Embattled Memories: Contested Meanings in Korean War Memorials

Embattled Memories

Contested Meanings in Korean War Memorials

Suhi Choi

RENO & LAS VEGAS

University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

Copyright © 2014 by University of Nevada Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Choi, Suhi, 1971-

Embattled memories : contested meanings in Korean War memorials / Suhi Choi.

   pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87417-936-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-87417-937-8 (e-book)

1. Korean War, 1950–1953—Monuments—United States. 2. Korean War, 1950–1953— Monuments—Korea (South) 3. Memorialization—Social aspects—United States. 4. Memorialization—Social aspects—Korea (South) 5. Collective memory—United States. 6. Collective memory—Korea (South) I. Title.

DS921.9.C56   2014

951.904'28—dc23                             2013042695

To Moshe, Avi, and Jeff

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction: The Korean War Memories on Its 50th Anniversary

1 - Silencing Memories: Why Are We Again Forgetting the No Gun Ri Story?

2 - Scripting Memories: Female Survivors’ Witnessing the No Gun Ri Killings

3 - Sanitizing Memories: Archival Images in the PBS Documentary Battle for Korea

4 - Mythologizing Memories: A Critique of the Utah Korean War Memorial

5 - Shattering Memories: The Statue of MacArthur in South Korea

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

The No Gun Ri Bridge (2005)

During the Joint Memorial Ceremony, a performance for the dead of the No Gun Ri killings (July 28, 2005)

The Utah Korean War Memorial (Memorial Day, 2009)

Names on the apex of the Utah Korean War Memorial

A panel of the Utah Korean War Memorial

A statue of Douglas MacArthur at Freedom Park, Incheon

A South Korean Marine veteran at Freedom Park (November 25, 2008)

PREFACE

This book examines the collective memory of the Korean War through five discrete memory sites in both the United States and South Korea. These include U.S. media coverage of the No Gun Ri killings, female survivors’ recollections of No Gun Ri, the PBS documentary Battle for Korea, the Utah Korean War Memorial, and the statue of General Douglas MacArthur in South Korea. In these active sites of memory, counter-memories of the war have recently clashed with official, state-sanctioned memories. Through analysis of these five sites, Embattled Memories details the ways in which diverse narratives of the Korean War compete for hegemony in our acts of remembering.

I am part of the postwar generation of the Korean Peninsula. I did not witness the Korean War, but I grew up with copious memories of it. My upbringing in the Jeolla Province of South Korea, where harsh struggles between the right- and left-wing factions of the political force took place immediately before and during the Korean War, exposed me to disturbing memories of that time. Moreover, my college major of Korean history at Korea University in Seoul made me aware not only of conflicting accounts of the war that were a subject of debate among historians, but also of dogmatic narratives that existed in the mainstream discourse of the Korean War. I sensed a fissure between how we remember the Korean War, on the one hand, and how we have been socialized to remember the Korean War, on the other. Later, my studies of mass media at Temple University in Philadelphia intrigued me and got me thinking about the dynamic roles that media have played in creating this fissure, as well as about the gaps that have been produced in remembering the war. Now, as a college professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, I try not to miss any opportunity to talk about the Korean War with my U.S. students, whose upbringing was different from my own and whose memories of the Korean War are extremely tenuous despite the fact that this war consumed more than thirty-five thousand lives from their grandparents’ generation. Through these different journeys that I have taken, memories about the Korean War have come back to me joined with the notions of disjuncture, contradiction, and at times incommunicability.

Perhaps I first sensed such a complex texture of memories when I considered my family’s remembrances of our grandfather’s death. My grandmother Chung Kisoon, whose oral testimonies constitute the major part of the narrative of my family heritage, told us that our grandfather Choi Youngbum was the only Korean who had received an award for being an outstanding student in Jeolla Province during the Japanese occupation. He was an open-minded man who enjoyed playing the violin, a foreign novelty to his generation. He also provided me with a proud lineage: he was a descendant of Choi Hang, one of the renowned scholars who worked on creating the Korean alphabet during the Choson Dynasty (1392–1910). I remember gazing at the handsome face of my grandfather in a framed photograph that was always standing on a table in my grandmother’s bedroom. I never met him in person. My grandmother told us that he went missing near his hometown of Gurye right before the Korean War and was presumed to be dead.

