The Literary Representations of Korean War Memories as “Grief-Work”: Ha Jin’s War Trash and Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student

Abstract

Freud analyzes in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” the way in which the people react to the painful loss of the loved objects. According to him, people suffering from the death of the loved ones go through the process of mourning in which they detach themselves from the lost object and thereby heal themselves over time. Although grief was not a primary concern for Freud, feminist critics such as Judith Butler and Kathleen Woodward emphasize the importance of grief. Butler argues grieving is “not to be resigned to inaction” but is “the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering.” This paper demonstrates how grief becomes the process of transformation and reconstruction of the subjectivities of the Korean War survivors and their descendants by looking at the literary representations of Korean War memories. Ha Jin’s War Trash and Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student can be defined as what Kathleen Woodward calls “grief-work” whose emphasis is “not on a gradual giving up of those lost but remembering them in a sustainable grief.” Hs Jin’s War Trash, which portrays the lives of Chinese POWs during the Korean War, examines such important issues as the construction of national subjects, enforced migration and historical trauma. Ha Jin, looking at the Korean War from the perspectives of Chinese POWs, presents the internal ideological conflicts within the prison camps which become more horrific than the war itself. The novel demonstrates how Chinese national subjects were ordered to participate in the war and eventually discarded by the nation as war trash, having been completely erased from the Chinese history. In Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student, Chang Ahn suffers from the memory of physical torture. Being arrested by the National Police on suspicion of espionage, Chang was tortured by the police until the only way he could keep his sanity was to dissociate himself from the bodily pain. Judith Butler defines violence as “an exploitation of that primary ties, that primary way in which we are, as bodies, outside ourselves and for one another.” The vulnerability of our bodies is at its most extreme during the war when one’s existence is shattered by unbearable torture. In the literary representations of the historical and cultural memories of the Korean War by Ha Jin and Susan Choi, the grief of the war survivors which has not been mourned is brought to light. In doing so, two writers emphasize the importance of “naming historically lost Others.” The engagement with memories of the war and therefore violence poses us an important ontological and ethical question, that is, who we are in the world, what makes us human beings, and how we connect ourselves to others.