Korean Military Brides

Korean Military Brides

This article relates to The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Franny Choi's The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On delves into how Korean women were treated before, during and after the Korean War, as well as the generational trauma and isolation resulting from this treatment. One aspect of this is the experience of military brides, or Korean women who married members of the American military stationed in the country during or after the war. Despite the horrors some of these women may have experienced or feared in Korea, including economic hardship and sexual violence, there is a significant amount of difficulty that comes with fleeing one's homeland for marriage in a foreign country. In many accounts of Korean military bride history, the actual lives of individual women are not present in the narrative. Because of this, I would like to highlight the experiences of some Korean women who were military brides or tried to become military brides.

Many women who have been open to sharing their stories are heard in Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America by Ji-Yeon Yuh. Historian Yuh describes the cultural lure of the United States for Korean women during a time of American occupation. Camptowns, or areas where American soldiers would go to seek out women and liquor (and which still exist in some forms), were historically places associated with women who were sex workers and hoped to eventually marry an American.

Novelist Kang Suk-kyung, who resided in a camptown in order to write about the women who lived there, describes a camptown as "an island floating between Korea and America. Neither mainland nor sea, just an island." This imagery speaks to the level of both desperation and isolation these women faced.

Some women were attracted to camptowns because, in Korea, America was seen through the lens of Hollywood glamor. One woman Yuh interviews recounts seeking out camptowns in the 1980s due to her consumption of American media and her poor household growing up. "I never imagined that I would do this kind of work," she says, "And it doesn't even earn lots of money. If I had known that it was this kind of place, I would have never come." The disconnect between reality and the dream of freedom was a common and very dismal aspect of camptown life.

Korean women who married foreigners and moved to America did not all have a history of sex work in camptowns. Nonetheless, the stories of camptown women and military brides have an interesting overlap when it comes to the inherent isolation and negative stigma associated with both. Bai Juhyun describes wanting her parents' approval to marry her American fiance, who she met on a military base while working as a typist in the 1960s during her early 20s. When trying to explain to Yuh why her parents reacted with such disdain, Bai had to confront her own biases about Korean-American interracial marriages, even if she herself had one. Yuh summarizes her conversation with Bai as follows:

"Ms. Bai felt the shadow of camptown, but could not bring herself to explicitly discuss it. She started to say that some 80 to 90 percent of military brides were former camptown women, but then stopped, unable to find a way to say this without, in her view, putting down women who married Americans. It would be an insult to herself as well…this sense of a shared image…was expressed by every military bride I encountered."

The aftereffects of the Korean War left many women who fled the country — or tried — dealing with an identity crisis. Whether that manifested in feelings of isolation or other emotional difficulties, one thing is for sure: These women dealt with more than what history has let them vocalize. It is important to spotlight not just this aspect of life in Korea, but the women behind it.

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This "beyond the book article" relates to The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. It originally ran in February 2023 and has been updated for the November 2023 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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