Ghosts of Camptown

Grace Kyungwon Hong

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., Volume 39, Number 3, Fall 2014,
pp. 49-67 (Article)

Published by Oxford University Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/550253

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Ghosts of Camptown
Grace Kyungwon Hong
University of California, Los Angeles

Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996), a memoir of his child-
hood in the South Korean military camptown of Pupyong, opens appropriately
enough with ghosts.1 In particular, the narrative begins with the ghost of a
Japanese military officer who is rumored to have inhabited, in an earlier era of
Japanese colonialism in Korea, the house into which young Insu, the first-person
narrator, and his family move: “Before we moved in, we had heard rumors about
why the rent was so low. Everyone said that the house had been built during the
Japanese Annexation by a Colonel who tortured and murdered tens of thousands
of Koreans for his amusement” (5). The rumors of this ghost become real when
Insu sees and even speaks to the ghost of the Japanese Colonel. But rather than
being cruel and vindictive, this ghost seems to Insu to be sad and lonely. The
ghost—as well as the many other ghosts who inhabit the memoir—represents
the unburied lingering effect of the everyday and pervasive experience of exacer-
bated death, or in other words, death that is not natural but is socially engineered,
as a consequence of colonial and neocolonial violence. Memories of My Ghost
Brother departs from the conventions of memoir in a variety of ways, not the least
significant of which is the centrality of the magical, mythic events and portents
that Fenkl matter-of-factly narrates as constituting his earliest experiences.
In this strange and haunting narrative, the sex workers and their mixed-race
children who inhabit Pupyong share their space with ghosts, goblins, and other
mythical beings.2 Unlike the Latin American texts seen as most representative of
the genre of magical realism, Fenkl’s text does not establish a realistic tone that is
interrupted by magical or mythical events.3 Instead, the tone of the text is magical
or mythical, and the incongruity emerges when the commonplace brutalities that
characterize militarized sex work are represented in this otherworldly manner. I
engage this novel’s deployment of form—focusing in particular on the strategy of
embedding fantastical stories within the narrative structure and the ways in
which the mystical or magical tone of these stories pervades the entire narra-
tive—establishing a frame seemingly incongruous with the memoir’s setting
within the routine cruelties of a town that exists to provide paid sex and other
commodities to the US military. If a classically realist tone and linear narrative
arc are the formal expressions of nationalist culture, the autobiographical novel’s

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MELUS  Volume 39  Number 3  (Fall 2014) 49
 Hong

departure from these formal strategies, I argue, is necessary to convey the com-
plex juridical status of the camptown. Through a curious excess of state sover-
eignty, because they are simultaneously under both US and South Korean
sovereignty, the camptown and its residents are subject to abandonment by both
nation-states, producing a heightened vulnerability to death. This state of exis-
tence between life and death means the exacerbation of death within the ranks
of the residents, creating the ghosts that inhabit the narrator’s world, but also ren-
ders the inhabitants of the camptown as themselves ghostly. These inhabitants
and their contradictory juridical states are exemplary, rather than anomalous,
within contemporary geopolitics. As such, I read the camptown as a precursor
to the myriad forms of complex sovereignty that many have argued are hallmarks
of contemporary neoliberalism.
In this essay, I argue that the formal aspects of the work are an index of the
ambivalent condition of the camptown itself. While on South Korean soil and
ostensibly under South Korean sovereignty, the camptown is, in effect, governed
by the US military and its policies. Yet the camptown cannot simply be read as a
metaphor for South Korea’s neocolonized status vis-à-vis the United States, inso-
far as South Korea’s status has enabled its emergence as a subempire in the
Pacific region. Scholars have demonstrated that South Korea’s subimperialist
influence over the Pacific region is due in significant part to its role in the
Vietnam War, which provides the backdrop to Memories of My Ghost Brother.4
South Korea was an ally of the United States in the conflict, providing troops
and serving as a staging area. If South Korea has managed to transition into a
postindustrial subempire, it has done so by aiding and abetting the US’s military
ventures in Southeast Asia. This triangulated set of state relationships was, of
course, spurred by South Korea’s vulnerable position, locked in perpetual poten-
tial war because of the peninsular partition of North and South Korea. In this con-
text, any binaristic schema of colonizer and colonized, perpetrator and victim,
complicit and blameless, is rendered impossible.5 Accordingly, such complex
relationships to sovereignty demand a narrative form organized around a com-
plex and divided subject unlike the possessive individual at the center of tradi-
tional autobiographies,6 a divided subject formed around an ethics in which
no one is blameless and everyone is complicit.
If the formal strategy of a divided subject with a complex ethics is a register of
the layered juridical claims that are the hallmark of neocolonial state formation,
the magical, mythical tone indexes the backdrop of vulnerability and precarious-
ness that such an excess of sovereignty allows and even makes worse. No one
remains blameless in this context, but this excess of sovereignty has uneven
effects, rendering some more vulnerable to death and devaluation than others.
The ghosts in this work serve as figures for the terror and vulnerability attendant
on the condition of being under an excess of sovereignty, the juridical condition in
which the presence of multiple state jurisdictions (here, the United States and
50
 Ghosts of Camptown

