensify the heat and pain of the flame blazing
over the drummer’s head.” And then finally, at dawn,
the man and the woman lay down side by side in her room…there was no need for words
between the singer and the traveller as they lay together. They expressed no surprise.
From the start both had foreknowledge of what would come to pass, and so had been

28
Ch’ŏngjun Yi (Yi Cheong-jun). Seopyeonje: The Southerners’ Song. (London; Chicago: Peter Owen,
2011), 57-58.

138

prepared. When the sun rose the traveller left the tavern quietly, without a word.
29

Though the wording here leaves the events of that night open to interpretation, it certainly leaves
open the strong possibility that “what came to pass” was in fact sexual intercourse. The
likelihood of this interpretation is strengthened a couple of pages later, when the singer explains
to a friend that her father had blinded her because he “[foresaw] that an illicit relationship might
develop between the half-siblings.”
30
Brother and sister also implicitly agree that meeting again
after that union is forbidden. The singer says, “Even if he should return to seek me out,
everything has ended. From this moment forth, we, the two half-siblings, must never face one
another again.”
31
Her emphasis in this quote is the fact that they are siblings; this seems to
indicate that it is precisely because they had been together in a taboo manner that they must
remain forever apart.
The anxiety of incest is prominent in Sopyonje, the semiotics of which, I argue, is rooted
in traces of collective trauma that illuminate the enmeshment of Korean memory and identity
with constructs of kinship. More specifically, the trope of incestuous attraction in Sopyonje
indexes a crisis of interrupted kinship as the impasse of biological inheritance converging with
the disappearance of cultural heritage. In Yi’s novella, the breakdown of the long-standing link
between inheritance and heritage manifests as an impossible love between half-siblings who long
for each other but who cannot be together. Unlike the film, the reunion scene is actually near the
beginning of the book. The rest of the novella shows the half-brother figure following his
itinerant half-sister at a distance for the rest of their lives, obsessed with finding traces of her and

29
Ibid., 58.

30
Ibid., 60.

31
Ibid., 64.

139

hearing stories about her legendary singing. His obsession turns into a larger “quest for the songs
of the south,”
32
songs that the novella depicts as becoming rarer and harder to find with time.
A fundamental breakdown of inheritance and heritage likewise opens Im’s film adapation
of Yi’s story: when Dongho’s mother dies in childbirth and Dongho’s half-sibling and Yubong’s
only would-be biological successor dies with her. The film quite fittingly ends with a crisis of
primogeniture, in which one of the last of a disappearing class of traditional pansori singers is
shown cast to the wayside of society, a disabled woman wandering the countryside with a
daughter who will struggle to keep the “national” art form, and the essence of Korean-ness, alive.
The “natural” order of inheritance is upended in this final image as the daughter leads her blind
mother. It is an image symbolizing the old, the traditional, and the “purely” Korean becoming
lost to the new, the modern, and the Western. The younger generations march into a future that is
perilous, with the older generations blindly following suit.
In both these stories, the pansori family experiences obstruction to the commingled flows
of biological inheritance and cultural heritage. The incestuous undertones in both works
communicate a feeling of stagnancy; the family members not only remain endogamous but also
son-less. With no male biological or cultural heir, the threat is that pansori will die within one
family line. The threat to the endurance of pansori can be read as metonymic of a threat to the
idea of Korean essence and national identity. Different registers of lost heritage converge in the
figure of the long-lost sister. Incest is a multiplication of kinship relations condensed onto one
body; she is a layering of relationships—sister, mother, lover—condensed into one figure that
psychically attempts to recuperate all that is being lost.

32
Ibid., 149.

140

In Yi’s novella, pansori is both the expression of that han, and the representation of the
vanishing Korean essence that is being lost as “outside” economic and cultural influences begin
to dominate the South. The national partition is not explicitly referred to in the text
33
, but its
sociocultural effects are reflected in the text’s sustained meditation on han, defined by a
character in the book as “unremitting suffering, unavenged wrongs, this belief in an undeserved
fate inflicted upon us.”
34
Another character says to the sister figure, “I don’t know too much
about songs…but I encounter the deep han of our existence in your songs, and I can almost
picture in my mind’s eye all that you have endured in your life.”
35
Han, as I’ve discussed in
chapter 1, is a complex cultural concept that is used to convey a collective feeling of oppression,
suffering and helplessness in the face of injustice. Koreans understand it as a uniquely Korean
experience of prolonged historical suffering. Thus the ongoing, inescapable trauma of national
division itself is deeply entrenched in the Korean understanding and expression of han. For Yi,
the stories and sounds of the pansori tradition capture the essence of Korean han, as does the
impossible nature of the half-siblings relationship. Set in the years following the Korean War, it
is difficult not to appreciate how the impossibility of the half-siblings’ romantic relationship, and
the kind of union they desire, resonates deeply with the impossibilities of reunion maintained by
the DMZ. The story itself can be read as a metaphor in which the brother and sister represent the
two Koreas who have been separated and who long to be together even though it is impossible.

33
Outright political critiques would have been difficult to publish safely when Yi was writing these
stories. The president in power at that time was Park Chung-hee, who was notorious for
censorship, political repression, and the torture of political prisoners under martial law. Park
Chung-hee’s regime was very much defined by anti-communism and aggressive measures for
economic development.

34
Ibid., 45.

35
Ibid., 63.

141

The sister’s blinding symbolizes the mutilation of the nation by war and partition as well as the
deepening of han that this ongoing situation of collective suffering has produced in the Korean
people.
The section entitled “Bird and Tree” in particular critiques the demands of capital that
perpetuate “hollow, useless relationships” that “serve personal interests” and “engender
exploitation and domination.”
36
The poor farmer at the center of this episode opts out of the
prevailing mode of production, choosing instead to live a solitary, simple life “free from
compromise and free from the need to forge profitable connections.”
37
For the poor farmer,
freedom from ownership extended beyond human relationship. In a striking passage that could
very well be a critique of the DMZ at the same time that it is a critique of capital, the farmer tells
the brother figure,
‘Even a blade of grass has its own life, and that life doesn’t belong to me. People tend to
manipulate living things, moving them around at will, because they think they own
them…Human beings as well as trees must stay where they belong, each in its own place.
A tree has rights just as it has life’…The farmer refused to claim possession the life of
even a single tree, abstaining from the creation of a forced relationship.
38

The farmer’s message is that a sense of entitlement to “property”- to ownership of land,
and of people- coupled with a disregard for life has led to “forced relationships” of all kinds,
including the exploitations of capitalism, (neo)colonialisms, and arbitrary national partition.
Korea’s experience of han as the victim of geopolitical struggles is depicted in the metaphor of a

36
Ibid., 118.

37
Ibid., 119.

38
Ibid., 119-120. Emphases mine.

142

“rainbird” who sings sad songs as it flies in the chill rain. In the story, the rainbird is a
reincarnation of the farmer’s older brother who ran away from home; he was “the wretched bird
who never made his nest. He dies without ever owning the land he so desperately wanted for his
own.”
39
After the older brother’s death, the rainbird comes to herald the immanent arrival of
various travellers (including the pansori-seeking brother figure) who encounter the farmer in the
midst of their wanderings, each one seeking “to build his own nest.”
40
The rainbird multiplies in
symbolic significance as this vignette progresses, and by the end it becomes the symbol of Korea
divided and colonized by competing geopolitical interests.
These critical threads in Yi’s novella make their way into Im’s film adaptation. In Im’s
story too, pansori symbolically stands in for the essence of what is Korean, and its status as a
dying “national” art indexes the threat of losing the Korean “essence” to tremendous postwar
sociocultural changes under an American-dominant world order. The film’s focus moves beyond
the intimate han of the half-siblings’ relationship in Yi’s novella to the struggle of an itinerant
pansori family who struggles to maintain its livelihood as American cultural forms like jazz
begin to take over in popularity. Their art becomes reduced to busking in the service of street
peddlers of medicines, which illustrates the transition of pansori being part of an organic popular
culture based on use value to an inorganic commodity based on exchange value.
41
The culture of
rapid industrialization is occurring in full force outside the frame in the film Sopyonje, which
focuses instead on what remains of the unadulterated countryside as the pansori family roams

39
Ibid., 116.

40
Ibid., 107.

41
Chungmoo Choi, “The Politics of Gender, Aestheticism, and Cultural Nationalism in Sopyonje and
The Genealogy” in Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema, ed. David. E.
James and Kyung Hyun Kim, 107-133 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 114.

143

through it. They squat in abandoned, dilapidated rural homes that subtly remind the viewer of the
war’s mass displacement of families. In the film, modernity and the specter of the “West”
threatens to push out Korean land, culture and heritage. The multivalent effects of globalization
are reflected in the conspicuous signs of rapid economic development, the vanishing Korean
countryside, and the culture of late capitalism that has taken over the South. Just as in TOSODR,
we see in Sopyonje how the undercurrent anxiety of incest as a trope overlaps with a return to
nationalistic “endogamy” so as to preserve Korean identity in the face of Western influence and
globalization.

OLDBOY’S SPLITTING SELVES AND THE REM(A)INDERS OF TRAUMA
In this last section of the chapter, let us return again to film director Park Chan-wook’s
quote about the widespread sociocultural impact of the tragedy of division on everyday life:
Right, it happens everywhere in daily life. So when we live our lives without a care in the
world, we can always encounter someone directly related to that tragedy, and through the
relationship with that person, the tragedy touches us, too. In that way, I come to take on
what someone else used to carry by himself. The tragedy of the Korean division, which
seemed to have nothing to do with [the film] Geumja (Lady Vengeance), comes down to
her with the gun the old [North Korean] spy hands her. This is the network that makes up
society.
42

Park’s observation reveals not only how the interpersonal nature of tragedy becomes a collective
experience of historical trauma, but also how cultural productions like his own films can show

42
Interview with Park Chan-wook, “Sympathy for the Old Boy,” trans. Steffen Hantke and Aryong
Choi-Hantke, June 8, 2008, http://www.ikonenmagazin.de/interview/Park.htm (emphasis mine).

144

symptoms of the circulation of that trauma, even when it seems “to have nothing to do with [it]”.
His film Oldboy is another such film which, on the surface, seems to have nothing to do with
historical traumas. I want to suggest however that the logic of the incest trope in Oldboy continue
to reveal the psychosocial effects stemming from the collective trauma of interrupted kinship
relations.
Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003) is an adaptation of the Japanese manga of the same
name.
43
Significantly, the film takes its source text and adds a dominating incest theme to it.
Tsuchiya’s manga Oldboy features a protagonist who is kidnapped and placed in solitary
confinement for years. Neither he nor the reader knows the captor’s reason for confining him
until the end of the eight-volume series, when we discover that the reason for revenge is based on
an eccentric interpretation of a fairly innocuous event from their childhood. Park’s film Oldboy
similarly features a protagonist, O Dae-su, who is abducted and confined for years for reasons
that are unknown until the end. However, in this film adaptation, the reason is that Wu-jin, a high
school classmate, blames Dae-su for spreading rumors of Wu-jin’s incestuous relationship with
his sister Su-a. Su-a commits suicide over these rumors, and Wu-jin spends the rest of his life
planning his revenge against Dae-su. Not only does he succeed in incarcerating him for fifteen
years, but also in forcing him to commit incest: through years of drugged hypnosis, Wu-jin
plants post-hypnotic suggestions to ensure that Dae-su and Dae-su’s daughter fall in love with
each other after he releases Dae-su from prison. Though much has been written about Oldboy,
there has yet to be an analysis of the semiotics of incest in the narrative, not only in O Dae-su’s
unwitting, induced romantic relationship with his daughter Mi-do, but also more fundamentally

43
Written by Garon Tsuchiya and illustrated by Nobuaki Minegishi. Garon Tsuchiya et al., Old boy. 1st
ed. (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Manga, 2006).

145

in Wu-jin’s incestuous relations with his sister. Wu-jin’s taboo relationship with Su-a ends up
being key to the entire plot, and his revenge is not in manipulating a forced act of incest, but in
creating a genuine incestuous desire between Dae-su and Mi-do that cannot be removed even
after the truth has been revealed. Wu-jin succeeds in reproducing the forbidden relationship as
the vehicle of his revenge.
A flashback near the end of the film reveals that young Dae-su, on his last day at
Sangnok High School before he transfers to another school in Seoul, had accidentally stumbled
upon Wu-jin and Su-a being sexually intimate in a deserted classroom after school. Not realizing
that Wu-jin and Su-a are siblings, Dae-su tells a friend what he has seen. Since he moves away
that day, he does not know that rumors of Su-a being “a total slut” “[who] would fuck anyone”
would spread and ultimately lead to rumors that she was pregnant. Su-a begins to believe the
rumors herself, and the idea that she is pregnant with her own nephew drives her to commit
suicide.
What is the significance of this incestuous relationship between Wu-jin and Su-a? Is it
too related to the traumatic effects of national division, as in the other texts I’ve analyzed above?
I suggest that Oldboy captures the effects of massive sociocultural and economic transformation
following national division, and that Wu-jin and Su-a’s relationship can be read as a critique of
South Korean economic development and idolization of the American-led “West”. The single
most prominent detail concerning these siblings is that they come from an elite, wealthy
background. When Dae-su asks his friend Ju-hwan if he remembers any details about their
classmate Su-a, Ju-hwan replies, “I heard that her family is filthy rich.” Joseph Jeon has astutely
pointed out that, from the opening scene, Dae-su “is immediately recognizable as a salary man,
one of an army of men put to work for South Korean chaebols.” Chaebols are “the massive state-

146

supported conglomerates given tax and market advantages to compete on a global scale” that are
controlled by powerful families and passed down paternalistically, from fathers to sons.
44
Joseph
Jeon notes that, in contrast to Dae-su, Wu-jin seems to represent a chaebol figure, “the scion of a
rich family” who “figures corporate authority.”
45
He lives in the luxurious penthouse of a
towering skyscraper and is followed around by a personal staff of financial advisors, bodyguards,
henchmen, even nurses and a doctor who monitor his heart condition. He is also college-
educated in America, a practice that has been common among chaebol and other wealthy elite in
South Korea since the period of rapid economic development starting in the 1960s.
Wealth in Oldboy is tied to a thematic strain concerning the influence of the West, from
Wu-jin’s American education to (think of other examples if possible) to his American heart
doctor (referred to as “Dr. Hopkins”) to the explicit allusions to the Oedipus
46
, Frankenstein, and
The Count of Monte Cristo. Even the lucrative kidnapping business and black market prison that
Wu-jin uses to incarcerate Dae-su is housed in a building called “Yuhagwŏn” which translates to
“Institute of Foreign Studies”. Park Chan-wook has said that he chose this detail because
“Koreans place a lot of emphasis on English, as well as on studying abroad [i.e. in America]. So
I'm extremely interested in cultural collision and cultural transformation.” And when asked about
the frequent use of Western elements in his films, Park Chan-wook responded, “Yes, well,
Western culture has influenced and changed many aspects of Korean society. And it is the

44
Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, “Residual Selves: Trauma and Forgetting in Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy,”
positions: east asia cultures critique 17, no. 3 (2009): 718.

45
Ibid., 720.

46
Park chose O Dae-su’s name because it sounds similar to “Odysseus” (Choi-Hantke). Dae-su’s cutting
off his own tongue is reminiscent of Odysseus’s blinding his own eyes.

