Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America

Appendix 2: Overview of Scholarly Treatment of Korean Military Brides

appendix 2 Overview of Scholarly Treatment of Korean Military Brides In framing the life experiences of Korean military brides within both Korean and American historical contexts and examining issues of hegemony , power, and resistance, this study is a radical break from existing studies of military brides. The overwhelming majority of the studies have been conducted by social service providers who are primarily interested in marital adjustment and conflict, incidence of domestic abuse, and strategies for providing better care. A number of chaplains and other social service providers associated with the military have produced studies on Korean women-U.S. soldier marriages and the services that the military should provide to assist these couples.1 Ministers of Korean immigrant churches have also written about ways to minister to Korean military brides.2 Some studies use statistical analysis to research narrowly defined issues. A typical study is a 1989 doctoral dissertation that examines factors in marital satisfaction among interracially married Korean women.3 A few studies have taken different approaches, but in them the experiences of the women are used primarily as research material for theoretical discussions about issues specific to a discipline. One anthropological study looks at the narrative strategies of two Korean military brides telling their life stories.4 A communications study analyzes the American television and Korean video viewing habits of four different Korean populations in Texas, including first-generation immigrants, international students, second-generation Korean Americans, and military brides.5 The best known of the social service provider studies are those conducted by Bok-Lim Kim and Daniel Boo-Duk Lee, both of whom have spent twenty years or more working with Korean military brides seeking assistance.6 Although both scholars are careful to note that many Korean military brides have happy, successful lives and marriages, they stress the difficulties that the women face in cultural adjustment, abuse from husbands, social isolation, and the resulting psychological damage. The portrait is of a population in extreme distress, even pathological, and in urgent need of external intervention. But since the women they studied 233 were those who came to the attention of social service providers, this may not be an accurate reflection of the Korean military bride population as a whole. A 1991 article written by an undergraduate is a refreshing departure from the other literature on Korean military brides. Haeyun Juliana Kim frames her article with the story of a second-generation Korean American woman, herself, getting to know the “women in shadows,” women similar to those she remembers from church. She goes to a dinner with military brides in the Fort Devens, Massachusetts, area, and finds that they “could have been my aunts back in Korea.”7 After meeting with them regularly over a period of three months, she presents the stories of seven military brides. Kim also makes an important assertion that indicates a shift in research perspective away from issues of social deviance and marital adjustment and toward the construction of history and community. She asserts that the military brides are Korean American women, which situates them as part of the Korean American community and its history. This perspective is tempered, however, by her characterization of them as “voices from the shadows.” Although she situates them as Korean American women, she also keeps them at the margins of Korean American society . Despite this, her perspective places her work within an Asian American studies tradition of recovering and reconstructing a multilinked past and thereby drawing marginalized and/or disparate populations into a coherent community. While the previous studies discussed are grounded in traditional disciplines such as sociology, social work, or anthropology and primarily address debates specific to those fields, her study attempts to chronicle the lives of marginalized peoples in the manner of the revisionist, groundbreaking scholarship embodied in fields such as ethnic studies and women’s studies.8 With the exception of Bok-Lim Kim’s work, none of the existing studies situate Korean military brides within the broader phenomenon of what I call international military brides, that is, women from around the world who have married American soldiers. This phenomenon began in earnest during World War II, when American soldiers began to fraternize with and marry women from Britain, France, Italy, and Germany as they were stationed in these countries.9 These international marriages were largely limited to the immediate postwar period. By the 1960s, their appendix 2 234 numbers had drastically dwindled...