In September 1999, The New York Times published an article based on the testimony of twenty-four Korean survivors and twelve U.S. veterans who reported “that in the first desperate weeks of the Korean War, American soldiers killed 100, 200 or simply hundreds of refugees, many of them women and children” (Choe). This mass killing of Korean civilians by U.S. troops took place during the last week of July in 1950 at the railroad tracks and tunnel near No Gun Ri. The history of this horrific event, little-known in the U.S. until 1999, was side-stepped by the U.S. military in their 2001 official investigation of the No Gun Ri event, which concluded, “What befell civilians in the vicinity of No Gun Ri in late July 1950 was a tragic and deeply regrettable accompaniment to a war forced upon unprepared U.S. and ROK forces” (xv).
Against the lack of recognition for these Korean victims and the burial of their history, Jayne Anne Phillips reanimates the dead of No Gun Ri in her 2009 novel Lark and Termite. This novel details the lives of an American family in West Virginia in 1959 and of a Korean family at No Gun Ri in 1950. In this paper I argue that Jayne Anne Phillips draws upon the radical traditions and forms of magical realism by linking the physical gestures of precarious bodies in poverty-stricken U.S. Appalachia to those within the war-torn realities of 1950s Korea, thereby bringing into view the devastating effects of interrelated systems of war and regional economic exploitation. Significantly, the magical bodily continuum between the children articulates an ethical, transnational dimension of war trauma, which bears witness to the massacre at No Gun Ri while resisting the rationality of historical narrative. In this way, I argue that Lark and Termite stages an intervention into the process of forgetting so strongly associated with “The Forgotten War.”
Works Cited
Choe, Sang Hun, Charles J. Hanley, and Martha Mendoza. “G.I.’S Tell of a U.S. Massacre in Korean War.” The New York Times September 30 1999: A16. Print. No Gun Ri Review Team. Report of the No Gun Ri Review. Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 2001. Phillips, Jayne Anne. Lark and Termite. New York: Vintage, 2010 (2009).
About the presenterRuth A.H. Lahti
Ruth Lahti is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Siena College, where she teaches courses on twentieth century American literature, the modern novel, and gender and sexuality in global literature. Her current book project is “Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma in U.S. War Fiction,” and her articles have appeared in The Journal of Transnational American Studies, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, and a forthcoming collection Teaching Hemingway and War.