147

culture which Koreans tend to overestimate, often at the expense of our own traditional culture or
values, about which we Koreans often feel much more conflicted and ambivalent.”
47

Aspects of Wu-jin and Su-a’s family background—the elite status, the enormous wealth,
and the esteem of American education—index the culture of global capitalism and deep class
stratification in South Korea. Despite material affluence and social status, Wu-jin is a profoundly
unhappy, angry, lonely man. He neither seems to have friends nor family members who care
about him. He never once mentions his parents. Among the many photographs of Su-a in his
penthouse apartment, there are none that include their parents.
48
Are they around? Were they
ever around? Or does their absence in these photos and in Wu-jin’s own memories possibly
suggest that they were absent parents, busy making and spending their wealth, leaving their
children to be cared for by hired staff? While one can only speculate on the nature of the Yi
family, what is notable about Wu-jin is that the only family member he ever mentions and seems
to care about is his sister Su-ah.
As in TOSODR, the figuration of incest here signifies a desire to return to “just us”. Wu-
jin’s camera is not only a technology of memory that freezes the past, but also a means for fixing
and capturing his lover’s gaze. That Su-a is always the only person within the frame, looking
directly at the lens, is a sign of Wu-jin’s abiding desire: that they be everything for each other.
Wu-jin and his sister desire only each other. They manage their apparent familial lack and
isolation by filling multiple roles for each other- sibling, lover, protector, nurturer—in a tight

47
Choi-Hantke, “Sympathy for the Old Boy”.

48
This is also noteworthy because we know that Wu-jin has been obsessed with photography for a long
time. In all the flashbacks of Wu-jin as a high school student, there is a camera perpetually
around his neck. He also owns an impressive collection of vintage cameras that are showcased
throughout his penthouse.

148

circle of seeming self-sufficiency. Their relationship challenges what Judith Butler has called the
myth of “the efficacious incest taboo,”
49
in which the incest taboo is supposed to ensure social
order and prove the validity of hegemonic norms by functioning as a type of normalizing
anxiety. But Wu-jin and his sister successfully rebel against the social order by practicing what is
supposed to be impossible. If the incest taboo positions and regulates subjects in social
structures, Wu-jin and Su-a de-position themselves from the social order at the scene of incest.
By rebelling against the proper object of desire, they live out the forbidden. Wu-jin and Su-a
together opt out of society by only wanting each other. Their incestuous love expresses the
desire to remain apart, wholly endogamous.
I suggest that the incestuous relationship between Wu-jin and Su-a performs what
Athanasiou calls a “politics of troubling: trouble in the political, as it works at the most intricate
and profound layers of selves and lives.”
50
The politics of troubling in Oldboy functions as a
critique of what has emerged from the ideological hegemony structuring national partition: the
South Korean political economy and the uncritical “overestimation” of all things American. The
film connects this politics of troubling to a phenomenology of “the unknowable”. Dae-su is
overwhelmed and disoriented by the unknowable. He does not know who his captor is; he does
not know why he is imprisoned; he does not know where he is. We follow his search for truth
and desire for revenge against invisible forces that have imprisoned and tortured him for
unknown reasons. For scholar Kyung Hyun Kim, the lens of the unknowable in Oldboy

49
Butler, “Quandaries,” 45.

50
Athanasiou, Dispossession, 59.

149

communicates the postmodern premise that “representation is untenable—and therefore, that any
kind of agency to be excavated from it is inconceivable.”
51

We can see how the sense of the unknowable in Oldboy very much illustrates the
postmodern problem of “cognitive mapping”, which Fredric Jameson describes as the lack of
means to make the world intelligible through a situational understanding of one’s position
52
.
Dae-su is incarcerated in what Kyun Hyun Kim describes as “the critical years between 1988 to
2003, during which time South Korea became one of the most successful economic and
technologically advanced democratic countries in the world”
53
; Dae-su’s incapacitating
experience could very well be emblematic an unrepresentable, unlocatable global social totality,
which Jameson argues is a phenomenological effect of multinational capitalism. Drawing upon
the work of Kevin Lynch, an urban theorist who suggested that urban alienation is directly
proportional to the mental “unmapability” of local cityscapes, Jameson uses Lynch’s spatial
approach emblematically to suggest that individuals experience an analogous deficiency of
cognitive mapping in relation to a globalized capitalist social system. The incapacity to map
socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for

51
Kyung Hyun Kim, “Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling: Reading Park
Chan-wook’s “Unknowable” Old Boy” Korea Journal Spring 2006: 107. Kyung Hyun Kim has
suggested that the status of the image in Oldboy is not an impression of “reality”; rather it is a
perception of matter, space, and time that renders “a sense of the unknowable” (2006, 84). Kim
demonstrates that the film presents this sense of the unknowable through cinematic and thematic
strategies such as the frequently flattened mise-en-scene, the simultaneity of the familiar with the
unfamiliar, the postmodern pervasiveness of anonymity and isolation, the “transcendental” voice
of Dae-su, and the disjunctive relationship between sound and image.

52
Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” in Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

53
Ibid., 101.

150

urban experience. Furthermore, “enormous global realities” are essentially inaccessible to any
individual subject, “ultimately unrepresentable” and “something like an absent cause, one that
can never emerge into the presence of perception.”
54

But I believe that the sense of the unknowable in Oldboy reveals a problem of cognitive
mapping in relation not only to the world space of multinational capital, but also to the
experience of “history” itself. Taking Lynch’s spatial analogy in a direction slightly different
than Jameson did, I want to suggest that the problem of cognitive mapping in Oldboy also
illustrates an experience of alienation that corresponds to the “unmapability” of one’s place in
the flow of historical time, of one’s relation to disrupted memory. In South Korea, the Korean
War’s devastation of the peninsula, the mass displacement of people, the national division, the
separated families, and the tens of thousands of lost orphans created a chaotic loss of
infrastructure. This was immediately followed by a period of rapid export-led economic growth
that rebuilt and transformed the peninsula under the logic of capitalism, making South Korea one
of Asia’s “Tigers” and considered an “economic miracle.” Such complete chaos, followed by
such enormous transformation under ongoing national division, have created a deep, structurally
supported kind of forgetting.
In many ways, the crossed-out street arrow that the camera focuses on as the opening
credits roll captures not only Wu-jin’s and Dae-su’s experience of time, but also the unmapable,
disorienting weight of history’s traumas and its erasures. Park Chan-wook tells us on the
commentary track that the arrow represents “the irreversible arrow of time.” Steve Choe reads in
this arrow the idea that, “throughout Oldboy revenge in the present is profoundly shaped by an
unforgettable past, indeed a highly charged, traumatic past that cannot be “worked through” and

54
Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” 279.

151

overcome.”
55
In keeping with this reading, I read the X that crosses out the arrow as the moment
of trauma within the flow of historical time, an absolute rupture that refuses erasure even as the
arrow pushes time forward. However, the X could read in another way. The camera tilts down
and pans up to focus on the street arrow with a bird’s-eye shot immediately following the
moment of Dae-su’s kidnapping. The X that crosses out the arrow could thus signify trauma’s
tendency to obliterate a normative experience of time altogether. David J. Morris has written
about how trauma destroys the fabric of time: “In normal time you move from one moment to
the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself
being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back
again.”
56
Both Wu-jin and Dae-su are persistently sucked “backwards” into the violent circles
and powerful eddies that the scenes of trauma induce. And in a broader sense, the crossed-out
arrow captures the Korean experience of disrupted history by collective trauma as well as the
experience of the obliteration of a sense of one’s place in historical time, in which structured
forgetting creates a profound sense of living under the weight of the unknowable, the
unrepresentable, and the unlocatable.
Dae-su’s predicament at the end shows how trauma continues to generate effects even as
it is actively “forgotten.” Dae-su desperately wants to forget his history. In an iconic Oedipal
move, he attempts to block the means of communicating memory by cutting off a vital sensory
organ. Oedipus gouges out his own eyes; O Dae-su cuts off his own tongue. Both cases are
techniques of memory—self-inflicted, permanent wounds that serve as a bodily reminder of past

55
Steve Choe, “Love Your Enemies: Revenge and Forgiveness in Films by Park Chan-wook”. Korean
Studies Vol. 33 (2009): 38.

56
David J. Morris qtd. in David Brooks “The Moral Injury.” The New York Times 17 Feb. 2015.
NYTimes.com.

152

trauma. However Dae-su’s severed tongue is also a silencing that enforces historical forgetting.
He begs Wu-jin not to reveal to Mi-do that he is her father, beginning first by enforcing his own
silence. Wu-jin agrees to keep silent, perhaps knowing that Mi-do’s ignorance will allow Dae-su
and Mi-do to continue their incestuous relationship in secret. He says, “We knew what we were
doing and we still loved each other—will you and Mido be the same?” Wu-jin relishes the idea
of Dae-su and Mi-do continuing their relationship with Dae-su’s full knowledge of its incestuous
nature. And when Wu-jin kills himself moments later, he essentially makes their secret
permanent.
The only one left with knowledge of Dae-su and Mi-do’s incestuous relationship is the
now mute Dae-su himself. In the penultimate scene of the film, we realize that the film’s diegesis
up until that point, and the use of Dae-su’s strange, monotone voice in frequent voiceovers, is in
fact the reading of a letter he has been writing to a hypnotist. He writes, “This is the whole
adventure of my life until now. Thank you for listening to this terrible story to the end. You will
by now understand why I am writing you a letter instead of talking to you in person: it’s because
I have no tongue.” Dae-su writes the hypnotist—the same hypnotist whom Wu-jin employed to
brainwash Dae-su—in order to enlist her help: he would like her to erase from his mind the
secret that plagues him. She warns him that “the hypnosis may go wrong and distort memories”,
but Dae-su agrees to proceed. While there is no guarantee of the desired results, Dae-su has
decided to try to be with the woman he loves. He cannot somehow unmake Mi-do his daughter,
and yet he cannot stop loving her romantically either. Since the forbidden nature of their
relationship cannot be changed, Daesu chooses instead to forget the truth.
But does forgetting have a remainder? Is it possible that forgetting can be total? Or does
forgetting return, as psychoanalysts would say, in the form of hauntings and symptoms of

153

repression? Bliss Cua Lim has pointed to how the return of traumatic events troubles the
homogenous, empty time of universal history that imagines “the past as inert and the present
uniform.”
57
She shows how tropes of haunting, what she refers to as “the spectral”, estrange our
predisposed ways of experiencing space, time, and history. The spectral “hauntingly insinuates
that more worlds than one exist in the world we think we know; times other than the present
contend with each other in the disputed Now.”
58
The past is never passed. The past is full of
worlds that coexist with the worlds of the present, and these multiple worlds contend with one
another. The forgotten makes returns that haunt and disrupt the present. For Lim, ghosts are the
signifiers of this disruptive haunting.
59
But in both Oldboy and TOSODR, the return of the
forgotten becomes an uncanny experience of multiple selves and multiple existences.
In TOSODR, the protagonist has a sensation of going back in time when he takes a cab to
go back to the last bar he remembers drinking at the night before:
A time machine. It raced back to last night. He was going back to meet himself of
yesterday. He could feel the multiple existences of himself that he had not known before.
Not one single existence, not one conclusion was there for him. Now he might be finally
encountering one among those multiple existences of himself because of the lost satchel.
(47)

57
Bliss Cua Lim, “Spectral Times: The Ghost Film as Historical Allegory.” positions 9, no. 2 (2001):
287.

58
Ibid., 294.

59
She analyzes the ghost narratives in the films Rouge (dir. Stanley Kwan, 1987) and Haplos (dir.
Antonio Jose Perez, 1982)

154

At this point, the protagonist is simply looking for his satchel, an object he had forgotten about
and lost. But later, after he realizes that he looked for his long-lost sister in his drunken state, he
repeats nearly word for word the quote above:
Behind the monotonous routine and apparent placidity after all the wounds had healed,
ah, the alcoholic intoxication searched out and exposed the hidden pouch of the old pus.
He came to face his own multiple existence [sic]. There had never been one single
existence, never one single conclusion. And now he confronted one facet of that multiple
existence because of the lost satchel. (64)
The search for his lost satchel after intoxication erased his memory of the night before ultimately
becomes a journey that leads him back to a traumatic past. The experience of living multiple
existences illustrates how the trauma that he has tried to forget pierces through and disrupts his
present. There had also “never been one single conclusion”, indicating how the return of the past
can impact the future. What could have happened if he and his sister had stayed together? For the
remainder of his life after trauma, there are always two possible life trajectories going on at once.
In TOSODR, the twist at the end shows these multiple existences and multiple conclusions
converging through the possibility of incestuous attraction.
Similarly, forgetting also creates multiple existences in Oldboy. The title itself invokes
the multiple existences that both Wu-jin and Dae-su experience. Wu-jin in particular stubbornly
and obsessively remains the boy who lost his sister even as he grows older and must go through
the motions of adult life. Wu-jin creates an “oldboy” out of Dae-su, first by subjecting him to
fifteen harrowing years of solitary confinement, which Dae-su emerges from literally looking
like an old man, and then by ordering him to figure out the reason for his imprisonment, which
ultimately leads him to memories of their boyhood.

155

The multiple existences of the “oldboy” are encapsulated fittingly in the unusual form of
representation of key memories that they each have. After much investigation, Dae-su is finally
able to remember important details about his last day at Sangnok High School which he had long
forgotten. This crucial flashback employs familiar camera techniques and special effects used for
analepsis, such as the camera taking on the point of view of the young Dae-su, the sudden
change in color of the picture to sepia, and the blurred edges of close-ups. But Park also jarringly
inserts the older Dae-su right there in the middle of the unfolding scenes of memory, observing
his younger self and reliving the events of that day. Park visually creates the simultaneity of
multiple existences when we see the older Dae-su watching the younger Dae-su, who in turn is
watching and following Su-a. The past and the present converge in tension when both the older
Dae-su and the boy Dae-su together spy on Wu-jin and Su-a’s incestuous lovemaking.
The older Wu-jin similarly inserts himself into a flashback in which the boy Wu-jin
desperately holds onto his sister’s hand as she precariously hangs off a bridge. Reliving the last
few moments with his beloved Su-a before she plunges to her death, the scene abruptly inserts
the older Wu-jin in place of the boy Wu-jin at the moment of letting her hand go. As the camera
zooms in on the empty hand of the older, contemporary Wu-jin, the background morphs back to
the present, when Wu-jin is in his penthouse elevator, having just exited the scene that was the
culmination of his extensive revenge plan against Dae-su. The empty hand of his memory now
becomes the current hand that holds a gun; the older Wu-jin shoots himself dead.
The hypnotist reverses the order of forgetting and self-multiplication at the end,
following a kind of logic that suggests that if forgetting creates multiple selves, creating
multiples selves enforces forgetting. Her hypnotic procedure splits Dae-su into two persons in
order to design Dae-su’s amnesia. She instructs him: “When I ring my bell, you will be split into

