Memories of My Ghost Brother

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Memories of My Ghost Brother Pub. Date: 11/1/1997 Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)

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Memories of My Ghost Brother (New Edition) Pub. Date: 5/28/2005 Publisher: Bo-Leaf Books
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Memories of My Ghost Brother Pub. Date: 11/1/1996 Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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Overview

This autobiographical novel explores the coming of age of an Amerasian boy in Korea, torn between his mother's world - haunted by the specter of Japanese occupations and ruled by the imperatives of the spirit kingdom - and his father's transplanted America, the local U.S. army base where G.I.s are preparing for combat in another Asian nation, Vietnam. Young Insu grows up in the chaotic streets of Pupyong, among black marketeers, prostitutes, and castoff biracial children. Death comes daily to Pupyong - through cholera, murder, fatal accidents that are either sad or suspicious - and touches Insu's life directly when his beloved aunt commits suicide after being cruelly spurned by her G.I. lover, and his friend James is found drowned in a drain and neighborhood gossips accuse James's mother, whose pursuit of a new blond husband would have been hampered by a half-black son. Although life on the streets is brutal, and the American school Insu attends no better, his Korean family provides him with love and the nourishment of stories and laughter. Like his mother, Insu is attuned to the world of spirits, and he is haunted by the ghost figure of a young boy, a secret half-brother. When Insu learns the true identity of his ghost brother, he also makes a painful discovery about the corrosive prejudices that have torn his family apart.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Ghosts and goblins are part of the 1960s Korean experience for this autobiographical novel's young protagonist. So are alcoholism, prostitution, racism and war. Insu (or Heinz, as he is known to his American schoolteachers) is the son of an American father, a blond G.I. stationed near the city of Inchon, and a Korean mother, a black-marketeer. Despite his marriage, Insu's father lives on-base, far from the haunted house the boy and his mother share with a handful of relatives. Insu encounters many spirits in dreams or in dreamlike episodes; perhaps the most enigmatic of these is the Japanese colonel who literally opens the boy's mind. Insu grows up wild, running with a pack of boys who splatter frogs on rocks, indulge in petty larceny and get into knife fights. His alcoholic uncle tells Insu long, terrifying anecdotes about goblins who gang-bang matrons and vampiric fox demons disguised as beautiful women. None of these, however, are as difficult for Insu to understand as is the Sunday-school world his father pushes at him. Insu's mixed blood causes him perpetual ambivalence, making him feel "caught here in the boundary between the two Koreas, caught between North and South and East and West with my own blood mixed from the blood of enemies." Although the book's story line is too episodic and its structurebroken into segments that alternate between childlike point-of-view and omniscient adult interpretationa bit rigid, this is a stately, mature and understated first novel written with great sensitivity and assurance. (Nov.)

Library Journal

Fenkl's first novel is based on his boyhood in Korea. Born to a Korean mother and an American GI father, he contrasts a childhood influenced by an extended Korean family and the American way of life as represented by the hamburgers, hot dogs, and Coca-Cola of his father's army base. Elements of this novel are reminiscent of Mishima's writingyoung boys portrayed as both emotionally sensitive and cruel, and beyond adult control. Fenkl's own character, however, exhibits compassion and thoughtfulness toward others as he attempts to cope with the consequences of his biracial heritage and the many tragedies that occur among his friends and family. The narrative voice shifts between child and adult, reflecting on the events of childhooda strategy that is not completely successful. Certain potentially significant parts of the story are not introduced well or not fully developed. For instance, the "ghost" brother does not appear until the end, with no build-up. Despite its weaknesses, this book is a worthwhile addition to academic and public library collections.Rebecca A. Stuhr-Rommereim, Grinnell Coll. Libs., Iowa

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Kirkus Reviews

Autobiographical first novel told from the point of view of a young Amerasian boy, the son of a "yellow-haired" German-American GI and his Korean wife.

Young Insu grows up in Inchon in a house that was owned by a Japanese colonel during WW II. Korean resisters were tortured here in the beautiful garden, but Insu, a sensitive boy, prefers to imagine the cruel colonel to have been more like a harsh surrogate father than a murderer. Insu's sorrows exist not only in his imagination. His mother gave up her other son for adoption so that her GI lover, Insu's father, would marry her. The missing brother is like a missing limb, and because of him, Insu despises his profane, profoundly alien father, whom he visits periodically on a post near the DMZ. There, he learns of other worlds: the Vietnam his father has been transferred from, the Germany where his Caucasian grandparents live, and, strangest of all, the America that he senses will shape his destiny. Although his father is diagnosed with inoperable cancer, Insu and his mother emigrate to America; she goes in the hope of finding her lost son, who had been adopted by an American couple. In the new land, an overwhelmed Insu tries to form an identity out of his mixed heritage of Korean folklore, Inchon street-life, and the black market strategies of his mother, all amid the confusion of America. Eventually, he begins to find his own way. He does well in school and his future is promising. And yet his brother, a symbol of his wrenching past, and of the difficult relationship between America and Korea, will always haunt him.

Rather slow-moving, and different from its obvious antecedent, Gus Lee's moving but awkward China Boy. Think instead of James Agee's A Death in the Family: not as powerful, perhaps, but equally lyrical, dreamy, and sad.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780452277175
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Publication date: 11/1/1997
Pages: 288
Product dimensions: 5.34 (w) x 7.96 (h) x 0.78 (d)

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Memories of My Ghost Brother

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