Journal of American Studies, 42 (2008), 2, 317–340 f 2008 Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S0021875808004702 Printed in the United Kingdom

Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of

My Ghost Brother : An Amerasian
Rewriting of Rudyard
Kipling’s Kim
KUN J ONG L EE

Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother is an Amerasian rewriting of Rudyard Kipling’s
Kim. Fenkl transforms the adventures of a white boy in colonial India into those of an
Amerasian boy in post-/neocolonial Korea and changes the Russo-British rivalry of the
nineteenth-century Great Game into the Russo-/Communist–American competition of the
twentieth-century Cold War. He resurrects the native voice silenced by colonial discourse and
highlights the dilemma of Asian women and their biracial children. He ultimately denounces
the troubling legacy of the US military presence in Korea and critiques the centuries-old
Western imperialist project in Asia.

In her 1997 overview of Korean American literature, Elaine H. Kim states

that writings by Korean wives of American servicemen are conspicuously
missing from published Korean American texts. Kim problematizes the
absence of the voices of the Korean women married to American soldiers,
since they constitute a significant part of the Korean American population
and have sponsored a considerable portion of Korean immigration to the
USA.1 In her later survey of Korean American literature, Kim duly notes the
significance of Korean women’s voices in documentary films and scholarly
books on the Korean prostitutes and their biracial children in camptowns
around US military installations in Korea: Diana S. Lee and Grace Yoon
Kyung Lee’s Camp Arirang (1995), J. T. Takagi and Hye Jung Park’s

Kun Jong Lee is Professor of English at Korea University, Seoul, Korea. He is grateful to
Heinz Insu Fenkl, Min-Jung Kim, Eun Kyung Min, Hyungji Park, Myung Sook Ryu, and an
anonymous reader of the Journal of American Studies for their insightful comments on earlier
versions of this article. This essay was supported by a Korea Research Foundation Grant
(KRF-2003-041-A00510).
1
Elaine H. Kim, ‘‘ Korean American Literature, ’’ in King-kok Cheung, ed., An Interethnic
Companion to Asian American Literature (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1997), 156,
180 n1.
318 Kun Jong Lee
The Women Outside (1996), Katherine H. S. Moon’s Sex among Allies (1997),
and Ji-Yeon Yuh’s Beyond the Shadow of Camptown (2002).2 Not only Korean
American filmmakers and scholars but also poets and novelists have gradu-
ally addressed the issue of the Korean women, servicing or married to
American soldiers, and their Amerasian children. In fact, literature on the
camptown Korean women and their mixed-blood children has comprised a
growing sub-genre of Korean American literature : Myung Mi Kim’s ‘‘ Into
Such Assembly’’ (1989) and ‘‘A Rose of Sharon’’ (1989), Heinz Insu Fenkl’s
Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996), Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999),
Ishle Yi Park’s ‘‘ Saewoomtuh Flower Shop ’’ (2000), Don Lee’s ‘‘ Domo
Arigato ’’ (2001), and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl (2002).
Out of the Korean American literary texts on camptown women and
Amerasian children, Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother is a unique text :
unlike other texts, it is an autobiographical narrative by an Amerasian writer
born of a Korean woman and an American soldier.3 Fenkl’s narrative re-
alistically presents the world of an Amerasian boy growing up in a Korean
camptown during the Vietnam War. It not only provides an intimate account
of the camptown world positioned at the interstice between US military life
and Korean civilian life in the 1960s but also challenges popular assumptions
about camptown women and Amerasian children. Despite its unique sig-
nificance, Fenkl’s narrative has not been properly studied by scholars of
Korean American literature. There is no article-length study on Memories of
My Ghost Brother, although some critical studies of Korean/Asian American
literature mention or discuss the text.4 Significantly enough, though, two
articles – Elaine Kim’s ‘‘ Myth, Memory, and Desire’’ and Hyungji Park’s
‘‘ The Globalization of Asian American Studies’’ – out of the limited existing

2
Elaine H. Kim, ‘‘ Roots and Wings : An Overview of Korean American Literature,
1934–2003, ’’ in Young-Key Kim-Renaud, R. Richard Grinker, and Kirk W. Larsen, eds.,
The Sigur Center Asia Papers #20: Korean American Literature (Washington, DC: The George
Washington University, 2004), 12.
3
It is not easy to categorize Memories of My Ghost Brother, because the narrative mixes fact and
fiction inextricably. Even Fenkl has called his work variously an ‘‘ autobiographical novel, ’’
a ‘‘ displaced ethnographic narrative, ’’ an ‘‘ autoethnography, ’’ and an ‘‘ interstitial work. ’’
4
See Gregory Choy, ‘‘ Sites of Function in Asian American Literature : Tropics of Place,
Agents of Space, ’’ University of Washington Ph.D. dissertation (1999), 147–56; Elaine H.
Kim, ‘‘ Myth, Memory, and Desire : Homeland and History in Contemporary Korean
American Writing and Visual Art, ’’ in Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Heike Raphael-
Hernandez, eds., Holding Their Own : Perspectives on the Multi-ethnic Literatures of the United States
(Tübingen : Stauffenburg Verlag, 2000), 80–83 ; Alexandra Chung Suh, ‘‘ ‘ Movie in My
Mind’ : American Culture and Military Prostitution in Asia,’’ Columbia University Ph.D.
dissertation, 2001), 261–63 ; and Hyungji Park, ‘‘ The Globalization of Asian American
Studies,’’ Hyundae youngme sosul (Studies in Modern Fiction), 10, 1 (2003), 59–62.
 Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother 319
critical scholarship on Fenkl mention the intertextuality between Fenkl’s
Memories of My Ghost Brother and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). Kim states
that Insu, Fenkl’s narrator-cum-protagonist, ‘‘ wonders why his father thinks
he should read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. ’’5 In a more detailed study, Park notes
Fenkl’s identification of ‘‘ the U. S. presence ’’ in Asia with ‘‘the Great Game
of British Empire,’’ compares Kipling’s Kim and Fenkl’s Insu, and discusses
Insu’s father’s direct allusion to Kipling’s Kim.6
Indeed, as Park notes, Insu vividly remembers a crucial moment in his
relationship with his father, Sergeant Heinz Fenkl. After his first tour of duty
in Vietnam, Sergeant Fenkl took his seven-year-old son to the Yongsan
Garrison in Seoul, Korea. To take a picture of his Amerasian son, the
American sergeant positioned Insu astride a howitzer at the edge of the
parade field of the US 8th Army Headquarters. When Insu asked what his
father had done in Vietnam, the American soldier did not answer the ques-
tion but said enigmatically, ‘‘You’re sitting on top of Zam-Zammah! ’’ Heinz
went on to exclaim to his bewildered son : ‘‘ Thy father was a pastry cook!’’
Insu repeated his question, but Heinz continued ‘‘some sort of riddle ’’:
‘‘ I was a red bull on a green field.’’7 Sergeant Fenkl resumed his riddle later
when he said to Insu that he would soon leave for ‘‘ [t]he Great Game ’’ again
(132). Needless to say, Zam-Zammah, a red bull on a green field, and the
Great Game are key images in Kipling’s Kim. A great admirer of Kim, Heinz
in fact reenacted the opening scene of Kipling’s fiction when he sat Insu
astraddle the heavy gun and repeated Kim’s taunting exclamation at the
American military compound. Moreover, he bought Insu a cloth-bound
copy of the novel on his son’s eleventh birthday, and quoted Kipling to his
son again when Insu was in high school. Thus Heinz tried to pass his fatherly
message down to his son through Kipling’s Kim throughout his life. He died
believing that Insu ‘‘ had made some decision about [Kim’s] contents, ’’ his
message to his son (63).
Most prophetically, however, the photograph of the Amerasian boy
astride the howitzer at the US military compound in Korea, the visual rep-
resentation of Heinz’s message, never came out. In fact, Insu did not get his
father’s message encoded in Kim even at the time of his father’s death,
sixteen years after his posture for the photo, simply because he had not
read Kipling’s novel. It was only after the fourth anniversary of his father’s
death that Insu read Kim and could understand what his father had meant by