156

two persons…the one who doesn’t know the secret is O Dae-su. The one who keeps the secret is
the monster.” She orders the monster to walk away and die after seventy steps. In Daesu’s
monster, the scar of national partition makes an eerie return: we encounter a reminder of the
other self that has been split from the whole, creating two selves that are so barred from each
other that one seems dead to the other. The effects of the DMZ on the peninsula too very much
follows the hypnotist’s logic that the creating of multiple selves enforces forgetting— forgetting
of pre-division Korea, of the war, of the intrusion of outside power and influence.
In the final scene of the film, Dae-su wakes up from the hypnosis, lying prostrate on the
snowy ground of the forest where he had met the hypnotist, who is now gone. But traces remain.
Mi-do comes onto the scene, picking up Dae-su off the ground. As she embraces him, the camera
closes in on the direction of her gaze, which notices something. She asks, “Who were you
with?” The camera then pans over the ground, and the screen suddenly is blank and completely
white, taken over by the freshly fallen snow. But slowly, what comes into focus as the camera
continues to pan over the ground with increasing distance are the shadows of impressions in the
snow—footprints. After following the set of footprints, the camera finally rests on the two chairs
in which Dae-su and the hypnotist had sat. Dae-su the monster had walked away and died, and
seventy steps later, emerged the man without the memory of a secret. The footsteps in the snow
are a metaphor for Dae-su’s newly blank memory, but which nevertheless retain traces that are
remainders, and reminders, of the trauma he wanted to forget.
We also see rem(a)inders of Dae-su’s trauma in his face after the hypnotic treatment.
Before the picture fades to black and the credits roll, the camera focuses on Daesu’s face as he
embraces Mi-do. At first he smiles, but the smile gradually turns into a pained grimace. Joseph
Jeon observes that the pained expression on Dae-su’s face displays “a thoroughly

157

decontextualized pain”
60
in the absence of memory of the trauma that caused the pain. The scene
enacts the fantasy of “a kind of forgetting that exceeds repression,” yet it is a forgetting that still
“leaves a residual self.”
61
Though there is a disconnection from the original experience of
trauma, traces remain that continue to have effects beyond active remembrance.
Drawing on the work of trauma studies scholar Cathy Caruth, Jeon further suggests that
the referent that is lost and forgotten is nonetheless the subject of persistent searching. Because
the original experience of the traumatic event goes unclaimed and forgotten,
the referentiality of the past becomes unclear. Reenactments of trauma…become not only
compulsive returns to an unassimilated experience, but also a means for belatedly
experiencing the original traumatic event, each as if for the first time… Traumatic
reenactments attempt to supplement the original unclaimed experience, but because they
are belated and incomplete, they always fail to do so. These failures in turn compel more
reenactments, increasingly devoted to an unrecoverable past. Although the original
referent is forever lost, it is nevertheless forever (though not consciously) sought.
62

Stated in another way, it is possible that the effects and repressions of past trauma continue to
haunt the present in ways that are not immediately recognizable as such. Caruth argues that
history cannot be straightforwardly referential, where experience and history line up neatly.
History itself must be resituated in our understanding such that we permit “history to arise where
immediate understanding may not.”
63
This is how a film like Oldboy, which New York Times

60
Jeon, “Residual Selves,” 714.

61
Ibid., 715.

62
Ibid., 717.

63
Ibid., 716.

158

critic Manohla Dargis accused of being just another “shiny, meaningless…B movie tricked out
as an A movie…symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism”
64
, could very well be an
effect of Korea’s unrecoverable, unassimilated historical traumas. It too is one of many re-
enactments of trauma in which the original referent has been “lost” but which nevertheless
incites compulsive returns.
Like the puzzling traces of footsteps and empty chairs in the snow or the inexplicable
persistent expression of pain on Daesu’s face even after his memory has been erased, TOSODR,
Oldboy, and other South Korean incest dramas reflect the effects of historical trauma and
interrupted kinship relations without necessarily “remembering” the referent.
Today, we can see symptoms of the original collective crisis of interrupted kinship that
set in motion the circulation and evolution of the trope of the incest scare. We see repeats of the
contours of the circumstances and plotline that appeared in TOSODR. In popular television
dramas, for example, the incest scare usually involves a man and a woman presumed to be
siblings or half siblings, one or both of whom are single-parent children, orphaned, or émigrés
who have returned to Korea. There is also typically a key loss of memory that creates the
possibility that one wouldn’t recognize one’s sibling or even know that one had a sibling.
However, the typical denouement of these stories involves the realization that the love is not
incestuous after all, giving the viewer the vicarious gratification of overcoming trauma and
finding true love without having to disrupt the status quo.
65

64
Manohla Dargis, “The Violence (and the Seafood) Is More Than Raw,” The New York Times 25 Mar.
2005. NYTimes.com.

65
For example, in the prototypical case of Winter Sonata, the main male character loses his memory
after a car accident, after which his single mother decides to use the services of a hypnotist to
erase his bastard past and change his identity completely. She moves them to the United States,

159

I want to make clear that I am not saying that the trope of incest always looks the same in
South Korean incest dramas. What I have argued is that the current iteration of the trope has
origins in the collective crisis of interrupted kinship following the war, and that it circulated
readily as a manifestation of the crisis. Current South Korean incest dramas reflect the effects of
historical trauma and interrupted kinship relations without necessarily “remembering” the
referent at all. This is possible because tropes can reflect what Michel de Certeau calls “the
memory of a culture.” He believes that the expressions of the memory of a culture remain
repressed specifically in literary zones and popular culture because they are “tricks” that
characterize “a popular art of speaking.”
66
I see the repetition and evolution of the incest trope in
South Korean cultural productions as a kind of response to and internal (not necessarily
conscious) manipulation of the hegemonic order; the trope perpetuates a traumatic aspect of the
memory of a culture, even as that memory is repressed or actively forgotten. The trope emerged
from the violent incursions of geopolitics, war, and national division that literally interrupted
lines of biological descent on the Korean peninsula. Over time, the incest trope has evolved and
diversified as the original experience of trauma has become forgotten or repressed under
circumstances of tremendous sociocultural and economic-political change in the past sixty years.
But the residues of historical trauma continue to circulate in Korean culture.

where she gets married in order to provide her son with a father and a fresh start. However, when
he returns to Korea as an adult, he falls in love with a woman whom both the key characters and
the audience believe for several episodes is his half sister. At the very end of the series, of
course, their sibling relationship in fact turns out to be false, and all ends happily ever after.

66
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),
24.

160

4

A DIFFERENT INHERITANCE THROUGH EX-ORBITANT BELONGING
IN CHO SEHŬI’S THE DWARF

If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather
than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it
contains us as much as it flings us away.
GAYATRI SPIVAK
1

Cho Sehŭi’s 1978 novella The Dwarf
2
ends with a teacher telling a classroom of students
that he has decided to leave on a space voyage for another planet, where he will live with alien
beings whom he has befriended. The students are skeptical and pepper him with questions. He
replies:
…“Believe me when I say I will leave with the aliens for that planet and that when I do,
sparks will soar up and brighten the western sky…Whether we live on Earth or another
planet, our spirit is always free…”
3

Judging from this ending alone, one might assume that the genre of the story falls under fantasy
or science fiction. The teacher even seems to be transforming into an alien as the students watch
him walk away. After the teacher leaves the classroom, the students note that “the way he walked
was peculiar. Maybe that’s how aliens walk” (219). The novella as a whole, in fact, contains

1
Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 73.

2
Nanjangiga ssoa ollin jageun gong, literally “the little ball launched by the dwarf.”

3
Cho Sehŭi, The Dwarf, trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006),
218. All subsequent page references to this work will be given in parentheses in the text.

161

repeated references to the extraterrestrial by various characters—to outer space, to aliens
4
, space
voyages
5
, planetary features and movements
6
, and a utopian idea of the moon
7
throughout the
novel. But to call The Dwarf a science fiction or fantasy novel would be inaccurate and
misleading. Notwithstanding the fantastical elements and fictional places dispersed throughout
the text, in many ways it also faithfully represents South Korea during military dictator Park
Chung Hee’s era of Yushin (“revitalizing”) reform, with real-world references to places like the
capital city of Seoul, and with incisive critiques of contemporary social crises like factory labor
exploitation and the plight of the urban poor. Cho’s fluency in socialist ideas and the writings of
Karl Marx is evident throughout the text. Even in the novella’s ending described above, for
example, the teacher expresses excitement about his alien friends’ ability to “manufacture
organic substances out of inorganic substances” on their planet. When read out of context this
may seem like a curious detail, it is in fact thematically resonant with moments throughout the
novella that critique the capitalist mode of production.
Youngju Ryu has traced the history of South Korean conflicted literary criticism on The
Dwarf, showing how this text uniquely troubled existing categorizations of literature that put
socialist realism and experimental modernism at epistemological odds with each other.
8
Socialist
realism represented the left-wing political literary movement that championed objective
representations of a dialectical reality. Experimental modernism was associated with the

4
see pages 37, 218.

5
see pages 79, 165, 218.

6
see pages 79, 117, 163, 218.

7
see pages 38, 79, 163, 172.

8
Youngju Ryu, Writers of the Winter Republic (University of Hawaii Press, 2016), 103-110.

162

epistemology of the right-wing, mainstream conservative literary establishment that focused on
the subjective and the metaphysical.
9
Cho Sehŭi’s The Dwarf was confusing for critics because it
both engaged in and undermined the favored norms of “labor fiction” (nodong sosŏl), which
sought to create a counterhegemonic discourse by emphasizing contemporary social reality.
While the text’s sustained critique of political and economic oppressions contains moments of
utterly realistic representation, it also experiments with form and narrative technique in ways that
resisted accepted notions of what realism should be. One scholar criticized Cho of “indulg[ing]
in a fantasy that is ultimately just an expression of despair, rather than offering a concrete vision
of the future based on a scientific understanding of the existing social structure.”
10
While I agree
that The Dwarf does not offer a “scientific” understanding of existing social structures, I disagree
that the fantasy element is a mere authorial indulgence. Far from being simply an expression of
despair, this chapter will show how the repeated extraterrestrial and planetary indexing that the
novella performs is part and parcel of its critique as well as its vision of the future. The figure of
the alien that the text ends with, I argue, brings into relation two arguments threaded throughout
the novella. On one level, the figure of the alien embodies a critique of existing social relations
within an exploitative political economy. On another level, the perspective of the alien offers a
reimagining of the planet through a utopic lens of inheritance and love.

THINKING BEYOND: THE MÖBIUS STRIP
Before being collected as a single volume, the stories of The Dwarf were published
individually in various journals and newspapers over the span of three years, from 1975-1978.

9
Ibid., 107.

10
Hwang Kwang-su, quoted in Ryu, Winter Republic, 108.

163

The interlinked stories share an overarching plot told in snippets from the perspectives of
different characters. As a whole, the novella follows a dwarf and his family after a city ordinance
condemns the squatter settlement in Seoul where they live in order to make way for the
development of high-rise apartment buildings. Losing his home causes the dwarf such distress
that he has a mental breakdown and eventually kills himself.
11
The rest of the family is forced to
move to the industrial zone of the city of Ŭngang
12
, where they try in vain to make ends meet as
workers in various Ŭngang Group
13
factories. In an act of desperation, the dwarf’s eldest son
attempts to murder the president of Ŭngang Group, and accidentally kills the president’s brother
instead, a crime for which he is eventually sentenced to death.
Youngju Ryu has noted that the stories’ placement in the book follows a strictly
chronological order according to the initial publication dates, except for the reversal between the
first two stories. The placement of “The Möbius Strip” at the start of the novel, therefore, reflects
a deliberate move on the part of the author. Ryu suggests that “The Möbius Strip” functions as a
prologue that sets the stage for the entire collection. It, along with the last story “Epilogue”,
installs two narrative frames that enclose the rest of the stories contained in the volume.
14
The
double narrative frame represented in “The Möbius Strip” and “Epilogue” is important for
understanding The Dwarf as a whole.

11
Though most of the book refers to the dwarf as “falling” to his death from the smokestack, something
that Yongsu recalls his father saying indicates suicide: “I’ve decided I’m not going to live any
longer…Since you’re the eldest, you’re the only one I’m telling. I’ve made my decision” (170).

12
Ŭngang is a fictional city, unlike Seoul, which is also featured in the book.

13
The name of the huge conglomerate that controls all the industry in Ŭngang.

14
Ryu, Winter Republic, 111.

164

“The Möbius Strip” opens with a math teacher facing a classroom of high school students
on their last day of class. He asks them an enigmatic question about chimney sweeps: “Two
boys have just finished cleaning a chimney. One of them comes down with his face black as
night. The other comes down without a trace of soot. Now, gentlemen, which of the boys do you
suppose will wash his face?” (1). No one is quick to answer, but after a while one student offers
the seemingly logical answer that the boy with the dirty face would wash his face. The teacher
tells the student that he is wrong, that because one boy has a clean face, the other a dirty one, the
dirty child will look at his clean friend and think that his face is clean too. The clean boy will
look at his friend and think his own face is dirty. After a gasp of surprise from the students, the
math teacher asks the same question again. A student answers this time that the clean child will
wash his face, but the teacher paradoxically replies that this answer is also wrong: “Two boys,
together, cleaned the very same chimney. And so it’s not possible that one of them had a clean
face and the other a dirty face.” The teacher then quite abruptly turns to the concept of the
“Möbius strip”, which is a one-sided continuous surface created by taking a strip, giving one of
the two ends a half twist, and then attaching the two ends. Whereas a closed band has an inner
and outer surface, the Möbius band has no such distinction. It is a single, curved surface that
literally has no inside or outside
15
. The teacher asks the students to consider “this curved surface
that has no separate interior and exterior” (2).

15
See Figure 1

165

After such a baffling and suggestive beginning,
the text jumps to the second narrative frame of the
novel: the story of two disabled men—referred to as
Humpback and Squatlegs—who kill a real estate
speculator. Their story points to the failure of urban
planning policies in South Korea. In exchange for their
squatter homes, evictees are given the “opportunity” to
purchase apartment units in the newly developed
complexes that will replace the demolished squatter
settlement. The majority of the working poor who built these homes cannot afford to purchase
the new apartments however. The evictees sell their occupancy rights to real estate brokers at
low prices, who then resell these rights at a high premium to wealthy clients. Cho Sehŭi was not
making up this bleak scenario; he was clearly referring to the ruthlessness of Seoul’s urban
renewal measures of the late 1960s. Rapid industrialization, in addition to the influx of displaced
rural dwellers and refugees from the north following the Korean War, produced massive surges
in urban migration. Lack of affordable housing, according to Kim-Watson, resulted in “the
construction of squatter housing, which by the 1960s was a dominant physical feature of Seoul,
accounting for some 30 percent of its buildings.”
16
Kim-Watson further notes that, “by the late
1960s, the government responded to the crisis by sponsoring slum clearance projects and high-
rise public housing, often using for-profit private construction contracts rather than public

16
Jini Kim-Watson, The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 101.

Figure
1

166

funds.”
17
In “The Möbius Strip,” Humpback and Squatlegs steal back from the real estate
speculator the money they feel they should have been paid, and then set him and his car on fire.
The story then jumps back to the classroom and concludes with a brief discussion by the teacher,
in which he points out that the Möbius strip “conceals many truths”. He warns the students that
“human knowledge is often put to extraordinarily evil uses”, that they should “never compromise
[their] knowledge for the sake of self-interest” (12).
The chimney anecdote, it turns out, is a reworking of an anecdote about Talmudic logic.
In the various Jewish versions of the story, which is often told as a joke, two men happen to fall
or climb down the chimney.
18
What is notable about Cho’s adaptation is the insertion of the
labor context. Youngju Ryu observes that “[b]y changing the men into children, and making the
children into chimney sweeps, Cho Sehŭi evokes the work context, specifically of Victorian
England, when the terrible plight of chimney sweeps became a cause célèbre
among social
reformers.”
19
This interpretation does not seem so farfetched when we take into account the fact
that in the story entitled “The Fault Lies with God as Well,” the dwarf’s eldest son reflects on the
labor situations during the Industrial Revolution in England, when “children who worked in the
Rotherham factories were whipped so they could stay awake” and when children “at the
Leighton factory...would fight one another for a bowl of porridge” (143). Cho was certainly

