Communicating Trauma: Female Survivors’ Witnessing the No Gun Ri Killings

Abstract

In 2000, the Associated Press investigative report team won the Pulitzer Prize award for reporting on the No Gun Ri incident in which American troops during the Korean War killed innocent civilian refugees who had taken shelter near and under the bridge called No Gun Ri. As the primary witnesses of the No Gun Ri killings, female survivors have courageously communicated their unutterable trauma through both scripting and exorcizing. Through oral history interviews with survivors in South Korea, this article examines how the Confucian script of motherhood (i.e., mothers as reproducers, protectors, and expandable assistants of the male blood line) has enabled the No Gun Ri female rhetors on one hand to weave trauma into plausible stories, yet on the other hand provoked them to reflect on their memories with a sense of culpability. The findings of the study also suggest that the oral form of communication has facilitated the female rhetors to exorcize inarticulable memories which cannot be subject to the Confucian script of motherhood.

Keywords

memory female rhetors Korean War motherhood trauma

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anderson, K. , & Jack, D. ( 1998). Learning to listen: Interview techniques and analyses . In R. Perks & A. Thomson (Eds.), The oral history reader (pp. 157-171). New York, NY: Routledge.

Barthes, R. ( 1977). Rhetoric of the image. In S. Heath (Trans.), Image, Music, Text: Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (pp. 32-51). New York, NY: Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1964)

Bodnar, J. ( 1989). Power and memory in oral history: Workers and managers at Studebaker. Journal of American History, 75, 1201-1221.

Campbell, K.K. ( 1989). The sound of women’s voices. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 75, 212-258.

Caruth, C. ( 1991). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Choi, C. ( 1992). Korean women in a culture of inequality. In D. N. Clark (Ed.), Korea briefing (pp. 97-116). Boulder, CO: Westview..

Choi, E. ( 1994). Statues of the family and motherhood for Korean women . In J. Gelb & M. L. Palley (Eds.), Women of Japan and Korea: Continuity and change (pp. 189-205). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Choi, S. ( 2008). Silencing survivors’ narratives: Why are we again forgetting the No Gun Ri story? Rhetoric & Public Affairs , 11, 367-388.

Chung, E.-Y. ( 1994). Gdai, Wooriyi Apumyul Anunga? [Do you know our pain?] . Seoul, Republic of Korea: Dari Media.

10.

Conway-Lanz, S. ( 2005). Beyond No Gun Ri: Refugees and the United States Military in the Korean War. Diplomatic History, 29(1), 49-81.

11.

Cumings, B. ( 2001). Occurrence at Nogŭn-ri Bridge: An inquiry into the history and memory of a civil war. Critical Asian Studies , 33, 509-526.

12.

Deuchler, M. ( 2003). Propagating female virtues in Chosn Korea. In D. Ko , J. K. Haboush , & J. A. Piggott (Eds.), Women and Confucian cultures in premodern China, Korea, and Japan (pp. 142-169). Berkeley: University of California Press.

13.

Duncan, J. ( 1997). Confucian social values in contemporary South Korea. In L. R. Lancaster & R. K. Payne (Eds.), Religion and society in contemporary Korea (pp. 49-73). Berkeley: University of California Press.

14.

Edkins, J. ( 2003). Trauma and the memory of politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

15.

Hanley, L. ( 1991). Writing war: Fiction, gender & memory. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

16.

Hanley, C.J. , Choe, S. , & Mendoza, M. ( 1999, September 29). War’s hidden chapter: Ex-GIs tell AP of Korea killing. New York, NY: Associated Press. Retrieved from http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6350

17.

Hanley, C.J. , Choe, S. , & Mendoza, M. ( 2001). The bridge at No Gun Ri: A hidden nightmare from the Korean War. New York, NY: Henry Holt.

18.

Hanley, C.J. , & Mendoza, M. ( 2007, 14 April). Army knew of letter on shooting refugees: Korean War document was omitted from report on No Gun Ri. New York, NY: Associated Press.

19.

Henke, S.A. ( 2000). Trauma and testimony in women’s life-writing. New York, NY: St. Martin’s.

20.

Lowenthal, D. ( 1985). The past is a foreign country. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

21.

Moon, S. ( 2005). Militarized modernity and gendered citizenship in South Korea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

22.

Smith, S. , & Watson, J. ( 2001). Reading autobiography: A guide for interpreting life narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

23.

Thompson, P. ( 2000). The voice of the past: Oral history (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

24.

Trainor, B. ( 2001, January 21). The anguish of knowing: What happened at No Gun Ri. The Washington Post, pp. B1, B4.

25.

Young, J.E. ( 2003). Between history and memory: The voice of the eyewitness . In A. Douglass & T. A. Vogler (Eds.), Witness & memory (pp. 275-283). New York: Routledge.

26.

Young, M. ( 2002). An incident at No Gun Ri. In B. Omer , G. Atina , & N. Mary (Eds.), Crimes of war: Guilt and denial in the twentieth century. New York, NY: New Press.

27.

Zelizer, B. ( 1998). Remembering to forget: Holocaust memory through the camera’s eye. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.