5 6
Kim, ‘‘ Myth, Memory, and Desire,’’ 81. Park, 59.
7
Fenkl, Memories of My Ghost Brother (New York : Dutton, 1996), 127. Subsequent references
to Memories of My Ghost Brother are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.
320 Kun Jong Lee
Zam-Zammah, a red bull on a green field, and the Great Game. Nonetheless,
the narrator makes Kim one of the most crucial palimpsests of Memories of My
Ghost Brother, as if to make up for his long neglect of Kipling’s text. Indeed,
one can find what Fenkl calls ‘‘ the remarkable coincidences’’ and ‘‘ the ironic
resonances ’’ between the two texts throughout Memories of My Ghost Brother
(63).
This essay will flesh out the full spectrum of Fenkl’s allusions to Kipling
and the layers of irony in those allusions. In Memories of My Ghost Brother,
Fenkl twists key episodes and political contexts of Kim to emphasize the
continuity of the Great Game in Asia: he transforms the adventures of a
white boy in colonial India into those of an Amerasian boy in post-/
neocolonial Korea and changes the Russo-British rivalry of the nineteenth-
century Great Game into the Russo-/Communist–American competition of
the twentieth-century Cold War. In so doing, Fenkl focusses less on the
achievements than on the predicaments of American Great Game players.
At the same time, he resurrects the native voice silenced by colonial dis-
course and highlights the dilemma of Asian women and their biracial
children. While thus identifying and problematizing the US Great Game, the
Korean American writer ultimately denounces the troubling legacy of the US
military presence in Korea and critiques the centuries-old Western imperialist
project and its devastating effects in Asia in his postcolonial rewriting of the
British colonial text from a uniquely Amerasian perspective.

Zam-Zammah, recalled by Sergeant Fenkl, is a huge iron cannon built on the

orders of an Afghan warrior-king in 1762. The largest gun ever made in India
in its day, Zam-Zammah had an appropriate inscription in Persian on its
barrel : ‘‘taker of the Ramparts of Heaven. ’’ As befitted its impressive size
and awesome firepower, the cannon was widely believed to have ‘‘ divine
powers ’’ and served as ‘‘ a powerful talisman for victory. ’’8 The narrator of
Kim repeats this popular belief : ‘‘Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-
breathing dragon,’ hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is
always first of the conqueror’s loot.’’9 Kim, the eponymous hero of Kim,
makes his first appearance while playing with his native friends a king-of-the-
castle game on Zam-Zammah opposite the Lahore Museum. After first
clambering over Zam-Zammah, Kim repels Abdullah and Chota Lal by
kicking them off the trunnion and wheel of the ancient gun. Kipling’s
8
Peter Hopkirk, Quest for Kim (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002 ; first
published 1996), 44.
9
Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Zohreh T. Sullivan (New York : Norton, 2002), 3. Subsequent
references to Kim are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.
 Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother 321
narrator justifies Kim’s revilement of and tyranny over his native friends
succinctly: ‘‘the English held the Punjab and Kim was English ’’ (3). Indeed,
Kim uses local history to explain to his Muslim and Hindu friends his ex-
clusive right to possess the cannon : ‘‘ All Mussalmans fell off Zam-Zammah
long ago’’ ; ‘‘ The Hindus fell off Zam-Zammah too. The Mussalmans pushed
them off ’’ (6).
Well aware of the political significance of Zam-Zammah in the local
history, Sergeant Fenkl positions his Korean American son astride a howit-
zer, calls the heavy gun Zam-Zammah, and repeats Kim’s teasing taunt to the
native boys. His recall of Zam-Zammah is a most appropriate one, for the
American howitzer in the Yongsan Garrison has a symbolic meaning strik-
ingly similar to that of Zam-Zammah in Punjab. Yongsan, the site of the US
military compound, is close to the Han River and has been used as the site
of advance command and logistics by foreign invaders at least from the
thirteenth century. Since Yongsan has been the site of a bitter legacy of
foreign invasions and occupations and is still the prominent symbol of
Korea’s neocolonial status,10 some Koreans have self-derisively expressed
the idea that ‘‘ those who rule Yongsan are the masters of the [Korean]
peninsula.’’11 It is striking that the self-scorning expression echoes
the matter-of-fact statement of Kipling’s narrator : ‘‘ Who hold Zam-
Zammah _ hold the Punjab. ’’ Not surprisingly, then, as Zam-Zammah
under British control justified the British occupation of Punjab, so the
howitzer in the Yongsan Garrison proclaims the neoimperialist presence of
the USA in Korea and reminds Koreans of their neocolonial status every
day : the howitzer under the flagpole of the US 8th Army Headquarters in the
capital city of Korea fires ‘‘ deafening blanks’’ when the Stars and Stripes
comes down and ‘‘ the sad taps music’’ is played just before sundown
everyday (127). Therefore Sergeant Fenkl, part of an imperialist game, reveals
his imperialist unconscious when he equates the American howitzer in the
Yongsan Garrison with Zam-Zammah opposite the Lahore museum.
Sergeant Fenkl discloses his imperialist mindset also when he states that
he was ‘‘ a red bull on a green field’’ (127). A red bull on a green field was first
mentioned by Kim’s father, Kimball O’Hara, in Kim. In his opium-induced
delirium, Kimball used to predict his son’s glorious future : ‘‘ Nine hundred

10
The Yongsan Garrison at the heart of Seoul is an extraterritorial zone exempt from the
legal jurisdiction of Korea. The American military base in the capital city had been a source
of anti-American sentiment among Koreans, and Korea and the USA agreed in 2004 to
relocate the Yongsan base to Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometers south of Seoul, as a key part of the
US reshuffle of its troops in Korea.
11
Yong-shik Choe, ‘‘Yongsan to Be Turned into Mammoth Park,’’ Korea Herald, 19 Jan. 2004, 3.
322 Kun Jong Lee
first-class devils, whose God was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to
him’’ (4). A native priest in Umballa casts Kim’s horoscope and interprets
the red bull as ‘‘a red and an angry sign of War’’ (38). Indeed, ‘‘ the great Red
Bull on a background of Irish green’’ turns out to be ‘‘ the crest of the
Mavericks ’’ (70). The Mavericks were a fictive Irish regiment in the British
Army and Kimball was the color sergeant of ‘‘the finest Regiment in the
world ’’ (4). By calling himself a red bull on a green field, then, Sergeant Fenkl
identifies with Sergeant O’Hara, who fetishized his regimental device. In fact,
there are intriguing similarities between the two white sergeants : both serve
the interests of the empires that subjugated or defeated their own
countries – Kimball was an Irishman in the British army, and Heinz is a
German immigrant in the US army. Kimball married a woman who had been
a nursemaid in ‘‘ a Colonel’s family’’ (3) ; Heinz’s wife lives in the ‘‘house of
the Japanese Colonel’’ (5). Kimball and Heinz also both named their sons
born in Asia after themselves. Moreover, their (neo)colonial agency is at best
ambivalent, since they are simultaneously agents and victims of (neo)col-
onialism. After all, both white sergeants stationed in Asia are displaced men
par excellence in times of colonialism and neocolonialism. Kimball moved
with his regiment under the control of the British Empire. After leaving his
regiment, he took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi Railway and loafed
up and down the line. He drifted away and almost went native by living with
a half-caste woman. Heinz was born in Czechoslovakia, but his family was
‘‘ chased’’ out of their home to Germany (71). An outsider in Czechoslovakia
and Germany, Heinz became an alien again when he immigrated to the USA.
After joining the US army, he was sent to Korea, where he married a native
woman. While stationed in Korea, he did two tours of duty in Vietnam in the
1960s. The displaced soldier’s life on the periphery of the empire is succinctly
described when Insu’s uncle advises Insu to study hard : ‘‘ Otherwise, you’ll
be a grunt just like [your father]. You’ll wind up in some no-name country
with some war going on and you’ll knock up some dark-skinned whore and
end up marrying her ’’ (221).
A latter-day ‘‘ red bull on a green field,’’ Sergeant Fenkl appropriately
makes a joking allusion to the Mavericks and their regimental device. His
jeep substitutes the UN flag with the Jolly Roger, which is ‘‘ emblazoned in
red with ‘Alpha Company’ and ‘Angry Alpha’’’ (251). On their way to
Panmunjom in the middle of the Demilitarized Zone, Sergeant Fenkl and
Private Jones sing the ‘‘ Angry Alpha song’’ :
Every place we go-oh
People want to know-oh
So we tell them
 Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother 323
We are the Alpha
Angry, angry Alpha
Mad, mad Alpha (253)
The ‘‘ Angry Alpha song’’ of ‘‘ Hooligan Fenkl and his Gang’’ (251) in a US
army jeep curiously reminds one of the Mavericks’ marching song, ‘‘ The
Mulligan Guard,’’ in Kim:

