asian american studies

The “Comfort” of Critical Consolidation: Pedagogy, Ethical Alienation, and Asian American Literary Studies

Tina Chen

Abstract This article proposes ethical alienation as a critical pedagogical practice by analyzing the neoteric critical consolidation of Asian American literary and cultural studies, a consolidation marked by the recent (and near simultaneous) publication of four major compendiums—The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (Lee 2014), Keywords for Asian American Studies (Schlund-Vials, Vo, and Wong 2015), The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Parikh and Kim 2015), and The Cambridge History of Asian Ameri- can Literature (Srikanth and Song 2015). The publication of these four compendiums within the span of a year signals a pivotal moment in Asian American literary and cultural studies, one that both recognizes the institutional gains of the field and addresses the (in)compatibilities between the field’s theoretical developments and its pedagogical practices. This article considers the centrality of ethics to a postidentity Asian American studies, suggesting how ethical alienation—signaled both by the figuration of “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni and our own estrangement from it—can create productive classroom and metapedagogical practices in the study of Asian American literature. By attending to the field’s consolidations around a set of pedagogical and scholarly imperatives and analyzing that critical solidification in relation to “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni both as a figuration of “complex per- sonhood” (Gordon 1997, 4–5) and as an interdisciplinary “term of analysis and history rather than personhood” (Chuh 2003a, 9), this article argues that ethical alienation as pedagogical practice can lead us to a differently ordered set of disciplinary priorities. Keywords pedagogy, ethics, ethical alienation, Asian American studies, comfort women

Even from the historically myopic vantage point of the present, it is easy to see why 2014–15 is an institutionally signifi- cant moment in Asian American literary and cultural studies. The pub- lication of four major compendiums—The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (Lee 2014), Keywords

American Literature, Volume 89, Number 2, June 2017 DOI 10.1215/00029831-3861541 © 2017 by Duke University Press

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for Asian American Studies (Schlund-Vials, Vo, and Wong 2015), The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Parikh and Kim 2015), and The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (Srikanth and Song 2015)—within the span of a year constitutes an opportunity not only to recognize the institutional gains of the field but also to address the (in)compatibilities between the field’s theo- retical developments and its pedagogical practices. Although the four volumes are conceptualized quite differently, they all share an aware- ness of the importance of disseminating developing critical, theoreti- cal, and disciplinary knowledge via the classroom. In other words, even as each volume draws on the scholarship generated by the field of Asian American studies, each is also shaped by the institutional imperative of the field’s (re)production in pedagogical terms. Tar- geted to students and teachers as well as more generally to critics, the pedagogical impetus behind each project significantly contours its organizational logic and approach—something rendered explicit at the end of Rachel Lee’s introduction to The Routledge Companion. Lee groups keywords according to the various course rubrics governing the study of Asian American and Pacific Islander literatures and cul- tures, her concluding assessments thus laying bare some of the con- nections between disciplinary knowledge formation and pedagogical practice undergirding all these publications. Crucially, field consolida- tion offers us as critics and teachers a unique chance to engage with the discipline’s coherences and contradictions. Two aspects rendered especially palpable in this moment of criti-

cal consolidation are the shifting relationship between margins and centers effected by the professionalization of the field and the problems and possibilities of establishing shared terms. To make vis- ible the dynamics of such consolidation while also exploring the ways in which the teaching of literature can generatively respond to the epistemological and institutional aspects of field formation, I focus this article on comfort women—figures who have some- how remained relatively unaccounted for in these handbooks despite having been important subjects of critical attention in Asian Ameri- can studies, particularly in the early 2000s. Specifically, I offer the unwieldy, awkward, and nonstandard term “comfort women”/ military sex slaves/halmoni as a wedge into the homogenizing effects created by the critical consolidation of keywords, and I delve into the ways that pedagogical practices centered on such figures

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can refine and complicate the intellectual and critical assumptions of the field of Asian American literary and cultural studies.

The plight of “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni— women who were coerced into sexual slavery by the Japanese mili- tary during World War II—has gained much international attention in the last twenty-five years.1 Since 1991, when Kim Hak-sun publicly testified that she had been forced by the Japanese military to be a “comfort woman” in response to assertions made by the Japanese gov- ernment that such women were prostitutes who voluntarily serviced soldiers during the war, evidence has surfaced confirming that more than 100,000 women from all parts of Asia (although the majority of these women were Korean) had been forced into sexual service by the Japanese military.2 “Comfort woman” is the English translation of the Japanese ianfu and the Korean wianbu, and as scholars have pointed out, the term is “a travesty” (Watanabe 1994, 4) and has itself “played a role in concealing and normalizing the violence used against these women” (O’Brien 2000, 213). Even so, many scholars and activ- ists still employ this term, albeit often marked by scare quotes to sig- nal a simultaneous disavowal of it, because it is the name by which the women are most commonly known. “Military sex slaves” marks a radical shift from the euphemism of “comfort women” and has been adopted by both the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Mili- tary Sexual Slavery by Japan and by the United Nations. Some of the former Korean victims have suggested, though, that both “comfort women” and “military sex slaves” are distasteful, and they would pre- fer being called halmoni, which is the Korean word for “grandmother” and is an honorific accorded all older women in Korea. Additionally, there are a number of other terms in circulation, most notably Chong- shindae, which means “corps volunteering their bodies” in Korean, and is often used by Korean Americans.

