Beyond the Shadow of Camptown

Korean Military Brides in America

Ji-Yeon Yuh

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780814796993
• eBook ISBN: 9780814797372
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Explores the experiences of Korean military brides in the United States

Since the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, nearly 100,000 Korean women have immigrated to the United States as the wives of American soldiers. Based on extensive oral interviews and archival research, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown tells the stories of these women, from their presumed association with U.S. military camptowns and prostitution to their struggles within the intercultural families they create in the United States.

Historian Ji-Yeon Yuh argues that military brides are a unique prism through which to view cultural and social contact between Korea and the U.S. After placing these women within the context of Korean-U.S. relations and the legacies of both Japanese and U.S. colonialism vis á vis military prostitution, Yuh goes on to explore their lives, their coping strategies with their new families, and their relationships with their Korean families and homeland. Topics range from the personal—the role of food in their lives—to the communal—the efforts of military wives to form support groups that enable them to affirm Korean identity that both American and Koreans would deny them.

Relayed with warmth and compassion, this is the first in-depth study of Korean military brides, and is a groundbreaking contribution to Asian American, women's, and "new" immigrant studies, while also providing a unique approach to military history.

CHAPTER 1

Camptown, U.S.A.

The first Korean woman to enter the United States as the bride of a U.S. citizen arrived in 1950. She was the only one that year, and in all likelihood her husband was an American soldier. In the nearly half-century since then, close to a hundred thousand Korean women have followed as brides of U.S. soldiers.¹ These marriages have been made possible by the continued American military presence in South Korea, which provides the immediate context in which Korean women and U.S. soldiers meet and marry. The American presence not only creates the physical context—military bases and nearby camp-towns, towns that revolve economically around the bases and which contain red-light districts catering to U.S. soldiers, where the two meet—but it also helps create the social and cultural contexts—militarized prostitution, local civilian employment on military bases, and the lure of America—that make marriage to U.S. soldiers, an appealing option for Korean women.

Relationships between Korean women and American soldiers have been shaped by the unequal relationship between the United States and Korea. These marriages might be based on personal choices made at the individual level but they are also a consequence of a half-century of American military domination over Korea. At least for the women, the choice to marry an American soldier is profoundly shaped by this larger context of Korean subordination. America’s military presence in Korea serves as a constant reminder of the glaring contrast between Korean poverty and American wealth, which is too often interpreted as the contrast between Korean backwardness and American modernity. Additionally, the sexual subordination of Korean women on and around U.S. military bases in the region cannot be overlooked when examining the nature and the origins of relationships between Korean women and American soldiers.

The relationship between Korea and the United States is itself gendered, with Korea inscribed as the feminine other in need of protection and the United States playing the role of the masculine superior and guardian. This gendered context of neoimperialism is a major factor in the skewed gender profile of intermarriages between Koreans and Americans, the overwhelming majority of which are between American men and Korean women.²

The flip side of protection, of course, is that the masculine guardian also has the power to exploit the feminine other. This aspect of the gendered nature of the U.S.-Korea relationship is perhaps most notoriously reflected in the phenomenon of militarized prostitution, which can be found around every U.S. military base in Asia. South Korea, Okinawa, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam have been or still are locations where Asian women serve the sexual desires of U.S. soldiers in clubs and bars clustered in so-called camptowns (also known as base towns or GI towns) that develop near military bases.³ In Korea, these camptowns are found next to every major U.S. military installation, small ones near the small bases, larger ones next to the larger bases. Camptown activists estimate that between twenty to twenty-five thousand women are currently engaged in sex work within these communities.⁴

Itaewon, located in the heart of Seoul, South Korea’s capital, is one of the better known and larger camptowns. Replete with U.S. fast-food restaurants and stores selling Korean-made goods such as leather jackets and baseball caps, by day Itaewon serves as a shopping district for American tourists and expatriates longing for a taste of home. By night, it becomes the red-light entertainment district for soldiers stationed at nearby Yongsan, home of the Eighth Army and headquarters of the USFK, U.S. Forces Korea. An American reporter describes Itaewon this way:

A mile or so outside of Yongsan U.S. Army Garrison in central Seoul, past the tourist shops and street vendors selling Bulls, Raiders, et al apparel, past the Burger King and the newly-opened Orange Julius and down a series of narrow roadways packed with American soldiers who are falling in and out of ramshackle clubs—Cadillac Bar, Love Cupid, Texas Club, Boston Club, the King Club, the Palladium, the Grand Ole’ Opry—is one of the 180 GI camptowns that exist outside of every significantly sized military base in South Korea. . . .

