Actividades planteadas y ejecutadas para el Resultado 1:

The enemy becomes abstract. The relationship becomes abstract. The nation the enemy the name becomes larger than its own identity. Larger than its own measure. Larger than its own properties. Larger than its own signification.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee.

How do we live with the past? How do we tailor it so that we can go about living our daily lives?

Cristina García, “A Conversation.”

In Susan Choi’s novel The Foreign Student (1998), Korean American Chang Ahn (known in the U.S. as “Chuck”) confronts the impossibility of explaining the war in Korea to a group of white Americans in 1950s Tennessee. Chang’s slide show presentations about Korean culture and history are a condition of his scholarship as the eponymous “foreign student” at the University of the South at Sewanee. Yet speaking in churches throughout the South, Chang encounters the difficulty of translating the complexity of Cold War politics to audiences who understand Korea as a timeless, exotic place liberated from communism by American generosity. As the text of the novel gradually reveals, Chang’s experience of the war has been brutal, a painful story of oppression and betrayal, torture, starvation, and terror at the hands of both the North Korean communist forces and the Republic of Korea’s American-led military government. However, he is unable to reconcile this experience with the audiences’ Cold War ideology; finally, he is reduced to comparing the shape of Korea to Florida and “groundlessly” equating the thirty-eighth parallel to the Mason-Dixon line (51). This simplified and inaccurate narrative satisfies his audiences’ understanding of the world in terms of two opposing forces, although

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notably it complicates ideas of justice by equating South Korea with the antebellum South.1 As Chang discovers, however, complications are not welcome ideas to his American audiences; “the particularities of the UN force never interested anyone” (51), even though these very

particularities were key to his own fate and those of millions of Korean civilians during the war. Trying and failing to bridge the gap between his own experience and his audiences’ limited understanding, Chang focuses on the single ostensibly successful American military action in Korea: General MacArthur’s landing at Inchon. Again and again, Chang explains to white American audiences, “I’m not here, if this doesn’t happen” (50).

Chang’s statement is deliberately framed to satisfy a Cold War epistemology that interprets the war as Korean liberation by American military action; if the “here” is understood to be a place of freedom, then MacArthur and the U.S. forces have enabled Chang’s passage from a Korea menaced by communism to freedom in America. The paternalism that underlies this ideology is evident in many instances in the novel, as when a white American man jovially asks Chang, “How did you people like that war we had for you?” (234). However, the text necessitates that Chang’s explanation also be read ironically, as a testament to the massive displacement and violence that occurred along with U.S. military intervention in Korea. Chang’s “I,” in the statement, incorporating the physical and emotional scars of the war, is “here” in a church in the U.S. South because he has cast his lot with the U.S. military as a strategy of survival, much as his father survived the Japanese imperial occupation of Korea by choosing to study in Japan. By drawing structural parallels between Chang’s situation and that of his father, the novel forces a comparison between Japanese and American occupations of Korea. Thus, Chang’s statement “I’m not here, if this doesn’t happen” satisfies his audiences’ desire for an American liberation narrative, but it also resonates with the postcolonial slogan: “We are here

123 because you were there.”2

It traces a genealogy that emphasizes the continuities of imperialism and Cold War military interventions overseas to explain the development of new racial and ethnic demographics in the U.S. during the second half of the twentieth century.

The emergence of Korean American, Vietnamese American, Hmong and Laotian American literature in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as the establishment of a significant body of Cuban American literature since 1959, unevenly reflects the large numbers of communities and individuals within the U.S. whose presence is directly tied to Cold War military operations.3 More generally, Asian American and Latina/o cultural productions since the last decades of the twentieth century have served as important counter-narratives to the Cold War rhetoric of containment, insurgency, and dualism that shaped twentieth-century politics and continues to inform U.S. policy in the age of “wars on terror.” At the most basic level, Asian American and Latina/o writers and artists document and bear witness to suppressed histories of military intervention in Asia and Latin America during the Cold War, insisting that we remember not only the wars in Vietnam and Korea but also the “secret wars” that were fought in Laos and Cambodia in the twentieth century – forcing us to acknowledge not only the Cuban American communities shaped by Cold War politics but also the U.S. military presence in the Dominican Republic and throughout Central and South America. For civilians, these wars constituted some of the bloodiest, brutal, and deadly conflicts in recent history. The “Forgotten War” in Korea left a staggering 3 million civilians dead from violence and starvation and forced survivors into underground caves to escape relentless aerial bombing and the implementation of new chemical weapons such as napalm (J. Kim 148). During the same years in Latin America, a CIA-led coup in 1951 initiated a period of violence in Guatemala that lasted four decades and included the torture and massacre of up to two hundred thousand civilians, mostly indigenous villagers, in a

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genocidal reign of terror (Rabe 36). Histories of U.S. involvement in East and Southeast Asia, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean belie the simple explanation of Cold War politics that audiences like Chang’s have been led to believe. If the dominant historical narrative of the Cold War is a triumphalist one, celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as the victory of freedom and democracy over Soviet oppression, Asian American and Latina/o writers offer an alternative frame of reference. Underneath Chang’s statement “I’m not here, if this doesn’t happen” is a narrative that painfully documents the physical and psychological costs of the Cold War for peoples in the Third World.