The tripartite nomenclature of “comfort women”/military sex slaves/ halmoni alerts us to contested vocabularies, consolidating critical imperatives, and shifting notions of marginality and centrality as well as evolving, overlapped, and often incongruent historical conscious- nesses. Inspired by Laura Hyun Yi Kang’s (2003, 27) insistence on the importance of “dispel[ling] the wishful trajectory in which a more intimate identification with the Korean ‘comfort women’ leads to bet- ter representations of the ‘comfort women,’ which in turn secures greater justice for these women,” I draw attention to how such a term

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encourages us to consider the ways in which identification—of art- ist with character, of critic with victim, of student with subaltern subject—might be suspect or problematic in efforts to create ethical work and to teach ethically. As a term, “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni foregrounds the ways in which identities are created and maintained via particular regimes of knowledge (in this case denoted by the very different terminologies in play) as well as to make visible the discontinuities that productively trouble the hermeneutic desire to fix the identities of such subjects in any easy or uncompli- cated way. Clearly what is at stake in these multiple designations, both the ones used and the ones whose titular absence makes apparent the partiality of the term’s construction, concerns not only the ways in which the survivors of the Japanese military comfort stations repre- sent themselves or have been represented by activists, artists, and aca- demics who have become invested in their cause but also the vexed reality of how identification and identity structure our ways of under- standing the subjects and practices that make up Asian American stud- ies. Even as practicality dictates a strategically essentialist choice between the many naming options available, I think the deliber- ately defamiliarizing usage of “comfort women”/military sex slaves/ halmoni will help enact as well as explore the issue of ethical alien- ation on which this article elaborates. In directing our attention to the figure of “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni, I suggest that such a figure enables us to question the critical investments of Asian American literary studies by revealing how ethical alienation might counter the field’s own “wishful trajectory” as it manifests in an identification-based alignment with the marginalized and oppressed. In suggesting that we not privilege identification when considering

“comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni, Kang foregrounds the critical possibilities of what I term ethical alienation—an interpretive position and pedagogical philosophy that, while not discounting iden- tification and the valorization of sameness on which such a psycholog- ical structure usually depends, insist also on a valuation of difference and disjunction in order to create an ethical orientation to the subjects being represented and reviewed. More concretely, an ethical alien- ation acknowledges the critical investments we bring to any study of alterity and encourages us both to disidentify with (while not disavow- ing) victims and to acknowledge affiliations with victimizers. As such, ethical alienation becomes an inordinately useful pedagogical practice,

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one that actively encourages us to engage with the fraught issues raised by the seemingly unproblematic embrace of “comfort women”/ military sex slaves/halmoni—a plural subject whose uneven treat- ment in US academia signals both the possibilities and limits of the “beyond nation” turn in American studies.

In order to make my arguments about the pedagogical possibilities of ethical alienation, I briefly analyze the neoteric critical consoli- dation of Asian American literary and cultural studies marked by the recent (and near simultaneous) publication of four major compendi- ums to frame how the institutional gains of the field have produced (in)compatibilities between the field’s theoretical developments and its pedagogical practices. Then I consider the centrality of eth- ics to a postidentity Asian American studies, suggesting how ethi- cal alienation—signaled both by the figuration of “comfort women”/ military sex slaves/halmoni and by our own estrangement from it— can create productive classroom and metapedagogical practices in the study of Asian American literature. Finally, I identify some critical issues—the dangers of empathy and the field’s shifting alignments with dominance and repression—raised by the literary representa- tion and pedagogy of “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni. By attending to the field’s consolidations around a set of pedagogical and scholarly imperatives and analyzing that critical solidification in relation to “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni both as a figuration of “complex personhood” (Gordon 1997, 4–5) and as an interdisciplinary “term of analysis and history rather than person- hood” (Chuh 2003a, 9), this article argues that ethical alienation as pedagogical practice can lead us to a differently ordered set of disci- plinary priorities.

Critical Consolidation, Active Interference, and Ethical Alienation

Four major compendiums published within the span of a year can mean many things. For some, the publication of these volumes sig- nals that Asian American studies has come of age; in echoing the pri- macy of Bildung, this reading emphasizes the ways in which the field has developed the intellectual and academic wherewithal to support the creation of substantive pedagogical materials. For others, these volumes mark the field’s power to manufacture and legitimate cultural capital through the educational system, a reflection of the ways in

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which Asian American literary studies sanctifies its own “authority” via what John Guillory (1993, 56) has identified as a process of creden- tialization by which the school not only “produces a specific relation to culture . . . [but also] reproduces social relations.” For still others, these volumes suggest a critical opportunity for the field to manage its various (dis)alignments—aesthetic and political, theoretical and pedagogical, institutional and critical. Without privileging any one of these possible interpretations—

indeed, by considering them collectively—I begin with the assump- tion that the simultaneity of these publications suggests both the significant institutional gains made by the field and the pedagogical challenges resulting from those gains. Although the volumes are structured quite differently, reading them as part of a collective field- consolidating movement highlights four major takeaways.

