Science Fiction and Postmemory Hain in the Contemporary Korean American Literature

Abstract

As Marianne Hirsch observes in Family Frames (1997), children of Holocaust survivors often remember suffering that their parents endured. The memory of Holocaust is no less vivid for these children than is for mothers and fathers who experienced tragedy firsthand. Yet while members of postwar generation--Hirsch among them--mourn what their parents lost, that mourning is inevitably complicated by feelings of doubt, curiosity, and guilt. In Hirsch's words: relationship one have to traumatic events of one's parents' lives--horror? ambivalence? envy? negative nostalgia? How is possible to grieve for something that one never knew firsthand? What right does one have to feel traumatized by catastrophe from which one was spared? In addressing such questions, Hirsch likens Holocaust to a foreign that she and others of her generation can never hope to visit yet for which they often feel mysteriously homesick (244). Born after war, they are exiled from very experiences that haunt them--exiled by their belatedness, by fact that tragedy preceded their births. Such exile, Hirsch contends, is shared not just by children of Holocaust survivors but by children of those who have survived any collective tragedy (22). To designate this condition of spatial and temporal exile, Hirsch offers term postmemory. (1) In this essay, I explore representations of specifically Korean American type of that I call postmemory han. (2) Han, word with no equivalent in English, refers to Korean form of grief. (3) According to one writer, All Koreans feel it because our country has always had to shut up and listen to bigger countries--Japan, Russia, America. And because of war that split brother from sister and left everyone's family missing or dead (I. Park). Complex and dynamic, han cannot be neatly analyzed (A. Park). It ranges from bitter-sweet longing to despair that wracks your insides like fire (Freda; I. Park). Yet han never explodes. Writers repeatedly portray han as something shaped by repressiveness: han is the unexpressed anger felt inside (Luke Kim, qtd. in Somers), a pent-up historical and personal anguish (I. Park), compressed feeling of suffering caused by injustice (A. Park). Anthropologists have recognized as culture-specific medical condition whose symptoms include dyspnea, heart palpitation, and dizziness (Somers). (4) Someone who dies of han is said to have died of hwabyung (E. Kim 215). Despite evidence that han is medical condition, illness remains difficult to categorize. Are symptoms literal or figurative? Do they originate in body or are they psychosomatic? The answers are unclear. But if han is problematic, then han--the han that flows in blood of Korean Americans--is infinitely more so. A second-generation Korean American might be haunted by her parents' anguish, but she would be equally haunted by knowledge that she herself was not directly victimized by circumstances that led to such pain. For example, she is not one of Korean patriots who, in March of 1919, staged nationwide peaceful demonstration for Korean independence only to watch powerlessly as fellow protestors were shot to death by Japanese military. She is not one of students beaten for speaking their native language, or from one of families who starved because imperial government requisitioned crops from Korean farmers, or one of dysentery-stricken schoolchildren forced to spend months building airfields for kamikaze planes. She is not among girls who were abducted, sold to military brothels as comfort women, and routinely gang-raped by Japanese soldiers, nor is she among millions of Koreans who fled their hometowns in 1950 and walked south for hundreds of miles to avoid being killed by communist troops. How, then, does she remember pain caused by such experiences? …