Asian American and Latina/o literature can also interrogate the politics of the national amnesia that follows the Cold War into the present day. This amnesia is encapsulated and re- inscribed in names like “The Forgotten War” and “The Secret War”; declassification of military documents has revealed military operations with obscure code names like Operation Limpieza and Operation Mongoose, which describe actions in Guatemala and Cuba, respectively. By defining war in Korea as forgotten, conflict in Laos as secret, and operations in Guatemala and Cuba with names not only ominous but obfuscating, standard histories continue to define these operations as existing outside of the kind of history that is worthy of remembrance or

acknowledgement. In this chapter, I consider two literary works that not only write back in the history of U.S. military involvement in Asia and Latin America but also take on the task of deconstructing the Cold War as an ideological project, one that exceeds its official dates during the middle decades of the twentieth century as well as its official, bilateral axis as a U.S.-Soviet conflict. Both Choi’s The Foreign Student and Cuban American writer Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo (1996) trace the ways in which Cold War ideology in the U.S. was (and is) complicit with internal racism, earlier imperial practices, and gendered violence.

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Writing at the turn of the twenty-first century, both Choi and Obejas engage the Cold War from the perspective of a critical historical reconstruction that has personal as well as artistic and political implications. The daughter of a Korean father and a Russian Jewish mother, Susan Choi was born in 1969 in Indiana and raised in Texas; The Foreign Student is based on her father’s experiences in Korea and the U.S. South during the 1950s (Park 61). Her novel is thus a historical reconstruction, one that critic Daniel Y. Kim convincingly analyzes within the larger category of “postmemorial” art. Kim borrows from Marianne Hirsch’s definition of postmemory to describe Choi’s complex relationship to her novel’s subject as a second-generation Korean American writer. According to Hirsch, postmemory is a phenomenon in which the children of trauma survivors are haunted by stories so powerful that these stories come to constitute

memories in and of themselves (D. Kim 571). Postmemory is different from survivor memory; its emotional impact derives from the fact that “its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation” (Hirsch qtd. in D. Kim 571). Like her protagonist Chang Ahn, Choi’s father (also named Chang) lived through the events of the Korean War and then attended the University of the South at Sewanee in the 1950s. However, as a postmemorial text, the novel adds a layer of interpretation to Chang’s story that stretches far beyond the literal experiences of Choi’s father, both in Korea and the U.S. Chang’s story is an act of translation and creation, more a meditation on memory than an eyewitness account. Most strikingly, the novel incorporates the completely fictional story of Katherine Monroe, Chang’s white American love interest, whose experiences of Southern patriarchy and sexual exploitation serve as reminders of the race and gender hierarchies on which Cold War ideologies were founded. Indeed, ultimately the novel is both a historical reconstruction and an interrogation of U.S. politics and society during the Cold War, in which its true object is to

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highlight the transnational ties between that war and domestic structures of power. In this project, memory is self-consciously unstable. Of writing the novel, Choi has said: “It’s not simply that the book is a huge departure from his life … but that I’ll never really know how things went. Memory was compromised” (Koeppel G3). Thus, as Kim observes, the novel is less a reconstruction of facts than a theorization of memory through the trope of translation, a “postmemory that marks the vanishing point of an original that is nonetheless ‘actually there’” (D. Kim 575). It is an act of deferred translation, in which, as in Chang’s slide presentation, memories of the Korean War can never quite be translated in the context of a nation that has chosen to name the war “forgotten.”4

Memory Mambo may also be read as a postmemorial text, one that explicitly reflects on the slippage between personal and cultural memories. Achy Obejas was born in Cuba in 1956; like her protagonist Juani, her family came to the U.S. illegally by boat when she was six years old and settled in the Midwest. Yet Juani’s story is set twenty years later than Obejas’s own life, and the issues she faces are not Obejas’s own: in an interview, Obejas has described the book’s events as “something that could have happened to me but didn’t” (Harper 7). Indeed, like Choi’s novel, Memory Mambo is less concerned with documenting a particular experience than with exploring the ways in which Cuban/American experiences are shaped by Cold War politics. For Juani, these experiences are deeply personal; the central plot of the novel revolves around her obsessive desire to remember both her family’s journey to the United States and her own violent confrontation with an ex-girlfriend: her insatiable need to know “what really happened” (14). Juani’s two obsessions are intertwined, as the violence between the two women is both political and sexual: it pits Puerto Rican independence activism against Cuban American complicity with U.S. Cold War ideology, even while it centers on the inability of some race-based activists to

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acknowledge gay and lesbian rights. In Memory Mambo, as in The Foreign Student, memory is unstable; it also extends beyond the individual. Juani explains: “sometimes other lives lived right alongside mine interrupt, barge in on my senses, and I no longer know if I really lived through an experience or just heard about it so many times, or so convincingly, that I believed it for myself – became the lens through which it was captured, retold and reshaped” (9). Like Chang, Juani struggles to translate experiences that contradict the Cold War ideology that interpellates her as a Cuban American success story, a refugee from a communist regime and an unquestioned supporter of U.S. containment policies. Through the trope of memory, the text of Memory Mambo pieces together a critique of both Cuban communism and U.S. Cold War policies, especially demonstrating the ways in which the latter is commensurate with imperialist and domestic racial ideologies and gendered violence.