Korea) ironically renders lives entirely unprotected from premature death of all
types. As Jodi Kim observes, “Pupyong’s biopolitics are such that death is an
everyday occurrence” (166). The camptown is a kind of ghost space, both here
and there and neither. And it does indeed produce ghosts of all kinds. This ghostly
state of in-betweenness, characterized by both life and death but belonging fully
to neither, represents the complex juridical condition of these camptown resi-
dents.
This text is a litany of deaths that mark young Insu’s childhood and the ghosts
that such deaths produce. In the camptown, life and death are not discrete con-
ditions; death saturates life, and life happens in mundane and prosaic ways in the
midst of death. The text recounts not only the deaths that are overtly determined
by the US military presence but also seemingly random premature deaths from
cancer, automobile accidents, and suicide. As a result, the text represents death
as common, pervasive, and ordinary. South Korea’s condition as a postcolony,
then, is certainly predicated on the valuelessness of certain lives, yet in this novel,
the condition makes itself felt as a heightened sensitivity to death, a subjectivity
and epistemology felt as deathliness. The novel’s main preoccupation is exactly
and literally the trade-off between one life and another. Thus, everyone is a sort
of ghost, existing simultaneously in death and life.
The scholarship on this text ably addresses how Fenkl’s memoir resurrects the
repressed histories of US neocolonialism and Cold War geopolitics. Kim’s rigor-
ous and elegant study of Asian American literature as a critical record of the ways
in which the United States’ contemporary neocolonial hegemony depends on a
particular, selective narrative of its ostensible political, ideological, and economic
victory in the Cold War contest situates Fenkl’s text as “reveal[ing] the unsettling
intersection between Cold War epistemology and Korean America’s own admit-
ted knowledge about the conditions of possibility for its post-1945 formation.”
Kim further observes that the camptown prostitutes and their mixed-race chil-
dren, especially those who, like Fenkl’s family, migrate to the United States,
are indelible reminders of the United States’ “protracted military presence in
South Korea” (161). As such, they are ghosts themselves, haunting and troubling
the narratives of US global hegemony as bringing peace, prosperity, and security
to the world in general and to South Korea in particular.
In a related argument, Grace M. Cho’s moving and poetic study centers on one
ghostly figure in particular: the yanggongju, the derogatory term both for a sex
worker for the US military and for a Korean woman who has married an
American GI (3). Cho focuses on the yanggongju as the simultaneously emblem-
atic and erased figure of twentieth-century Korea’s history under colonialism,
neocolonialism, and US militarism. The yanggongju is the residue of the trauma
of Korea’s colonial and neocolonial history, a trauma that must be erased and dis-
avowed (5). Cho examines the conditions and effects of the violent erasure and
loss of memory, history, and knowledge, and likewise stages the yanggongju as
51
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a ghostly figure that recalls these violently repressed histories (7). In other words,
erasures that occlude our ability to apprehend the yanggongju happen in
language, in the structure of narrative. Although there is no narrative structure
available, these memories do return, but in different, fractured, and fleeting ways.
In order to read or apprehend these memories, we require a different way of
seeing, a different way of reading—a way, Cho suggests, that exists in madness,
in hallucinations. If power legitimates itself through rationality and empiricism
and relegates the histories of the vanquished to irrationality, then it is in madness
that we may apprehend the residues or traces of these erased histories (162). As
Cho observes, however, madness as memory does not allow one to get at some
real, preexisting truth, but exists more as the residue of loss (164).
In conversation with the work of Kim and Cho, this essay examines how the
formal characteristics of Fenkl’s text are analogous to the “madness” that Cho
traces, an alternative epistemology that registers the liminal space of the camp-
town. That is, the novel’s embedding of stories of magic and myth, and the dis-
persal of this mystical tone throughout the narrative, are its way of apprehending
that which has become violently erased by Cold War deployments of the ideology
of “freedom” and “democracy” that claims to preserve life but creates conditions
such as overlapping and excessive sovereignties that allow for mass death.
That these magical or mythical effects so often take the shape of ghosts in
Fenkl’s text resonates eerily with Avery F. Gordon’s theorization of ghostliness
as the residue in the present of the “unrememberable past” (4). In theorizing
ghostliness, Gordon references Patricia J. Williams’s account of her attempts to
find evidence of her enslaved great-great-grandmother in the shadow of her
great-great-grandfather, her owner. Attempting to track an illiterate enslaved
woman—the object of a contract that makes her the property of her mate—all
Williams can even look for is “the shape described by her absence” (qtd. in
Gordon 6). In Memories of My Ghost Brother, we can understand the various
deployments of form—the magical or mythical tone and the development of a
conflicted and contradictory subject with a correspondingly complex ethical
formation—as ways in which the narrative traces “the shape described by
[the] absence” of those relegated to death, devaluation, and precariousness by
the regimes of US militarism and imperialism.
In other words, while realism is based on a purported correspondence
between social reality and literary form, reading realist texts for their ability to
represent fully and adequately the conditions of social life has led scholars to
conclude that these novels fail miserably. In this case, as Amy Kaplan notes, “the
realistic enterprise must be redefined to ask what realistic novels do accomplish
and how they work as a cultural practice” (8). Extending this question to a novel
such as this, which juxtaposes realistic description with deliberate breaks from
the conventions of realism, I ask what work such a formal strategy performs. I
argue that such deployments of form express a condition in which biopolitical
52
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management and protection of life mandate death and devaluation. That is, the
mythical tone of Fenkl’s text articulates an existential condition in which the pres-
ervation of life for some legislates death as an ever-present, everyday reality for
others. In this context, the mobilization of a divided subject and an alternative
explication of ethics that defines this subject advance a new set of political pos-
sibilities.

