earticle

영어

Dubbed “the forgotten war that never ended,” the Korean War is replete with senses of ambivalence, deferral, and repressed memory that resist Manichean constructions such as victim and perpetrator, national and foreign, friendly fire and enemy attack. Only a month into the war, it had become a commonplace assumption among U.S. military personnel that North Korean soldiers were masquerading as peasants and blending into refugee streams as a means of attacking troops from the rear; such suspicions foreground the No Gun Ri massacre, wherein 300 refugees were murdered by U.S. troops. Jayne Anne Phillips's Lark and Termite reimagines the tragedy from an American soldier's standpoint and maps the catastrophic legacies of the Korean War via his disabled son, whose birth in rural West Virginia coincides with his father's death. In Toni Morrison's Home, on the other hand, a Black soldier’s wartime violence perpetrated to a Korean refugee girl lays bare how the Korean War was also a contested site of racism both inside and outside the U.S. Such refugee frames are divergently at the forefront of Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered, which likewise features a U.S. soldier in a humanitarian role and narrates a Korean War orphan's journey from stateless war subject to Korean American. By reading these three recent American novels together, this essay productively explores the intersection between war, disability narrative, and transnational homecoming. Charting the enduring effects of Korean War vis-à-vis the disabled subject, Lark and Termite, Home, and The Surrendered offer an oblique and still-relevant critique of U.S. exceptionalism, soldier liberation, and militarized humanitarianism.