We crave your condescension

To tell you what we know
Of marching in the Mulligan Guards
To Sligo Port below ! (71)
In fact, as Kim hears ‘‘ The Mulligan Guard’’ after he finds the fictive regi-
mental device of the Mavericks, so Insu hears the ‘‘ Angry Alpha song ’’ after
he sees the unofficial company flag of ‘‘Hooligan Fenkl and his Gang.’’
In Kim, the Mavericks entrain at Umballa for ‘‘thee War’’ in the far north
of India (84). A latter-day Maverick, Sergeant Fenkl leaves Korea twice for
the Vietnam War in Memories of My Ghost Brother. Significantly, the American
sergeant calls the Vietnam War the ‘‘ Great Game ’’ (132). The Great Game,
a term coined by Lieutenant Arthur Conolly in the mid-nineteenth century,
refers to that century’s imperial contest between Britain and Russia for
hegemony in the Middle East and Central Asia. In their imperial contest,
Britain and Russia sought to win the friendship, confidence, and allegiance of
the tribes and semi-independent states in the political no-man’s-lands sep-
arating the two empires. The century-long Great Game was fundamentally a
‘‘ shadowy struggle for political ascendancy’’ between Russia and Britain in
the buffer zone,12 since the Anglo-Russian rivalry was carried on mostly
through ‘‘ diplomacy, alliances, client states, espionage, exploration, surveys,
maps, and the out-positioning of each other along their border areas. ’’13 The
imperial rivalry between Victorian Britain and tsarist Russia was endowed
with a mythic status by Kipling in Kim: Mahbub Ali states that the Great
Game ‘‘ is so large that one sees but a little at a time,’’ Lurgan understands
that the Great Game ‘‘never ceases day and night, ’’ Kim thinks that it ‘‘ runs
like a shuttle throughout all Hind, ’’ and Hurree Chunder Mookerjee predicts
that the Great Game will be finished only ‘‘when everyone is dead’’ (143, 148,
188, 185). The Great Game seemed to end with the Anglo-Russian

12
Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game : The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York : Kodansha
International, 1992), 2.
13
Blair B. Kling, ‘‘ Kim in Historical Context, ’’ in Kim, ed. Sullivan, 302.
324 Kun Jong Lee
Convention in 1907,14 but a second round resumed during the Cold War
period between the USA and the USSR.15 It is the continuity between the
Great Game and the Cold War which Sergeant Fenkl clearly identifies when
he calls the Vietnam War the Great Game.
The British players in the Great Game were convinced that St. Petersburg’s
ultimate ambition was to invade and dominate India, the treasure of the
British Empire. In a similar vein, American policymakers during the Cold
War era believed that the Kremlin’s eventual intention was to communize all
the ‘‘ free ’’ Asian countries. Thus the Englishmen’s obsessive fear of the
tsarist Russian threats to Central and South Asia in the nineteenth century
anticipated the Americans’ paranoid anxiety over the Communist Russian
designs on East and Southeast Asia in the twentieth century. Most interest-
ingly, the American version of the Great Game also used the metaphor of a
game : dominoes. The ‘‘domino theory ’’ was first mentioned by Dwight D.
Eisenhower in 1953,16 but its classic example had already been expressed by
Harry S. Truman at the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950: ‘‘if South
Korea was allowed to fall Communist leaders would be emboldened to
override nations closer to our own shores. ’’17 The domino theory provided
the USA with one of the rationales justifying US intervention in Korea and
Vietnam. The theory arguing for the need to contain Communist influences
with military power developed most fully during the Vietnam War. With the
collapse of Vietnam, American policymakers feared, the Asian Communist
bloc controlled by Moscow and Beijing would not only invade neighboring
Asian countries but also spread communism beyond the Iron Curtain and
the Bamboo Curtain to the rest of the world, ultimately isolating and en-
dangering the last domino, the USA. The apocalyptic vision of the domino
theory that viewed every military confrontation in Asia as a part of a larger
plan of the USSR seemed to come true when the most serious threats to
US Asian front lines broke out in Korea and Vietnam consecutively in
January 1968.
Thirty-one heavily armed North Korean commandos left Pyongyang on
16 January 1968 in an attempt to assassinate the South Korean president and

14
Hopkirk, The Great Game, 521.
15
Interestingly enough, the third round of the Great Game began with the end of the Cold
War and the collapse of the USSR in Central Asia. In the New Great Game not only the US
and Russia, but also several European and Asian countries, are competing against each
other to secure oil, other raw materials, and new markets in the region. See Hopkirk,
The Great Game, xv–xviii.
16
Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power : The History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century
17
(Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1994), 223. Quoted in Ninkovich, 186.
 Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother 325
the US ambassador to Korea. After crossing the demilitarized zone (DMZ)
undetected, they came within five hundred yards of the Blue House,
President Park Chung Hee’s presidential residence, and encountered the
now-alerted South Korean military and police on 21 January 1968. In the
ensuing firefight, twenty-seven guerrillas were killed, three escaped, and one
was captured.18 The ‘‘Blue House Raid’’19 was a volatile prelude to the Pueblo
incident and the Tet offensive. Insu describes the two military confrontations
between the USA and Asian communist regimes succinctly: two days after
the Blue House Raid, ‘‘ the U. S. S. Pueblo, an electronic spy ship, was
captured off the coast of North Korea _ Later that month, during the
Vietnamese New Year’s celebration of Têt, the NVA and the Vietcong
simultaneously attacked over a hundred towns, cities, and military instal-
lations all over Vietnam’’ (131). Most fittingly, Insu situates the Pueblo incident
and the Tet offensive in the context of the Great Game : he mentions his
father’s Great Game for the first time after his description of the two military
confrontations (132). After all, the Pueblo incident and the Tet offensive had
to do with military information and espionage, most closely associated with
the Great Game. The Pueblo was officially ‘‘ an oceanographic research vessel
designed for ‘technical research operations to support oceanographic,
electromagnetic, and related research projects. ’ ’’20 But the secret mission of
the auxiliary general environmental research vessel was to ‘‘ determine the
nature and extent of North Korean naval activity, conduct surveillance of
Soviet naval units in the Tsushima Strait _ [and] report the deployment of
North Korean and Soviet units.’’21 Since the intelligence-gathering ship was
disguised as a research vessel, it was truly in the tradition of the nineteenth-
century players of the British Great Game who had been disguised as
merchants, pilgrims, and holy men while collecting information among
hostile tribes and states. The Tet offensive in Vietnam has also been recorded
in US military history as a case of the failure of intelligence-gathering. US
forces could not anticipate ‘‘ the scope, intensity, targets, and timing ’’ of the
Tet offensive, which marked the turning point between US escalation in
and withdrawal from the Vietnam War. This was so simply because the
Communists had used a series of ‘‘deceptive strategies to mislead the allies

