The Korean War (1950-53) is arguably the least-remembered of the wars involving the US, and in both academia and the popular imagination you may find it referred to as The Forgotten War. Commencing not quite two years after the division of the Korean Peninsula into the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) in August and September 1948, respectively, the war claimed the lives of millions of combatants and civilians alike, as well as prompting the migration from North to South of countless refugees, most of them never again to see family members remaining in the North. Brother’s Keeper is a fictional account of one such journey, based on the life of the author’s mother.
The novel opens in a mountainous village 50 miles north of Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, on the evening of June 25, 1950. The schools have closed until further notice and 12-year-old Pak Sora and her 8-year-old brother Youngsoo are having dinner with their parents and a neighbor couple. The neighbors wish to escape to the South, knowing that their privileged background will render them vulnerable to the staunchly class-conscious NK authorities. The children’s father has a sibling and spouse living in Pusan, at the far southeast of the Korean Peninsul and the neighbor couple wish to connect with them at the end of their journey, ideally in the company of the Paks.
Their journey southward begins in November 1950, but shortly after their departure Sora and Youngsoo are separated from their parents and younger brother by an aerial attack (the US contingent of the United Nations forces fighting alongside the ROK econducted a relentless aerial bombing campaign of the North). The children continue south, following numerous other refugees and encountering US forces and then ROK soldiers, and arrive in South Korea only to learn that the arrival of PRC troops have helped the North Korean People’s Army turn the tide of the war. Sora and Youngsoo must then join a tide of refugees swarming into and onto a train bound for Pusan. The novel ends as it starts, with Sora and Youngsoo, reunited with their family, returning from a day of school.
Researched by means of testimony, interviews, and the experience of the author’s mother, who likewise guided a younger sibling to safety during the war, the novel contains unsparing detail of the refugee experience, a journey undertaken in the dead of winter through a barren, unpopulated landscape and requiring passage across a major river. Contextualizing the narrative are an Author’s note, a selection of photos of the author’s family, a Glossary, and a Timeline of the Korean War, the latter reminding us of the timelessness of the story in that the two Koreas, having failed to agree to a formal treaty ending the conflict, remain technically in a state of war. The Author Note concludes with these words: “While the movement toward remembering the Korean War continues, the stories of refugee survivors remain largely untold—narratives full of courage, hope, and love. …let us listen to their stories and never forget.
Brothers’ Keeper is among the latest of a new flowering of Korean American, and increasingly Korean Canadian, young adult (high school) and juvenile (middle school) novels, a rich body of work dating back almost a century to Younghill Kang’s The Grass Roof and flourishing in the new millennium in fiction by Sook Nyul Choi, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Helen Kim, Patti Kim, Marie Lee, An Na, and Helie Lee. That almost all of these authors are female is striking evidence of the progress made by women writers not only in Korea but among Korean diasporic communities in surmounting the gender-role limitations imposed on Korean women by neo-Confucian ideology.
Bruce Fulton occupies the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia, where he serves as a Professor in the Department of Asian Studies. He is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous works of modern Korean fiction, most recently Togani by Gong Ji-young and Chinatown, four stories by Oh Jung-hee (Penguin Modern Classic); co-recipient, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of the first U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for a Korean literary work and the first residency at the Banff International Literature Translation Centre awarded for a translation from any Asian language; and editor of The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories.
