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Association: Name: American Studies Association URL: http://www.theasa.net
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p113676_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Nguyen, Viet. "Ghostly Stories, Haunted memories: South Korea and Viet Nam" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association, <Not Available>. 2009-05-24 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p113676_index.html>

Nguyen, V. T. "Ghostly Stories, Haunted memories: South Korea and Viet Nam" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association <Not Available>. 2009-05-24 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p113676_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Abstract: This paper examines the war from the perspective of South Koreans, who were the largest foreign military force in Viet Nam second only to the Americans. The role South Koreans served in Viet Nam, and the role Viet Nam served in South Korean history, demonstrates that the war was never purely an American one, and that its impact would have economic and political ramifications throughout Asia. The paper examines in particular three texts dealing with South Koreans during the war: the novel White Badge (1989) by Junghyo Ahn, the film of the same title adapted from it (1994), and the film R-Point (2004). White Badge, novel and film, show the demolished lives of South Korean war veterans in contemporary South Korea, haunted by what was done to them and what they have done. R-Point takes the idea of haunting literally, telling the story of a South Korean squad sent to a jungle zone where soldiers of all nationalities vanish without a trace. Moving away from the standard war movie, R-Point appropriates the ghost story to narrate its idea of soldiers and landscapes being haunted. Together these three texts show that haunting is not simply an imaginative or emotional state, but one produced from history, so that we are to understand South Korea’s contemporary economic “miracle” as being made possible by the deaths of its soldiers and the deaths they inflicted. White Badge and R-Point are markers in the development of the South Korean economy, film industry, and democracy. The war in Viet Nam serves as the thread that ties all these elements together. For American studies, reading the emergence of this national cultural production is critical because it presents another history of the meaning of the war in Viet Nam. In this other history, the narrative of American exceptionalism in Viet Nam is contested through the denunciation of the United States’ role in South Korea and Southeast Asia. The South Korean narrative of their own involvement in Viet Nam forces us to reconsider the centrality of American stories and histories of the war, and in so doing, compels us to see the war’s global, ghostly legacy—the way it would haunt not only Americans and Vietnamese, but many others as well.

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