earticle

영어

This paper discusses Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother, a memoir and autobiographical novel of his childhood, which is set in the Kijichon in Bupyong of South Korea during the late 1960s and the 1970s. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the history of Korea-U.S relations created postcolonial shadows that hover over Fenkl’s memoir. I read haunting appearance of ghosts in Fenkl’s memoir as a metaphor to reveal what’s been concealed is very much alive and present based on Avery F. Gordon’s theorization of ghostliness as the remnant in the presence of the ”unrememberable past” (Gordon 4). In particular, I read the misfortune of western princesses and mixed-race children in Fenkl’s narrative as the embodiment of the unacknowledged and accumulated grief and losses as well as reminders of America’s protracted military presence, violence and the dominance of South Korea since 1945. This paper also explores how Fenkl in his narrative serves as a shaman to mourn for his ghost brother and other lonely ghosts as the historical traumas that haunt the present and give voices, names, and histories to those who have been lost, adopted, and disavowed to make post-World War II Korean migration to America possible.