1. There is detailed attention to developing and interpreting a common vocabulary; even when the volumes are not explicitly organized by keywords, key terms—such as immigration, law, identity/postidentity, and war, for example—emerge as part of the process of field interpretation.

2. Despite being organized to elucidate specific disciplinary practices, there is a greater awareness of the increasingly interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary resonances of the key- words being used to organize academic knowledge production.

3. The shared investment in identifying the critical concerns unify- ing the field of Asian American literary and cultural studies also results in the inevitable privileging of certain pedagogical perspec- tives and approaches, varyingly determined by discipline, method- ology, history, and the attendant conceptual and theoretical vocabularies they generate.

4. The pedagogical consequences of Asian American literature’s institutional success must be theorized in relation to canonicity, a “profoundly problematic attainment for a body of writing that drew its strength from being at the margins and challenging the com- plicity of the center” (Srikanth and Song 2015, 27), and Asian American studies’ institutionalization as an interdiscipline.

In their assertion that it is “odd . . . to consider Asian America as refer- ring to anything but a margin,” Rajini Srikanth and Min Hyoung Song (2015, 27) recognize that the transition of Asian American literary

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studies from emergence to establishment brings with it new chal- lenges and opportunities. In other words, field consolidation offers us as critics and teachers a unique chance to engage with the discipline’s coherences and contradictions. Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015, 296) notes in his analysis of this transitional period that as Asian American literary criticism is disciplined, it has shifted from an “ideologically driven criticism” to an “institutionally driven criticism.” Nguyen does not argue this movement in either simplistic or developmental terms, instead encouraging us to concentrate on the costs of critical consolidation.

Crucially, although “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni have been important figures of critical attention in Asian American studies, especially in the early 2000s, they do not appear in any signifi- cant way in any of the compendiums. As such, they offer a unique opportunity to self-reflexively assess the less visible consequences of interdisciplinary field formation. Specifically, I argue that focusing on such figures—on their naming, their literary representation, and especially on the kinds of pedagogical insights such figures enable— can help us highlight and complicate some of the critical tendencies generated as part of field-making and field-interpreting efforts.

As ongoing discussions of “Asian American” itself as a term by crit- ics such as Susan Koshy (1996), Kandice Chuh (2003a, 2003b), and Colleen Lye (2005) have highlighted, establishing a critical lexicon is a necessary step for making intellectual work possible. Pedagogically speaking, however, such instantiation engenders an unavoidably homogenizing effect that immediately begins rendering invisible the core assumptions and priorities driving its usage. If ethical alien- ation is in part about countering those erasures and acknowledging the possibility of destabilizing critical consolidations before they con- cretize into unquestioned prominence, utilizing a term like “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni commits to a pedagogy and crit- ical practice of active interference. Gregory Jay (1991, 271) persua- sively argues in his article about the teaching of a multicultural Ameri- can literature that “undoing the canon[ical] doesn’t just mean adding on previously excluded figures; it requires a disturbance of the inter- nal security of the classics themselves.” Although Jay was writing at the beginning of the 1990s and as such against a narrowly defined canon of male- and white-authored texts, I employ his adjuration as a still-meaningful response to the challenges of the specific historical

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moment in which I write this article, when the successful institutional- ization of the minority literatures fighting for curricular recognition has resulted in the establishment of alternative canons. Interestingly enough, ethics is not an explicitly identified keyword

in any of the four compendiums surveyed in the first section of this article. In this case, I argue that such an absence ironically signals the fundamental importance of ethics to the field. More concretely, atten- tion to ethics as an embodied practice, an intellectual question, and a theoretical concern is so ingrained in the field’s identity that it becomes an assumed foundation undergirding not just the field’s obvi- ous social and political commitments (to social justice, protest and resistance, and human rights) but also to its less overtly ideological concerns (aesthetics, comparativism, and self-critique). In practical and pedagogical terms, ethics is crucial to the continued development of the field beyond identity politics paradigms because it encourages us to embrace a problematic Asian American agency—one that identi- fies not just with victims but also with victimizers. What does an ethically complicated, problematic Asian Ameri-

can agency look like? To address this issue, I return to the figure of Korean “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni in order to consider how the discourse and classroom practices surrounding these figures make visible various kinds of ethical imperatives and considerations. In the introduction by Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B. C. Oh to Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II (2001, xiii), such women become the occasion for producing work that encour- ages, perhaps even requires, “acts of fusion and of crossing over”:

Indeed, the challenges raised by these war victims are so wide- reaching—challenges not only to the concepts of imperialism, mili- tarism, sexism, classism, and racism, but also to the ways in which history itself has traditionally been recorded and written—that they can only be addressed through multi-faceted approaches. Thus, in confronting, exploring, understanding, and taking up these challenges, academics are finding themselves moved to political activism, activists are turning to mediums of artistic representation, and artists are performing the duties of scholarly researchers and analysts.

