| Book Review | Oral History Review, 31.1

BOOK REVIEWS

BEYOND THE SHADOW OF CAMPTOWN: KOREAN MILITARY BRIDES IN AMERICA. By Ji-Yeon Yuh. New York and London: New York University Press, 2002. 284 pp. Hardbound $25.95.

Mrs. Peterson's seven-year-old biracial son doesn't like rice. He says he's an American boy, not Korean, so he must eat bread.

Mrs. Goldin says she can cook American food better than Americans, and like other Korean wives of U.S. military men, she says her husband is proud of her cooking.

Mrs. Bai starts to tell oral historian Ji-YeonYuh that 80 to 90 percent of the military brides from Korea are former camptown women, the bar hostesses and prostitutes who inhabit the well-organized, militarily regulated red-light districts adjacent to major U.S. military installations in South Korea. But Mrs. Bai struggles to find a way to say that without putting down all women who married Americans. She would, in effect, be insulting herself because she, too, married an American serviceman.

The nuggets are from Yuh's formal interviews with 16 military brides and her participant-observation research with about 150 military brides and their families, which she conducted primarily from 1993 through 1996 in the Delaware Valley and surrounding areas. Yuh changes the names of her interviewees to protect their confidentiality and her oral history interviews are not publicly available, but her groundbreaking study of Korean women who married United States military men nonetheless is a first-rate example of how oral history can shed light on otherwise hidden aspects of American society. Yuh conducted all the interviews in Korean and translated them into English, and she provides brief biographical sketches of each of the women she interviewed. Coupled with ample quotations from the interviews, this background enlivens Yuh's work in ways scholarly treatises based on oral history interviews often fail to do.

Yuh, a former reporter for Newsday who now teaches history at Northwestern University, sets the stage for the oral history interviews with a timeline of modern Korean history. She offers an extensive discussion of the South Korean camptowns and the complex relationships between an impoverished Korea and a wealthy, powerful America. Yuh cites estimates by Korean camptown activists that up to 25,000 women are engaged in sex work in those communities.

Since 1950, an estimated 100,000 Korean women have entered the United States as brides of American soldiers. And while many of them met their husbands while working on military bases as clerical staff or in other civilian jobs or while taking English classes taught by servicemen, all of the Korean wives live in the shadow of those camptowns. The military brides have often sponsored the subsequent chain immigration of other family members—parents, siblings, and the like—yet even their extended families shun them and treat them as the skeleton in the family's closet.

Two of the most interesting discussions in Yuh's book relate to the women's complex negotiations within their families over language and food and how those central characteristics of culture affect their self-identity. Language was particularly problematic for the women who came to the United States in the 1950s. They grew up in a Korea that was a colony of Japan. Japanese was the language of educated Koreans, and many of the women had only a rudimentary knowledge of Korean. With American domination beginning in the 1950s, English became the language of economic survival. As a result, many of the older women in Yuh's study had no language in which they could fully express themselves. She says every woman she interviewed cited language as one of her biggest challenges in immigrant life. Yuh notes that while social service providers often recommend English-language courses as a solution to the women's problems, no one suggests that the husbands or families learn to speak Korean. The burden of adaptation, in other words, is entirely on the woman's shoulders.

Food also is an ongoing sore point for the Korean women, who, for the sake of prized family harmony, go along with their husbands' insistence on American cooking. The earliest Korean military brides came to a United States where familiar ingredients for Korean foods were unavailable. Some complained of near starvation for lack of the spicy dishes to which they were accustomed. But even more recently, as the Korean immigrant population in many areas has grown large enough to support Korean groceries, many of the women acquiesce in their families' insistence on eating "American." The women enjoy Korean dishes alone or with Korean friends, refusing to allow their Koreanness to be erased.

Yuh makes much of this American food dominance, seeing it as yet another example of American imperialism. But if there were Korean brides of British, French, German, or Scandanavian soldiers, would the food picture be any different? I suspect it's difficult to know how the individual interplay of gender roles, nationality, and sheer availability of ingredients for "foreign" foods affect what people eat for dinner.

Yuh also ascribes racist motives to the upsurge in multicultural interest in schools and community organizations. Many of her Korean informants described participating in multicultural festivals, which they saw as an opportunity to share the beauty of Korean culture with an American audience and thereby affirm their Korean identity. Yuh argues that such celebrations of multiculturalism serve instead to portray "ethnic" cultures as superficial and reinforce the Korean women's "alien" status. While an interesting point for debate, the political critique of multiculturalism seems far afield from the focus of her oral history materials.

Nonetheless, this book offers fascinating insights into a little-studied population, exploring the ways Korean military wives coped with the transition to a new homeland while preserving their links to the Korea that remains in their hearts.


Mary Kay Quinlan
Oral History Association Newsletter Editor

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