18
Richard A. Mobley, Flash Point North Korea : The Pueblo and EC-121 Crises (Annapolis : Naval
Institute Press, 2003), 15.
19
The ‘‘ Blue House Raid, ’’ conspicuously missing in the original edition of Memories of My
Ghost Brother, is duly added in the 2005 edition. See Fenkl, Memories of My Ghost Brother (n.p.:
Bo-Leaf, 2005), 131.
20
Mitchell B. Lerner, The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy
21
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 68. Mobley, 25.
326 Kun Jong Lee
about the location of the offensive and to hide preparations for the coming
attacks. ’’22
Some American policymakers suspected that the Pueblo incident and the
Tet offensive were linked to each other. They believed that Moscow might
have backed the North Korean provocation in order to inflict a fatal blow on
the US position in the Vietnam War and ultimately to cause a chain reaction
of the dominoes. Naturally enough, the GIs stationed in Korea did not
differentiate between the two military confrontations involving the US
military. ‘‘ The mood among the GIs in Korea,’’ notes Insu,
became thick and black, full of hate for Asian people and tense with the fear that the
North Koreans might invade. The GIs were afraid to stay in Korea, but even more
afraid that they might be shipped to Cam Ranh Bay to join some counteroffensive
against the North Vietnamese. (131–32)
Unlike most GIs, however, Sergeant Fenkl volunteered for a second tour of
duty in Vietnam, seeking ‘‘ retribution’’ for his comrades in arms killed
during the Tet offensive (132). The American red bull on a green field thus
followed in the footsteps of British Great Game players: it was not un-
common that Britain sent punitive expeditions when some British players
had been killed by hostile tribes or states during the Great Game.
The Great Game was carried out in the vast area that stretched from ‘‘ the
snow-capped Caucasus,’’ across ‘‘ the great deserts and mountain ranges of
Central Asia, ’’ to ‘‘ Chinese Turkestan and Tibet’’ throughout the nineteenth
century.23 Kipling focusses on the northwestern provinces of India as the
main chessboard of the Great Game in Kim. Two agents of the tsar – one
Russian and the other French – explore, survey, and map the valleys
and passes, while coming down through the Karakorum Mountains ‘‘ to
Leh _ and down the Indus to Hanlé _ and then down _ to Bushahr and
Chini valley ’’ (195). It is in Chini valley between Punjab and Tibet that
Hurree Babu and Kim foil the Russo-French plot to stir up troubles in the
Northwest Frontier region by stealing the spies’ handwritten books, diaries,
and ‘‘ native correspondence’’ ; ‘‘ the murasla’’ from Hilás to the tsar ; and
‘‘ their pictures of the country’’ (211, 203, 213). Kipling’s focus on the
northwest of India reflects his obsessive fear of a Russian threat to – and a
joint Franco-Russian invasion of – India through the northwestern passes,
already shown in his ‘‘ The Man Who Was’’ (1890), ‘‘ The Ballad of the King’s
Jest ’’ (1890), and ‘‘ The Truce of the Bear’’ (1898).

22
James J. Wirtz, The Tet Offensive : Intelligence Failure in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
23
Press, 1994 ; first published 1991), 2, 3. Hopkirk, The Great Game, 2.
 Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother 327
Sergeant Fenkl was sent to the central highlands of Vietnam. Like the
tribal lands in the northwest of India, the central highlands of Vietnam were
a strategically important area, because they included the Ho Chi Minh trail,
the North Vietnamese infiltration route and supply line for Vietcong forces
in the south. Aware of the strategic significance of the central highlands, the
US Central Intelligence Agency first used the Montagnards living there ‘‘ to
gather intelligence on Viet Cong movements. ’’ The CIA also recruited and
organized the Montagnards with Village Defense and Mountain Scout pro-
grams.24 Like the Indian ‘‘ pundits’’ recruited and trained as indispensable
players of the Great Game by the Survey of India,25 the Montagnard trainees
were taught by the CIA ‘‘ to use weapons, to form an intelligence system,’’
to use radios, and to read maps.26 The CIA’s highland operations were
later turned over to the US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, which
deployed special forces in the central highlands to train Montagnard strike
forces. A Green Beret on an advisory team, a special forces A detachment,
Sergeant Fenkl duly recruited and trained Montagnard Strikers against the
Vietcong and North Vietnamese army in the highlands near Nha Trang
(127–28, 256).

One of the most striking features in Kim is that the major players of the Great
Game belong to peoples subjugated and colonized by the British Empire,
and even those ‘‘ unpacified’’ by it : Kim is Irish, Hurree is a Bengali, and
Mahbub is a Pathan. Kipling’s fantasy about coopting alien peoples for the
interests of the British Empire ultimately makes an Irish orphan, a Bengali
Babu, and a Pathan horse-trader ‘‘ happy with British rule, and even _ col-
laborator[s] with it. ’’27 In Memories of My Ghost Brother, however, the
Montagnards are critical of the US policy of mobilizing the highlanders in the
American Great Game. This is best demonstrated in the folktale
a Montagnard chief tells to Sergeant Fenkl. The Montagnard folktale is
basically an explanatory story of why ‘‘ the monkeys steal corn and rice from
people and they’re always screaming in anger’’ (257). But the monkey story is
more than a purely explanatory myth, since it metaphorically reflects the
history of the Montagnards, who have, over the centuries, been driven from

24
Gerald Cannon Hickey, Free in the Forest : Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands
1954–1976 (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1982), 74–75.
25
When certain areas beyond India’s northern frontiers were judged to be perilous for British
Great Game players, hand-picked and highly trained Indians known as the ‘‘ pundits’’ were
often sent in the guise of traders or holy men on pilgrimage to gather information.
26
Hopkirk, Quest for Kim, 56–57. Hickey, 76, 78.
27
Edward W. Said, introduction to Kim (London : Penguin, 1989), 26.
328 Kun Jong Lee
the fertile areas to the mountains of Southeast Asia by the Vietnamese.
More significantly, the folktale has contemporary political relevance as well.
With the folktale, the Montagnard chief bitterly regrets his and other tribal
leaders’ connivance in the US recruitment and training of Montagnard
youths, many of whom were ultimately killed in the Vietnam War: ‘‘ Now the
monkeys still trusted the men for their wisdom, so they went home,
and _ butchered all their children ’’ (257). The chief’s incorporation of the
contemporary motif in his folktale is not unique in Montagnard culture.
After all, many Montagnard carvings around highland tombs depict
‘‘ American military personnel, notably those in the Special Forces’’ and
‘‘ American military cargo aircraft and jet bombers. ’’28 More specifically, one
Jarai girl who was famous for improvising songs with contemporary motifs
sang sadly of ‘‘highland boys in the Mobile Strike Force going off in
helicopters to conduct guerrilla operations in distant places _ and never
returning. ’’29 With the monkey story, then, the Montagnard chief not only
succinctly metaphorizes that the Montagnards have been betrayed by the
Vietnamese, the French, and the Vietcong, but also eloquently predicts that
he and his tribes will be ultimately discarded again by the USA.30 Thus the
chief’s story is ‘‘ designed to evoke guilt in [the American sergeant] for his
complicity with one of the armies that forcibly recruited Montagnard sons
from their villages.’’31
Indeed, Sergeant Fenkl retells the monkey story after frankly acknowl-
edging that the USA, like the French, the South Vietnamese, and the
Vietcong, dumped the Montagnards. No less significant, he takes the place
of and identifies with the Montagnard chief when he narrates the folktale to
his half-Asian son. He seems to be sympathetic to the plight of the displaced
and mistreated Montagnards partly because his family was forcefully re-
located from Czechoslovakia to Germany by ‘‘ [s]ome bad people’’ as well
(71). Living with the Montagnards, he also came to understand their
mentality, customs, culture, and history (128–0, 255–7) and to trust the
natives much more than any South Vietnamese, his allies. He even identified
with the Montagnards symbolically when he lost his partial plate : he said to
the highlanders, who filed down their front teeth, ‘‘See, me Montagnards,