South Korea’s Exceptionally Exemplary Sovereignty

We might understand the deployments of form so particular to this novel as the
aesthetic register of the complex juridical status of the camptown. Drawing on the
scholarship of Katharine H. S. Moon, later in this essay I read the “Camptown
Clean-Up Campaign” in the 1970s by the South Korean government in concert
with the United States Armed Forces as a moment in which the overlapping
sovereign power of the two nations enabled a massive deployment of modes of
biopolitical regulation that ironically ended up not preserving camptown sex
workers’ lives but actually rendering them more vulnerable to death and deval-
uation. Yet the camptown is not an exception to the more general status of
South Korea but is perhaps its most exemplary case. The partition of Korea into
a Communist North and a US-controlled South after World War II, a tense Cold
War stand-off left unresolved after a bloody war (1950-53), created a situation,
still ongoing, of perpetually simmering hostilities: while an armistice was signed
by North Korea and the United States in 1953, no peace treaty between North and
South Korea has ever been signed, meaning that the threat of war has been a con-
stant backdrop to modern Korean geopolitics.
South Korea, as a neo-colony of the United States, eventually a subempire,
inhabits a complex juridical sovereignty. A nation heavily dependent on the
United States for economic, military, and diplomatic support, South Korea’s
own sovereignty is limited and contingent. At the same time, this neocolonial
relationship to the United States enabled South Korea’s so-called economic
miracle in the post-Korean War era. South Korea transformed itself from a
war-devastated country into the world’s fifteenth-largest economy (based on
GDP) and witnessed a transition from a mainly agrarian to an industrial to the
current postindustrial society, all within the span of two generations
(“World”). For the United States, South Korea has been a key ally in the region,
as the United States has attempted to negotiate a position of strength within the
growing importance of Pacific Rim economies through a combination of milita-
rism, economic investment, and the ideological establishment and maintenance
of supposedly democratic capitalist societies. South Korea now serves as one of
the United States’ most exemplary success stories, providing untold ideological
traction as living proof of the contention that war, US military occupation, and
capitalist development are the road to security, stability, and democracy for
53
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developing nations. For example, in 2007, the administration of President George

W. Bush explicitly envisioned a future for Iraq on the “Korean model,” which
then-White House spokesman Tony Snow described as “one in which the
United States provides a security presence, but you’ve had the development of
a successful democracy in South Korea over a period of years, and, therefore,
the United States is there as a force of stability” (qtd. in Holland).
However, in order for this narrative to paint South Korea as a global “model
minority,” an ideal for other nations geopolitically strategic to the United States to
emulate, it must erase a number of inopportune facts, most glaringly the distinct
lack of security for a country perpetually at war. Even further, this narrative
effaces the forms of biopolitical regulation and necropolitical violence upon which
this so-called miracle is based.7 Domestically, hundreds of thousands of Koreans,
mainly female, during the early period of industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s
were recruited as low-wage workers for the export processing factories that pro-
pelled South Korea into an industrial economy. In these factories, young women
were subjected to brutal working conditions in which workers previously accus-
tomed to agricultural labor were forced to sit still doing repetitive tasks at
machines for upward of twenty hours a day.8 At the same time, South Korea’s
economic growth was made possible in part by its investment in Southeast
Asia, particularly Vietnam, starting from the late 1980s. Addressing South
Korea’s dispatching of over 300,000 soldiers to the Vietnam War, as well as its
material aid in providing bases and supplies for US troops, Jin-kyung
Lee observes that “South Korean submilitarism in Vietnam was a significant
factor in securing South Korea’s position as a subimperial force within the US-
dominated global capitalism in the years following the end of the Vietnam
War” (657). South Korea accomplished its economic and political ascendency
in the last three decades through a necropolitical relegation of its working class
to death and violence, by deploying young working-class men as soldiers, exploit-
ing young women in export processing factories, and using working-class women
as prostitutes for the US military. South Korean sovereignty as a nation-state can-
not be characterized only as subsumed or dominated by the United States; while
this is certainly the case, South Korea has wielded its own forms of subimperialist
power, gaining economically and politically through its position of power relative
to Vietnam.9
The collusion of the South Korean government and the US military in sustain-
ing and regulating camptowns highlights the ironies of neocolonial sovereignty.
Camptowns, inhabited by military prostitutes and other Koreans who cater spe-
cifically to US soldiers, exist near every US military base in Korea. While prosti-
tution is illegal under South Korean law and is banned by the US military, in
practice sex work is what Katharine Moon calls “the raison d’etre of the kijich’on
[camptown]” (17). While officially citizens of South Korea, these women are not
protected by their formal status, but instead are subjected to the needs of a foreign
54
 Ghosts of Camptown

state. During the 1970s, for example, when this memoir is set, the Korean gov-
ernment had an official policy of heralding military sex workers as patriots
who, in their interactions with American soldiers, were ostensibly operating as
a kind of diplomatic corps, building ties between South Korea and their much
more powerful and wealthy ally (K. Moon 103).10 As Moon documents, in the
early 1970s, when the United States decreased troop presence in response to
domestic protests over the Vietnam War, the South Korean government launched
a campaign to appease the US military and convince them to stay. Formerly
unregulated camptown sex workers were required to submit themselves to reg-
ular health check-ups, carry identification cards, and register themselves with
the South Korean police. This official governmental policy, of course, did not
reflect or mitigate the general disparagement of military sex workers within
Korean society, which ostracized these women, making it extremely difficult
for them to leave sex work. Likewise, extensive administrative regulation did
not translate into more protection from abusive clients or boyfriends. While
ostensibly South Korean citizens, the women were regulated by both the South
Korean and US states. The multiple claims on these women by the two states cre-
ated a condition in which they were ironically rendered more vulnerable and less
protected—in a way, stateless.
In describing the condition of the camptown as a form of statelessness pro-
duced by being under multiple sovereign powers, I am deploying, in another con-
text, Lisa Ho’s theory of the juridical condition of postpartition North Korean
refugees. In an analysis of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951),
Ho argues that the normative human rights assumption that all subjects are gov-
erned by only one state or juridical entity at a time disregards the complexity of
the status of North Korean refugees, who are multiply claimed by North Korean,
Chinese, and international sovereignty law. Thus international human rights
discourse ironically does not protect these refugees but renders them even more
vulnerable. When we take into consideration the complexity of juridical sover-
eignty for these camptown inhabitants, we might understand Ho’s description
of North Korean refugees as demonstrating their representative rather than
exemplary status vis-à-vis Korean (North and South) juridical status.

