"Bled In, Letter by Letter": Translation, Postmemory, and the Subject of Korean War: History in Susan Choi's The Foreign Student

1. Introduction

To the extent that Americanist scholars have begun to fill in what Amy Kaplan famously described as "The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture," they have done so largely by remembering forgotten wars. While the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War have not eclipsed the US Civil War in significance (or, for that matter, either of the World Wars or the Vietnam War), studies that have stressed the historical significance of these events have been vital to the project of illuminating "the multiple historical trajectories of the anarchy of empire" that connect the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of this one (Anarchy 170).¹ What to do, then, with the American military conflict that is most closely associated with, and certainly merits, the epithet "the forgotten war"? For there are no images that come readily to mind in reference to the Korean War (1950-53), a somewhat surprising state of affairs given the superabundance of images and narratives associated with the conflict that preceded it by five years and the one that followed it by six: World War II (1940-45) and the Vietnam War (1959-75), respectively. There is, moreover, relatively little scholarship in American literary and cultural studies that focuses primarily on this event or on its representation.²

This essay explores the question of how we might respond productively to this seeming absence through an extensive analysis of Susan Choi's The Foreign Student (1998), the best received American novel about the Korean War to emerge in recent decades. Given the emergent critical interest in both decolonization and the Cold War, I turn to Choi's novel to make a case for the importance of the Korean War as a watershed moment in which a number of national and transnational histories of race converge. I will examine the complex and contradictory imperatives that Choi's text negotiates in telling the story of the war and outline the model that these negotiations provide both for Korean American literary production and for Americanist scholarship on the period.

First of all, The Foreign Student opens up a multivalent historical view of the Korean War that situates it in a transnational framework that is different from the one in which it has traditionally been situated. The novel invites readers to consider the conflict not simply in the binary terms of the American Cold War rhetoric of containment but within the historical context of decolonization. The novel thereby disrupts the triumphalist historical narrative in which this war is usually placed and demands that the war be considered from the vantage point of the Koreans themselves, for whom it was primarily a civil war, one that emerged out of the collapse of a deeply repressive colonial regime, which was exacerbated by the intervention of the US and other countries.

The Foreign Student's rendering of this largely unknown Asian history is nestled, however, in a much larger framing narrative that is set in the American South of the 1950s. As readers move forward in the novel, following events that take place in a familiar American "present," we are also drawn backward through a series of flashbacks into an unfamiliar Korean past-into a foreign history that is somehow linked to our own, thereby making us the eponymous protagonists of the novel. This, of course, makes it a text tailor-made for an American Studies that has increasingly adopted a transnational orientation. But in highlighting a historical event that is, by definition, supranational, The Foreign Student is nonetheless deeply concerned with domestic issues: with how Korean Americans are positioned vis à vis whites, blacks, and other Asian Americans and what that positioning reveals about the workings of race in America. This is a text that reminds us that a heightened attention to analytical categories that exceed the nation-state can and should coexist with a renewed attention to national issues.³

To convey the historiographical ambition of The Foreign Student, and to show, moreover, how it engages...