On any given night in Itaewon, women in prostitution costume hang out club doors soliciting GIs: one part come on, one part contempt. An old Korean woman, hands clasped behind her back, spends the night strolling up and down Hooker Hill, approaching young GIs in their downy sports jackets, asking, “Lady?” as the GI, after questioning “How much? How old?” follows her up the hill and down an alley.⁵

My own 1997 visit to Uijongbu, a much smaller camptown near Seoul, highlighted both the social distance between mainstream Korean society and the camptowns, and the pervasiveness of the U.S. military presence in South Korea. I boarded the subway in central Seoul, along with students, smartly dressed middle-aged women, younger women in office garb, and business-suited men. Only one foreigner, a woman, was visible. During the fifty-minute subway ride, the composition of the passengers changed. The middle-aged women became more shabbily dressed and the young women more heavily made-up, while the business-suited men were nowhere to be seen, having been replaced by men in work clothes. Black and white American GIs, identifiable by their military fatigues, could be seen in nearly every compartment of the train: alone, in groups, or in pairs with young Korean women who were almost invariably dressed in short skirts, with permed hair and heavy makeup. Although perms, heavy makeup, and short skirts are in vogue among young urban women in Korea, the cheap quality of their clothes and the sparkly disco club style of their slightly smudged makeup set these women apart from the chic urbanites who stride through Seoul’s fashionable districts.

Uijongbu itself was a bustling small town with what appeared to be a thriving commercial district. English signs made it clear that Americans were among the customers and several American fast-food chains were within walking distance of the station. American soldiers mixed with Korean pedestrians and U.S. military vehicles were visible among the cars and buses. I boarded a city bus along with several GIs and asked the driver to let me off at bbaet-bul, the local name for the Uijongbu red-light district.⁶ We headed for the outskirts of the town. Evidence of the U.S. military was everywhere: in addition to military jeeps and trucks, there were signs pointing to Camp Red Cloud and Camp Stanley, the gates of Camp Stanley itself, and the road, which was too wide for such a rural area and was obviously constructed to accommodate military vehicles.

The Uijongbu camptown is actually two neighborhoods, one in front of each U.S. military camp. The bbaet-bul bus stop is in the Gosan-dong neighborhood in front of Camp Stanley. It is a shabby, obviously poor area, with narrow streets and back alleys honeycombed with small houses. At first glance, it could be mistaken for any poor neighborhood in any semirural area of South Korea. But the local establishments and clubs, with names like Diamond and Mustang, and the presence of American GIs walking with Korean women, indicate that this area is somehow different. According to camptown activists, Uijongbu has about fifteen clubs in which fifty women work.

Many of the Korean women who marry American soldiers are assumed to have been prostitutes and club hostesses in camptowns such as this. Although no reliable statistics are available regarding the number of camptown women who married American GIs, the existing literature still concludes that the majority of Korean women-American GI marriages involve camptown women.⁷ Most of these conclusions are based on ethnographic evidence, casework with Korean military wives living in the United States, speculation based on INS statistics of Korean women who immigrate to the United States as wives of American citizens, and/or statistics kept by the Korean government on emigration and marriages between Korean and American citizens.⁸ One Korean wife of an American GI told a researcher that nine out of ten Korean women met their GI husbands at clubs catering exclusively to American soldiers, thus implying that they were prostitutes, and then added that nine out of ten will deny it.⁹ Another researcher, however, found that the assumption that most women who marry American soldiers are prostitutes was unsupported by her data, which included a random sampling of applications made in 1978 by soldiers seeking permission from their commanding officers to marry Korean women and a survey of Korean women who had married American men and were seeking emigration visas from the Korean government.¹⁰

Among the wives that I encountered, it was considered a “known fact” that many of their compatriots had once been camptown women. However, only a few women spoke of camptown backgrounds, and most of the other women had detailed stories about meeting their husbands through friends, on-base jobs, and other encounters.

A satisfactory demographic profile of Korean women who marry American soldiers will probably never be compiled, given the dearth of data. However, it is clear that even though camptowns are one place where Korean women and American soldiers meet and form relationships, it is not the only place. And although it may have been the primary place in the past for the blossoming of such international marriages, it can no longer be assumed that this remains the case. Yet there is no doubting that militarized prostitution figures prominently in the phenomenon of marriages between Korean women and American soldiers. Research in the camptowns and with Korean women who came to the United States as GI wives consistently reveal that many marriages do involve former camptown prostitutes. Research also shows that many come from areas near camptowns and U.S. military bases, regardless of whether or not the women themselves were prostitutes.¹¹

But more important, the very existence of militarized prostitution looms like a shadow over both Korean society and the lives of Korean women who marry American soldiers, even if those marriages began in locales other than camptowns. To take only the most blatant example, the sexual virtue of all women who marry American soldiers is immediately suspect, as one Korean woman found upon her engagement to a soldier. The woman, who worked in the same U.S. military base office as her fiancé, recalled the reaction of her coworkers:

As soon as people in my office heard about my engagement with John, they looked down on me. I was made to feel dirty and unworthy. Some soldiers asked me to go out with them, obviously thinking that I was now an easy mark for propositions. I quit my work rather than put up with such nonsense.¹²

Her fiancé, for his part, found that his military colleagues and commanding officers tried to dissuade him from the marriage. Some showed him pictures of sisters and female cousins, offering to introduce him to them. Korean women, it seems, were generally deemed acceptable as sexual companions, but not as wives to take home.