In this formulation, “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni provide an unprecedented opportunity for academics, activists, and

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artists to remake themselves in interdisciplinary ways. By moving out- side of the comfort zones created by vocational training and avo- cational affiliation, those of us who study and remember “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni are taking advantage of what Lisa Lowe, in her article titled “The International within the National: American Studies and Asian American Critique,” has identified as the value of interdisciplinary study; in Lowe’s (2002, 85) assessment, inter- disciplinary sites (and subjects) mediate contradiction to the degree that they can (1) disrupt empiricist paradigms separating the scholar- subject and the object of study; (2) challenge a developmentalist his- toricism that requires assimilation of “primitive,” nonmodern, and racialized knowledges to the terms of Western rationalism; (3) refuse univocality, totalization, and scholarly indifference; and (4) argue for the inseparability of the nonequivalent determinations of race, class, and gender. Such end results are, although not described explicitly as such, ethical goals; they can be understood as part of a larger and at times rather diffuse set of academic practices that operate in pursuit of what Chuh (2003b, 8) identifies as the “(im)possibility of justice”—which understands justice “not as the achievement of a determinate end, but rather as an endless project of searching out the knowledge and material apparatuses that extinguish some (Other) life ways and that hoard economic and social opportunities only for some.”

And yet, even as the figure of “comfort women”/military sex slaves/ halmoni has “emerge[d] as an especially and even perhaps ideally interdisciplinary and even trans-disciplinary subject, . . . such repre- sentational and epistemological mobility . . . must alert us to the hidden discursive and ideological work for which this newly visible subject is enlisted” (Kang 2003, 42). Thus while taking up “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni in relation to an ethics of knowl- edge seems to argue the obvious, it behooves us to ask what it means for us to treat such subject matter ethically as Asian Americanists, both critically and pedagogically. How might we look to our pedagogy to respond to, refine, and complicate the scholarship we produce? According to legal theorist Leti Volpp, a “condemnatory reaction” to what is perceived as problematic behavior does not, in and of itself, necessarily constitute an ethical response. For Volpp (2000, 115), con- demnation, which “distances the observer from the practice and defi- nes the observer as the antithesis of that practice, relies upon and per- petuates a failure to see subordinating practices in our own culture.”

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Significantly, Volpp (114) understands condemnation to “unreflectively say ‘that is not me’” just as a laudatory response would essentially articulate “that is me.” In delineating the position of ethical alienation this article explores, neither of these underlying utterances—“that is not me” or “that is me”—is adequate since ethical alienation is pre- mised on a measured disidentification that can occur only after a rec- ognition of nondifference. Conceptually and performatively, then, ethi- cal alienation inhabits neither the “that is me” nor “that is not me” of Volpp’s formulation but rather the vexed space of Rhonda Blair’s (1993, 303) litotic notion of contrary performance, what she calls the “not-me/not-not-me.” In the classroom, a position of ethical alienation means exposing

what has traditionally been valorized in a Western educational frame- work as effective reading practice (empathetic identification as a way of incorporating the representation of difference into a humanistic framework that does not make explicit its own assumptions about cul- tural authority). It is critical to treat such identificatory desire skepti- cally, since even as “learning and teaching to read . . . in ways that acknowledge difference can be the most basic training for the demo- cratic imagination,” all too often students are taught to embrace “one- sided approaches that ask them to identify with favorite characters, without also asking what interferes in the process” (Sommer 1999, 8).3 Margaret Stetz (2003), in an essay in Radical Teacher, highlights the process by which this operates in her recounting of the experi- ences of Michiko Hase, a Japanese-born feminist scholar. Hase often experiences student anger and resistance when trying to discuss “U.S. citizens’ complicity in and accountability for their government’s and businesses’ policies and actions” but notes, tellingly, that in teach- ing about “comfort women,” students became more “appreciative” because “when I presented the ‘comfort women’ issue in a way that was very critical of Japan, the students knew that I had not been ‘bash- ing’ the United States but had been applying my critical analysis to all countries and issues” (quoted in Stetz 2003). As Hase’s experi- ence illuminates, it may be all too easy for students to read “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni according to the dynamics of response Volpp articulates (i.e., condemnatory versus laudatory, “that is me” versus “that is not me”), especially when issues of cultural dif- ference are operative and moral judgments are differentiated on the basis of “us” and “them” distinctions.

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In response, Stetz (2003) suggests that while the importance of bringing this interdisciplinary, multiracial, transnational material into women’s studies courses is crucial for a host of obvious reasons (among them the need to express solidarity with women who deserve support, helping to recognize the trauma and legacy of survivors, and to demonstrate that feminist concerns are not primarily white, middle class, or exclusively American), perhaps the most indispensable role that the “comfort women” issue has to play has to do with the (re)mili- tarization of US society in the wake of 9/11. Specifically, she advo- cates for the importance of teaching about “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni in an effort to address the conflation of US patriot- ism with an uncritical embrace of the military establishment.4 With this insight, she gestures to how crucial it is to perform ethical alien- ation as a critical as well as a pedagogical stance, to clarify the ways in which “around the issue of sexual violence, victimization as a tech- nology of subjectification can proceed by installing and deploying ‘cultural difference’ such that the culture of the other is seen as patri- archal and oppressive while the United Stated appears in contrast as liberatory” (Chuh 2003a, 7).

