Journal of Asian American Studies

“Asian American Studies is a wartime formation” (264), writes Josephine Nock-Hee Park in her 2016 book, Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature. While the field’s historical formation largely determines its antiwar and anti-imperialist politics, the politics of resistance in Asian American histories and communities is complicated by the proto-American subjects—immigrants or refugees who have not yet been fully Americanized—at the center of Park’s survey. Wartime proto-American subjects are what Park calls “friendlies”: unthreatening locals who form provisional alliances with American military personnel, gathering sympathy while doing wartime service in return. During the Korean and Vietnam Wars, wartime friendlies’ anticommunist and anticolonial struggle was always overdetermined by the difficult question of how to be anticommunist without becoming agents of U.S. imperialism and colonialism. Tackling this conundrum, Cold War Friendships intervenes in the field of Asian American studies by addressing how friendly proto-American subjects painstakingly fashion new selves via a neocolonial relation with the United States.

Park’s sophisticated literary analysis in Cold War Friendships is methodologically informed by two Cold War logics: the logic of substitution and that of integration and division. The first logic speaks to the United States’ recasting of internal conflicts in Korea and Vietnam as symbolic of the confrontation between two superpowers. This logic is also seen in the United States’ substitution of military victory with militarization and humanitarian rescue in both countries. The logic of integration and division shows that one was seen either as a friend who could be integrated into the U.S. neocolonial regime or as an enemy who needed to be contained. Accordingly, Park’s analyses trace how Cold War friendlies sustain a neocolonial alignment while sacrificing their [End Page 481] ethnic solidarity, and how they embrace the vision of humanitarian missions while harboring convoluted attachments to their American friends.

Park addresses a range of texts that collectively portray a Cold War alliance scripted by the mainstream culture to gather popular sympathy while significantly challenging and rewriting the cultural imagination of Cold War friendlies. The six texts can be divided into three categories that represent different functions of Cold War literature: first, Cold War literature offers incisive philosophical truths that free the friendly from the shame of neocolonial dependence; second, it reveals how the war recasts political alliances, fabricating enemies while purifying friends; finally, it challenges the idea of American benevolence and the promise of liberal integration. Through her critical juxtaposition of autobiographically informed novels, experimental literary fiction, and memoirs, Park shows how wartime bonds are never transcended but are transformed and used as resources for self-creation.

Cold War Friendships is structured into two parts: the first part includes chapters 1 to 4 and is dedicated to the Korean War; the second part includes chapters 5 to 8 and focuses on the Vietnam War. The framing chapters in each part synthesize American journalistic and cinematic representations of the two wars, signifying the friendlies’ impossible Americanization or the few political choices available to them. In part I, “Securing the Korean War,” Park investigates different dimensions of Cold War friendlies, focusing on the roles of the friendly soldier, the foreign student, and the adopted child. Through these wartime figures, Park also traces the sense of isolation and otherness inseparable from Cold War friendlies’ attempts to become Americans. Part II, “Reviving the War in Vietnam,” elucidates Vietnam War friendlies’ attachments to their American friends, as Park analyzes how they rescue the war for defeated Americans and rehabilitate traumatized GIs. Although Park explains how this narrative of rescue grants different political choices to Vietnam War friendlies, readers might still wonder if that is the only reason that determines the thematic difference and political outcomes presented in parts I and II. A more explicit answer to this question would also clarify how much agency was given to refugees of Korean and Vietnam Wars due to...