For both Choi and Obejas, the Cold War is a problem primarily of memory. As postmemorial texts, these novels position Asian American and Latina/o literature as a way of highlighting the disconnect between experience and ideology, between the Asian American and Cuban “immigrant success story” and the lived reality of grappling with a traumatic past that is globally connected to the webs of race, class, and gendered power that immigrants from Asia and Latin America must negotiate in the U.S. The unstable memories of these novels’ protagonists signal the difficulties of subject formation for Asian American and Latina/o immigrants to the U.S. However, they also demonstrate the power of Asian American and Latina/o literature to deconstruct and interrogate national memory. First-generation testimonial texts like Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart or Yamada’s Camp Notes are important because they contradict and subvert dominant narratives; they insist that the structural violence of imperialism or nativistic racism must not be forgotten. Postmemorial texts question how family and national memories

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are formed in dialogue with political ideologies. Strikingly, both The Foreign Student and Memory Mambo link Cold War ideology to patriarchal, gendered oppression; military violence abroad complements sexual violence at home in which both men and women become active agents of their own destruction. It is a commonplace in feminist and other civil rights discourses to insist that the personal is political. Asian American and Latina/o literature about the Cold War demonstrates the ways in which the political is also personal, as domestic spaces come to reflect the power and the contradictions of Cold War epistemologies.

“Translation’s Unnatural Byproduct”: Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student

Nearly sixty years after the war that is known in the U.S. as the “Korean War,” an article by the Associated Press demonstrates the continued importance of Cold War political ideologies in U.S.-Korean relations. Titled “In North Korea, Learning to Hate US Starts Early,” the article describes four-year-olds in twenty-first century North Korea who are being taught in state

kindergartens to seek vengeance against their worst enemies, the “Yankee imperialists” (J. Lee). The posters depicting this message comprise the crudest kind of propaganda, featuring U.S. soldiers as “cruel, ghoulish barbarians with big noses and fiendish eyes,” engaging in graphically violent acts such as branding prisoners, wrenching out children’s teeth with pliers, and crushing a girl with an army boot, “blood pouring from her mouth, her eyes wild with fear and pain” (J. Lee). The article explains how these violent pictures are used to foment anti-American sentiment in children from an early age:

North Korean students learn that their country has had two main enemies: the Japanese, who colonized Korea from 1910 to 1945, and the U.S., which fought against North Korea during the 1950-53 Korean War. They are told that North Korea’s defense against outside forces – particularly the U.S., which has more than 28,000 soldiers stationed in South Korea – remains the backbone of the country’s foreign policy. And they are bred to seek revenge … (J. Lee).

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In North Korea’s official version of history, the “American imperialists” started the Korean War, and North Korea must not only continue to endure the pain of being a divided country, but also develop and stockpile nuclear weapons against future attacks by U.S. forces.

In contrast to this narrative, the AP article explains that “outside North Korea, history books tell a different story.” The author elaborates:

Western textbooks say that two years after North and South Korea declared themselves separate republics, North Korean troops marched into South Korean [sic] capital, Seoul, on the morning of June 25, 1950. U.S.-led United Nations and South Korean forces fought communist North Korean troops backed by Chinese soldiers in a three-year battle for control of the peninsula. The U.S. and North Korea finally called a truce in 1953, and Korea remains divided to this day. (J. Lee)

The differences between these two twenty-first century narratives are striking. In the first narrative, the U.S. plays the role of an imperialist occupying force, invading Korea much like Japan did decades earlier, and continuing to threaten Korean sovereignty in the present day with its military presence in South Korea. In the second, the war of 1950-1953 is attributed entirely to North Korean aggression against a sovereign republic; the U.S. was involved, but the true

oppositional “forces” were South Korean and that of an international governing body, the United Nations. Yet while an American reader is clearly meant to dismiss North Korean allegations accompanied by shockingly violent images hung in kindergarten classrooms (and situated

alongside heroic and obviously apocryphal stories of the nation’s dictator), it is worth noting that neither version of history adequately explains the events of 1950-1953. If North Korean

propaganda omits any mention of North Korean military aggression or alliance with China, Western textbooks omit the fact that it was a Soviet-US agreement, not a Korean-led endeavor, that divided the country at the 38th parallel in 1945. Neither history mentions the tremendous number of casualties – 100,000 Koreans dead even before the “official” start of the war in 1950

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(LaFeber 107) – as the result of a conflict that was both a civil war and a global war, a failed