The Pedagogical Paradoxes of Ethical Alienation

In the two most well-known novels about comfort women to date, Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) and Chang-rae Lee’s A Ges- ture Life (1999), the comfort woman issue is addressed within a US context that can make the narratives more approachable to a US audi- ence as well as obscure the hermeneutic process by which “com- fort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni emerge as “object[s] of a distinctly American regime of knowledge” (Kang 2003, 42). Keller’s novel centers its attention on the filial (dis)connection between a mother and daughter: Akiko, whose horrific experiences in the “rec- reation camps” of the Japanese army dislocate her from her home and former identity as Soon Hyo, and Beccah, who fears her mother is crazy and who does not fully understand the nature of her painful rela- tionship with Akiko. Comfort Woman enacts the kind of ethical alien- ation effect of which I write through Keller’s careful deployment of Korean shamanism as a critical, performative, and even pedagogical practice. Through shamanism, which allows Akiko the possibilities of a double reinscription into the world as both victim and agent,

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traumatized and healer, readers come to see what the “not-me/not- not-me” both looks and feels like.5 In teaching Comfort Woman, it may be all too easy to emphasize Japanese atrocity and responsibility in ways that encourage students to engage in Volpp’s “condemnatory reaction,” but critically Keller also encourages her readers to recog- nize how the United States’s neocolonial presence in Korea creates a gendered dynamic in US-Korean relations and consequentially impacts Korean American subject formation—particularly via her delineation of the similarities between Akiko’s relationship to her min- ister husband, Richard Bradley, and her objectification and repression in the comfort camps. Lee makes the connection between Japanese imperialism and US

neocolonialism even more explicit in A Gesture Life by emphasizing both the failure of institutional structures in fostering ethical behavior and the transcultural dynamics by which women are subordinated to the demands of militarized prostitution. Lee’s novel explores the conti- nuities and disjunctions between protagonist Franklin Hata’s present and past, his current identity as an institution of his bucolic suburban neighborhood, a veritable town father known popularly as “good Doc Hata,” and his previous life as the young medical officer Jiro Kurohata who is “uncertain of himself [and whether he] could find meaning amidst the camaraderie of his fellows working in such shared pur- pose” (1999, 224). Through Hata’s “gesture life,” Lee foregrounds a crisis of faith in institutional structures that the war—and particularly the institutionalized system of comfort women as part of the Japanese military effort of which Hata is a part—sets in motion. Critical to Lee’s critique and how the novel attempts to clarify

the ways in which “victimization as a technology of subjectification can proceed by installing and deploying ‘cultural difference’” (Chuh 2003a, 7) is the figure of Sunny, Hata’s adopted daughter. Half-black and half-Korean, Sunny is estranged from Hata, who adopts her in an effort to rewrite his earlier ethical failure in saving “K.” Although Kang (2003, 32) has argued that Sunny represents “an especially forced attempt to conjoin the histories of Japanese military sexual slavery and U.S. military-related prostitution in Korea,” such a con- joining is nonetheless significant in light of the student responses Hase and others have encountered in the classroom. More concretely, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold on to the us-versus-them, oppressor-versus-liberator identity positions identified by Volpp and

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Chuh when “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni are intro- duced in relation to the context of US militarized prostitution in Korea (and other parts of Asia)—especially when we acknowledge the ways in which camptowns and the system of militarized prostitution they embody operate in ways not entirely different from the Japanese mili- tarization of sex slaves during World War II (see Moon 1997; and Yuh 2004). Although these systems are clearly not the same, there are striking similarities—such as the coercion of women through third- party brokers or placement services, the euphemistic terminology ascribed to the women (“comfort women” in the case of the Japanese military and yang gongju [Western princess] and yang saeksi [Western bride] in the case of US-style militarized prostitution), the military hierarchies’ demand for and orchestration of campaigns to regulate the testing and treatment of venereal disease, and the requiring of women to wear numbered tags for identification purposes. In this case, we need to be willing to be alienated from the process that histo- rian Lisa Yoneyama (2003, 59) has termed the “Americanization of redress and historical justice,” a process that depends on “an imperial- ist myth of ‘liberation and rehabilitation’ in which violence and recov- ery are enunciated simultaneously [such that] the enemy population’s liberation from the barbaric and the backward and its successful reha- bilitation into an assimilated ally are both anticipated and explained as an outcome of the U.S. military interventions.” Ji-Yeon Yuh (2004, 36–37) concurs, arguing, “To see the camptown women as victims of militarized prostitution and as modern-day comfort women would be to shatter [a] vision of America” as a South Korean ally and friend whose freedoms and material abundance are ideals to be envied and emulated.