Juridical Status, Aesthetic Form: Myth, Magic, and a Divided Ethics

As many scholars of the novel have observed, this genre—particularly the
Bildungsroman or novel of formation or education with its defining conventions
of an atomized protagonist whose conflicts with the larger social world provide
the narrative crisis to be resolved—is associated with emergence of the
nation-state.11 The novel form enables what Benedict Anderson describes as
the “horizontal comradeship” (7) that is the basis of nationalism by producing
55
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an ethos of identification with the protagonist. While the traditional novel form
works to resolve the protagonist’s contradiction between self and society over the
course of the narrative, Memories of My Ghost Brother is organized around the
impossibility of resolution. This novel undermines horizontal identification by
narrating ghosts as residues of the uneven violence levied by contradictory and
complex juridical statuses. The mixed-race author whose identifications are
ambivalent and interrupted stands not as an anomaly but as representative of
the subject formation of Korea and of modern subjectivity itself, as the imperialist
nation-state articulates itself as inherently undermining the very modes of hori-
zontal identification upon which it depends.
This novel mobilizes magic and myth to articulate the unevenness of protec-
tion from, and identification with, a state form that renders its subjects vulnerable
to death. Memories of My Ghost Brother establishes the camptown in great detail
as necropolitical space, illustrating the extreme vulnerability of life and pervasive-
ness of death for subjects whose livelihoods and lives depend on the US military.
The memoir is set in the 1970s in Pupyong, a town adjacent to the Army Service
Command military base, and is written in first-person from the perspective
(often naı̈ve) of the protagonist, Insu, as he progresses from early childhood to
his mid-teens. His mother, a former camptown prostitute now married
to Insu’s father, a white US military officer, literally capitalizes on her access to
the US military, supplementing their income by selling on the black market items
that she buys from the base’s PX. The entire family’s economy depends on the
military: she helps support not only Insu but the rest of their household, compris-
ing her sister, whom Insu calls “Emo” (the name for one’s maternal aunt), her
sister’s husband “Hyongbu” (the name for the spouse of a relative), and their
two children Yongsu and Haesuni. Insu’s father, a somewhat distant figure, stays
with them only on his leaves, living mostly in bachelor quarters in a different
camp, Camp Casey, and spending extended periods of time deployed in
Vietnam. While the narrative meanders through episodes common to coming-
of-age stories, including Insu’s first days at the American school, incidents of boy-
hood trouble-making, and his reckonings with various models of masculinity, the
memoir’s recounting of the brutalities of life in a camptown—the many deaths
and humiliations and the generalized condition of desperation and impoverish-
ment—precludes any uncompromised nostalgia about childhood.
The memoir is rife with ghosts of all kinds, figures that mark the difficulty of
apprehending those subjects whose grasp on life is precarious in a space where
death is prevalent and all-pervasive. Many of these deaths are directly attributable
to the violence associated with militarism and US neocolonialism, like that of
Gannan, Insu’s cousin who commits suicide when the GI who impregnated her
refuses to take responsibility, and whose beautiful, pale ghost haunts Insu.
However, many deaths seem more random: the memoir is a litany of death by
various means, from cholera to drowning to leukemia to car accidents. Rather
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than emphasize only a simple causality, the memoir conveys a generalized sense
of deathliness that pervades the camptown, with the backdrop of potential war
and neocolonial militarism:
The war was fifteen years past with Korea in an uneasy peace, and yet Pupyong
seemed to have some fatality nearly every day: the shoeshine boy who was run over
by a train as he tried to pull scrap metal off the tracks; the delivery boy crushed
between two buses when he tried to take a shortcut through the terminal; the
bar girl killed by a truck as she tried to free her high heels from a patch of fresh
tar on the main road. (138)
Gesturing to the ways in which vulnerability to death extends beyond the actual
years of war, the memoir makes visible the more subtle and pervasive structures
of violence that constitute the camptown itself. These deaths produce ghosts,
including the Japanese Colonel, Gannan, and the distraught maid who kills herself
after accidentally allowing a baby to drown in a well, but also ghosts of other
kinds: ghosts of lost children—ghost brothers—who haunt Insu throughout
his childhood. Yet the excessive sovereignty that leaves residents unprotected
and vulnerable to death ensures that every inhabitant lives ghostly lives, physically
alive but juridically and socially exposed to death.
The ghostliness of camptown life is apprehended and narrated through a
mythical tone, an antirational episteme that references Korean folk traditions.
While at first glance it may be easy to dismiss this use of Asian folk aesthetics
as a kind of self-Orientalizing or essentializing gesture, I argue that the deploy-
ment of such aesthetics instead acts as a way to mark the violent encounter
between two incommensurate epistemes: the neocolonial episteme of US milita-
rism, marked by symmetry and symbolism, and a kind of myth that articulates
those epistemes erased and foreclosed by US militarism. US militarism, as the
book demonstrates, is not guided by a rationalist precision but instead by a set
of investments in symbolism that is entirely as effective as, or perhaps even more
effective than, Korean myths. Likewise, investments in the mythical are not evi-
dence of an essentialist Korean culture that transcends history but instead medi-
ate histories of Japanese colonialism, US neocolonialism, and Korean anticolonial
nationalism, with all the patriarchal and masculinist investments that such
nationalisms imply. In other words, the differences in these epistemes are not
marked by a difference between a reified West vs. East, as in Orientalist under-
standings, but rather by the divergence between two epistemic formations created
by occupying different positions within a geopolitical field that depends upon the
uneven extension of life and death across populations.
This mythical tone, therefore, is not a simple Orientalist schema of the meeting
of East and West, with the East represented as mythical and the West as rational-
ized and realist. In actuality, the text represents both the East and the West: first,
as completely imbricated in each other; and second, as entirely invested in myth.
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Neither of these mythic cultural systems stems from an essentialist idea of cul-
ture, as if American, Korean, or even German (because Insu also lives in
Germany for a time) culture is static and unchanging. Rather, the mythical is a
mediation of complex and intertwining histories. In this narrative of a boy’s com-
ing of age, myth and symbol are articulated as the basis for two competing yet
complementary models of masculinity: US militarism and so-called Korean
nationalism, represented respectively by Insu’s father Heinz and by the other
main masculine figure in Insu’s life, his uncle Hyongbu.
Much of Insu’s understanding of the world as an inherently magical place is
reinforced by his uncle Hyongbu’s stories. Hyongbu’s stories-within-a story nar-
rate a realm in which goblins, ghosts, and demons are facts of life and in which
Hyongbu and his male ancestors demonstrate great feats of strength and wisdom
as they outwit goblins and banish demons. However, lest we imagine Hyongbu’s
stories as simple retellings of Korean folk tales and Hyongbu’s belief in the mys-
tical simply as a reflection of Korean folk culture, the text makes clear the histor-
ically specific and contingent nature of Hyongbu’s deployment of such mystical
imagery. Hyongbu’s stories narrate a compensatory hypermasculinity and a cor-
responding misogyny that is an index of his status as a Korean man rendered
“surplus” by US militarism. In the context of the camptown, organized entirely
around the US military, Hyongbu is extraneous and unemployable. Hyongbu is
supported first by his wife and Insu’s mother, and later by his daughter
Haesuni, who herself becomes incorporated into the sex work economy of the
camptown as a “hostess” at the bar on the base. Hyongbu’s formation as a
Korean man is represented as contradictory. The division of the Korean peninsula
has meant hypermilitarization: US troops have been stationed in Korea, mostly
along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), continuously since 1945, and a period of
military service is mandatory for all South Korean males. Further, as
Seungsook Moon has observed, South Korean nationalist identity was deliberately
established through the valorization of a militarized masculinity by the Park
Chung Hee regime (1961-79) (47). Yet while a certain form of militarized hyper-
masculinity became the norm, the economic and political conditions created by
the presence of the US military preclude Korean men from achieving this norm.
Hyongbu’s contradictory masculinity articulates itself through his storytelling as a
kind of hypermasculine braggadocio coupled with a bitter misogyny.
This is particularly evident in two of Hyongbu’s longest and most elaborate
tales: the Fox Demon story and the ginseng hunter story. In the former,
Hyongbu’s great-great-grandfather marries a beautiful woman who, in an unsub-
tle allegory of female danger and power as represented by the menstrual cycle,
transforms into a Fox Demon during the full moon and murders the unsuspecting
villagers in their sleep (Fenkl 46-53). In the ginseng hunter story, in contrast, a
faithful wife undergoes great hardship, including gang rape by a pack of goblins,
to find a ginseng root to cure her ailing husband (222-27). In Hyongbu’s
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bifurcated schema, women are either murderous, traitorous, and dangerous or