28
Gerald Cannon Hickey, Sons of the Mountains : Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands to
1954 (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1982), 446, 447.
29
Hickey, Free in the Forest, 157.
30
For another anticolonial rewriting of a folktale in Memories of My Ghost Brother see the story
of a ginseng hunter and his wife narrated by Insu’s uncle (222–27).
31
Fenkl, ‘‘ All Cultures Are Invited to the Dysfunctional Family Reunion, ’’ Realms of Fantasy,
5, 6 (Aug. 1999), 28.
 Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother 329
too ’’ (129). His experience with them seems to have left an indelible mark on
his life even after his return from Vietnam. Montagnard swords, scabbards,
and bracelets – his main mementos from Vietnam – are conspicuously dis-
played at his Quonset hut in the DMZ separating North and South Korea.
Like the Montagnards, who ‘‘ don’t quite live in this world ’’ (256), he is
sometimes ‘‘ distant, as if a part of him ha[s] not made it back ’’ from
Vietnam. Insu imagines that his father has left something ‘‘ back in the
highlands outside Nha Trang ’’ (128), where Sergeant Fenkl used to watch big
planes spraying ‘‘ beautiful’’ clouds of defoliant, Agent Orange, which would
ultimately kill him and Montagnards, as well as denude the forests of trees
and grass (129).
Sergeant Fenkl might have expressed his doubts and reservations about
his involvement in the American Great Game in his subtle identification with
the Montagnard chief who criticized the US treatment of the highlanders.
But eleven-year-old Insu just wonders why his father has told him the
monkey story. He unwittingly puts himself in the position of the
Montagnards, however, when he goes on to muse on his interstitial status as
an Amerasian who is ‘‘ caught here in the boundary between the two Koreas,
caught between North and South and East and West with [his] own blood
mixed from the blood of enemies’’ (258). The Korean American boy dif-
ferentiates two Koreas without explicitly antagonizing them, but he contra-
poses the West and the East as enemies. Fenkl subverts the popular
assumptions about Amerasians’ split ethnic identity: far from being torn by
conflicting loyalties, Insu prefers his mother’s Korea and Koreans to his
father’s USA and Americans. On his way to the DMZ area to see his white
father, the biracial boy has aligned himself with Koreans : he looks out the
window of a US army bus, gazes at the familiar Korean faces and scenery
wistfully, and concludes that he ‘‘belong[s] out there’’ (248). In his dichot-
omized world, the GIs are foreign intruders ‘‘whose boots and tanks trod the
earth of [Korea] to bitter dust’’ and ‘‘ wired’’ the peaceful Korean landscape
for immediate destruction in case of invasions from the North (248, 253).
Naturally enough, Insu feels alienated by the camaraderie of his father and
Jones, who sing the ‘‘Angry Alpha song’’ harmoniously. He senses that he
would never understand the white GIs’ ‘‘secret language of knowing glances
and inside jokes. ’’ He also differentiates himself from his white father and
affirms his Koreanness rather dejectedly : ‘‘ I would forever be tainted by a
Koreanness that would make the words ‘ gook’ or ‘ dink’ sound strange
coming from my lips, like the word ‘nigger ’ spoken by a Black GI to anyone
but his brothers ’’ (253–54). He understands perfectly well that GIs’ ‘‘ gook’’
and ‘‘ dink,’’ apparently directed against the Vietcong and North Koreans,
330 Kun Jong Lee
are in fact derogatory terms for all Asians and Asian Americans, including
himself. No less significant, the Korean American boy identifies with African
Americans as fellow victims of American racism. Insu’s identification with
African American GIs was already presaged on his first day at the Seoul
American Elementary School. The segregated US Army bus that took him to
the school colored him black : white GIs sat in the front half of the bus ;
Korean women with their biracial children, KATUSAs,32 and black GIs sat
in the back half of the bus (93).
Insu shows his pan-Asian consciousness most clearly while pondering the
significance of his father’s military insignia:
Black hourglass against a field of red. _ An Indian head in a feathered headdress
superimposed on a white star. A field of black. _ A black horsehead silhouette _
above a diagonal black slash across a shield of gold. _ The four cardinal points in
green. _ A white sword pointing upright between two yellow batwing doors against
a field of blood. _ Golden chevrons, a white long rifle against a blue bar, oak-leaf
clusters, a cross of iron. (132–33)
The first four insignia are ‘‘ the totemic symbols’’ of Sergeant Fenkl, who was
in the Seventh Division, the Second Infantry Division, the First Cavalry
Division, and the Fourth Mechanized Infantry Division (132). The last two
insignia represent the Vietnam campaign and superior marksmanship. Hence
all the six military insignia of the US army are American ‘‘ bulls on green
fields ’’ (132), clearly the descendants of the Mavericks’ regimental badge.
Whereas a red bull on a green field is ‘‘ a sort of fetish ’’ Kim follows to
confirm his whiteness (97), the US military insignia are the very ‘‘ [s]ymbols
of power’’ and ‘‘ [t]otems of the clan that kills people whose skin is the color
of [Insu’s]’’ (133). Here Insu subverts the popular binary opposition between
the ‘‘ good’’ Americans and the ‘‘bad’’ Asians. The Amerasian boy proclaims
his Asianness by sympathizing with the Vietnamese killed by his father and
other American soldiers.33 While thus transforming and multiplying the
Mavericks’ insignia into the US soldiers’ dreadful symbols against Asians,
Insu focusses on Asian women and their biracial children who are margin-
alized by or hidden beneath the mythopoeic metaphors of Zam-Zammah,
a red bull on a green field, and the Great Game in Kipling’s Kim.
32
Korean Augmentation Troops to the United States Army.
33
Insu’s sympathy with the Vietnamese derives also from his understanding that Koreans
and Vietnamese have many similarities in terms of territorial division, political ideologies,
international affiliations, religious diversity, and agricultural production, in addition to their
skin color. But Insu rejects the identification of Koreans with Vietnamese and prob-
lematizes the dichotomy between Americans and Asians by shrewdly pointing out Korea’s
contradictory position in the Vietnam War: ‘‘ The Korean army stayed on alert and con-
tinued to mobilize more men to send to Vietnam ’’ (132).
 Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother 331
Mahbub Ali states that many plans of the Great Game have ‘‘ come to
ruin’’ because of women (150). For Kim, however, the potential danger of
Asian women is not personified by the Flower of Delight who attempts to
steal information from the Afghan horse-dealer. In Kim Asian women are
dangerous less as spies than as potential sexual partners who can indigenize
and damn white men. Although Kim is pestered also by a ‘‘ girl at Akrola of
the Ford ’’ and a ‘‘ scullion’s wife ’’ (214), Kipling illustrates the danger of an
interracial relationship between a white man and an Indian woman most
clearly in his portrayal of the Woman of Shamlegh. The Woman of Shamlegh
tells Kim about her experience with a Sahib : once she was a ‘‘ Ker-lis-ti-an’’
and spoke English ; she nursed a Sahib when he was sick ; he promised to
return and wed her ; he went away, but never returned (219). She is identified
as ‘‘ Lispeth’’ (223) and, as scholars have pointed out, her narrative re-
capitulates the plot of Kipling’s 1886 ‘‘Lispeth. ’’ In the short story the title
character is an orphan and lives in the Kotgarh Mission. She rescues an
injured Englishman. She falls in love with him at first glance and makes up
her mind to marry him when he is recovered. The Englishman finds it ‘‘ very
pleasant to talk to Lispeth, and walk with Lispeth, and say nice things to her,
and call her pet names’’ while he is recovering from the injury. He also falsely
assures the girl that he will come back and marry her. But he forgets every-
thing about Lispeth after leaving Kotgarh. After learning the truth, Lispeth
returns to her ‘‘ own people.’’34
One of Lispeth’s descendants is Gannan in Memories of My Ghost Brother.
Gannan is Insu’s cousin from a rural family impoverished by the Korean
War. To help out her poor family, she comes to her aunt in search of work in
Pupyong, which has the oldest camptown in Korea.35 She works for a while
as a waitress in the Lower Four Club of the US Army Service Command
(ASCOM). She later joins the group of camptown women who are ‘‘ waiting
outside the ASCOM gate each day until a GI [takes] her through’’ (19). Insu’s
mother introduces her to a white GI in the NCO Club of ASCOM. The
American soldier takes Gannan to the bar. Later, he comes to Insu’s house
and spends the night in Gannan’s room. She maintains a steady relationship
with the GI, in the hope of marrying him. She becomes pregnant, but the
white GI refuses to marry her. Unable to give birth to or abort an illegitimate
biracial baby, she commits suicide by hanging herself from a thick branch
of a chestnut tree. Before she dies Gannan tells Insu ‘‘a big secret ’’:

34
Kipling, ‘‘ Lispeth, ’’ in Kim, ed. Sullivan, 249, 251.
35
Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York :
New York University Press, 2002), 20.
332 Kun Jong Lee
‘‘ When you’re grown up, you must have compassion. _ You must have
injong. ’’ She goes on to explain to her little cousin that injong ‘‘ means you have
to be a kind person and think of others,’’ thereby indirectly criticizing GIs’
frivolous treatment of camptown women (22).
Kipling hints that Lispeth’s bitter experience with a Sahib stems mostly
from her naivety, ignorance, and misunderstanding. But the Englishman is at
least partially responsible for her misfortune, since he deceives Lispeth about
his own feelings and makes a pledge without at all intending to keep it.
Lispeth, who rescues and nurses him, is in the last analysis no better than a
butterfly or a plant he collects in the East. He forgets her completely when
he resumes butterfly-hunting in Assam, and does not mention even her name
in his book on the East. The Englishman has no idea what his betrayal of a
marriage pledge would mean to Lispeth. His experience with Lispeth means
‘‘ nothing at all’’ to him but ‘‘everything in the world ’’ to her.36 This is also
true of Gannan’s case. Lonely in an alien environment, the white GI must
have sought companionship with local women and has maintained a steady
relationship with Gannan. He might have stated or implied his commitment
to her, without intending to marry her. He is just one of the ‘‘ fickle American
soldiers ’’ who have had ‘‘ merciless affairs with Asian women’’ and can state,
unashamedly, ‘‘ we played the _ games with the poor Korean girls. They
meant nothing to us. We used them and just walked away. Nobody pays any
attention to promises made in a war zone.’’37 Learning of Gannan’s suicide,
the white American soldier brings ‘‘ a stack of colourful MPC [Military
Payment Certificate] bills,’’ donated by her GI friends, to help out the be-
reaved family. For him, Gannan is just one of the cheap prostitutes servicing
the GIs in the camptown. In other words, she is no more than a commodity
easily bought and easily discarded. As he has paid her for companionship and
sex, so the GI expresses his condolences with ‘‘ t’aksan money’’ (29). Lispeth
has her ‘‘ own people’’ to return to when she is betrayed by the Englishman,
but Gannan cannot return to her own people because she has forfeited
herself of her Koreanness by fraternizing with American soldiers in the self-
proclaimed homogeneous society.

