Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature by Josephine Nock-Hee Park (review)

At the height of the Korean War, Maxine Hong Kingston, then in the sixth grade, tormented another Chinese American girl for her timidness, for not being "friendly." As she recounts in her classic memoir The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976), she confronted the girl in the "army green" basement of their school, where the students huddled during air raid drills (qtd. in Park 259). Cornering the girl and ordering her to talk until she herself broke down in tears, Maxine recognized her own mandate to be "friendly" in the girl. In Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature, Josephine Nock-Hee Park takes a closer look at how the Cold War—the "army green" basement, the air raid drills—conditions Maxine's insistence on friendliness. Through an investigation of Asian American writing on the wars in Korea and Southeast Asia, Park follows the strange career of the Asian "friendly," arguing that Korean and Vietnamese allies indict but also instrumentalize to their own ends the uneven relations of Cold War attachment. "The friendly is all too aware of the determining forces of Cold War division and integration," Park writes, "and though she risks her integrity, her gestures of alliance recalibrate vectors of great power politics in order to ensure her own place within a global order" (264). As the scene from Kingston's first memoir demonstrates, Park's book advances a new way of reading familiar Asian American literature that reveals a story of neocolonial war and liberal contradiction but also one of Asian friendlies' conscious self-fashioning through Cold War affiliations.

Cold War Friendships builds on and recalibrates the large bodies of work on the Korean and Vietnam Wars in the fields of Asian American studies, American cultural studies, and Cold War studies. While scholars such as Christina Klein have drawn attention to Cold War overtures of integration directed at the decolonizing nations of Asia, Park attends instead to the Asian friendlies to whom such overtures were addressed. This term, friendlies, emerged as a means for the Cold War state to describe weak alliances with non-Western countries and as an instrument of racialization used to distinguish those to whom it might "confer" liberal humanness (anticommunist allies) from nonhuman enemies (communist resisters). But Park's friendlies cross over from wartime allies to Americans. They constitute what she calls "proto-Americans" (18). Thus, while such scholars as Lisa Lowe, Susan Koshy, and Kandice Chuh have theorized Asian American studies as a critique- rather than identity-based field, Park sets out to read pre- rather than post-identity Asian America through the figure of the Cold War friendly. Her method brings to light how the United States' wars have not only reinforced racial divisions but also created and defined them.

Park's book offers more than a series of close readings, however. It uses literature as a vehicle for tracing what she calls "an Asian American genealogy of war," which exposes the violence of the Cold War state's liberal vision of its role in the world without reducing Asian American writing to a reflection of that violence (12). The book's first part, "Securing the Vietnam War," begins by considering American journalists' and filmmakers' efforts to rationalize the Korean War through South Korean friendlies imagined as allied soldiers, international students, and rescued children. It then examines three Asian American novels—Richard E. Kim's The Martyred (1964), Susan Choi's The Foreign Student (1998), and Changrae Lee's The Surrendered (2010)—that reanimate such characters to show how they contribute to, are harmed by, and yet do not abandon the Cold War ideal of integration.

The book's second part, "Reviving the War in Vietnam," traces the breakdown of such alliances in Southeast Asia through the figure of the American special agent as he evolves from bright idealist in William Lederer and Eugene Burdick's novel The Ugly...