faithful, self-sacrificing, and devoted. Hyongbu’s stories are registers of his partic-
ularly racialized masculinity as a Korean man in a camptown devoted solely to the
maintenance of the US military. While Insu finds himself identifying less with
Hyongbu than with the women he insults and mistreats, including his daughter
Haesuni, we can also read Hyongbu as the story-teller figure that Insu grows up to
become as a writer. Indeed, the mythical tone of the novel is borrowed from the
stylistic conventions of Hyongbu’s stories.
While Hyongbu’s tales are clearly inflected by his own masculine investments,
the novel does not treat these stories as mere superstition or belief. The demons
and goblins of Hyongbu’s stories—and the ghosts of the camptown—are real
and concrete. Fenkl writes, “My father’s religion wallowed in stories and pictures
of tragedy and suffering, but it could not heal what happened every day outside
the gates of the US Army post. And so I could not worship his God or the mur-
dered son—I believed in ghosts and ancestors and portentous dreams of serpents
and dragons because those were the things I could touch in my world” (141;
emphasis added). Fenkl implies that these ghosts, ancestors, and mythical crea-
tures, in contrast to the figures of Christianity, can affect, or at least register, the
realities of camptown life. As the camptown residents tell it, ghosts are real and
not a matter of belief. When a baby accidentally falls down a well and dies, a local
business owner warns Insu to be careful because its ghost is “calling people.” Mr.
Paek warns, “even if you believe in Jesus—the ghost will call you too. Korean
ghosts don’t care what you believe in” (184).
In the above passage, Fenkl analogizes his father’s religion to his own experi-
ence of ghosts, demons, and other supernatural entities, yet it becomes increas-
ingly clear that it is not Christianity that forms the core of his father’s beliefs but
something more akin to military symbolism. If the necropolitical exigencies of
camptown life can only be represented via recourse to the mythic, the novel like-
wise portrays US militarism and neocolonialism as palimpsests of earlier colonial
configurations, which the novel depicts as organized not around rationality but
around myth and symbol. The text portrays this investment in myth and
totem—the belief that a symbol has power beyond rationality—as emerging
out of the particular historical conditions of US militarism, in particular the ways
in which US neocolonialism bears the traces of earlier eras of colonial power.
Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, the exemplar of Americanism and the most rep-
resentative figure for the US military in the memoir—Insu’s father—is himself
an immigrant. While his father, Heinz, is figured as iconically American, almost
to the point of caricature (Insu observes that when not in his army uniform, his
father “liked to wear his cowboy hat and hand-made suede cowboy boots when
the weather was good, and he would often come home in his civvies—a
Wranglers jean jacket and Levi’s with the legs folded up” [214]), we learn that
Heinz and his family have been multiply displaced, first as refugees from
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Czechoslovakia and then again as immigrants to the United States. These histo-
ries of displacement determine his relationship to his son. In other words, if
Heinz represents the United States, then “American” is a historically sedimented
identity.
Indeed, his father makes sense of his half-Korean son through recourse to
British colonial tropes: his father gives him a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim
(1901) for Insu’s birthday, and because Insu does not read the book until much
later, he does not understand the myriad references to this book that his father
makes. Insu may be a naı̈ve narrator in this way, but Kim—a story of a white
orphan left to fend for himself in pre-Partition India during the “Great Game,”
a geopolitical contest between Russia and Great Britain in the late nineteenth cen-
tury over supremacy in Central Asia—has obvious parallels to the characters and
context of Memoirs of My Ghost Brother.12 Inheriting this legacy of Western colo-
nialism is not to inherit Western rationalism but rather a language of myth, sym-
bol, and allegory, where the Vietnam War is the “Great Game” and Insu is Kim. In
a passage where Fenkl describes his father’s deployment to Vietnam in the after-
math of the Tet offensive in early 1968, Fenkl resignifies Kipling’s imagery to
highlight the myth-based nature of military culture, a symbolism formed from
layers of sedimented meaning:
And because I had not read the blue book he had given me, I wouldn’t know what
he meant by “The Great Game” or “Zam-Zammah” or bulls on green fields for
another twenty years.
Black hourglass against a field of red. Seventh Division—Bayonet. An Indian
head in a feathered headdress superimposed on a white star. A field of black.
Second Infantry Division. A black horsehead silhouette, like a chess knight, above
a diagonal black slash across a shield of gold. The First Cavalry Division. In his
German accent, he called it “The First Calf.” These were the totemic symbols of
my father, his military insignia. The four cardinal points in green, which the
Germans in World War II had called “The Devil’s Cross.” Fourth Mechanized
Infantry Division. A white sword pointing upright between two yellow batwing
doors against a field of blood. The Vietnam campaign. . . . Symbols of power.
Totems of the clan that kills people whose skin is the color of mine. Indelible. (133)
While militarism might be associated with precision, regimentation, and bodily
discipline, this passage makes clear that such forms of organization are ruled
not by rationality but by superstition and symbols. In this passage, Fenkl refer-
ences a scene in Kipling’s novel when Kim, having been orphaned by his poor
white parents and raised by a Tibetan Lama, is told that “900 first-class devils
whose god was a red bull on a green field” (3) would take care of Kim in his
father’s absence. In Kim’s narrow understanding, Kipling implies, his father’s
regimental colors are “misread” as a form of religiosity or spirituality.
In Fenkl’s retelling of this incident, however, such a reading is not a mistake
but one that recognizes the deeply mythical investments of military culture that,
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in asking its soldiers to live in such close proximity to death, must provide tran-
scendent images and totems beyond what the living require. Jin-kyung Lee notes
that the soldier “[occupies] an inherently paradoxical and contradictory position
as both the agent of the state’s necropolitical power and its potential victim”
(656). While Lee is referring specifically to Korean soldiers, she provides an anal-
ysis that can be more systematically applied to illuminate the foundational
paradox of military participation. And indeed, even though Insu’s father is an
officer, and thus not subject to the same vulnerability to death as rank-and-file
foot soldiers, the irony of his position becomes clear when he is diagnosed with
cancer, most likely a result of exposure to Agent Orange.
In instructing us to reconsider whether nationalism can be understood as
entirely rational, the text resonates with Anderson’s contention that nationalism
taps into a structure of feeling more akin to the religious than to the political (11).
Anderson observes that nationalism is the secular manifestation of religion’s
ability to impart meaning and continuity to human mortality. If this is the case,
then nationalism does so through structures of feeling mobilized by idioms and
imagery that are in excess of rationality. Militarism, arguably the epitome of
nationalist sentiment and the form of nationalist sentiment most immediately
inspired by physical death and potential mortality, is particularly bound to such
idioms and imagery. The passage above highlights the “totemic symbols” of
Fenkl’s father, but in so doing, it highlights the purely emblematic nature of these
images, which at one point may have represented something but now functions
