Interstitial Negotiations of Identity in Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother

Abstract

Heinz Insu Fenkl’s autobiographical novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, while set entirely in Korea, is ultimately a novel about America, interrogating conventional definitions of Americanness as well as the role of race, ethnicity, and choice in the construction and acknowledgement of American identity. The protagonist Insu’s sense of self is threatened not only because his legal U.S. citizenship and his cultural Korean citizenship are each associated with different nations but also because they each signify racialized representations of national identity constructed in the interstices of gijichon and U.S. army bases, showing how racial and cultural coding of identity have been used to police membership in the nation. Memories of My Ghost Brother shows how cultural rather than legal racial marking of non-white Americans has emerged in the post-1965 era as the predominant means of restricting access to full American citizenship. Negotiating through interstices that are related and often overlap, Insu’s Korean cultural citizenship helps him preserve his sense of self against the fracturing pressures of American racism that work to use his lack of access to American cultural citizenship as a means of denying his Americanness in spite of his legal citizenship, and show how transnational constructions of identity are not only empowering but also necessitated by American history. It is the fact that interstitial Insu/Heinz is Korean American that makes his adherence to a Korean identity all the more necessary and crucial to his preservation of self in an American context unwilling to acknowledge that he is indeed an American. Memories of My Ghost Brother demonstrates how American engagement in the geopolitical sphere of Asia has created multilayers of interstices and multiple points of reference in the definition of national identity as well as necessitating multilateral negotiations of cultural, ethnic, racial, and national identities for Americans of Asian descent. Specifically, this novel shows how the protagonist Insu’s legal citizenship and cultural citizenship not only differ, but also respectively represent racialized notions of national identity that have been constructed in the overlapping interstices of nations, necessitating transnational, interstitial, and inter-racial negotiations of identity.