by Theodore Hughes [www.japanfocus.org for 16 April 2007]
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. provides a privileged site for Americans to "remember" the Vietnam War. The monument, however, produces meaning, and constructs a national narrative, precisely in its performance of differentiation, its exclusion of the deaths of the "other" (the Vietnamese).
The monument also elides those who fought on the side of the U.S. during the war: the "more flags" program that brought Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand into the war in the mid-1960s does not appear on the screen of the U.S. national imaginary. Americans do not learn in their high school history textbooks that over 300,000 South Korean troops fought in Vietnam, and that over 4,000 of them were killed.
This article considers the meaning of the Vietnam War for Korean soldiers through analysis of Hwang Suk-Young's novel, The Shadow of Arms.
Theodore Hughes is an assistant professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, at Columbia University. This article was written for Japan Focus. Posted on April 12, 2007.
Read more . . . [see also several other Korea articles carried by the weekly JapanFocus journal]
Monday, April 16, 2007
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