simply as icons that are “symbols of power”: a horse head symbol for a cavalry
that no longer rides horses. Fenkl’s father’s accented mispronunciation “First
Calf,” like Kim’s misunderstanding, accidentally conveys a truth; the worshipful
nature of the soldiers’ relationship to these images recalls the Golden Calf and
biblical sacrifice. The irony of Fenkl’s German father wearing a symbol once worn
by troops fighting against Germans—the “four cardinal points in green, which
the Germans in World War II had called ‘The Devil’s Cross’”—highlights both
the long history of warfare that accrues around these symbols and the quickly
shifting national alliances of the Cold War era.
US military culture, therefore, is represented in this text not as rational or sec-
ular, but as steeped in superstition and myth as Hyongbu’s tales. When Insu visits
his father at Camp Casey, just a few miles from the DMZ, his father gives him a
tour of the base, and Insu sees “an eerie concrete monument” off in the distance
(252). His father explains that the concrete is wired to explode, so that the debris
can fall into the road and keep enemy tanks from driving through to the camp and
on to Seoul. Despite its seemingly practical military use, Insu is reminded of other
kinds of structures: “It reminded me of the ancient dolmens I had seen on
Kanhwado Island, the place where they said Tan’gun, the mythic father of
Korea, had descended from heaven” (252). The text lays bare that the ways in
which these structures function as totemic bulwarks against the fear of enemy
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attack are actually more important than their utility as practical measures.
Indeed, Insu contextualizes this concrete structure among other like structures,
which have served similar purposes throughout time and across space: “mythic
places I had read about—Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the ruins of Machú Pichú”
(252). The novel undermines any Orientalist binary that might posit an essential-
izing definition of Korean culture as mythic and US society as rationalized, and
indeed suggests a correspondence between the superstitions and symbols that
camptown residents and soldiers alike deploy to articulate their proximity to
death. The novel thus presents all of these populations as ghostly: physically alive,
but ruled by death.
At the same time, Fenkl is careful to remind us of the deep imbalances of
necropolitical power; his father’s totems are representative of his membership
in a “clan that kills people whose skin is the color of mine.” Yet even this process,
the designation of enemy and ally, aggressor and victim, is complicated. In this
context, the narrator’s divided condition, characterized by his split and inconsis-
tent identifications, is not anomalous but representative. Here we see the second
formal aspect of this novel: the production of a narrative subject based on con-
tradiction. In the midst of these so-called hot wars—Korea and Vietnam—in the
Cold War, Insu’s alliances are divided in ways that render blame and causality
difficult to attribute. Insu certainly identifies with the Vietnamese—a “people
whose skin is the color of mine”—and constantly stages his alienation and dis-
tance from his father and the whiteness that he represents. On his tour of Camp
Casey, Insu and his father are driven by a young private, Jones. Jones and Heinz
start singing a song associated with their battalion, which leads Insu to muse on
their deep and uncomplicated identification: “They must have sung this together
a thousand times, I thought. They must work together, eat together, sleep in the
same barracks, worry the same worries and fight the same fights to have their
voices merged together like this.” In contrast to this camaraderie, Insu figures
himself as an outsider: “I could not imagine my voice joining with my father’s
the way Jonesy’s did. I could not imagine how I would ever understand their
secret language of knowing glances and inside jokes.” While Fenkl begins by asso-
ciating this schema of conviviality and exclusion with masculine bonding, he
quickly highlights its racialized dimension: Insu observes that this camaraderie
“was something only yellow-haired soldiers could do. I would forever be tainted
by a Koreanness that would make the words ‘gook’ or ‘dink’ sound strange com-
ing from my lips” (253).
Insu disidentifies with whiteness, while deeply feeling his “Koreanness”—or
perhaps more accurately, given his identification with the Vietnamese (“people
whose skin is the color of mine”), his Asianness. Yet such a straightforwardly
racialized identification is ultimately impossible for a number of reasons. This
is particularly highlighted by yet another event during this trip to Camp Casey.
Insu’s father tells him a tale that he heard from a group of indigenous people
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of Vietnam whom he calls the Montagnards,13 in which men trick monkeys out of
their land and convince the hungry monkeys to kill their own children for food.
Fenkl writes, “Why had my father told me this? . . . What did he expect me to say,
caught here in the boundary between two Koreas, caught between North and
South and East and West with my own blood mixed from the blood of enemies?”
(257). Ostensibly meant to identify with the men who cleverly trick the monkeys,
Insu finds he cannot, and instead goes into a reverie about being torn between
two enemies. This story could be read as racially allegorical, and Insu’s biracial
identity certainly is expressed in this notion of being “mixed from the blood of
enemies,” particularly given that his reference to “blood” gestures to historical
definitions of race. Yet given that he comes from multiple histories of Cold
War partition—Korean on one side, German on the other—such narration of
warring factions cannot be represented as only racially based. The two enemies
that he explicitly references are the “two Koreas . . . North and South,” while “East
and West” could refer as much to East and West Germany as to the Eastern and
Western hemispheres. In fact, he represents all of these complicated Cold War
enmities simultaneously.
The ambivalence Insu feels about his father is heightened by the nature of the
monkey story, which, in its narration of monkeys tricked and driven to murder
their offspring, allegorizes the central drama of this memoir. What might other-
wise read as an individual reverse-Oedipal narrative becomes an allegory for the
ways in which the necropolitical conditions of the camptown organize and
arrange familial and social relations. Ghosts, in other words, are bound by differ-
ent sets of rules and obligations. At a crucial moment, the text juxtaposes two
ironically apposite narratives. In the first, a friend of Insu’s mother married to
an infertile Black GI hatches a plan to find another GI to inseminate her secretly
so that she can ensure her husband’s loyalty by bearing him a child. At the same
time, Insu finds out that an old childhood friend, James, died under suspicious
circumstances when James’s mother, widowed by her first husband, a black
GI, finds another husband, but one who is white. Hyongbu, in his own inimitable
way, bluntly lays out the brutal calculus that most likely led to James’s death:
“‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘You’re a dungwhore and you catch yourself a GI by
getting yourself pregnant with his brat, but then he goes off to Vietnam and gets
himself killed. . . . So now you want another GI husband to start things over—
maybe a white guy with a higher rank, ungh?—but who would marry a whore
with a Black kid?’” (229).
James, the boy who once swore with Insu to “be brothers from now on” (107),
is not the only ghost brother that Insu mourns, as the memoir later reveals that a
similar bartering of children occurred within Insu’s own family. Haunted by
flashes of memory of a familiar young boy that he cannot place, and a
name—Kuristo—that he does not recognize, Insu eventually finds out that his
mother had given birth to a boy by another GI before meeting Heinz.
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Unwilling to raise another man’s son, Heinz eventually succeeds in pressuring