17
Ibid.

18
For examples, see http://home.tiac.net/~cri/2005/talmud.html, http://jewishjokes.tripod.com/talmudic-
logic-chimney.htm. Translations of Japanese books about the Talmud entered South Korea in the
1970s. The earliest known South Korean edition of Marvin Tokayer’s “5,000 Years of Jewish
Wisdom: Secrets of the Talmud Scriptures” was printed in 1974, by Tae Zang, a publishing
house that appears to have shut down in the early 1990s.
(http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-the-talmud-became-a-best-seller-in-south-
korea)

19
Ryu, Winter Republic, 205 note 31.

167

aware of the similarities between the “events of a hundred and sixty years earlier” (143) and the
labor situation in South Korea at the time. In the last story “Epilogue,” Cho takes the subtle
evocation of labor abuse in “The Möbius Strip” further when the teacher essentially critiques the
entire education system and the production of knowledge that “develop[s] you gentlemen and
your successors as human capital”—as “the means” rather than “the ends” (210).
The references to the history of industrialization, labor abuse, and knowledge production
are clues as to what the chimney riddle has to do with the Möbius strip. The teacher’s first
answer to the riddle shuns the common-sense approach that immediately assumes that the boy
with the dirty face would be the one to wash his face. Since the boys do not have an outside
vantage point from which to see themselves, they must rely on their relationship to the other as
the basis of their judgment. Each sees the other as a semblance of himself, and the perception of
a certain kind of sameness becomes the foundation for an assumption about reality, as erroneous
as that assumption might be.
The teacher’s second answer to the question introduces a sudden materialist assessment
of the hypothetical situation and reveals its assumption of an either/or dichotomy as an
impossibility: “Two boys, together, cleaned the very same chimney. And so it’s not possible that
one of them had a clean face and the other a dirty one” (2, emphasis mine). By centering on the
problematic of materialist (im)possibility, the teacher discursively transcends the question by
questioning the premise. He reveals the question itself as a false question. The teacher’s second
answer, then, is not meant to overturn the first answer so much as it is to build upon it. He
emphasizes the importance of questioning the question.
The teacher’s introduction of the word “Möbius strip” immediately after the chimney
sweeps discussion now begins to make more sense. The teacher’s answers to the chimney sweep

168

riddle address, from one angle, the epistemological problem of inside vs. outside (the clean boy
thinks his face is dirty because he can’t see outside his situation), and from another angle, the
materialist critique of an arbitrary either/or dichotomy (the impossibility that one boy could be
clean and the other dirty if both cleaned the same chimney). The inside/outside and either/or
problematics that the teacher introduces are exemplified in the Möbius strip. The Möbius strip is
itself a riddle in that the fundamental opposition that is very real from a position on the strip
dissolves when the topology as a whole is looked at from an external vantage point.
The sketch by artist M.C. Escher in Figure 1 illustrates the paradox of the Möbius strip
well. The ants, while traveling on the Möbius strip, are in real opposition to the ants traveling on
the other side of the band. From an outside perspective, however, the viewer is able to see that
the ants traverse every part of the strip without ever crossing an edge. They are never “on the
other side”.
Recalling that “The Möbius Strip” concludes with the teacher’s warning that “human
knowledge is often put to extraordinarily evil uses” and that the students should never
“compromise [their] knowledge for the sake of self-interest” (12), it seems that Cho’s main
object of critique is the production of a certain kind of knowledge. The political bent of this trope
becomes more evident in “Epilogue,” when the teacher condemns the entire South Korean
education system and the production of knowledge that “develop[s] you gentlemen and your
successors as human capital”—as “the means” rather than “the ends” (210). The text of The
Dwarf takes issue with the production of knowledge that serves capital and stunts both human
consciousness and social relations. The abrupt jump to the story of Humpback and Squatlegs
illustrate what these problems look like at the level of lived experience. Dehumanization,
alienation, and class antagonism persist at every twist and turn.

169

The narrative about the teacher in the classroom in “Epilogue” seems to be a modified
repetition, or an altered version, of the scene in “The Möbius Strip”. “Epilogue” even begins
with the same sentences that begin “The Möbius Strip”: “The mathematics teacher entered the
classroom. The students noticed that he hadn’t brought the textbook” (1, 209). Both stories also
end with the very same sentence: “The winter sun slanted down and the classroom grew dark”
(12, 219). The repetition brings the reader back full circle to the start, reminiscent of the structure
of the Möbius Strip itself. The conversation that the teacher has with the students radically
changes however. Instead of chimney sweeps and Möbius strips, the teacher in “Epilogue”
discusses the education system and aliens. Is it the same teacher? The same students?
After comparing the two stories, it becomes clear that this conundrum of the math teacher
and the classroom of students bears resemblance to the riddle of the chimney sweeps. One
version is not meant to cancel out the other. Rather, both work together as a kind of heuristic
device. The teacher’s declaration that he has decided to leave with aliens on a space voyage to
another planet can be seen as a move to think beyond what is given, to attempt to relocate himself
to a vantage point outside the Möbius strip. He refuses to be enclosed in such an arbitrary and
unethical system of relations, and emphasizes the spirit of freedom: “Whether we live on Earth
or another planet, our spirit is always free” (219). Related to this spirit of freedom is also a
certain relationship to the history of the earth and mankind:
I wanted to write something I could share with all of you...I wanted to write about the
very first humans, who came down from the trees, and about animals, which get their
nutrients from eating plants and other animals, because they don’t have the ability to
manufacture organic substances from inorganic substances the way plants do. (218)

170

Here the teacher dwells on what Marx saw as the fundamental underlying reality of human
existence: that in order for human beings to survive, it is necessary for them to produce the
material requirements of life. The mode of production of those material requirements is the
foundation for the social production of human existence. The teacher, like many other characters
in this novella, finds difficulty expressing himself—he was unable to write what he wanted to
write. However he remarks that if he still had some time left, he would have written about the
people “who are trying to smother the creativity of you gentlemen. They don’t want the slightest
detail of our present circumstances to be revealed for what they really are, and they don’t want to
reform” (218). If “The Möbius Strip” centers its critique on the hegemonic production of
knowledge, “Epilogue” builds upon this critique and connects it to the biopolitical unconscious
produced by capitalism.

CAPITAL’S ALIENS: CREATING OTHERS AND OTHER WORLDS
The Dwarf explores how the systematic instrumentalization of life under capitalism leads
to dehumanization and antagonistic social relations. Capital creates others as well as distinct,
classed worlds that register as alien to those not living in them. The interlinked story format
makes it possible to install different ontological and epistemological levels that both reflect these
different worlds and move between them, highlighting their similarities and differences. The
formal features of fragmentation, cross-cutting, confusion of voices, abrupt juxtaposition, and
montage found in The Dwarf reflects the fragmentation and disintegration of not only individual
thought life, but also of social relations and the environment. The juxtaposition of characters—
rich and poor, educated and uneducated—and the elaboration of their spatial crossings and
separations create a montage of the city.

171

Cho employs the montage device not only at the level of prose within each story, but also
at the level of structure. Perspectival, spatial, and temporal adjustments are required each time
the reader moves to the next story. Some of the stories are told in the limited third-person from
the perspectives of Yun-ho, the son of an upper-class legal scholar, and Shin-ae, a middle-class
woman who befriends the dwarf after he fixes her water pump
20
. Other stories are told in the
first-person, mostly from the perspective of the dwarf’s eldest son, Yǒng-su, with the exception
of “The Little Ball Launched by the Dwarf” in which the middle son Yǒng-ho and the youngest
daughter Yǒng-hŭi also feature brief first-person segments, as well as “The Spinyfish Entering
my Net”, which is told from the first-person perspective of Kyǒng-hun, the son of the president
of Ŭngang Group. In addition to the distinct perspectives of each of these characters, the
locations where they live are so markedly different from one another that the abrupt change
between stories can be disorienting for the reader.
At the start of the narrative, Yun-ho, Shin-ae, and the dwarf’s family all live in a
fictitious area of Seoul called “Felicity Precinct”, but in such vastly different living conditions as
to constitute different worlds. Yun-ho’s family is wealthy enough to live in a three-story home
with multiple luxury cars and a staff of servants, whereas Shin-ae’s family lives in a small
apartment in a neighborhood crammed with apartment buildings that compete for inadequate
water supply through a variety of strategies involving the installation of “private” wells and
underground pumps. The dwarf’s family lives in a slum squatter settlement next to a brick
factory and a toxic sewer creek.
Though these families live as if they are worlds apart, they are in fact within visible
distance from one another. The text repeatedly elaborates visuospatial crossings from the

20
“Knifeblade” and “On the Footbridge” are told from the limited 3
rd
person perspective of middle class
character Shin-ae.

172

perspective of each location. From the third-floor loft in Yun-ho's home, “you could see clusters
of squatter’s homes above the creek—as well as the smokestack of the brick factory” (37). After
all the squatter homes are torn down, and just before their own home is razed, Yǒng-ho observes:
“[W]e had a direct view of the precinct office. Beyond it we could see bright, clean houses…The
bakeshop where Yǒng-hŭi had worked was visible.” Similarly, from Shin-ae’s front gate, Yǒng-
hŭi observes that she can see the space of her old neighborhood, which has since been erased
from the cityscape: “Our house, the neighbor’s houses, all the other houses—they were nowhere
to be seen. The bank of the sewer creek was gone, the brick factory smokestack was gone, the
hillside path was gone. No trace there of the dwarf, the dwarf’s two sons, and the dwarf’s
daughter. Only a broad clearing” (89). The redevelopment zone no longer bears traces of the
lives that had lived there and that have been displaced. The “broad clearing” (nŭlbeun gong-tŭh)
here indexes not only a visuospatial erasure, but also the dynamics of the biopolitical production
of “bare life”, to use Agamben’s term. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
Agamben identifies a zone of indistinction between the Ancient Greek senses of “life” as zoe, or
“natural life”, and bios, or “way of life” (social, political). Neither one or the other, what he
refers to as “bare life” can best be defined as “life exposed to death”, when natural life becomes
politicized by “abandoning” itself to the power of sovereignty, which Agamben equates to the
unconditional power of death: “[T]he first foundation of political life is a life that may be killed,
which is politicized through its very capacity to be killed.”
21
The figure of the homo sacer in
ancient Roman law epitomizes bare life as one whom the people have judged on account of a
crime, yet “who can be killed but not sacrificed.” According to Agamben, the sacredness

21
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995), 89.

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of homo sacer does not so much indicate the principle of the sacredness of life as we tend to
understand it today, as it does the idea of a sphere beyond both divine and human law. Sacer
simply meant “a life that could be killed,”
22
Homo sacer is unsacrificeable, yet he may
nevertheless be killed, which Agamben points out is the dimension of bare life that constitutes
the immediate referent of sovereign violence.
23
Agamben identifies a structural analogy between
the sovereign exception and homo sacer: “At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign
and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative:
the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo
sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.”
24
Agamben’s model of the
sovereign and homo sacer as symmetrical, correlative figures also highlights the fluidity with
which “all men” can step into either role in the modern State. Who are the “sovereigns” and who
are the “homines sacri” in the capitalist world-system?
I argue that the realm of “sacredness” of homo sacer—which, to repeat, does not so much
indicate the principle of the sacredness of life as it does the idea of a sphere beyond both divine
and human law—is in fact encapsulated in the capitalist idea the market. The idea of “free
market forces” refers to a system where prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces
of supply and demand and are allowed to reach their point of “natural” equilibrium without
government regulation. Markets are necessary for development; markets are self-correcting;
markets lead to general prosperity for all. This particular idea of the market was proselytized by
Park Chung-hee’s regime. Park instituted what he called “guided capitalism,” which according to

22
Ibid., 86.

23
Ibid., 113.

24
Ibid., 84.

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him was a “system of economic management designed to create an economic order that would
guarantee the equalization of income and public benefit from the economy.”
25
Park saw the
government’s role in the course of national development as that of an industry manager or “a
guardian” so that equal opportunities for all could be guaranteed by free competition.
26

A modern “sovereign” would be the ones who can “guide” the market (e.g. the
government), or have the capital to participate in the market (e.g. property owners), but those
who can do neither fit Agamben’s description of the homo sacer. The deciding factor is power,
which in the case of The Dwarf, belongs to whoever has more (material and social) capital. We
see this dynamic embedded in the story of the dwarf’s family and their squatter community being
evicted from the redevelopment zone. Agamben’s statement that bare life “dwells in the no-
man’s-land between the home and the city” also takes on spatial and material significance in this
story, as squatters homes are not regarded as “homes” because they are illegitimate under the
capitalist paradigm of private property. The biopolitical mechanisms driven by capitalism allows
the city government to create new “living spaces” for those who can afford high-rise apartments
while simultaneously rendering a whole community of poor working class families homeless and
left to fend for themselves. The traces of their lives are completely erased from the built
environment. They are treated as bare life, as literally their “exclusions found the city of men.”
27

They, like the homo sacer, are treated as “the living dead”, but this very political exclusion from
“the city” is what helps the city to “renew” itself, as the phrase “urban renewal” implies. The

25
Jon Woronoff, Korea's Economy: Man-made Miracle (Seoul, Korea; Oregon, U.S.A: Si-sa-yong-o-sa
Publishers; Pace International Research, 1983), 28.

26
Hyung-a Kim, Korea’s Development Under Park Chung Hee: Rapid Industrialization,1961-79
(London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 79.

27
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 7.

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activity of the city government and the brokers buying and selling property rights act as if in “the
sovereign sphere,” which Agamben refers to as “the sphere in which it is permitted to kill
without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice”—the squatters constitute
“sacred life” that may be left to die, but not sacrificed. The “broad clearing” where the squatter
settlement once existed, along with the dwarf, his family, and their neighbors, indexes a
collusion of space and power under capitalism whereby a blank space conceals the very nature of
its production.
The Dwarf illustrates how the mode of production produces the built environment as an
operative biopolitical category. Not only is there a huge disparity in income between the wealthy
and the poor, but there is also a spatial divide, in which the wealthy can live as if they are in
another world far from the industrial zone. Capitalist logic translates spatially into the increasing
isolation of classes into slums and industrial zones versus suburbs and closed communities. Not
long after the dwarf dies, Yun-ho and his family move out of Seoul’s Felicity Precinct to the
suburbs, where their new house is
a single-story dwelling in the wooded foothills of Pugak Mountain…The neighborhood
was fenced off. There was a guardpost at the entrance where security people stopped
vehicles and checked the identity of all who entered. Yun-ho had the feeling of entering a
different world. The streets were clean, the houses picturesque. No one went about
this fine settlement of fine homes on foot. Spring brought fragrances that filled the
neighborhood. Double cherry blossoms, climbing roses, lilacs, yulan trees, mountain
rhododendrons, viburnum, redbuds, and whatnot came into bloom. Bees buzzed about.
Sounds from the past could not be heard in this neighborhood. (103-104, emphasis mine)

176

It should be noted here that the original Korean phrase translated into “a different world” is
dahreun sĕgyeh, which connotes differences so stark and overwhelming as to constitute a wholly
different spatial and relational orientation altogether. Yun-ho’s new neighborhood is closed off
from the outside world, “the guardpost” presumably protecting its inhabitants not only from
unwanted intruders, but also the sanctity of the domain they’ve crafted within its walls, where
everything is clean, beautiful and stress-free. This is a created world, designed to shelter the
wealthy from the noisy, the polluted, and the dangerous. This world is meticulously landscaped
with abundant and varied vegetation, which contrasts heavily with the absolute lack of plant life
in the slums of Seoul.
28
The elaboration of the names of different plants and flowers in Yun-ho’s
neighborhood points to the classifying table which Foucault, in The Order of Things, identifies as
a method of the “science of order”. He suggests that the table was a language designed to resolve
the endless abundance of things into a finite number of categories and “the centre of knowledge
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”
29
We can see how this kind of episteme would
undergird a biopolitics that produced a procedure of power-knowledge (pouvoir-savoir) for
classifying, harnessing, and managing both human and non-human life under a globally
hegemonic capitalist accumulation regime. The episteme that produces the procedure of
classifying plants is the same one that classifies bodies, spaces and modes of existence, and that
leads to the creation of phenomenons such as gated communities and suburban/urban divides.
At the same time that Yun-ho moves to a secluded gated community, the dwarf’s family
relocates to the industrial zone of Ŭngang, where the living and working conditions are even

28
The only vegetation described in the Felicity Precinct slum is the “flowerbed where the pansies were
blooming, a flowerbed the size of your outstretched hands”(42), where the dwarf’s daughter likes
sit and play her broken guitar.