As I grew up, however, I realized that my grandmother had intentionally left out some of the details of my grandfather’s death. It was my mother who provided me with more of the previously hidden aspects of his passing. In fact, my grandfather had gone missing while he was hastily trying to escape from the South Korean police. These were the same police who had massacred countless young, educated Korean men, accusing them of being communists before and during the Korean War. Like my grandmother, many of the South Korean families who had lost their loved ones due to the inhumane treatment by U.S. allied–South Korean forces had maintained a silence. This disregard was in contrast to the treatment of families of victims of the North Korean troops, whose sufferings have been publicly recognized through numerous official commemorations of the Korean War.

My grandmother lost her husband when she was twenty-nine years old, and she never remarried. She passed away at the age of seventy-five. The patriarchal society of Confucianism called the loneliness of the widow the virtuous chastity of womankind. Until her last moment, my grandmother’s favorite trip was going to the family mountain in Gurye, where she had made a symbolic grave for her missing husband. Although she had shared many memories with us, I often wonder how much she never told us. I solicit her stories only in my imagination. Had I asked, would she have had the desire to relate her untold memories? Had she wished to do so, would she have been capable of communicating these stories? Had she actually related them to me, could I in return have ever fathomed her complicated cache of memories? Since the time that I began to explore memories in the Korean War context, I have continuously been recalling images of my grandmother and the actions she chose to take in her life that I did not have a chance to hear directly from her but have come to imagine through the witnessing of others. I now realize that my grandfather and his loving wife—my dear grandmother—have become the muses of this book.

Along with my muses, I also feel indebted to many people who have provided me with invaluable assistance in completing this book. There is no way that I can recall all the names of these gracious individuals. I can recognize only a few here. First of all, I am extremely grateful to the survivors of both civilians and veterans of the Korean War who have graciously shared their unspeakable memories with me, a stranger from the academic world. Without their persistent recollections of the past, without their courage to witness in the present, without their faith in goodness in the future, this book would not have existed. I thank my friends Go Heegap, Kim Chaemi, Choi Kwangsoon, and Rulon Wood, who have helped me greatly in my interviewing of these survivors.

Moreover, I have had the great privilege to work with remarkable individuals in various academic communities. I am grateful to Hal Himmelstein and Kathy Napoli at Brooklyn College for their thoughtful assistance as I took my initial steps on an academic journey on a foreign soil. I thank Carolyn Kitch at Temple University, who, with her exemplary academic performance, called my attention to memory studies in the first place. I also thank John A. Lent, Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Andrew Mendelson, and Jay Ruby at Temple University, who introduced me to critical knowledge on culture and communication. I thank my current colleagues at the University of Utah for their friendship and inspiration. I feel particularly honored to work closely with Mary Strine and Len Hawes, extraordinary scholars and mentors in our field.

I thank also both the Korea Foundation in South Korea and the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah for providing me with a research grant and fellowship for this book project. I owe elaboration of my writing to many critical readers from various academic fields. While working on this book, I first introduced case studies for each chapter, respectively, to several academic journals, including Rhetoric and Public Affairs; Qualitative Inquiry; Media, Culture, and Society; Public Historian; and Memory Studies. Both editors and anonymous reviewers of these journals offered me valuable critiques that have guided me to further revise each manuscript. In addition, I thank Fanny Rothschild, a thoughtful, sensitive, and encouraging editor who has helped me at every stage of writing this manuscript. I also thank Matt Becker, a senior acquisitions editor at the University of Nevada Press, for recognizing the value of my insights and working with me to publish this book.

I am grateful to my families in South Korea and the United States. My four Choi sisters—Sookyung, Soojin, Soohyun, and Sooyoung—have always energized me with their unfailing friendship and ever-growing wisdom. My father, Choi Dosook, with his unwavering Confucian fatherhood, has persistently reminded me of the value of home, the roots from which I have grown. Without my mother, Lee Soook, nothing seems to be possible. I am extremely humbled by her deeds, faith, and prayers, all of which I believe have made a difference in the lives of her children. I miss my late father-in-law, Herman Spiegel, who survived the Holocaust and touched many, including me, with his warmth and kindness. My mother-in-law, Ruth Spiegel, has made it possible for me to be a scholar while being a mother of two. And finally, there are three men who have supported me every single day: my sweet husband, Jeff, who spares me from a life of illusion at every possible moment, and my two loving sons, Moshe and Avi, who miraculously came to us while I was delivering this book and have since taught me so much about life’s blessings. I dedicate this book to my family.