At this juncture, I focus on a poem by Ishle Park titled “House of Sharing Comfort Women” (2001, 51–53) in order to render more concrete how ethical alienation helps me, as a critic and a teacher, embrace a problematic Asian American agency. Park’s poem features an unnamed speaker and a halmoni whose daily life is initially charac- terized by activities—playing cards “worn smooth,” cooking “white corn over a portable stove,” smoking cigarettes, and dancing with Jap- anese students—that do not necessarily differentiate her from the other older women of her generation (51–52). The poem’s central con- ceit is the tension between the unnamed speaker, who observes the halmoni and whose descriptions are stubbornly descriptive, making

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clear her exteriority, and the halmoni herself, whose thoughts come across sporadically but never really give either the speaker or the poem’s reader a point of identificatory access. The alienation between the poem’s speaker and the halmoni,

between its reader/critic and its subjects, is precisely what allows for the consideration of the ethical dimensions of the ways in which the figures of “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni have been represented and come to assume meaning as part of a (in this case) particularly American regime of knowledge. Although the poem always names the woman as halmoni, its title also names her as a very specific kind of former “comfort woman”—someone affiliated with the House of Sharing, a communal living center established in 1992 by a Buddhist charity that houses a small group of former “com- fort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni who have since become the public faces for the redress campaign.6 Significantly, the halmoni’s past in the comfort camps is gestured to only elliptically in the first half of the poem in her internal thoughts:

3 pine trees. my parents thought they sent me to a good place. my hands like rubber gloves. my heart bleeding. I was 14. (Park 2001, 51)

Given the overt signaling by the poem’s title and its reference to the House of Sharing, the poem’s refusal to provide and affirm immedi- ately the details of victimization rather than the halmoni’s successful daily functioning produces a sense of expectation in the reader that is exposed as something created not so much by an ethical orienta- tion toward the subject matter as part of a reobjectivizing and exploit- ative gaze that has been trained to interpellate the “comfort women”/ military sex slaves/halmoni in specific ways. As documentary film- maker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson (1997, 259) notes, the narrative formula by which “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni have been pro- duced by activists, academics, and artists is quite rigid:

Each of the grandmas I interviewed preferred to start out citing her age at the time of capture and then move directly to the initial period of bondage. Each wanted to tell me immediately about “how many soldiers a day,” the medical examination, the venereal

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diseases, her menstruation, fees for services, and more than any- thing else, about the particular sadism of the soldiers, recruiters, and managers. . . . If indeed the old women had disclosed material beyond “that period,” it rarely made its way into the stories. It was as if their existence was justified by the horrendous years they suf- fered; nothing before or after that seemed to matter. Saddest of all, the grandmas themselves were convinced of that. They have become issues, numbers, and objects of studies, not full blooded human beings.

As soon as the reader comes to an awareness of the ethical conse- quences of expecting the halmoni’s story to conform to a narrative for- mula that focuses almost exclusively on the period of sexual slavery, Park (2001, 52) seemingly undercuts herself by obliging us with the kind of graphic image we initially expected: that of the young girl being cut open with rusted scissors because “she was too small.” As the poem continues to make clear, though, the halmoni is herself not that girl imprisoned and tortured in the comfort camps; this alienation between the girl of the past and the halmoni of the present is then what lays bare the reader’s affiliation with a victimizing position and allows the speaker to address the ethical problems of resolving such disjunction by relying on identification’s “wishful trajectory” (Kang 2003, 27). The alienation between the poem’s speaker and the hal- moni, between its reader/critic and its subjects, and between the hal- moni’s past and present identities thus emerges, at poem’s end, as the poem’s central preoccupation:

I cannot reconcile this halmoni with a girl 50 years ago, lips like pressed heart, neck long as reed, who never learned to write her own name, this halmoni, bundled thick in 2 wool coats, bus ticket clenched tightly in gloved fist to attend her hundredth rally, pushing the glass-covered police young enough to be her grandsons, to be in spitting distance of the Japanese embassy.

She draws a painting larger than herself of a soldier in mustard green, strapped to a cherry blossom tree with black barbed wire,

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guns pointed at his chest from 3 directions, white doves taking flight from its branches.

A painting of a hand picking ripe plum, Inside each one the face of a young Korean girl, Hair plaited in two thick braids, inside each plum, one girl. (Park

2001, 53)

The poem’s final stanzas can be read as paradoxically problematic: even as the speaker claims that she “cannot reconcile this halmoni with a girl 50 years ago,” she arguably tries to resolve this inability through her recounting of the halmoni’s paintings. The details of the paintings as well as the fact of the halmoni’s painting might be read as part of an effort to reconcile artistically through a visual register what cannot be spoken by either the speaker or the halmoni. However, I suggest that this concluding moment might also be read as one that embraces irreconcilability and the lack of identificatory correspon- dence on which a position of ethical alienation depends. In order to clarify how each of these critical readings operates, I

direct our attention to paintings produced by Kang Deuk-kyung, a now-deceased former “comfort woman”/military sex slave/halmoni who spent the last years of her life living at the House of Sharing and participating in weekly Wednesday protests at the Japanese con- sulate.7 Clearly, Kang Deuk-kyung’s paintings, which were created as part of an art therapy program, are the ones being referenced in Park’s poem. There is the “soldier in mustard green,” the “white doves taking flight,” and the “face of a young Korean girl” (Park 2001, 53). The actuality of these paintings and the fact that they were cre- ated by a former “comfort woman”/military sex slave/halmoni would seem to produce the reconciliation that the speaker professes not to be able to perform at poem’s end. And yet, a closer inspection of the paintings reveals that the poem’s visual images, however vivid, detailed, and referential, are also deliberately rendered imperfectly. Although the soldier in Kang’s painting is strapped to a tree, the tree is not a cherry tree in bloom but rather a tree without leaves or flow- ers, denuded and acting as a stark background to the blindfolded sol- dier strapped to its trunk. The image of the cherry blossom tree is actually taken from another picture—“Purity Lost Forever”—which features a soldier who seems to be part of the tree itself. He is half- man, half-tree, and he looms over a naked woman who lies at the roots

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of the cherry tree, her hands over her eyes and her body curled in a fetal position. At the foreground of the picture is a field of skulls, which might represent other female victims of the camps or might be meant to invoke the death of “purity” that is referenced in the pic- ture’s title. The last painting, which indeed shows hands plucking fruit on which are figured the images of young Korean girls, is also “mis- translated” by the poem; rather than plums and a girl with “hair plaited in two thick braids,” the painting features pears and a girl with a single braid.