29
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), 75.

177

more deplorable than they were in Seoul. Yǒng-hŭi describes Ŭngang as “a land where all living
things suffered”(131); Yǒng-su laments that “when we moved to Ŭngang we started worrying
about everything, even our breathing” (132), indicating the severe level of air pollution. The
never-ending poverty, the pollution that is even worse than what they experienced in Seoul, and
the lack of adequate food makes them depressed and in poor health, perpetuating the vicious
cycle in which the weak get weaker and the strong get stronger.
The geographical layout of the city of Ŭngang creates a natural topographical division
that becomes absorbed into the “eco-logics”
30
of the mode of production, dictating where people
live according to their economic positioning:
Downtown is a place of ups and downs with its many hills, and since the hills in the heart
of the city spread east and west, the urban district is divided into north and south. The
industrial zone is to the north. Black smoke rises from countless smokestacks; inside the
factories machines are turning. This is where the workers work. And this is where the
dead dwarf’s children are working. Mixed with the air they breathe are toxic gases, sooty
smoke, and dust particles…Ŭngang’s inner harbor is a basin collecting polluted seawater.
Life in the vicinity is slowly dying. (121)
The factory workers live and work in the industrial zone, not only in poverty, but also in the
thick of the toxic pollution created by the factories. Ŭngang’s organization of urban space
illustrates how the mode of production produces its own space, affecting not only the built
environment, but also the natural environment. It produces ecological degradation as (human and
non-human) life becomes instrumentalized as a strategy of capital accumulation. The text
highlights the materialist impossibility of the logic of capitalist accumulation—in which infinite

30
Leerom Medovoi’s term, see Medovoi, “The Biopolitical Unconscious: Toward an Eco-Marxist
Literary Theory,” Mediations 24, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 134.

178

economic expansion within a finite environment is a contradiction in terms. This central delusion
in the capitalist mode of production is what causes the breakdown of both social relations and the
environment.

MAKING MACHINES
The ecological disaster created by the factories in Ŭngang not only affects the physical
body but also consciousness. In “City of Machines,” an episode is recounted in which the toxic
air pollution became so bad that one night, when the wind suddenly shifted over Ŭngang, the
people couldn’t breathe:
The adults rushed to the hospital, children in their arms, but then they too had trouble
breathing because of the stench in the air. Their eyes smarted, their throats grew hot.
Those who could not bear it ran out onto the streets...Chaos broke out and public order
collapsed in an instant...the people of Ŭngang shuddered at the exposure of their
helplessness in the face of a great terror...Although no one could have expressed it, they
realized they were living under ecological conditions without precedent in the history of
Ŭngang. (122)
In this passage, there is a strong sense of the enclosure, or entrapment, of the factory workers in
the industrial zone. They have nowhere to go to escape the toxic gases hanging over the ground
during a trough of low air pressure and desperately run out onto the streets, gasping for clean air
where there is none. This incident traumatizes the people of Ŭngang so much that they can do
nothing but “shudder at the exposure of their helplessness in the face of a great terror.” The
“great terror” is unnamable and inexpressible, but their severe anxiety and paralysis of action
serves as a weak substitute for the “realiz[ation]” that they were living under an ecological

179

disaster unparalleled in the history of the city. The people of Ŭngang are unable to express
themselves, and this inability seems also related to the unknowability of an ecological situation
that requires them to see their city from an outside perspective. Incapable of expressing
themselves, incapable of realizing an alternative reality, the people of Ŭngang helplessly go
through the motions of their daily lives, like automatons.
The pollution of the environment is on a continuum with the regulation of bodies in the
factories. Both reflect the instrumentalization of life born of an industrial accumulation regime.
The machines in the factories dictate the rhythm of the daily lives of the workers. The machines
at the textile factory never stop (145), for example, and require the constant presence of workers
to check the weaving machines and restart them if they become stuck. Yǒng-hŭi works long
hours, half-walking, half-running among the weaving machines all day long (135). When she and
others on the night shift fall asleep standing from sheer fatigue, the foreman stabs them with a
safety pin to wake them up (151). Yun-ho describes the labor situation to the daughter of the
president of Ŭngang Group: “The work they do at their workplace stunts their growth…The
young workers fit the rhythm of their daily lives to machines. Thoughts, feelings, they’re lost to
the machines” (107). Not only does the work of keeping up with the pace of the machines
impede their physical growth, it also impedes their ability to think and to express themselves.
Indeed, the title of the story itself—“City of Machines”—suggests that the people, in a
city full of machines, have become dehumanized and alienated to the point that they themselves
have become like machines. At Ŭngang Motors, Yǒng-su becomes known as the “Two-Gun
Kid” because he handles two pistol-shaped tools all day long, drilling holes and placing screws,
jammed inside the trunk of the car. Yǒng-su feels “yoked to machines” as the assembly line
determined the pace of work: “Those on the assembly line regarded me as just another machine.

180

To the factory manager the workers were one big machine” (133). The factory creates docile
bodies by limiting social interaction among the workers and keeping them constantly occupied.
Lunch was limited to thirty minutes, and even then “the company people” encouraged the
workers to eat for ten minutes and then spend the remaining twenty minutes kicking a ball
around: “We workers went out to the cramped yard and all we did was kick that ball. They kept
us at a distance from each other—no socializing—and all we did was drip with sweat” (65). And
yet, for the most part, the vast majority of the workers show no resistance to such inhumane
treatment. The capitalistic logic that produces this kind of paralysis of being is alluded to in the
story “A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf”: “Our understanding was limited to what we were
familiar with. None of us wanted to lose the foothold he’d sweated for. The company people
didn’t want us to think. Workers worked, and that was it. The great majority of workers
accepted a situation in which change was impossible. And there was no one to awaken them to a
single thing” (66).
This description of the workers in Ŭngang as unthinking machines resonates with John
Bellamy Foster’s discussion of ecology and human freedom.
31
The present global social order is
entrapped in a mechanistic view of human freedom, and of the human relation to nature, that is
directly at odds with ecological imperatives. Foster dates this mechanistic emphasis in our
culture with the emergence of the modern scientific worldview, which arose along with the
capitalist world economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although highly productive
in terms of technological advance, this way of seeing the world has had fateful consequences. He
quotes the physicist David Bohm, who observes that

31
John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002).

181

We are all pushing against each other and everyone is trying to win...If we regard the
world as made up of a lot of little bits, we will try to exploit each bit and we will end up
destroying the planet. At present, we do not realize that we are one whole with the planet
and that our whole being and substance comes out of it.
32

The idea of homo oeconomicus is one of atomized, solitary individuals each competing for
scarce resources. A market economy view expects human beings to behave in such a way as to
achieve maximum money gains, even if it means the use and abuse of other human beings.
Either way, the mode of being that is produced is one in which both the capitalist and the worker
are automatons—the capitalist a “cheerful robot”
33
and the worker a machine who is described in
The Dwarf as being “used for mechanical energy”
34
(107).

MAKING ALIEN
Along with ecological destruction and the systematic biopolitical deprivation of laborers,
the capitalist instrumentalization of life produces class antagonism, which is one of the central
concerns of the entire narrative. The processes of spatial othering and mechanization that follow
the logic of capital further produces the othering of people. The making of people into machines
is homologous to making people alien. The shape that class antagonism takes from the
perspective of a son of the president of the Ŭngang Group in “The Spinyfish Entering My Net” is

32
David Bohm quoted in ibid., 53.

33
Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism, 55.

34
The quote is from the story “Orbital Rotation”. Describing the work of the dwarf’s children to the
daughter of the president of Ŭngang Group, Yun-ho says, “The young workers fit the rhythm of
their daily lives to machines. Thoughts, feelings—they’re lost to the machines. Remember what
you studied at school? The force of a falling object becomes mechanical energy, and the force of
a wound spring, and so on. Well, these workers are the same: They’re used for mechanical
energy.”

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one of social Darwinism, of “survival of the fittest”. Influenced by his father, Kyŏng-hun sees
the threat of social change as equal to the threat of war, since “in an instant such changes could
strip Father of everything” (189). He has deluded himself into think that he and his family are
doing the workers a favor: “The fact is, [Father and Uncle] built a plant, gave them work, paid
them money. Those [workers] right there are the ones who benefited the most” (192). When
Yǒng-su, during his trial, gives as his motive behind the homicide the terse rationale that the
president of Ŭngang Group “did not think about human beings” (198), Kyŏng-hun thinks to
himself:
Why would Father have had to think about such stuff? This vicious little creature didn’t
know that Father was a busy man with countless better things to do—planning, making
decision, giving instructions, following up. I was well aware that there lived this ilk—
retarded development, smaller and weaker than the rest of us, but a small body stuffed
with cruel thoughts. (198)
Kyŏng-hun describes Yǒng-su, and by extension Yǒng-su’s family and fellow laborers, in a
manner that renders them wholly other. He refuses to refer to them as human beings, preferring
instead to characterize them “vicious creature[s]” of another “ilk”. Embedded in his description
of them as suffering “retarded development,” and as “smaller and weaker than the rest of us” is a
subtext that views the wealthy as more fit to survive, and therefore to deservedly dominate those
who are weak and “small”. This form of oppositional “othering” can also be detected in Kyŏng-
hun’s belief that the workers should be drugged in order to make them “happy” at work. He tells
his mother: “Just use drugs...We make a drug that makes them happy just to work. We’d have to
put it in what they eat and drink at the factory. We’d have to form a first-rate research team and
have them develop it” (206)—an idea he most likely gets from books like Human Engineering

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on his bookshelf (207). In order to see the plight of the workers, to “think about human beings”
(198) as Yǒng-su proposes during his trial, the text seems to suggest that the president and his
son would have had to step outside the mechanistic view of the market economy to see the
situation as a Möbius-strip-like whole, where class divisions break down in the face of a “single,
continuous surface” of being fellow human beings.
Capitalism’s processes of othering take on an explicitly alien, extraterrestrial metaphor
in the story “Space Travel,” which introduces a key character named Chi-sǒp who becomes Yun-
ho’s new tutor. Chi-sǒp curiously tells Yun-ho that “he’d met beings from outer space” and
promises to “introduce him to these creatures and their families” (37). Chi-sǒp leads Yun-ho to
the squatter settlement near the brick factory and introduces him to the supposed “aliens” he had
been referring to: the dwarf and his family. This scene, which comes early on in the novella, is
significant in that it metaphorizes Yun-ho’s crossing from a wealthy neighborhood into a slum of
Seoul as being akin to traveling to another world and meeting aliens. The memory of this
meeting, along with the news of the dwarf’s death, haunts Yun-ho throughout the narrative. He
experiences intrusive flashbacks of his visit with the dwarf’s family at seemingly random and
incongruous moments in the text. When the dwarf’s family moves to Ŭngang, Yun-ho cannot get
Ŭngang out of his mind:
July and August were extraordinarily hot and humid. The papers were full of articles
calling it the worst heat in thirty years. The entire country was tinder dry. But Yun-ho had
nothing to worry about. His father had installed an air conditioner and it spewed out cold
air without the slightest sound. One day this city of Ŭngang had suddenly loomed huge in
Yun-ho’s mind; if not for that he would have been content to prepare for the examination
in his pleasant surroundings. The city of Ŭngang left a gloomy outline in Yun-ho’s

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mind. The sons and daughter of the dead dwarf worked there. To Yun-ho, Ŭngang was
merely one part of the surface of a small planet. The dead dwarf’s children survived in
this part of the dark surface by performing sweaty labor at a work site of machines.
Yun-ho lives in a sheltered world designed to help him ignore anything other than his “pleasant
surroundings”, but the shadow of Ŭngang hangs darkly over his conscience. In the original
Korean “ŏ-du-un gŭ-rim”, which here is translated as “a gloomy outline”, literally means “a dark
picture”. The sense is that the city of Ŭngang is permanently engrained in his mind’s eye, the
darkness of the picture both suggesting a dim atmosphere thick with pollution as well as an
ominous, dangerous place. Moreover, Yun-ho sees Ŭngang as a small part of a “small planet”.
The meaning of “cha-kŭn nyu-sŏng” is actually closer to “small meteor” or “small falling star”
than “small planet”, which emphasizes even more the diminutive size of the Earth in comparison
to the universe, as well as its precarious, unstable state as a celestial body. One could say that
Yun-ho’s perspective abruptly changes to a planetary one after his encounter with the dwarf’s
world. He is also the only character other than Chi-sǒp who, by the end of the novella, seems to
stand in for the possibility of change. Both Yun-ho’s and Chi-sǒp’s examples suggest how an
extraterrestrial imagination can harness a utopian desire to free human beings from the
constraints of an unjust world and a toxic, self-destructing planet.
Chi-sǒp is a mysterious character with no ties—“no home, no parents, no brothers, no
organization he belonged to, no school, no friends” (33). What we do know about him is that he
was kicked out of a prestigious law school in his senior year, that he spends most of his time with
laborers in Ŭngang, and that he eventually becomes a worker himself and a revered leader of the
labor movement.

185

Chi-sǒp is the central character who disseminates ideas about living on another planet to
other characters in the book, including the dwarf himself. One might be quick to dismiss Chi-
sǒp’s extraterrestrial utopian impulse as futile at best, and fatal at worst, if we take the dwarf’s
eventual suicide to be its logical end. But the narrative suggests otherwise, when we see that
Chi-sǒp becomes an effective and charismatic leader of the labor movement. His method of
activism is described as being “so unique that labor unions sprang up at the factories where he
worked. Not only that, but the workers brought the wheels of the factory owner’s wagon to a
halt, lessened that wagon’s load—profit—and shared it with the employees” (167). In his
unremitting fight for social justice, Chi-sǒp’s body became mutilated—one could say almost
alien-like: “There were scars beneath his eyes. His nose looked a bit squashed. With his right
hand he covered his left hand, whose ring and little fingers had been severed to stumps” (168).
Yǒng-su connects the change in Chi-sǒp to his own father’s death:
That Chi-sǒp, whom Father liked, had become a labor activist during an age that had
heaped economic affliction on Father was not entirely coincidental…The important thing
was the warm affection he had extended to Father. At that time, only in his mind did
there exist the beautiful, unspoiled world that he called the Land of the Moon. To make
that world a reality outside his mind, he came to Ŭngang a brave man of action. (172)
This passage suggests that Chi-sǒp was spurred to action by his dear friend’s death, and that his
dreams of the “Land of the Moon” gave him the utopic vision and direction he needed to work
toward a revolution of the real world that he lived in. This is how he went from being a dreamer
who “in a single day…made several trips around the moon” (74) to being a “man of action”.
The dwarf himself incessantly reads a book that Chi-sǒp gave him, called The World Ten
Thousand Years from Now, which we learn is about the possibility of human beings living on the

186

moon. Chi-sǒp describes the moon as a utopic, virgin, pure space that stood in direct contrast to
Earth:
The moon was a pure world…and Earth an impure world...To him the moon was a
golden world, a world unto itself. The events that took place on Earth were too horrible,
he said. According to his book, time on Earth was utterly wasted, oaths and promises
were broken, prayers went unanswered. Tears flowed in vain, the spirit was suppressed,
hopes went unrealized. (38)
The dwarf’s and Chi-sop’s imagination of the moon as a utopic alternative to Earth clues us in on
how the recurrent extraterrestrial allusions together offer what I propose is a dislocating,
planetary, “ex-orbitant” orientation to the world that radically refigures ideas of inheritance and
national belonging.

