It has been almost twenty years since allegations of war crimes committed by South Korean troops during the Vietnam War were first featured in South Korean media in the 1990s. The public discussion that followed decades later was formed around the issue of “truth and reconciliation,” which, reverberated around the 2018 People's Tribunal on War Crimes by South Korean Troops during the Vietnam War.

The chapter that follows is excerpted from my book Women and China's Revolutions (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), which asks: If we place women at the center of our account of China's last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? Women and China's Revolutions takes a close look at the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Building on the research of gender studies scholars since the 1970s, it establishes that China's modern history is not comprehensible without close attention to women's labor and Woman as a flexible symbol of social problems, national humiliation, and political transformation.