- Author: Byun, Hwayeong
- Title: Reconstruction of Memory of the Half-breeds as Diaspora - Focusing on Ten Thousand Sorrow and Memories of My Ghost Brother
- Language: Korean
- Journal: Theses on Korean Literature 65: 615-641
- Publication Year: 2013
- Publisher: The Korean Literary Association
■ Abstract This article focuses on Ten Thousand Sorrow and Memories of My Ghost Brother, the former is written by Elizabeth Kim while the latter by Heinz Insu Fenkel. Both are autobiographical novels. In autobiographical novel, generally, it is ensuring the authenticity of autobiography while adding its fabrication as a fiction. Due to its nature of narrative that subject of description ‘I’ talk to the experience subject ‘I’, ‘I’ in the autobiographical novel should be located at the multi layers which constructed between the subject of description and the experience subject. So the whole which related with and constructed by the multi layer is represented in one space, where the ‘I’ in the novel and the identity of author as ‘real person’ are exposed.
In Ten Thousand Sorrow and Memories of My Ghost Brother, the 'I' or the author is Amerasian. That is, she/he was born as a half-breed between US Army father and Korean mother. Because of their socio-biological position as minority, Elizabeth Kim and Heinz Insu Fenkel who are Amerasian as well as diaspora, were not accepted or rejected by ‘our’ society in Korea where is their native land and in America where they migrated by force or involuntary. The color and appearance of the body as half-breed became a kind of socio-cultural marker which indicating they are different ‘thing’ and should be separate from both of ‘our’ society. However, there are differences among them, depending on their body color, appearance, sex, family(oriented or adapted), and etcetera, even though they were/are called as ‘half-breed’, ‘Amerasian’, or other names by the terms of politics of identity in Korea and America. |