36
Kipling, ‘‘ Lispeth, ’’ 249.
37
Le Ly Hayslip and James Hayslip, Child of War, Woman of Peace (New York : Anchor Books,
1994; first published 1993), 111–12. Though it is beyond the scope of this study, Hayslip’s
two autobiographical narratives – When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1990) and Child of
War, Woman of Peace – might invite a comparison with Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother in
terms of their portrayals of American soldiers, Asian women, and Amerasian children and
the issues of war, gender, biracialism, and neocolonialism.
 Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother 333
In Kipling’s ‘‘ Without Benefit of Clergy ’’ Ameera is happy to have a baby,
since she believes that the ‘‘ love of _ a white man, [i]s at the best an
inconstant affair, but it might _ be held fast by a baby’s hands.’’38 In Fenkl’s
fiction, Korean camptown women have a similar understanding of their
biracial children. Unlike Gannan, however, many of the camptown women
are more than passive and helpless victims at the mercy of American soldiers.
In fact there is a subtle ‘‘game ’’ going on between American GIs and Korean
camptown women, ‘‘ both trying to outmaneuver the other. ’’39 Whereas
most GIs want to maintain at best a temporary relationship with Korean
women during their tour of duty in Korea, many camptown women try to
marry GIs and go to the USA in order to escape from poverty and ostracism
in Korea. Insu shows rather ruthlessly camptown women shrewdly scheming
to catch a GI as a ticket to the USA: Jani’s mother wants to find a white GI
who looks like Jani’s father killed in Vietnam; James’s mother drowns her
half-black son in a sewer creek to marry a white GI ; Changmi’s mother is
hunting for a black GI to bear a baby, a security to keep her infertile, black
husband; and Insu’s mother gives up her first son – Kuristo, or Christopher,
Insu’s half-brother – in order to marry Heinz Fenkl. But, in retrospect, the
narrator cannot condemn outright the camptown women for trafficking or
killing their own Amerasian children, since he knows that ‘‘ the path of blame
is not an arrow’s flight, but the mad scatter of raindrops in a storm. ’’ He only
feels ‘‘ a great blank emptiness’’ and ‘‘ a profound sadness, a fatalism’’ at the
way of his world. He goes on to resign himself to the conclusion that in the
end ‘‘there is no blame, only endurance ’’ (232).
One of the biggest differences between Kipling and Fenkl is their treat-
ment of the biracial children in a (neo)colonial site. Kim was looked after by
a ‘‘ half-caste’’ ayah until his adolescence (3). Yet he remembers the Eurasian
woman with ‘‘ a gesture of disgust’’ (76) and the Mavericks do not think her
‘‘ a good guardian’’ (82). The narrator does not hide his prejudice against
mixed-race Eurasians when he attributes Kimball’s early death at least par-
tially to the half-caste woman: Kimball ‘‘learned the taste [of opium] from
her, and died as poor whites die in India ’’ (4). Kim also reveals his prejudices
against Eurasians when he replies to Colonel Creighton’s statement that
some St. Xavier’s boys ‘‘ despise the black men.’’ Kim confidently claims
that they must be the sons of ‘‘ bazaar-women,’’ since he knows well that
‘‘ there is no hatred like that of the half-caste for his brother-in-law’’ (102).
38
Kipling, ‘‘ Without Benefit of Clergy, ’’ in idem, Life’s Handicap : Being Stories of Mine Own People
(New York : Doubleday, 1899), 214.
39
Margo Okazawa-Rey, ‘‘ Amerasian Children of GI Town: A Legacy of U. S. Militarism in
South Korea, ’’ Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 3, 1 (1997), 77.
334 Kun Jong Lee
He expresses his racial and class prejudices most vehemently when he talks
of Eurasian students at St. Xavier’s: ‘‘ Their eyes are blued and their nails
are blackened with low-caste blood, many of them. Sons of mehteranees—
brothers-in-law to the bhungi.’’ The narrator and Kim do not feel the need to
‘‘ follow the rest of the pedigree’’ of the mixed-race students with the clear
signs of racial hybridity in their eyes and nails (122). Unlike the half-Sahibs,
Kim is a pure ‘‘ white ’’ boy, as is best symbolized in Mahbub’s message to
Creighton : ‘‘ The pedigree of the white stallion is fully established’’ (21).
Like the Eurasian boys dismissed by Kim, Insu is a biracial boy rejected by
both Americans and Koreans. Right after he was born, Insu was proudly
presented by his aunt to his father stepping down from a US Army bus. But
Sergeant Fenkl held his son ‘‘ like a piece of wood ’’ and ‘‘ turned bright red
from the shame of having a mixed-blood child’’ (63).40 Insu fares no better
among Koreans outside home. Whereas Britishness is a symbol of prowess
and dominance in Kim’s king-of-the-castle game with Indian boys in colonial
India, Americanness is a mark of laziness and unprofessionalism in Insu’s
war games with Korean boys in neocolonial Korea (153). Since even white-
ness is thus not privileged in Korea, Insu’s half-whiteness is less an asset than
a curse in the putatively homogeneous society. Insu is called a ‘‘ Yankee-
brat, ’’ ‘‘ mongrel dog,’’ and ‘‘ shit-dog’’ (85, 86). As if mixed blood signified
intellectual deficiency, he is labeled ‘‘ a half-wit’’ or ‘‘an idiot’’ by children
and adults alike (76, 86). On his first day in the American school Insu stands
by himself and watches American children playing together during recess. To
pretend to be doing something, he takes ‘‘ drink after drink ’’ of water at the
water fountain. He also walks back and forth along a wall ‘‘ to keep from
crying ’’ (100). Insu feels happy only when he meets another Amerasian boy,
half-black James, in the playground during the lunch recess. The Amerasian
children become close friends and after a few months swear a secret oath
‘‘ never to betray each other ’’ (109). James and Insu feel sympathy to each
other as half-bloods. Their sense of commonness is so powerful as to make
them disregard even the difference of their skin colors. To them, their dif-
ference of skin colors is lost under the common labels of ‘‘ ainoko [mixed
child], chapjong [mixed breed], t’wigi [mongrel]’’ (232). Naturally enough,
James takes center stage when Insu sadly remembers ‘‘ the misfortunes’’ of
Amerasian children who failed to ‘‘ escape ’’ to the promised land of the
40
Sergeant Fenkl seems to have an inferiority complex about his marriage with a Korean
woman. He rages at his wife ‘‘ for daring to let him be seen in public with a child presented
to him by a Korean ’’ (63). When his wife and son visit him at Camp Casey more than ten
years later, he states that ‘‘ having his men see his Korean wife undermine[s] his authority ’’
(131).
 Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother 335
USA: Gannan’s baby, who died still in the womb; James, who was killed by
his mother; half-white Suzie, James’s half-sister, who became a prostitute
and ate rat poison after she was disfigured by a Japanese banker; and Paulie,
who ‘‘ apprenticed himself to a pimp and disappeared’’ (172).
Kim’s natural talents for espionage are systematically developed at
St. Xavier’s. In the school for Sahibs and half-Sahibs, he learns the basic skills
and techniques – mathematics, elementary surveying, and mapmaking –
required of him to enter the Survey of India as a chainman. He learns, from
Mahbub Ali, Lurgan Sahib, and Hurree Babu, other skills necessary for the
performance of the Great Game, for the interests of the British Empire. Insu
anticipates he would learn something ‘‘mysterious, ’’ ‘‘grand, ’’ and ‘‘ magical’’
about his father’s world in the American school. He wants to ‘‘drink in the
source ’’ of that power but, like other Amerasian children, he ‘‘would come
away more parched than before ’’ (92). The school confirms his racial dif-
ference from white teachers and students, and makes him feel comfortable
only with Korean and half-Korean students. As the first step to being a loyal
American he learns to sing ‘‘ the Star-Spangled Banner’’ and to ‘‘ swear to be
loyal to the garish flag ’’ on his first day in the American school (100). But he
confesses that he has learned ‘‘ very little’’ else there. Instead, he learns a lot
from his mother, Lee, ‘‘how to get by, without her, in [his] father’s world ’’
(121). Lee is an ideal teacher for her son, since she is an expert at navigating
and surviving in the camptown world shadowed by the US presence. On
holidays, Insu accompanies his mother while she is doing her black-market
business. She buys American goods at the Post Echange (PX) and the
Commissary and sells them to ‘‘ a Yankee goods vendor at the Hollywood
market near Pagoda Park.’’ Insu enjoys ‘‘ the fantastic chaos of Seoul’’ and
drinks ‘‘ cold cans of Coca-Cola with black marketeers and petty criminals’’
(120). At the same time, he learns to make money through small-time
peddling in the black market. He sells ‘‘ fourteen pounds of M&M’s at twice
their price’’ to a Korean storekeeper and takes orders for ‘‘Alka-Seltzer,
Hershey bars, and Wrigley’s chewing gum’’ (183). He buys ‘‘ tool boxes for
Mr. Fatso and Mr. Chong, a pair of blue jeans for Mr. Panji Lee, and Philips
Milk of Magnesia for Mr. Paek ’’ at Yongsan (190). Unlike Kim’s systematic
education, in other words, Insu’s haphazard education is not for the interests
of the American empire but for the interest of his own survival as an
Amerasian on the periphery of the American empire.
Kim learns how to survive as an orphaned white boy in the alleys and
bazaars of Lahore. He is on friendly terms with the natives and becomes the
‘‘ Little Friend of all the World.’’ Not surprisingly, he is ‘‘ hand in glove with
men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of’’
336 Kun Jong Lee
and lives ‘‘ in a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights. ’’ He also executes
nightly ‘‘ commissions’’ for young men of fashion for the sake of ‘‘ the game ’’
(5). Kipling’s mention of the eighth-century caliph in The Arabian Nights and
Kim’s nightly errand for ‘‘ intrigue’’ not only exoticizes and romanticizes
Kim’s boyhood in Lahore but also decontextualizes and dehistoricizes Kim’s
world in nineteenth-century colonial India. In other words, he brushes past
social miseries – poverty, injustice, caste rigidity, and colonialism – into
the fictional world of The Arabian Nights. Though not an orphan, Insu is
symbolically an abandoned boy. After all, he subconsciously fears that, like
his ‘‘ ghost brother, ’’ he might be abandoned by his parents. Moreover, his
father is not only sometimes reluctant to acknowledge Insu as his own son in
public but also usually absent from home with his tours of duty in Vietnam
and jobs in military camps in Korea. His mother is too busy with her own
businesses – ‘‘ the black-marketing, the gambling, the debts, the friendships
and antipathies, the matches she made, the ungrateful friends and business
partners ’’ (244) – to take care of him. Not surprisingly, Sergeant Heinz
wonders ‘‘what old man is going to teach [Insu] the important things while
I’m off in The Great Game ’’ (132). But, like Kim, Insu is a savvy boy in
the underworld of Pupyong. Even in first grade, Insu comes to know
all the black-marketeers, gamblers, ‘‘waitresses at the military clubs,’’ and
‘‘ prostitutes and husband-seekers’’ lining up outside the gates of ASCOM
(121). He has shadowy and illegal dealings with Korean black-marketeers,
buying items for them from the PX. In striking contrast to Kipling, however,
Fenkl highlights both the postcolonial and neocolonial status of twentieth-
century Korea in the reminiscences of the camptowns around US military
installations.
Insu’s family lives in a house built by a Japanese colonel during the
Japanese occupation. After his stay in Korea, the Japanese colonel was sent
to ‘‘ Burma, then to defend Iwo Jima against the Americans. He lost the
island to the U. S. Marines and committed seppuku in his bunker on
Mt. Suribachi’’ (5). The US invasion of Iwo Jima was one of the most crucial
victories during World War II, and the US Marines’ flag-raising atop Mount
Suribachi has been one of the most treasured icons of US military history.
Therefore the Japanese colonel’s defeat and suicide on the mountain antici-
pates the Japanese surrender to the USA and his ghost is an apt figure of
lingering Japanese colonialism in Korea. More significantly, although his
ashes were spread in the rock garden of his house in Korea, the house itself
is occupied by the family of a US sergeant. Since the Japanese occupation is
thus replaced by the US military intervention, post-independence Korea is
both postcolonial and neocolonial. Indeed, Insu’s family moves to Tatagumi,
 Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother 337
a Japanese-named neighbourhood near an American military service center.
Insu dramatizes the colonial succession more indirectly in the episode of the
stolen camera: an American GI’s Japanese-made Pentax is a symbolic ‘‘ tool
used for ‘ capturing’ images [of Koreans] by ‘ shooting’ them through a
lens.’’ The image of the camera neatly resonates with the image of the black
train that takes daily supplies across a rail bridge into ASCOM: the steam
engine ‘‘ was left by the Japanese and now operated by Koreans working for
the US Army. ’’41 The mutual imbrication of the postcolonial and the neo-
colonial is more clearly reflected in the GI pidgin of Japanese origin such
as mama-san, papa-san, boy-san, baby-san, ainokos, t’aksan, number one,
number ten, and so on.
In his description of camptown life, Insu indicts the devastating effects
of the US military presence on the inhabitants of the camptowns. For his
spending money, Insu searches for artillery brass – ‘‘wads of C4 plastic
explosive, manual fuses, unexploded shells ’’ – in a US firing range at the risk
of his own life. He sells the brass to a Korean dealer ‘‘ who would turn it into
ashtrays, bedposts, deep-sea diving helmets, and gaudy decorations for
spendthrift GIs to take back to ‘ The World’ ’’ in Itaewon, the camptown
near the Yongsan Garrison (248, 249). Insu’s depiction of Itaewon is one of
the most dismal portrayals of camptowns in Korea:
I had walked down alleys where girls not much older than me would suck a GI’s
penis for a few dollars, where boys my age would let a man fuck them and then
pretend to be their family friend. I had seen a man stabbed in the gut with a
sharpened afro pick, had my shoulder slashed by a fast straight razor, smashed a
thief’s head with a brick. And we were all doing our best to get money from the
yellow hairs, the long noses, the Yankees. The yang saekshis, the slicky boys, the
hustlers, the pimps – all after the same things – skulking through narrow alleys
running with sewage and piss and wafting with a stench so awful that it gagged you.
(249)
Unlike Kim’s romantic and even idyllic Lahore, Insu’s Itaewon is full of
thugs, thieves, hustlers, prostitutes, and pimps. Filled with the awful stench
of sewage and urine, Itaewon is mired in poverty, wrongs, disorder, violence,
crime, and prostitution. Itaewon relies on the US military compound for its
economic survival, and everybody in the camptown is eager to get money
from the GIs by whatever means. The seedy world, with its disorder,
violence, and crime, is tragic and doomed, for the survival of its inhabitants
cannot be extricated from the infrastructures of US imperialism. Whereas
41
Fenkl, ‘‘ Images from a Stolen Camera : An Autoethnographic Recursion, ’’ paper presented
at the Transnational Korea: Division and Diaspora conference, Korean Studies Institute,
University of Southern California, 30 Nov.–2 Dec. 1995, 7, 8.
338 Kun Jong Lee
Kipling suppresses and disregards the harsh realities of colonial India, Fenkl
thus ruthlessly highlights and denounces the self-destroying camptown of
neocolonial Korea shadowed by the US military presence. In other words,
Kipling implicitly endorses the British presence in India, but Fenkl explicitly
criticizes the US presence in Korea (and the US involvement in Vietnam).

