Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (review)

Yuh Ji-Yeon's Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America, centers on interviews with sixteen Korean women from among the nearly 100,000 who have married U.S. military servicemen and come to live in the United States since 1950. Korean "military brides" have played a primary but rarely acknowledged role in the establishment of Korean communities in the United States. They make up a significant proportion of Korean immigrants, particularly so before 1970, and have often been path-breaking immigration sponsors: human bridges enabling manifold kin to cross the Pacific. Yet these women remain stigmatized in Korean communities and marginalized in Asian American Studies scholarship. Yuh's book challenges the interested amnesia that tends to smooth over this ragged edge of Korean- and Asian American history.

The book is organized thematically. The first chapter draws from scholarly research and information gathered from community-based organizations to sketch the history of the U.S. military camptowns in Korea, their legacy of prostitution, and the significance of the camptown in the lives of all Korean wives of U.S. military servicemen, regardless of their involvement—or lack thereof—in prostitution. The second chapter, "American Fever," introduces five of the women interviewees. There are details about hometowns, families, and the often wrenching experiences that led to their decisions to marry U.S. servicemen. The women's lives are revealed to be imbricated in broader historical forces as we learn how Cho Soonyi became Mrs. Linburg, why Chun Myungsook became Mrs. Peterson. We read Noh Soonae's own account of how she became a military camptown prostitute and why she decided to become Mrs. Edson. Yuh places these experiences and the marriages in the context of overwhelming U.S. dominance over the southern part of Korea since the end of World War II. The third chapter discusses women's experiences once they have migrated to the United States, emphasizing the ways in which the women themselves make sense of the difficult circumstances they faced and their everyday strategies of resistance. The fourth chapter zooms in on one aspect of daily life, highlighting food as a critical terrain of social struggle and control within the international, intercultural, and interracial family. Yuh brings historical and theoretical material to bear on women's attempts to resist the erasure of culture and identity through the preparation and consumption of Korean food. The fifth chapter examines one aspect of the women's identities that remains significant throughout their lives: their position as daughters within their birth families. Yuh structures her discussion around her interviewees' views regarding their neglect and their fulfillment of their roles and duties as daughters. The sixth chapter features ways in which Korean women married or formerly married to U.S. military servicemen have organized both informally and formally for collective support, providing assistance to "sisters" in need and advocacy in the broader American society.

Beyond the Shadow of Camptown achieves several important objectives. First, the book tackles head-on the task of presenting the impossibly complex and multiple historical, social, and political forces bearing upon the women's lives, including U.S. military, economic, and cultural domination of South Korea, patriarchal traditions both South Korean and American, capitalism and the economic exploitation of racialized and gendered immigrant labor, and English language hegemony. In a virtuosic synthesis of scholarship from a wide range of disciplines and fields, Yuh frames the women's daily struggles—in the public spaces of American life as well as within their own families—in a manner that neither simplifies the complexities nor loses its focus. The book also carefully walks the line between underscoring the difficulties the women face on the one hand, and, on the other, their strength, their resilience, and their creative agency. Yuh avoids treating the women as victims and features...