Insu’s mother to give Kuristo—Christopher—up for adoption as a condition
of marrying her. In this way, as Kim observes, “the military brides of Pupyong
enact a biopolitics of their own in order to survive and escape the economic
and physical precariousness of their world and reach the mythic shores of
America” (167).
While the brutality of “bartering sons for their own welfare” (232) may seem
easy to condemn, Insu does not find it to be so. Insu’s position as someone with
the “blood of enemies” is representative of the complexity of everyone’s status; in
the camptown, and indeed, in South Korea as both neocolony and subempire, it is
not straightforward who is the victim and who is the perpetrator, who is an ally
and who is an enemy. This necropolitical space requires an alternative moral
economy, in which blame is not transparent and everyone is complicit:
To say I hated James’s mother would be inadequate. . . . Looking back—or even
now—it would be easier for me to feel vengeful, to wish her ill, and be done with
it; but what I felt in my heart then and what I feel now, is a great emptiness. It is a
profound sadness, a fatalism, a knowledge that the world is the way it is, and that
the path of blame is not an arrow’s flight, but the mad scatter of raindrops in a
storm. I could have blamed James’s mother, but that would have been too simple
to do her justice. In the end there is no blame, only endurance. (232)
In this passage, Fenkl conveys the ways in which the preservation of one life
always requires the extermination of another, perhaps the clearest distillation
of the definition of necropolitics. To blame James’s mother would be to disregard
and perpetuate the basic organization of power that regulates the camptown and
beyond. Refusing to separate those who are guilty from those who are innocent
does not mean excusing or dismissing the devastating consequences of death and
devaluation; quite the opposite, it means foregrounding death. Unwilling to forget
the dead, Memories of My Ghost Brother finds a way to see ghosts.
In so doing, the memoir enacts a practice that is ethical while undermining
universalized notions of ethics, and that is political while troubling the concept
of a universalized politics. In our world and our time, set into being by the very
conditions of Cold War machinations that the memoir depicts, the pursuit of jus-
tice often causes as much violence as the violations it purports to remedy, and the
calculus of blame determines who meets with violence. In such a context, seeing
ghosts is a way to reckon with violence without replicating its conditions, a way of
mourning the deaths of others by acknowledging, rather than disavowing, the
connection between those deaths and one’s life.

