26 - The Forgotten War in Korea

Summary

The Korean War is best known for being forgotten in large part because it was orchestrated to disappear. This chapter explores three major Korean American literary works which are all vexed attempts to render the politics and brutality of a forgotten war: Richard E. Kim's long-forgotten 1964 bestseller The Martyred; Susan Choi's acclaimed first novel The Foreign Student; and Chang-Rae Lee's 2010 The Surrendered. These novels are remarkable not only because they stand as the handful of fictions devoted to the Korean War, but because all three grapple with how to tell the story of a conflict deliberately kept off-stage even as it was being fought. In their highly mannered approaches to the Korean War, these novels address an American mainstream accustomed to Cold War norms of containment, and each seeks to contain this unruly war within well-worn generic and typological conventions, but in every case the war threatens to erupt out of these constraints.