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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 August 2008
Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother is an Amerasian rewriting of Rudyard Kipling's Kim. Fenkl transforms the adventures of a white boy in colonial India into those of an Amerasian boy in post-/neocolonial Korea and changes the Russo-British rivalry of the nineteenth-century Great Game into the Russo-/Communist–American competition of the twentieth-century Cold War. He resurrects the native voice silenced by colonial discourse and highlights the dilemma of Asian women and their biracial children. He ultimately denounces the troubling legacy of the US military presence in Korea and critiques the centuries-old Western imperialist project in Asia.
1 Elaine H. Kim, “Korean American Literature,” in King-kok Cheung, ed., An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 156, 180 n1.
2 Elaine H. Kim, “Roots and Wings: An Overview of Korean American Literature, 1934–2003,” in Young-Key Kim-Renaud, R. Richard Grinker, and Kirk W. Larsen, eds., The Sigur Center Asia Papers #20: Korean American Literature (Washington, DC: The George Washington University, 2004), 12.
3 It is not easy to categorize Memories of My Ghost Brother, because the narrative mixes fact and fiction inextricably. Even Fenkl has called his work variously an “autobiographical novel,” a “displaced ethnographic narrative,” an “autoethnography,” and an “interstitial work.”
4 See Gregory Choy, “Sites of Function in Asian American Literature: Tropics of Place, Agents of Space,” University of Washington Ph.D. dissertation (1999), 147–56; Elaine H. Kim, “Myth, Memory, and Desire: Homeland and History in Contemporary Korean American Writing and Visual Art,” in Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Heike Raphael-Hernandez, eds., Holding Their Own: Perspectives on the Multi-ethnic Literatures of the United States (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2000), 80–83; Alexandra Chung Suh, “‘Movie in My Mind’: American Culture and Military Prostitution in Asia,” Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation, 2001), 261–63; and Park, Hyungji, “The Globalization of Asian American Studies,” Hyundae youngme sosul (Studies in Modern Fiction), 10, 1 (2003), 59–62Google Scholar.
5 Kim, “Myth, Memory, and Desire,” 81.
6 Park, 59.
7 Fenkl, Memories of My Ghost Brother (New York: Dutton, 1996), 127. Subsequent references to Memories of My Ghost Brother are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.
8 Peter Hopkirk, Quest for Kim (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002; first published 1996), 44.
9 Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Zohreh T. Sullivan (New York: Norton, 2002), 3. Subsequent references to Kim are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.
10 The Yongsan Garrison at the heart of Seoul is an extraterritorial zone exempt from the legal jurisdiction of Korea. The American military base in the capital city had been a source of anti-American sentiment among Koreans, and Korea and the USA agreed in 2004 to relocate the Yongsan base to Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometers south of Seoul, as a key part of the US reshuffle of its troops in Korea.
11 Yong-shik Choe, “Yongsan to Be Turned into Mammoth Park,” Korea Herald, 19 Jan. 2004, 3.
12 Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1992), 2.
13 Blair B. Kling, “Kim in Historical Context,” in Kim, ed. Sullivan, 302.
14 Hopkirk, The Great Game, 521.
15 Interestingly enough, the third round of the Great Game began with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR in Central Asia. In the New Great Game not only the US and Russia, but also several European and Asian countries, are competing against each other to secure oil, other raw materials, and new markets in the region. See Hopkirk, The Great Game, xv–xviii.
16 Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: The History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 223.
17 Quoted in Ninkovich, 186.
18 Richard A. Mobley, Flash Point North Korea: The Pueblo and EC-121 Crises (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2003), 15.
19 The “Blue House Raid,” conspicuously missing in the original edition of Memories of My Ghost Brother, is duly added in the 2005 edition. See Fenkl, Memories of My Ghost Brother (n.p.: Bo-Leaf, 2005), 131.
20 Mitchell B. Lerner, The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 68.
21 Mobley, 25.
22 James J. Wirtz, The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994; first published 1991), 2, 3.
23 Hopkirk, The Great Game, 2.
24 Gerald Cannon Hickey, Free in the Forest: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands 1954–1976 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 74–75.
25 When certain areas beyond India's northern frontiers were judged to be perilous for British Great Game players, hand-picked and highly trained Indians known as the “pundits” were often sent in the guise of traders or holy men on pilgrimage to gather information. Hopkirk, Quest for Kim, 56–57.
26 Hickey, 76, 78.
27 Edward W. Said, introduction to Kim (London: Penguin, 1989), 26.
28 Gerald Cannon Hickey, Sons of the Mountains: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands to 1954 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 446, 447.
29 Hickey, Free in the Forest, 157.
30 For another anticolonial rewriting of a folktale in Memories of My Ghost Brother see the story of a ginseng hunter and his wife narrated by Insu's uncle (222–27).
31 Fenkl, , “All Cultures Are Invited to the Dysfunctional Family Reunion,” Realms of Fantasy, 5, 6 (Aug. 1999), 28Google Scholar.
32 Korean Augmentation Troops to the United States Army.
33 Insu's sympathy with the Vietnamese derives also from his understanding that Koreans and Vietnamese have many similarities in terms of territorial division, political ideologies, international affiliations, religious diversity, and agricultural production, in addition to their skin color. But Insu rejects the identification of Koreans with Vietnamese and problematizes the dichotomy between Americans and Asians by shrewdly pointing out Korea's contradictory position in the Vietnam War: “The Korean army stayed on alert and continued to mobilize more men to send to Vietnam” (132).
34 Kipling, “Lispeth,” in Kim, ed. Sullivan, 249, 251.
35 Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 20.
36 Kipling, “Lispeth,” 249.
37 Le Ly Hayslip and James Hayslip, Child of War, Woman of Peace (New York: Anchor Books, 1994; first published 1993), 111–12. Though it is beyond the scope of this study, Hayslip's two autobiographical narratives – When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1990) and Child of War, Woman of Peace – might invite a comparison with Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother in terms of their portrayals of American soldiers, Asian women, and Amerasian children and the issues of war, gender, biracialism, and neocolonialism.
38 Kipling, “Without Benefit of Clergy,” in idem, Life's Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People (New York: Doubleday, 1899), 214.
39 Okazawa-Rey, Margo, “Amerasian Children of GI Town: A Legacy of U. S. Militarism in South Korea,” Asian Journal of Women's Studies, 3, 1 (1997), 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
40 Sergeant Fenkl seems to have an inferiority complex about his marriage with a Korean woman. He rages at his wife “for daring to let him be seen in public with a child presented to him by a Korean” (63). When his wife and son visit him at Camp Casey more than ten years later, he states that “having his men see his Korean wife undermine[s] his authority” (131).
41 Fenkl, “Images from a Stolen Camera: An Autoethnographic Recursion,” paper presented at the Transnational Korea: Division and Diaspora conference, Korean Studies Institute, University of Southern California, 30 Nov.–2 Dec. 1995, 7, 8.
42 See Fenkl, Memories 19, 41, 73, 107, and 145. But Insu's attitude towards his father is at best ambivalent, since he also differentiates himself from his father by portraying the American GI with animal and nonhuman images (65, 66, 72, 123, 125).
43 Park, 61.
44 From this perspective, The Imperial Agent (1987) and The Last Victory (1988) by an Indian writer, T. N. Murari, are “expected” sequels to Kim.
45 Fenkl, “Song Bird [Kê-Nīao],” EnterText, 3, 2 (2003), 27. Available at http://www.brunel.ac.uk/faculty/arts/EnterText/3_2_pdfs/fenkl.pdf (accessed 10 Nov. 2004).