AN INHERITANCE OF LOVE
The dwarf dies, but his vision of a different future is passed onto his eldest son Yongsu,
who says, “I suffered because of the love I had inherited from Father. We lived in a loveless
world.” (147, emphasis mine) Yongsu describes his father’s dream world:
The world Father dreamed of was a world that provided work for all—a world where
people were fed and clothed in return for their work, where everyone sent all their
children through school and loved their neighbor…In the world of Father’s dreams the
only thing that was enforced was love. People would work with love, raise their children
with love. (142)
For the dwarf, who has had to live in poverty and under oppression all of his life, the
vision of a social utopia is also necessarily an ecological utopia: “Love would make the rain fall,

187

love would lead to equilibrium, love would make the wind blow and make it come to rest, even
on the small stems of buttercups.” The kind of love that the dwarf dreamt of would revolutionize
society and renew life in planetary belonging and harmony. Yongsu inherits this love.
Cho’s book is in many ways a warning to those who do not understand the powerful
weight of inheritance. Jacques Derrida conveys a similar admonition in his book Specters of
Marx- that those who refuse to listen to ghosts because they say they don't believe in them are
precisely those who are condemned to repeat their own history while loudly disavowing it.
35
The
revolutions of the past need to be constantly remembered and invoked, Derrida insists. Cho’s The
Dwarf does this by acknowledging the return of the ghosts of revolutions past within Korea’s
situation of rapid industrialization. Yǒng-su compares the situation of factory workers in Ŭngang
to the labor situations during the Industrial Revolution in England and France (143). When the
dwarf’s daughter Yǒng-hŭi asks with exasperation, “Are we closer to the situation a hundred and
sixty years ago or the situation today?” (144), no one is able to answer her or offer her a sense of
hope that their working and living conditions will improve.
Inheritance, at its most fundamental, is “to make heir, or put in possession.” Secondary
definitions include “to come into possession of, by legal descent or succession” and “to derive (a
quality or character, physical or mental) from one’s progenitors by natural descent.”
36
The
novella engages with these various senses of inheritance. The Dwarf examines and critiques the
idea of inheritance from different angles.

35
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International (New York: Routledge, 1994).

36
Oxford English Dictionary.

188

The Dwarf reflects a deep anxiety of biological inheritance. The novella is populated with
a number of characters whose genetic traits are perceived as abnormalities- the dwarf himself,
two other characters referred to as “Humpback” and “Squatlegs”; there is even an entire dwarf
city called Lilliput. There are also repeated descriptions of impoverished children dying from
disease, starvation, pollution, and the effects of exploitative factory labor, which register as a
threat to genealogical lines of descent. The work they did literally “stunts their growth” (107).
These depressing details resonate with the text’s description that “the society was a monstrosity”
(93). Literary scholar Yi Cheong argues that the disabled bodies in The Dwarf were symbols of
a diseased and deteriorating society.
37
Yi maintains that these bodily depictions were meant to
push readers at the time to reflect on the unjust nature of social structures despite the rapid
growth of the economy in the 1970s. To this interpretation I would add that the disabled and
dying bodies in the text also index the future inheritance of a toxic environment at large.
Cho Sehŭi paid prescient attention to the effects that rapid industrialization in the postwar
period was having on the environment. By the 1970s, when Cho Sehŭi was writing The Dwarf,
the ecological degradation resulting from South Korea’s rapid industrialization could not be
ignored. The Korean War (1950-1953) had wreaked havoc on the peninsula’s population, cities,
and industries. In 1961, South Korea came under the military dictatorship of Park Chung-Hee,
who launched a series of economic development plans with the aim of establishing a self-reliant
economy. Within four decades, the focus on export-led economic growth ushered in
unprecedented industrial and urban growth, radically transforming South Korea from an agrarian

37
Cheong Lee, “Cho Sehŭi sosŏre nat’anan pulgujŏk shinch’e p’yosang yŏn’gu” [“A Study of Disabled
Bodies in Cho Sehŭi’s Novel]. Uri ŏmun yŏn’gu [The Study of Korean Language and Literature]
27, (2006): 199.

189

to a heavily industrialized nation.
38
Paik Nak-chung has described Park’s version of economic
development with its “militarist ethos and unabashed environmental destruction” as the diametric
opposite of any definition of “sustainable development.”
39
However South Koreans generally
accepted pollution and ecodegradation as the sacrifice for explosive economic growth, a view
reflected in Park Chung-hee’s statement in 1962: “Dark smoke rising from factories is symbolic
of our nation’s growth and prosperity.”
40
Since then, South Korea has continued to have issues
with rampant deforestation, flood problems, heavy air and water pollution, acid rain, overtaxed
city sewer systems, radioactive waste, and excessive greenhouse gas emissions.
Ultimately the text performs an incisive critique of capitalistic inheritance, which
perpetuates society’s radically uneven and unjust distribution of wealth and property. The
novella depicts a situation in which all the wealth is in the hands of a corrupt few while the poor
and the middle classes struggle to make ends meet. Family-run conglomerates like the Ŭngang
Corporation own most of the means of production, which means that these economic inequities
get passed down through the generations.
The dwarf himself comes from a genealogical line in which his ancestors for generations
were slaves (nobi). Their ancestors “were bound by heredity to a life of physical toil. They could
be inherited, bought and sold, given away, and taxed” (52). The sufferings of the children of the
dwarf, therefore, are sufferings that have plagued the family for hundreds of years. The dwarf’s

38
Nak Pyeong, “The Environmental Problems and Movements in South Korea.” Gwangju Human
Rights Folk School, 2004. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/7797965/The-
Environmental-Problems-and-Movements-in-South-Korea.

39
Paik Nak-chung, “How to Think About the Park Chung-Hee Era,” Creation and Criticism
Quarterly 33, no.2 (Summer 2005). Retrieved from
http://www.koreafocus.or.kr/design1/layout/content_print.asp?group_id=176

40
Karen Thornber, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2012), 74.

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family shows a much longer historical process in which the social inheritance of class-bound
stratifications persist even as political economies shifted. There is no mobility between classes in
the world of the dwarf. Class antagonism increases within a social structure where the rich get
richer while the poor become poorer and increasingly desperate. Cho’s text undermines Park
Chunghee’s developmentalist paradigm that insisted that present sacrifices would lead to wealth
for all. It is a critique of the ethnonationalist discourse of “the modernization of the fatherland”
(joguk geundaehwa) that linked industrial labor and economic goals with nationalism. Park’s
regime created a sociocultural consensus that viewed an individual’s commitment to industrial
labor was key to various national objectives, including a defense against Northern threat, the
eventual eradication of poverty, and a strengthening of national sovereignty. According to the
government, anyone who worked hard would achieve financial and social success, “while
bringing prosperity and honor to the company and the country.”
41
In the world of The Dwarf,
however, “development” and “economic growth” meant not the so-called wisdom and generosity
of the state, but the exploitation of the working class.
Derrida asserts that inheritance begins at the level of ontological being itself. It is not a
legacy that is passively received in its entirety, but an ongoing, inexhaustible task: “Inheritance is
never a given, it is always a task… All the questions on the subject of being [are] questions of
inheritance…the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or
not.”
42
If the traditional idea of inheritance is being faithful to and reproducing the past, the
Derrida’s idea of inheritance is future-oriented, inventing new ways of being that we pursue even
with no guarantee of success. With this future-oriented view of inheritance comes a call to

41
Andrew Eungi Kim and Gil-sung Park, “Nationalism, Confucianism, Work Ethic and Industrialization
in South Korea,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 33, no.1 (2003): 41.

42
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 54.

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responsibility to the idea of justice, which is itself irreducible and functions like a promise. Cho’s
text exhibits how the hope and the longing for justice can mark history. Yǒng-su, having
inherited his father’s sense of love, suffered because he and his siblings also inherited a “loveless
world.” This specific type of love he inherited from his father compels him to join the labor
movement, after which he becomes a powerful voice advocating for factory workers. His
eventual court trial and death sentence signal martyrdom for the cause of justice in the face of
state power’s collusions with capital. What is this love worth dying for?

REIMAGINING LOVE: SARANG AND CHŎNG AS EX-ORBITANT BELONGING
Let us return to the passage describing the dwarf’s vision of a world built on love
alongside the passage about Chisop’s utopic vision of life on the moon:
To him the moon was a golden world, a world unto itself. The events that took place on
Earth were too horrible, he said. According to his book, time on Earth was utterly wasted,
oaths and promises were broken, prayers went unanswered. Tears flowed in vain, the
spirit was suppressed, hopes went unrealized. (38)
In the world of Father’s dreams the only thing that was enforced was love. People would
work with love, raise their children with love. Love would make the rain fall, love would
lead to equilibrium, love would make the wind blow and make it come to rest, even on
the small stems of buttercups. (142)
Looking at them together reveals a surprising resonance with a passage from a famous epistolary
novella called To My Young Friend (Ŏrin pŏt ege) written by Yi Kwangsu more than sixty years
before, in 1917:

192

On our peninsula, love has been imprisoned. And along with it, many other things linked
to love have also been shut away. We cry out in desperation to liberate love. Like the
newly sprouting spring grass, we want our oppressed spirits to flourish and like the spring
flowers, we want them to bloom.
43

Cho Sehŭi’s dwarf, much like Yi Kwangsu’s protagonist, centers on love (sarang) as a necessary
force for liberation from suffering and oppression.
There are important distinctions in how Yi and Cho are defining love, however, that are
worth paying attention to in order to grasp what The Dwarf is doing differently. Yi Kwangsu’s
version of love is undergirded by his very influential literary theory and practice that earned him
the moniker “the father of modern Korean literature” (한국 근대 문학의 개척자, han’guk kŭndae
munhagŭi kaech’ŏkcha). The foundation of his literary approach was his commitment to a
certain conception of chŏng (정 情), a word that in contemporary understanding and usage could
roughly be translated as “feelings”, “affection,” and “attachment.” Yi Kwangsu centered on
chŏng as the primary vehicle through which he could recode Western literary theories into a
uniquely Korean and modern literature that, in his view, should break from its Confucian and
pre-modern past.
In Narratives of Nation Building in Korea, Sheila Miyoshi Jager demonstrates how Yi
Kwangsu ended up accepting a universalist idea of civilization centered around the West in his
very effort to insist on the cultural or national uniqueness of Koreans. One could say that his
emphasis on feelings was rooted in a kind of Occidentalism- a wish to imitate Western literature
and culture, which he believed to be superior, in order for Korea to advance as a nation in its
own right. Yi’s usage of the term chŏng was a “modern invention rooted in new psychological

43
Yi Kwang-su, Ŏrin pŏt ege [To My Young Friend], 1917. Entire text is unpaginated and retrieved
from https://ko.wikisource.org/wiki/어린_벗에게

193

definitions of the term rendered from translated Western sources.”
44
Yi gave chŏng a very
different meaning from the way it had been used in the Confucian canon. In fact, he conceived of
it in direct opposition to Confucian morality, which in his view had caused irreparable damage to
the sensual and spiritual lives of the Korean people. It had stifled the expression of the people’s
feelings.
45

Mediated by his understanding of and admiration for Western literature and culture, Yi
essentially posits the expression of feeling as key to racial uplift, and the search for chŏng as a
national problem. Michael D. Shin traces how Yi Kwangsu was very much influenced by
Western thinkers and writers such as Byron, Gorky, Maupassant, Socrates and Tolstoy.
46
Yi’s
monumental 1916 essay “What is Literature?”
47
(“Munhak iran hao”) is engaged in dialogue
with Tolstoy, who once stated that “whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another,
by means of art he transmits his feelings.”
48
Yi intended for the term chŏng to cover as wide a
range of emotions as possible, including love, rage, sorrow, evil, hope, and courage
49
, while at
the same time tying chŏng to the emergence of the individual. The cultivation of feeling was the

44
Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Narratives of Nation Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism (Armonk,
N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 23.

45
Jager, Narratives of Nation Building, 23-24.

46
Michael D. Shin, “Interior Landscapes: Yi Kwangsu’s “The Heartless” and the Origins of Modern
Literature,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, eds. Gi-wook Shin and Michael E. Robinson
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 250.

47
“What is Literature?” is widely considered the first work of literary theory. Yi Kwangsu’s paradigm
shifting work, both as a writer and as a theorist, has earned him the nickname “the father of
modern Korean literature”

48
Ibid., 256.

49
Yi Kwangsu, “What is Literature?” Azalea (2011): 297

194

very source of morality, according to Yi, and chŏng was the spontaneous expression of moral
principles that caused people to voluntarily realize society’s ethical and moral ideals. Yi
translated Tolstoy’s ideas about literature into a specifically nationalist focus by emphasizing
how the “ideas, emotions, and modes of living”
50
of every generation of Koreans were the
inheritance that constitutes the “country’s spiritual civilization, and underpin the nationhood
(minjoksong) of its people.”
51

For Yi, the journey to national self-discovery was tied to the awakening of chŏng. In
practice, however, Yi’s novels collapse his literary theory of chŏng, which is a complex emotion,
with a more one-dimensional idea of romantic love. In doing so, Yi essentially westernizes
chŏng. In a self-Orientalizing move, for example, the protagonist in the story “To My Young
Friend” writes: “I am Korean. Although I am familiar with the word “love,” like most of my
people, I have never actually experienced it. Most married couples in Korea do not get together
because of love.”
52
Implicit in this statement is a contrast to Westerners whom he assumes have
experienced true love and who get married out of love. Yi’s character puts a racialized spin on
the issue when he despairs that “the Korean man’s heart” has no place for love because it is
“killed by our society’s customs and morals.”
53
He attributes “our nation’s coarseness” and
people “of such foul character and base feelings” to the loveless relationships of Korean couples:
“it is the lack of intimacy between man and woman that is the cause of this situation.” The
majority of Yi’s stories feature male protagonists discovering feeling through falling in love or

50
Ibid., 301.

51
Ibid.

52
Yi, “Ŏrin pŏt ege [To My Young Friend], 1917. Entire text is unpaginated and retrieved from
https://ko.wikisource.org/wiki/어린_벗에게

53
Ibid.

195

losing love. This motif of romantic love encapsulates Yi’s method of integrating the “search for
chŏng” into literary practice. This literary practice inaugurated a very specific canonical concept
of love in nationalist literature. It is important to recognize that this literary approach to love was
very much that of a neocolonial “mimic man” who was trying to “civilize” Korea by injecting
Western notions of Romanticism and individualism into nationalism via tropes of romantic love.
Though there are echoes between Yi’s and Cho’s texts on the dream of liberation through
“love,” it is clear that Cho’s understandings of a liberatory sarang and chŏng are very different
from Yi’s. I argue that Cho Sehŭi is implicitly critiquing the established ideas of chŏng and
sarang and redefining them. Cho is challenging the individualistic, nationalist, and occidentalist
paradigms with his very similar but different passage about love. In contrast to Yi’s notions of
chŏng and sarang, Cho’s sarang is not national or ethnic-- it is global and planetary. The dwarf’s
fantasies about living on the moon, a place without economic development or geopolitical
borders, provide a countertext to the idea of city and nation. Whereas Yi’s sarang and quest for
chŏng are rooted in the experience of romantic love, Cho’s sarang focuses on a universal love of
neighbor, love in work, and love that protects and nurtures future generations. Cho’s sarang is
not a love imprisoned on the Korean peninsula. The coloniality of power is global and enmeshed
with the capitalist world system. This aspect of Cho’s work resonates with what Latin American
decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo would say more than two decades later in Local
Histories/Global Designs: “Love [is] the necessary corrective to the “generosity” of hegemonic
power that institutionalizes violence.”
54
Mignolo insists that a kind of “border thinking” love is
the utopic horizon for the liberation of human beings enmeshed in systems of domination and

54
Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border
Thinking (Princeton, N.J. ;Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2012), 274.

