For a vast majority of students, guest lecturer Grace Cho’s talk at the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies on Thursday included shocking revelations about the low-profile, controversial relationship between the United States military and Korean women who make a living in the sex trade.
Cho presented her research in a talk entitled, “Traumatizing the Discourse of Honorary Whiteness: Assimilation as an Effect of War”
“Pretty much everywhere you find the military, you’ll find prostitution,” Cho said. “I’ve heard anecdotal evidence about Eastern European women going into Iraq. But it’s not institutionalized everywhere in the same way, the way it is in Korean camptowns outside U.S. military bases.”
During a talk which drew upon everything from transnational diaspora theory to modern Korean fiction, Cho explored the implications that these Korean women—alternatively called ‘yanggongju,’ or Yankee whores—have for the Americanized Korean diaspora.
“The Korean woman who works for the American G.I. as a sex worker is a key figure in the Korean diaspora,” Cho said. “She has come to represent the most shameful aspects of the Korean War…By keeping quiet about her past, she becomes a figure of trauma.”
Cho confronted the myth of “honorary whiteness” that contributes partly to high intermarriage rates between American G.I.s and Korean sex workers. Ultimately, though, she was more interested in emphasizing how the ‘yanggongju’ symbolize the traumatic aftershocks of the Korean War (1950-1953).
“People ask me what’s so special about Korean assimilation and intermarriage [versus other groups],” Cho said. “What I think is unique about this example is the way interracial marriage functions in the discourse as a metaphor for U.S.-Korean relations.”
Cho said that Korean women and white men have the highest rate of intermarriage in the United States, and 100,000 Korean women have migrated to the United States through marriage with American G.I.s.
“There’s little acknowledgement that these unions are a result of 60 years of U.S. hegemony and Korean-government sponsorship of sex workers entering unions that are often coercive and violent,” Cho said.
Cho introduced her talk with three personal vignettes that not only created a feeling of intimacy, but also introduced the broader themes of her research. Her introductory vignette recounted the first time she heard the term “honorary whiteness.” The term refers to the stereotype that Asian children assimilate more easily into white American society than other immigrant groups, learning English more quickly and becoming potential whites.
“Asian children usually become monolingual in two generations instead of three,” Cho said. “Hence, they are the ‘model minority.’”
Becoming a potential white is something that, on some deep level, Korean women sex workers also strive for either through marriage or by association with American G.I., who have a paradoxical presence in South Korea.
“Americans were both benevolent protectors and monstrous criminals,” Cho said.
According to Cho, while the women who worked in the sex trade with American soldiers were understood to be seeking social and political leverage, they are still stigmatized in Korea and within the Korean-American diaspora. Taboo encourages Korean G.I. brides and former sex workers to distance themselves from their past.
“There’s a systematic denial among brides, which makes it difficult to do social research,” Cho said. “You have to listen to what is alluded to, to the gaps in history… Nine out of 10 women you ask will say that it was other women in the camp towns who were sex workers, but not them.”
The camp towns are joint collaborations between the Korean government and the United States military. They continue to exist even though less than 10 percent of the sex workers end up marrying Americans and moving to the United States.
Cho described a crisis that occurred in 1992 when an American client murdered a Korean sex worker.
“She became a poster child for anti-U.S. base movement in Korea,” Cho said. “The injuries to her body became symbolic of the imperial violation of Korea.”
Cho said that she has also learned a great deal about daily life in the camp towns from oral interviews.
“Women used to go to etiquette lectures about how do you treat an American soldier in bed,” she said. “They use Japanese sex workers as an example. These are women who, after sex, were taught to get down on their knees and beg American soldiers to rebuild Japan.”
Students came away from the lecture with a stronger understanding of how the Korean sex laborer symbolizes unresolved traumas of the Korean War, a conflict long neglected by mainstream American history textbooks.
“It was an eye-opener even for someone born in Korea,” said Dave Woo ’08. “I never heard anything about legalized sex camps. It was interesting learning about something that was occurring so far under the radar of mainstream society.”
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