Thomas Clement’s The Unforgotten War: Redesigning One’s Life through Adoption Narrative

초록

The Korean War begot around 100,000 war orphans, and substantial numbers of them were born to Korean women and American soldiers. In particular, interracial babies and children were adopted mostly by western parents because Korean society not only encountered great economic repercussions but also retained racial stereotypes against “tuki” after the War. Decades later, these international adoptees strive to comprehend their mobile subjectivity by employing various genres of culture, such as films, paintings, web blogs, and creative writings. Among other cultural representations, this article examines Thomas Park Clement’s memoir The Unforgotten War (1998) in the nexus of narrative and life. On a surface level, this adoptee writer seems to follow the rhetorical conventions of western autobiography in which a mature adult looks back his successful middle-class life. He, for sure, narrates his relocated life in an attempt to foreground the socialization that he is gradually assimilated into the mainstream society. The general tone of his life writing is very optimistic in spite of many difficulties he has endured. He, I argue, is knowingly/unknowingly influenced by the self-made-man model that Benjamin Franklin created. Franklin's model was then supported by his contemporaries and posterities including Clement. Yet,