196

subordination. This revolutionary kind of love is an “educational and epistemological project”
that illuminates all that is disavowed by social structures complicitous with “colonial legacies
and national hegemonies.”
55

While The Dwarf challenges nationalistic economic development and the hegemony of
the West, it also pushes beyond the idea of the global toward the planetary. Yi’s representation
of chŏng found expression in the romantic love between individuals, but Cho’s conception of
chŏng is much different: it is encapsulated in the dwarf’s and Chisop’s desires to start over in a
utopic, pure space represented by the moon; it is the undercurrent of the nameless teacher’s plan
to leave on a space voyage to join alien friends another planet at the end of the book. I argue that
these extraterrestrial tropic moves in such a socially critical text
perform a displacement of the idea of globalization—or the
imposition of the capitalist system of exchange everywhere—with
what Gayatri Spivak would call “planetarity”. The idea of the globe
is something we can capture in its entirety on a computer, Spivak
points out, which allows us to think we can control it. The planet,
however, belongs to a much larger system within a universe of
inestimable unknowns, and we inhabit it “on loan.”
56

Related to the idea of the planetary is a figure much like the
Möbius Strip that is introduced in the story called “The Klein Bottle.” A Klein bottle is not a
typical bottle with an inside and a closed-in space. It is formed by making a hole in the wall of a
tube and passing one end of the tube through that hole. There is no ontologically determinable

55
Ibid.

56
Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 72.
Figure
2

197

inside or outside even though it has a closed space. A German mathematician, Felix Klein,
showed mathematically that one could create a single-sided, closed space with no boundary by
joining the edges of two Möbius Strips together. The Klein bottle however is based on “purely
abstract theoretical research” (176) and can only be embedded in four-dimensional space. When
Yǒng-su’s friend, who is referred to as “the man of science”, makes a Klein bottle model out of a
glass tube, Yǒng-su scrutinizes it with wonder: “What was even less understandable was that the
essence of the bottle...was right there before my eyes, but its reality was ignored and it seemed to
exist only in the world of imagination” (176). This passage is immediately followed by a
montage-like brief cutaway shot to a different scene: “The machine workers…emerged from the
factory’s main entrance and were dispersing into the dark. There was a vacant lot between that
factory and the aluminum factory. There dark figures were burning and burying solid industrial
waste” (176). This abrupt cutaway, only to resume right back to Yǒng-su’s narrative, creates a
symbolic association between the figure of the Klein bottle and the toxic industrial practices of
Ŭngang’s factories. The connection becomes clearer when Yǒng-su declares: “I wanted to make
the higher-ups in the company realize that we were all in the same boat. But they couldn’t see it.
They stubbornly insisted that they were in a different boat, and they expressed their own one-
sided demands” (178). He seeks the man of science again and understands the Klein bottle the
second time he considers it: “Now I understand...Because there’s no inside or outside, we can’t
talk of containing the inside—the notion of enclosure has no meaning here. If you just follow the
wall, you can get out. So in this world the notion of enclosure itself is an illusion” (178). If the
Klein bottle teaches us that the notion of enclosure is an illusion-- that its inside is also its outside
and vice versa—it is the delusion of inside vs. outside, us vs. them, man vs. nature, and self-
enclosure (“different boat[s]”) that allows for the kind of toxic industrial practices that degrade

198

the environment and human beings alike. The Klein bottle itself can stand in as a kind of
planetary figure: like the bottle, a planet is a “closed” space, yet arguably without an inside or
outside. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin reminds us that, while its complex self-organized
biosphere affords the Earth a degree of closure from the space around it, our planet does not
cease to participate in a dynamic solar system and galaxy. The Earth itself has inherited “the
organic elements necessary for its own self-organization from the greater system of which it is a
small part.”
57
A planet’s inside is inextricable from its outside. Though a planet has an inner
space, like the Klein bottle it has no edges or borders that completely close it off from outer
space.
The planetary aspect of the figure of the Klein bottle brings to mind Nigel Clark’s idea of
“ex-orbitant globality.” Clark argues that a closed view of the world, in which there is only an
inside, stunts rather than deepens our ethical impulses and possibilities. The Earth is an open
system in constant interchange with a dynamic cosmos. Clark, quoting Deleuze and Guattari,
observes that “the earth…belongs to the Cosmos, and presents itself as the material through
which human beings tap cosmic forces.”
58
Whereas philosophers and social scientists often look
only to differential factors proper to sociocultural systems to analyze what shapes human lives,
Deleuze sees this as an arbitrary drawing of limits that does not acknowledge how everything we
know and are is both imperiled and enabled by what is beyond Earth. The excessiveness of the
world and its persistent alterity resides ultimately in the capacity for the generation of something
other than what currently exists.
59

57
Nigel Clark, “Ex-orbitant Globality,” Theory, Culture & Society. 22, no. 5 (2005): 174.

58
Ibid., 172.

59
Ibid., 178.

199

The dwarf’s vision of the pure, beautiful “Land of the Moon” is itself an ex-orbitant
perspective that is enabled by the alterity that Deleuze refers to. His desires for freedom from
oppression becomes politically significant when his mental “trip” to a vantage point outside the
Earth then looked back on the Earth as an undivided world. This perspective-shifting process
bears much resemblance to the procedure inherent in viewing a Klein bottle. The point is not that
there is no surface at all, or no ontological “outside”, but that the manifold topological space
itself is continuous and boundary-less. An alien or extraterrestrial perspective is consequently
very important, since one must be looking at the bottle (and not be in the bottle) to see that it has
no discernible inside or outside. And one must be “off” the bottle’s surface to see that the global
form itself is undivided.
This ex-orbitant alterity requires a radical shift not only in our sense of the world, but
also our sense of history. The Dwarf breaks open the notion of “history” in several ways. For
one, there are surprising allusions to deep history in The Dwarf. These references jerk the reader
out of the time of recorded history and into a simultaneous past-future orientation. The title of
the book that the dwarf reads obsessively is, we recall, The World Ten Thousand Years from
Now. One Ŭngang Group family member responds to this title derisively, saying, “The shape of
the world ten thousand years in the future had nothing to do with him” (35). In context, his
statement reads as ironic, the implication being that the shape of the world ten thousand years in
the future has everything to do with how human beings live now. When Yǒng-hui, the dwarf’s
daughter, refers to the book, she is struck by the magnitude of the space-time continuum that is
its context: “According to [the] book, that nebular constellation [Coma Berenices] is five billion
light-years away. I can’t even compare my seventeen years to five billion years. Even a thousand
years might be just a few grains of sand in comparison. To me, five billion years is an eternity”

200

(79). This is simultaneously a deep view of past and future time, as the reference to “five billion
years” makes one think of the extended passing of time, as well as a deep view of the present,
since light-years in fact refers to interstellar spatial distance measured at the present moment.
Yǒng-hui’s consideration of a constellation five billion light-years away immediately leads her to
reflect on the shortness of her own seventeen years of life. A deep history/deep time perspective
has this effect of telescoping humankind from being the center of the universe to being one of
many species on a planet in the cosmos. The species perspective acknowledges deep time as well
as deep ecology, which sees the Earth as a delicate balance of complex, interdependent
relationships.
Human beings now wield a geological force that collapses the long-standing artificial
distinction between natural history and human history. Dipesh Chakrabarty argues compellingly
that we have reached numbers and invented technologies that are on scale large enough to have
an impact on the planet itself. This impact is so immense that some scientists have proposed that
we recognize the beginning of a new geological era
60
in which human beings are the principle
determinants of the environment of the planet.
61
Humans have become geological agents, and
geological time becomes enmeshed with human history. Whereas recorded history refers to the
last ten thousand years since the invention of agriculture, deep history extends much farther back
in time, taking into account “the combined genetic and cultural changes that created humanity
over hundreds of [thousands of] years”
62
—to which we might add geological and environmental
changes. Chakrabarty argues that recorded history alone is insufficient for understanding why a

60
Called “Anthropocene”

61
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 206-
207.

62
Ibid., 213.

201

phenomenon like climate change constitutes a crisis for humans. The consequences of climate
change only make sense if we take on the perspective of deep history, in which we think of
“humans as a form of life and look on human history as part of the history of life on this planet.”
What is at stake are the very conditions that make life even possible on Earth.
The Dwarf points to our obsession with the present, and how we neither look far back
enough, or far forward enough, in time. The president of Ŭngang Group was notorious for
“wield[ing] terrible power” and disregarding every article of labor law. His self-justification was:
“Now is the time to accumulate, not the time to distribute” (114), a presentist motto that echoes
the discourse of economic development of Park Chung-hee’s regime. Similarly, when a laborer
at a meeting between Ŭngang Textile labor union representatives and employer representatives
asks, “Why do we have to suffer on behalf of a healthy economy?”, an employer representative
answers, “Time will solve everything.” Again, the focus is on the present. As the future is always
indefinite, reference to the possibility of future change becomes a way to displace present
injustices and suffering. This approach is undermined by the text’s references to the global
history of capital, in which the history of industrialization in places like England and France
(143) shows that history tends to repeat itself rather than change for the better. The Dwarf deals
with this toxic obsession with the present by engaging in a future-oriented task of revolutionizing
inheritance that simultaneously remembers the failures of history.
Both the Möbius strip and the Klein bottle are figures in this text that fundamentally
upturn notions of all the divisions, borders, and processes of othering that people tend to take for
granted as “normal,” timeless and immutable. These topological mindbenders, Yongsu observes,
forces one to think “queer things that common sense would not lead you to think of” (176).
Queerness actively challenges common sense, which is ultimately a challenge against hegemony

202

and socializations that give power to certain groups over others. Cho’s strategic placement of the
discussions of the Möbius strip and the Klein bottle within the novella in effect call into question
unjust constructs created by capital and power. The Dwarf insists that we do not have to resign
ourselves and the next generations to the inheritance of the world as it is.
Love is, for the dwarf, the essence of all that creates and sustains life. Yi makes an
analogy about romantic love liberating oppressed spirits like “newly sprouting spring grass”, or
like the blooming of spring flowers. But for Cho, the connection is more literal. The
revolutionary love that The Dwarf envisions is far more than feeling; love will literally transform
the world physically. Collective love for the planet and for all living beings would actually
“make the rain fall,” “lead to equilibrium,” “make the wind blow and make it come to rest, even
on the small stems of buttercups” in the very ways that the contemporary social order and
political economy were failing. Revolutionary love will literally make flowers bloom. This is not
a metaphor. These effects of revolutionary love in the actual environment is very similar to the
philosophy undergirding African American writer and activist June Jordan’s claim that love is a
“lifeforce” which will make “manifest a peaceable order among us such that fear, conflict,
competition, waste, and environmental sacrifice will have no place” (11). This kind of love
imagines a world where the social and the natural affirm rather than negate each other, where
modes of communal organization sustain relationships of mutuality with the earth rather than the
privatization, extraction, and destruction of life.
The Dwarf calls for a move toward planetary love and an ethic of ex-orbitant belonging.
“Love” is the unifying factor—for the dwarf, love for fellow human beings and love for the
earth would lead to the renewal of a dying world. When seen in light of the love passage, the
dwarf’s and his son Yongsu’s death set them up as scapegoat figures, sacrificed in expiation of

203

society’s acts of violence against one another and against the planet. The personal struggle that
Yun-ho—a wealthy young man of privilege whose view of life radically changes after meeting
the dwarf and his family—has with feelings of guilt stands in for the collective guilt of capitalist
society. He is haunted by the dwarf’s death and obsessively talks about the dwarf’s family with
the girls he sleeps with (118). The city of Ŭngang “loomed huge in Yun-ho’s mind” as a city that
was “chock full of dark machines” (117, 119). When he thought of Ŭngang, its toxic
environment, and the dwarf’s children working and living there, “he sensed his own shriveled
self” (120). Yun-ho himself, one could say, realizes his own dwarfed existence. The “dwarf”
referred to in the title of the novella thus points to not just the one character of the dwarf, but the
way in which all the characters-- rich and poor alike-- have become dwarfed by the multiscalar
effects of the capitalist regime. The negative consequences affect all, and those effects are
personal, social, global, and geological.

BECOMING THE ALIEN
The perspective of planetarity is very much a defamiliarization of familiar space, which
makes our home suddenly “uncanny.”
63
There is something of an incomprehensible excess to
viewing the world in a planetary mode—it is impossible to actually experience ourselves as a
species or as geological agents. Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that the idea of species itself is “the
name of a placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the
moment of the danger…but we can never understand this universal...We may provisionally call
it a ‘negative universal history’.”
64
Thinking of ourselves as agents within a negative universal

63
Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 74.

64
Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 222.

204

history is a way of thinking beyond what is given. This mode of thinking in the beyond can open
the way to a responsibility that is itself ex-orbitant, “a justice, hospitality, or generosity that is
itself excessive.”
65
For example, Gayatri Spivak suggests that an attunement to the globality of
the ecological crisis should compel us to dream of an “undivided world” in which issues of
justice and responsibility become a global effort.
66
Nigel Clark proposes that a feeling for the
openness of individual and collective lives to the unpredictability of the cosmos might bring “a
new impetus to [a] sense of obligation without reserve.”
67
The irony of ex-orbitant belonging is
that its answer to the dehumanizations of capital that Cho Sehŭi depicts so vividly is not a
simplistic restoration of humanism. Instead, it urges us to consider the dehumanizations of
capital refracted through deep ecology and deep time, leading us to a posthuman state of
indetermination in which we can fluidly change perspectives and explore ourselves through
various emergent ontologies. For too long over the course of human history, the noxious
tendency has been to create the alien vis-à-vis the machinations of power and capital. Cho’s text
shows instead that it is valuable to become the alien—like the nameless teacher at the end of the
novella, like Chisop, and like the dwarf himself—embodying ex-orbitant alterity and belonging.
The perspective of ex-orbitant belonging urges us to embody identities other than our own
predetermined inheritances and to comprehend the world from multiple, heterogenous
viewpoints, both human and non-human. This counterintuitive move should not remove our
sense of justice or responsibility; it should make it excessive, pushing us to create a different

65
Clark, “Ex-orbitant Globality,” 181.

66
Ibid., 180.

67
Ibid., 182.

205

inheritance for a future that is founded on an ex-orbitant sense of belonging—or what the dwarf
called love.