Sergeant Fenkl, who has an enduring fascination with Kim, seems to have
been intrigued by the ‘‘ remarkable coincidences ’’ between Kim and his life
(63). He identifies himself as a red bull on a green field in the Great Game,
makes Insu a latter-day Kim with a reenactment of the opening scene of Kim,
and tries to pass down his fatherly message to his son with a copy of
Kipling’s fiction. He must have seen a bright future for his son while reading
Kim’s achievements in the Great Game of intelligence-gathering and
counterespionage : if a Sahib moving among the Indians did great jobs for
the British Empire, an Amerasian boy could achieve much more startling
successes for the American empire in the new Great Game. He might have
thought of Insu as an ideal descendant of Kim, indeed a much better-
qualified secret agent for the American empire. Kipling emphasizes Kim’s
ability to go native and to pass for an Indian: Kim is ‘‘ burned black as any
native, ’’ fluent in Hindustani, and versatile culturally (3). Yet, in reality, Kim
is a white boy who cannot pass for an Indian everywhere permanently: his
racial identity and national allegiance can be easily detected by any native, not
to mention enemy. In contrast, Sergeant Fenkl might have presumed, biracial
Insu could be an ideal imperial boy working for the interests of the American
empire with much less chance of being questioned about his racial and
national allegiances. Little wonder, then, that Sergeant Fenkl envisions a
military career for Insu in Asia: he hopes that his son will study in ‘‘ the US
Military Academy’’ and go to ‘‘ ’Nam with [him] sometime ’’ (221, 128).
Insu grows up in a camptown around a US military installation and goes to
the American school in a US garrison. Naturally enough, the Amerasian boy
sees his father as his role model and wants to be a soldier like his father.42
Sergeant Fenkl earnestly wishes Insu to follow in his footsteps and to
participate in the Great Game of the twentieth century. Yet Insu cannot be a
latter-day Kim working for the interests of the American empire in Korea.
Against his father’s wishful thinking, his mixed blood makes it difficult for
him to fit in with the Koreans as a successful secret agent of the USA.

42
See Fenkl, Memories 19, 41, 73, 107, and 145. But Insu’s attitude towards his father is at best
ambivalent, since he also differentiates himself from his father by portraying the American
GI with animal and nonhuman images (65, 66, 72, 123, 125).
 Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother 339
To Koreans for whom ethnic or racial homogeneity is a crucial issue, his
immediately perceptible biracial status signifies at best his divided loyalties.
After all, the biracial boy is derogatorily called a t’wigi, which means, etymo-
logically, ‘‘ uncommon,’’ ‘‘ unfamiliar,’’ ‘‘unnatural ’’ – that is, ‘‘ un-Korean.’’
Moreover, Insu grows up within his mother’s universe and has a natural
affinity for his Korean half. Although his father denounces ‘‘ the barbarism
and the pagan ceremonies ’’ in his house (239), Insu feels comfortable in his
mother’s spiritual world of animism, shamanism, ancestor worship, and
Buddhism. And he rejects his father’s spiritual world of Christianity which,
he thinks, does not have contemporary relevance ‘‘outside the gates of the
U. S. Army post ’’ (241). Not surprisingly, Insu is not interested in the Great
Game for the empire at all. As is best demonstrated in his translation of his
father’s Great Game into his mother’s game of slot machines (132), what is
far more interesting for the Amerasian boy is the little games going on
around him in the camptown: the little games ‘‘ of fleecing and being fleeced
by the U. S. military ; _ of flesh-peddling, black-marketing, infanticide, and
suicide; _ of prostituting a nation and a culture and a language ; _ of sexual
sale and husband-hunting and pregnancies and children used as tickets to the
promised land of America.’’43 Hence it is highly unlikely that he would grow
up to be a Great Game player working single-mindedly for the American
empire.
Memories of My Ghost Brother is an unexpected and ironic response to the call
of Kim, because it was written not by an Indian or Indian British/American
writer but by a Korean American writer.44 Interestingly enough, Fenkl wrote
another response to Kim and sequel to Memories of My Ghost Brother in the
introductory part of his short story ‘‘ Song Bird’’ (2003). In Memories of My
Ghost Brother Sergeant Fenkl grows sick with an Agent Orange-related cancer.
After his father’s departure to the USA for medical treatment, Insu is
reluctant to leave Korea to join his father and feels that he will ‘‘ long to
return to the place of [his] birth and the language of [his] mother ’’ (169). Insu
seems to return to Korea as the unnamed narrator of ‘‘ Song Bird. ’’ In the
short story the narrator and his friend, Walter K. Lew, meet one Colonel
Noakowski of the US 8th Army. The colonel takes the two Fulbright
students onto the US 8th Army compound, entertains them with a nice
dinner at the Officer’s Club, and shows them his personal study in the
Yongsan Garrison. To their surprise, the two Korean Americans find in the

43
Park, 61.
44
From this perspective, The Imperial Agent (1987) and The Last Victory (1988) by an Indian
writer, T. N. Murari, are ‘‘ expected ’’ sequels to Kim.
340 Kun Jong Lee
colonel’s study ‘‘ a fantastic range ’’ of ‘‘ antique Korean ‘knick-knacks. ’ ’’
They sense that many of the artifacts – folk paintings, panels from Buddhist
temple walls, antique masks, and embroidered rank insignia – in the colonel’s
study should have been displayed in museums. More significantly, Colonel
Noakowski tells them about ‘‘ the need for good translators in Military
Intelligence’’ and tries to recruit them with ‘‘ images of exotic advanced
military training and skullduggery.’’ But the narrator is not impressed at all
with the ‘‘ romance’’ of the images portrayed by the colonel, since he has
grown up ‘‘ as an Army brat’’ and knows ‘‘ the underbelly of the military
life. ’’45 Consequently he rejects the offer of the American colonel, who, an
ethnologist of sorts like Colonel Creighton in Kim, attempts to enlist the
culturally versatile Korean American scholars for a latter-day Great Game in
Korea.

45
Fenkl, ‘‘ Song Bird [Kê-Nı̄ao], ’’ EnterText, 3, 2 (2003), 27. Available at http://www.
brunel.ac.uk/ faculty/arts/EnterText/3_2_pdfs/fenkl.pdf (accessed 10 Nov. 2004).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.