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Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, by Grace M. Cho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 232 pp., photographs. $67.50 cloth; $22.50 paper.
Deeply personal and emotional, Haunting the Korean Diaspora is a pastiche of traumatic memories generated by the Korean War. Sometimes known as the Forgotten War in U.S. history, the unresolved traumas from the unfinished war haunt the violated and the progeny in temporal and spatial distance. Intertwined with sociological approaches, the book brings out an ugly past-violations against women, civilians, and, unknowingly, agains the soldiers who fought during the Korean War-that had been erased from history in a beautifully woven dreamwork.
Cho artfully begins the book by presenting the lack of historical memory of the past. Some personal, others collective, the unspeakable pasts of the women who were involved in the sex industry during the volatile modern history of Korea are discussed in the beginning. Cho introduces ''An Uncertain Beginning'' of her own family history in her narrative boxes that indicates her personal stories that are intertwined with the histories of Korean American families whose immigration is tightly connected with the Korean War. Then Cho states the term, yanggongju (broadly, women in the sex industry around the camp towns in Korea), the very word she...