Introduction

The Korean War Memories on It’s Fiftieth Anniversary

The Korean War began in 1950 and ended in an armistice in 1953. More than six decades have passed since then. When I began my writings for this book in 2005, the Korean War memories had just passed their half-century anniversary, a substantial marker of the war’s being subject to our memory construction for more than fifty years. The anniversaries of historical events often facilitate the introduction of new memory texts into public space. Because of its timing, the war’s fiftieth anniversary in particular had the potential to provoke many actors to join in the process of constructing memories. Expectations were that survivors of both civilians and veterans, with a heightened sense of their limited life spans, might step forward to tell their untold stories to others. The fiftieth anniversary also provided the memory industry with legitimate and lucrative opportunities to market a historical event whose image is archaic, yet still relatively lucid in the minds of contemporary audiences. Political institutions also might be attentive to this heightened memory space where they can reiterate, articulate, and reaffirm the historical narrative in hegemony that resonates with societal norms and values.

The fiftieth anniversary of the Korean War thus offered memory scholars the unique opportunity to explore how memories are continuously reconstructed in a way that reflects the ongoing interactions between the past and the present. Likewise, the fiftieth anniversary has created a unique context in which one can critically peruse memories in action. While producing many cultural products that reinforce habitual frameworks of appreciating the war, the anniversary has interrupted the status quo of remembering with the influx of counter-memories as well as the reemergence of power relations in the memory process. Given this milieu, the aim of this book is to critically witness such memory constructions that have taken place recently within the context of the fiftieth anniversary of the Korean War.

More specifically, this book introduces five discrete memory sites in the United States and South Korea where counter-memories have recently clashed with official memories. The sites include U.S. media coverage of the No Gun Ri killings (1999–2001), female survivors’ recollections of No Gun Ri (2005), the PBS documentary Battle for Korea (2001), the Utah Korean War Memorial (2003), and the statue of General Douglas MacArthur in South Korea (2005). I do not argue that these memory sites held more relevance than countless other Korean War memory sites that exist across the world. Nor do I intend to convince the reader that these sites are representative of the current dynamics of memory constructions regarding the Korean War. In fact, I did not seek out these memory sites on purpose. Rather, they serendipitously, inescapably, or even irresistibly came to my attention as I shifted my intellectual and personal journey from South Korea to the United States during the last decade. I encountered many of the memory agents and objects examined in this book at local memorial sites through which I have traveled or near which I have lived. The names of these sites are Youngdong, Daejeon, Nogunri, Incheon in South Korea, and Salt Lake City in the United States. Unlike national memorial sites, these local sites have offered not only sacrosanct zones where one can pause to contemplate meanings of historical events but also hybrid spaces where one can engage in mundane activities while being reminded of the relevance of past events. Thus, these local memorial sites have provided me with optimal ethnographic fields of memory studies where I could witness the acts of remembering in the most imminent, present context. I also have come to realize that it is the very specificity of provincial locations that has transformed an eclectic collection of memory sites into a meaningful memory collage communicating the notion that collective memories of the Korean War are unsettling at the current dynamic juncture of official memories and counter-memories of the war.

The process of writing this book has required me to engage in the very difficult task of translating meanings of words, images, and performance from one culture to the other. I have published this book in English with a university press in the United States. Yet many people whom I interviewed for this study speak only Korean. There also exist documents written only in Korean that became important references for this book. Given these factors, translation has become a critical part of my writing. Although my immersion in both South Korea and the United States has enabled me to identify equivalent signs for the same meaning in two different cultures, it also has provided me with a strong sense that meanings cannot easily travel through cross-cultural signs. Translation is beyond a technical process. It is thereby a daunting task to simultaneously, independently, and comparatively make sense of meanings in a cross-cultural context. I thus would like to remind readers of the possibilities of disjuncture and fracture that may have occurred in the process of translation. I am sure that much of the meaning that I intended to communicate can be found in what is said in this book. Yet I also would not overlook possible significant meanings that might not have survived in translation.

The book consists of five chapters, each of which explores a memory site of the Korean War. Chapter 1 examines how the U.S. media have both remembered and thereafter forgotten the incident in which U.S. troops killed South Korean civilians who were taking refuge on the trestles of the No Gun Ri Bridge at an early stage of the Korean War. Chapter 2 illuminates the way in which the female survivors—the primary witnesses of the No Gun Ri killings—have communicated their unutterable trauma through the Confucian script of motherhood. Chapter 3 investigates media’s use of newly found archival images by examining