Along with unfavorable reputations, the stereotype of the camptown woman results in social alienation. It helps to keep Korean military wives isolated from both mainstream American society and mainstream Korean society, whether in South Korea itself or in Korean immigrant communities in America, for it makes the women an easy target for contempt. This in effect leaves them isolated within tightly restricted social circles where their primary relationships are either with their immediate families or with other Korean military wives.

It is therefore absolutely necessary to examine militarized prostitution in order to fully understand the historical and social contexts in which marriages between Korean women and American soldiers occur.

America’s Comfort Women

For many American soldiers, Korea is synonymous with the proverbial rock ’n’ rolling good time, and Korean women—treated as playthings easily bought and easily discarded—are essential to that experience. The women are seen by the soldiers as innately sexual, even depraved, and doing what they do for fun and money. If anyone has forced them into prostitution, in the eyes of the soldier, it is the Korean madams and pimps, not the U.S. military and certainly not the soldiers themselves.¹³ The continuing prevalence of this belief is apparent in an April 1999 discussion about militarized prostitution in Korea on an e-mail list whose members, judging from their self-descriptions, are primarily Western males (mostly American) who spent some time in South Korea and maintain an interest in the country. The discussion also demonstrates that soldiers are not the only ones who hold this opinion. Most of the list members who posted on this topic refused to acknowledge that the women in this situation are victimized in any way by the U.S. military or individual soldiers. Instead, the discussants insisted that the majority of the women had made free choices to become prostitutes. One man called camptown women “women who are husband hunting, having fun, or in such [sic] of some sucker with a PX Ration Card.” He suggested that “what you really need to do is ‘follow the money,’” implying that since money flows from the soldiers to the women and pimps, it is the women and pimps who are benefiting from prostitution. Another man argued that without camptown prostitution, “there would be more rapes, and that the Army is thus keeping down violence against the local community (although that is a terrible thing to say).”¹⁴

Racism and sexism cannot be discounted as powerful factors in such discourses.¹⁵ These are military manifestations of a deep-rooted American racism against Asians, which in the twentieth century has been expressed in the vilification of Asians as the “yellow peril” or the “yellow horde,” as the villainous Fu Manchu, and the sexy but dangerous Dragon Lady. Combined with sexist and racist stereotypes of Asian women as exotic sex objects, this kind of thinking encourages and permits U.S. soldiers to treat Asian women, especially but not only prostitutes, as dispensable sex toys.

As Katherine Moon notes in her groundbreaking study of militarized prostitution in South Korea, the U.S. military condones and even encourages such behavior among its troops. One sailor told her that some commanding officers told their men that Asians like prostitution, calling it a way of life.¹⁶ Articles in the Pacific Stars and Stripes, the primary military newspaper for U.S. troops in the Pacific, actively encouraged soldiers to seek out the camptown by reviewing clubs. One 1977 article, for example, touted the kisaeng party—a night of drinking and dancing with female entertainment—as the “ultimate experience” and “the Orient you heard about and came to find.”¹⁷ A U.S. Army manual from the 1980s turned a blind eye to the troops frequenting prostitutes with a “boys will be boys” attitude, telling the reader that “being a red-blooded American soldier, you will undoubtedly get your chance to experience the various aspects of the village.” The manual then provided “tips” for patronizing camptown women, advising the soldiers to check the women’s VD cards, stick to the licensed club women, and stay away from the streetwalkers.¹⁸

A U.S. Army chaplain interviewed in 1991 by Moon explained:

What the soldiers have read and heard before ever arriving in a foreign country influences prostitution a lot. For example, stories about Korean women being beautiful, subservient—they’re tall tales, glamorized. . . . U.S. men would fall in lust with Korean women. They were property, things, slaves. . . . Racism, sexism—it’s all there. The men don’t see the women as human beings—they’re disgusting, things to be thrown away. . . . They speak of the women in the diminutive.¹⁹

These distorted and dangerous ideas on the part of Westerners are embedded in the very fabric of the relationship between U.S. soldiers and local camptown women. These women are America’s comfort women, the victims of a system of militarized prostitution that is supported and regulated by the U.S. military for the benefit of its soldiers.²⁰

Although it is usually Japan that is vilified for the creation of a corps of comfort women during World War II, virtual slaves serving the sexual desires of Japanese soldiers, America also has a history of forcing women and girls into similar situations of sexual subjugation and exploitation.²¹ In Vietnam, an installation of prostitutes servicing four thousand U.S. soldiers was specifically created by and for the benefit of the U.S. military. The brothels, two concrete barracks each containing a bar, bandstand, and sixty curtained-off compartments where the women lived and worked, were located in fenced compounds guarded by military police, compounds that included restaurants and other recreational facilities for the soldi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Editor
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Content
• Acknowledgments
• Explanatory Notes
• Chronology of Selected Events in Modern Korean History
• Introduction
• 1. Camptown, U.S.A.
• 2. American Fever
• 3. Immigrant Encounters: From Resistance to Survival
• 4. Cooking American, Eating Korean
• 5. Prodigal Daughters, Filial Daughters
• 6. Sisters Do It For Themselves: Building Community
• Biographies of Women Interviewed
• Appendix 1: A Note on Research
• Appendix 2: Overview of Scholarly Treatment of Korean Military Brides
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author