Beyond Identification’s “Wishful Trajectory”

What do such mistranslations tell us about the ethical dilemma of how to study and teach about comfort women and our own disciplin- ary investments as Asian Americanists and American studies practi- tioners? In using the work of Kang Deuk-kyung, I believe Park is clearly signaling the importance of remembering that even as “com- fort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni operate as a “term of analy- sis and history rather than personhood” (Chuh 2003a, 9) they also gesture, however inadequately, to the “complex personhood” (Gordon 1997, 4–5) of the women who survived this brutal history. Park’s poetic use of the paintings both pays homage to and refigures Kang’s work. In her transposition of the cherry tree from “Purity Lost For- ever,” a tree that represents both the young girl’s innocence and her traumatic sexualization, to the scene of “Punish Those Responsible,” Park brings together the separate images of violation and retribution from Kang’s oeuvre to fashion a statement about the possibility of rec- onciling the halmoni with the young girl in order to make sense of the political will revealed in the weekly demonstrations at poem’s end.

This is a critical statement, one that is crucial to the redress move- ment and represents a “coming to voice” that we want to celebrate. And yet, being ethically alienated from this possibility means recog- nizing that there can be no easy reconciliation—the transfiguration of the image is poetic license that can bring both halmoni and young girl together artistically only by acknowledging the disjunction that Kang’s painting insists on—and understanding that the significance of making such a statement locates not so much to the women con- scripted to sexual slavery but to us, critics and artists and teachers, to

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satisfy our will to knowledge. In this effort, Park’s resistance to “the core values of aesthetic realism—correspondence, mimesis, and equivalence—and [her] approach to these notions as contradictions” (Lowe 1996, 130), her commitment to what Lisa Lowe might call “an aesthetic of infidelity,” insists on an ethical alienation that recognizes critical distance as crucial to the embrace of a problematic Asian American agency that both acknowledges a desire to practice and works to counter what Rey Chow has termed “‘self-subalternization,’ a process by which the critic identifies with a position of powerlessness in order, paradoxically, to claim a certain kind of academic power” (quoted in Chuh 2003a, 8). Academic power comes in manifest forms. As a field that came into

being by challenging the various disciplinary mechanisms by which the university produces and maintains knowledge, Asian American lit- erary studies has always viewed its own agency and successes in somewhat suspect terms. From the early denunciations of mainstream success by the Aiiieeee! editors to a contemporary tendency toward “recursive feedback loops”—what Rachel Lee (2014, 4) has character- ized as a “fractal incorporation” of “critiques of its self-critiques of its self-critiques of its self-critiques, and so on”—Asian American literary studies would do well to attend to the possibilities of being ethically alienated from itself. Although it is easy to understand the dissemina- tion of knowledge hierarchically, a dynamic seemingly reinforced by the publication of four compendiums within a single year to mark the institutional successes of the field, this article has argued for the possibilities of reassessing that hierarchy by considering the ways in which pedagogical practice is not simply an application of scholarly work but can itself serve to respond to, refine, and complicate the intellectual and critical assumptions of the discipline. In some ways, this represents a logical next move for Asian American studies, so long used to protesting others but now, in the vein of recognizing how “adaptive hegemony” works, perhaps ready to move its self-critiques from a stance of theoretical open-endedness to wrestling with what Roderick Ferguson (2012) has named “the reorder of things,” wherein the successful institutionalization of new curricula might be what we need to problematize—not just celebrate. In other words, what does it mean in both pedagogical and institutional terms to recognize our alignments with dominance and repression, to engage with those positions as a meaningful part of the field’s professional responsibility?

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The trauma suffered by the women subjected to work in comfort stations has been compounded in multiple ways: in addition to surviv- ing their sexual slavery by the Japanese military, these women have had to struggle against a US Cold War hegemony that supported the suppression of their reparation efforts against Japan, the refutation of their testimony concerning the brutalities they suffered, and the Japa- nese government’s refusal to offer an official apology.8 Much of the public emphasis regarding the comfort women has been on restitu- tion and reparation, with both “comfort women”/military sex slaves/ halmoni organizations and war crimes commissions demanding an offi- cial apology as well as remuneration from the Japanese government. As the human rights and activist activity surrounding the redress move- ment reveals, the ethical dimensions to “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni issues are multiple—related to historical memory and amnesia, the debate over what really happened, and how public witness and personal testimony can be used to produce “bodies” of evidence in support of what has been historically disavowed or repressed. And yet, the artistic representation of comfort women in Asian American litera- ture and culture, which in many cases does not explicitly address the issue of reparations and government accountability that constitutes the ethical center of the redress movement, foregrounds for Asian Ameri- canists different kinds of questions and problems about what consti- tutes ethical knowledge production and practice in Asian American studies as a site of both academic inquiry and pedagogy.