Notes
Thank you to Martha J. Cutter and the anonymous readers at MELUS, as well as to
Jodi Kim for astute comments to an early draft of this essay.
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1. Heinz Insu Fenkl’s text is an autobiographical novel that, while based on the facts
of his own life, features heavily stylized and fictionalized narrative devices.
2. In this essay, I use the terms sex worker and prostitute interchangeably. I recog-
nize that these terms have very different etymological histories and that sex
worker is generally considered the less objectionable, less stigmatizing term.
But as Thu-huong Nguyen-vō observes, replacing prostitute with sex worker
evades an accounting of “what goes into the construction of these meanings in
the first place” (xxv). Following Nguyen-vō, I take into consideration the various
moral and political implications of these terms in my usage.
3. For an earlier analysis of the epistemological implications of Latin American
magical realism, particularly as theorized by Alejo Carpentier, see my book
(67-105).
4. See Jin-kyung Lee and see Keunho Park. Park’s essay usefully details the eco-
nomic benefits that accrued to South Korea because of its aid to the US in the
Vietnam War and exposes South Korean complicity in wartime violence against
Vietnamese civilians.
5. We might then also understand Fenkl’s novel in the context of a broader
South Korean reckoning with its militaristic ventures. Park writes that in
light of recent revelations of South Korean complicity in war-time geno-
cidal atrocities in Vietnam, in particular after the establishment of the
Korean Truth Committee on the Vietnam War in 2000, the South Korean pub-
lic has had to confront “responsibility not only as victims, but as wrongdoers”
(372).
6. I outline the particular incarnation of possessive individualism articulated by the
American Bildungsroman in my book (3-29).
7. For a discussion of his theory of biopower, see Michel Foucault (History 133-60).
See also Foucault (Security 1-29) and Achille Mbembe, who observes that
Foucault’s notion of biopower centers on Europe, and thus does not take into
consideration the ways in which the development of biopower in Europe is pred-
icated on, but erases, the relegation of the colony to death, a condition he calls
“necropolitics.”
8. For accounts of these conditions, as well as of women workers’ labor mobiliza-
tion, see Hagen Koo (23-153).
9. For a compelling discussion of the ways in which the so-called economic miracle
of East Asia was directly attributable to the military, foreign aid, and economic
investment expenditures of the United States during and after the Vietnam War,
see Park.
10. The relative prosperity of South Korea in recent years has caused a shift in the
demographics of camptown sex workers: working-class Korean women have
been able to enter a more robust job market in more legitimate professions
or, if they do participate in sex work, can cater to Korean men, meaning that
Filipina and Russian women are trafficked into South Korea to fill their place.

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But during the 1960s and 1970s, when Fenkl’s book is set, Korean women com-
prised the entirety of camptown sex workers.
11. Of course, Benedict Anderson’s is the most famous articulation of this argument
(26-29). See also Franco Moretti (3-74).
12. For a description of these parallels, see Kun Jong Lee.
13. Montagnard is a term the French gave the Degar people, an indigenous group
who live in present-day Vietnam.

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