206

CONCLUSION

THE INFINITY MIRROR EFFECT OF ANXIETY AND KINSHIP

As we’ve seen in Cho Sehŭi’s The Dwarf, the Möbius Strip and Klein bottle are figures
that fundamentally upturn notions of all the divisions, borders, and processes of othering that
people tend to take for granted as “normal,” timeless and immutable. These topological
mindbenders incite one to consider “queer things that common sense would not lead you to think
of”
1
. The challenging of “common sense,” and the challenge to think beyond what is given, are
ultimately confrontations against the hegemonic socializations that give power to certain groups
over others. In The Dwarf, the “ex-orbitant” perspective that the Möbius strip and the Klein
bottle demand is linked to a utopian re-imagining of what the world can be.
Interestingly, the Möbius Strip and the Klein bottle are topographical models of the
unconscious in Jacques Lacan’s Seminar X, which he delivered in 1962-1963
2
. While Cho’s use
of these shapes in his text performs a social critique, I see Lacan’s use of them as complementary
in analyzing what he considers the main affect that subtends the social: anxiety.
Whereas fear has an object (a fear of spiders, a fear of heights, a fear of nightmares, etc.),
anxiety feels something like fear without being able to name the object. “I feel anxious about the
future,” one might say, but while that person can say in general what he or she is anxious about,

1
Cho, The Dwarf, 176.

2
It was not published in French until 2004, and the English translation by A.R. Price was released in
2014 by Polity Press. Jacques Lacan, Anxiety, English ed. (Cambridge, UK; Malde, MA: Polity,
2014).

207

they cannot say with certainty what it is. Heidegger took this phenomenon to mean that “anxiety
has no object.”
3
Lacan disagrees with this formulation however, and in Seminar X repeatedly
asserts that “anxiety is not without an object.” His use of the double negative in this formulation
is intentional:
This relation of not without having doesn’t mean that one knows which object is
involved. When I say, He’s not without resources, He’s not without cunning, it means, at
least for me, that his resources are obscure, his cunning isn’t run of the mill.
4

For Lacan, the object of anxiety cannot be named because anxiety emerges in relation to a
context that is beyond the individual.
Gilbert Diatkine
5
observes that this seminar marks a turning point in the development of
Lacan’s thought. First, Lacan abandons his previous efforts to equate his ideas with Freud’s and
sets in relief his own unique contributions to psychoanalytic theory. Secondly, he implicitly
abandons his earlier stance that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” The Möbius strip
and Klein bottle illustrate both of these shifts in Lacanian theory. They represent one of his main
divergences from Freud in rejecting the idea of interiority, or the inner world. In Freud’s schema
of the psychic apparatus, the ego, the id, and the superego constitute an interior world that
confronts the external world. For this inside/outside model Lacan substitutes topographical
structures without interior or exterior, such as the Möbius strip, the Klein bottle, and the cross-

3
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper
Collins, 1962).

4
Lacan, Anxiety, 89

5
Gilbert Diatkine, “A review of Lacan’s seminar on anxiety,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis
87 (2006):1049-58.

208

cap. Lacan’s understanding of the psyche is that it is always already collectively constituted and
marked by the social, which precedes its existence.
These figures also reject the idea of psychoanalysis as being the same as linguistic
analysis, which is captured in the dictum Lacan had become famous for: “the unconscious is
structured like a language.” He moves away from this position in Seminar X, choosing instead
the metaphor of the stage as an anchor for analysis. Lacan evoked the idea of the theater stage in
order to capture how the illusion of an inside/outside distinction maintains itself until the Real
disrupts the performance, revealing an extra-discursive outside that is beyond.
The suspended, unrepresentable object of anxiety is what is beyond the stage—“the
Real”, that which is outside language and resists symbolization absolutely. The Real is the
ruptures in representation, and anxiety correlates with these ruptures. Anxiety is the experience
induced by “the desire of the Other”, the Other being the laws, structures, and signifiers that
precede us and that we are born into. In order to clarify the idea of “the desire of the Other,”
Lacan uses Pavlov’s experiments as an analogy: the presence of the human trainer, handling any
number of things around the dog, had to be accounted for at all times: “the very fact that there is
an array of apparatuses means that the dimension of the Other is present.”
6
If the object organism
of the experiment were an insect instead of a dog, most would say that the insect would not know
anything about this dimension of the Other. Lacan points out that this is the comparable scale of
our subjectivity in relation to the Other: “there is also a whole field in which we know nothing of
what constitutes us.”
7
And if it is on the stage of the Other where the subject has to be

6
Lacan, Anxiety, 58-59.

7
Ibid., 59.

209

constituted, taking up one’s place as a participant in the world, then it is only ever in a structure
that, “as truthful as it sets itself out to be, has the structure of fiction”
8
.
The parameters of the stage help us understand the fundamental distinction between the
world and “the locus where things…come to be voiced”
9
. All the things of the world come to be
staged in keeping with the laws of the signifier, the constructed nature of which causes
contradictions from the outset; these are laws that “we could never fancy in any way to be
consistent with the laws of the world at the outset”
10
. Of particular resonance with the anxiety of
interrupted kinship in the transpacific Korean cultural context is the key role of history in
Lacan’s discussion. The world climbs onto the stage, and that stage, Lacan says, is the dimension
of history:
Dates themselves all of a sudden take on a different value within the dimension of
history, whether they are called le Deux-Decembre or le 18 Brumaire. It’s not the same
calendar as the one you tear a page off each day. The proof of this is that these dates have
a different meaning for you. They can be mentioned again on any other day of the
calendar to signify that they impart it their stamp, their characteristic, their style of
difference or recurrence.
11

Korea’s history is defined by such date stamps, which South Koreans have developed a
shorthand for by using numbers: “3-“1 (sam-il) for March 1, 1919, when Koreans displayed
massive public resistance against the ruling of Korea by Japan. “6-2-5” (yook-i-o) for June 25,

8
Ibid., 116.

9
Ibid., 33.

10
Ibid., 33.

11
Ibid., 34.

210

1950, when the Korean War began; and “4-1-9” (sa-il-ku) for April 19, 1960, when a popular
uprising led by student and labor activists led to the resignation of President Rhee Syngman. In
the United States, “4-2-9” (sa-i-ku) has come to represent April 29, 1992 among Korean-
Americans to signify the devastation of Los Angeles’ Koreatown during the social upheaval
following the Rodney King verdict.
12
These dates, on the world stage and within the dimension
of history, signify the traumas of Korean history that have shaped a transpacific ethnic identity.
Kim Dong-Choon observes that calling the Korean War “6-2-5” embodies South Korea’s official
memory of the war and the canonized interpretation of the war’s political meaning. It is
reproduced through the version of history that is taught to South Korean and Korean-American
citizens. Kim asserts that “the term is meant to convey that the North launched a “surprise”
attack on the “peaceful” South on June 25, 1950, and that all the misery and suffering caused by
the war must therefore be attributed to North Korean communists who started the war”
13
. “6-2-5”
is meant to repeatedly remind South Korean of who was responsible for making them suffer such
a national tragedy. This is why, Kim observes, South Korea commemorates the day the war
broke out, but not the day the ceasefire was declared. It is why Seoul has an elaborate War
Memorial complex, but not a peace memorial
14
.
History as having the character of staging, and the world as being voiced through a stage
performance, are ideas that are isomorphic with social constructivism. Contradictions surface
from social constructs, and those contradictions allow for the emergence in the world for that

12
Elaine Kim, “Home Is Where the Han Is.” Social Justice, Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (51-52), Rethinking Race
(Spring-Summer 1993), 2.

13
Kim Dong Choon. The Unending Korean War: A Social History. Larkspur, California: Tamal Vista
Publications, 2009), 4.

14
Ibid.

211

which may not be said.
15
In other parts of Seminar X, Lacan makes analogies to anxiety being
like windows and mirrors; taken up along with the metaphor of the stage, the most salient aspect
of anxiety is that it is framed.
16
Anxiety attends this appearance of what was already there, just
outside the frame. Lacan insists that “everything that throughout the course of history we have
called the world has left behind superimposed residues that accumulate without the faintest care
for contradiction”
17
History, in other words, is the set of conditions we are born into, that we
have inherited from the past. We do not choose or create those conditions. They were there
before our entrance into the world. They are “the accumulated remains of what came from the
stage”
18
. The relentless, serial nature of historical traumas in Korea have accumulated remains
for more than a century; the accumulation of a multitude of effects of historical trauma set up the
stage of the Other that constitute the worlds of those who identify as ethnic Koreans. In this
context, anxiety marks lived experience as the intersubjective, traumatic effects of a history that
precede the individual. The stage of the Other constantly puts who I am in question. According to
Lacan, because this is what the Other targets “in a temporal relation of antecedence,” there is
nothing one can do “to break this hold, except to engage with it.”
19
Lacan seems to be describing
the psychical effects of antecedent hegemonic social constructs that delineate our senses of
identification—of “who I am”—that we are born into. Antecedence is the temporal dimension of

15
Lacan, Anxiety, 75.

16
Ibid., 72-75.

17
Ibid., 34.
.
18
Ibid., 34.

19
Ibid., 153.

212

anxiety, a dimension that cannot escape history. Anxiety arises when history itself threatens the
loss of one’s very sense of being and all the fictions that constitute subjectivization.
The embodied dimensions of subjectivization also contribute to anxiety. We exist as
bodies primordially, even before we recognize ourselves as subjects. The recognition of our
form, Lacan contends, is always limited at its core because of this. There is what he refers to as
a remainder—an “un-imaged residue of the body”— that feels like a lack but “in a way that, not
being specular, cannot thereafter be marked out”
20
. This failing of certain markings is an
important dimension of anxiety, and one that, in my view, subsumes a phenomenological matrix
involving race, nation, and kinship. Kinship is elusive in that one is expected to look like one’s
relatives, and one is supposed to look like others in one’s racial category in the coding of race. In
Korea, where members of the imagined transpacific community of nation are codified as one
race and one family, the interpellation by kinship is further intensified. This is a physical,
biologistic idea of kinship in which a host of meanings and desires are mapped onto similar
looking bodies that have been rendered similar via a matrix of racial and ethnic and biological
technologies.
But anxiety is framed by these embodied constructs. On anxiety being like a mirror,
Lacan writes:
A mirror doesn’t stretch out to infinity. It has limits…This mirror allows the subject to
see something from a point located somewhere within the space of the mirror, a point that
isn’t directly perceivable for him… [T]he first thing to be put forward concerning the
structure of anxiety—and which you always neglect in the observations because you’re

20
Ibid., 60.

213

fascinated by the content of the mirror and you forget its limits—is that anxiety is
framed.”
21

It is interesting that Lacan uses the mirror as an analogy for anxiety here, as he was already
famous by this point for another analysis involving the instrumental role of the mirror in
developing the ego. In a 1949 lecture, Lacan described what he called “the mirror stage,” a stage
in which the infant sees in its mirrored reflection an image of wholeness that does not correspond
with the bodily fragmentation it experiences. This dynamic of misidentification extends to a kind
of fusional identification with the mother, giving rise to the mental representation of an ideal “I”
that remains the part of the subject that is always pursuing wholeness and unity, trying to
overcome its original crisis of division.
22
I am interested here in how Lacan employs the mirror
both to analyze subjectivization in relation to kinship vis-à-vis the mother and to explain the
framed nature of anxiety. I do not think that this is an accident; that moment in the Imaginary,
when the infant beholds itself in the mirror, is itself a profound moment of anxiety. The anxiety
is framed by the presence of the mother, who, in Lacan’s psychoanalytic paradigm, represents
the child’s initiation into the order of the Other. The mother represents the biggest Other, the
Thing, the unattainable object of desire that will haunt the child into adulthood. And just as what
is outside the frame of the mirror is beyond the grasp of the infant, so is the enigmatic desire of
the Other. I do not read Lacan’s mirror stage literally; what interests me with both Lacan’s
mirror analyses are their capacities as analogies for the way in which anxiety and kinship are
intertwined in their framings and as mutually constituted phenomenologies. Lacan’s mirror
analogies teach us that anxiety attends the ruptures of any representations, not the least of which

21
Ibid., 72-73.

22
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,”
in Écrits, transl. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006).

214

are representations of kinship. The anxiety of kinship is, in a sense, always already an anxiety of
interrupted kinship. As discussed in the introduction, notions of kinship are constructs that reveal
more about society and culture than about biology. It is self-divided in the first instance because
it is not universal or whole in itself.
I will close with an image. Position two mirrors—the mirror of anxiety and the mirror of
kinship—so that they face each other in exact parallel. Step in between them and what happens?
Whichever mirror you are facing immediately reflects you, the subject. Behind you extends an
illusion of infinity that dominates on the horizontal plane. The reflection gives the illusion of the
surrounding space as stretching infinitely back in an endless tunnel, with your figure repeating
itself ad infinitum like a long queue of people. This infinity can be both exhilarating and
terrifying. It is a picture of immortality in a contained universe in one moment; in the next
moment it is a picture of limitless fragmentation in disintegrating space. You become plural,
your repeated bodies facing both forward and backward, alternating as they go down the chain.
You look ahead, and you look back. It is a temporality as much as it is an orientation. They look
ahead; they look back. You are they; they are you. This play of mirrors is, in an image, the
anxiety of interrupted kinship.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR THE PROJECT
This dissertation demonstrates how aspects of an anxiety of interrupted kinship have
radiated out from the historical events of modern Korea, evolving as they travel across time and
space. While the chapters here discuss a range of tropes, discourses, and narratives as the cultural
effects of historical traumas, from the Japanese colonial period to the contemporary period, there
is still much more work to be done to fill in the picture. In the book manuscript form of this

215

project, therefore, I will be adding a couple more chapters. One chapter will concern how
Korean-American adoption narratives express the anxiety of interrupted kinship. This research
will examine a variety of cultural texts such as children’s adoption literature, Chang Rae Lee’s, A
Gesture Life, Patricia Park’s Re Jane, Deann Borshay Liem’s First Person Plural, and Samantha
Futerman’s Twinsters. A final chapter will analyze the transnational activism that seek redress
for Korean comfort women, and the ways in which the attendant discourses of these movements
are produced via models of family that focus on how these comfort women were daughters,
mothers, and now grandmothers. Some of the texts this chapter will consider are Yun Jeongmo’s
novel Your Mother was a Comfort Woman (Emi Irumun Josenppi yeotta), Byun Youngjoo late
1990s documentary trilogy Grandmother, or Halmoni, and Nora Okja Keller’s novel The
Comfort Woman. This chapter will also examine the discourse surrounding the transnational
controversy of the comfort women memorial that was installed in Glendale, California in 2013.

216

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kim, Sandra So Hee Chi (author)

Core Title The anxiety of interrupted kinship: Transpacific cultures of Korean historical trauma

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 07/12/2019

Defense Date 05/08/2017

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

Tag diaspora,historical trauma,Korean literature and culture,Korean-American literature and culture,OAI-PMH Harvest,postcolonial studies,postmemory,transpacific studies

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Choe, Youngmin (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member)

Creator Email sandrask@usc.edu,sandy.chi@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-397712

Unique identifier UC11264481

Identifier etd-KimSandraS-5500.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-397712 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KimSandraS-5500.pdf

Dmrecord 397712

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Kim, Sandra So Hee Chi

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