Even as this article has employed the figures of “comfort women”/ military sex slaves/halmoni as a means of critiquing the consolidation of Asian Americanist academic knowledge production, the practices it espouses—a pedagogy of active interference and ethical alienation as a productive response to the institutionalization of specific episte- mological frameworks—can also usefully be turned on themselves. At the end of 2015, two significant events occurred illustrating both the drive toward consolidating knowledge practices and the impor- tance of ongoing interference through alienating practices. First, the state of California released a draft of guidelines for the teaching of history recommending that tenth graders be taught in world history about “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni “as an example of institutionalized sexual slavery, and one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century.” This recommendation has generated ongoing debates and even an online petition on Change.org

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in response to a conservative Japanese newspaper’s reporting (Kim 2016). Second, the Japanese and South Korean governments announced that they had come to an agreement about the “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni issue (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2015). Heralded as a diplomatic success, the agree- ment included Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “sincere apologies and remorse” and the establishment of “a foundation for the purpose of providing support for the former comfort women” funded by an $8.3 million contribution as well as the South Korean government’s pub- licly affirmed efforts to address the installation of a “comfort woman”/ military sex slave/halmoni statue in front of the Embassy of Japan in Seoul. Japan’s apologies and monetary contributions were not made contingent on the removal of the statue, and critically, the ongoing debates about the statue of a barefoot girl and an empty chair (see figure 1) placed in front of the embassy in 2011 to commemorate the unresolved “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni issue serve as an example of how important ethical alienation can be in response to what one might argue are the consolidating impera- tives articulated through both the curricular changes proposed by

Figure 1. The Statue of Peace, located in front of the Embassy of Japan in Seoul. Image courtesy of YunHo Lee

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California and the “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni agreement between Japan and Korea. The statue reminds us that there are many other statues commemorating “comfort women”/mili- tary sex slaves/halmoni established around the world—most notably in Manila, Nanjing, and the United States—and that the agreement between Japan and Korea continues to be vigorously protested by fac- tions in both countries as well as Filipina comfort women, who are angry about their exclusion from this official response. As such, it seems important to remember that the very worthwhile accomplish- ments of such consolidating moves can and must be subject to contin- ued critique, one made visible through a willingness to be alienated ethically from prevailing ideas about disciplinary, political, aesthetic, pedagogical, and epistemological priorities.

Tina Chen is associate professor of English and Asian American studies at the Penn- sylvania State University. Her book, Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture, was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2005. She is also the founding editor of Verge: Studies in Global Asias.

Notes

1 For an overview of the redress movement, see Hicks 1999. Several oral histories and testimonies have also been published, including Kim- Gibson 1997; Schellstede 2000; Howard 1996; and Henson 1999. Addition- ally, a number of scholarly studies in English have also appeared. See, for instance, Choi 1997; Hicks 1994; Soh 2009; Tanaka 1998, 2002; and Yoshiaki 2000.

2 Although Korean women made up approximately 80 percent of the com- fort women population during the war, data reveals that a wide variety of women—including Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Dutch, Burmese, Malay, White Russian, Filipina, Vietnamese, and Burmese— were used by the Japanese military. Historian George Hicks estimates that if we assume a ratio of comfort women to soldiers as 50:1, then there were about 139,000 comfort women in service during the war. Yoshimi Yoshiaki (2000, 93–94) acknowledges that we have no documents from which to derive accurate estimates; however, the number of women is between 50,000 and 200,000.

3 For a fuller discussion of how teaching minority writing can disrupt or problematize traditional Western pedagogical goals and assumptions in the classroom, see Chen 2005b, 2006.

4 This is due to the difference in attitude between the publication of Stetz’s essay and now, including changing notions of the appropriateness of war.

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5 For a more detailed discussion of how shamanism operates in Keller’s novel, see chapter 5, “Shamanism and the Subject(s) of History in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman,” in Chen 2005a, 113–51.

6 In addition to housing former “comfort women”/military sex slaves/ halmoni, the House of Sharing is also a human rights museum dedicated to the theme of sexual slavery. Its website can be accessed at www.nanum .org/eng/. The women who live there have been featured in many inter- views, in films such as Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s Silence Broken and The House of Sharing, and as the subjects of various art exhibits featuring their paint- ings (produced as part of an ongoing art therapy program). Additionally, several of the House of Sharing halmoni participated in the weekly protests at the Japanese Embassy sponsored by the Korean Council. The weekly Wednesday demonstrations have been ongoing since January 8, 1992.

7 Kang Deuk-kyung is also spelled Kang Duk-Kyung and Kang Deok- keong.

8 For nuanced articles on the Japanese response to comfort women’s demands for apology and reparations, see Field 1997; and Park 1997. For an argument about how US hegemony is complicit in the sexual enslave- ment of Asian women, see Thiesmeyer 1996.

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