Introduction
A unique literary genre of American military camptown novels (kijich’on sosŏl) emerged from the mid-1950s, in which South Korean writers began to use camptown life, and especially Korean men’s loss of their masculinity, as symbols and symptoms of the nation’s postwar coloniality vis-à-vis the United States.1 Of this genre, Nam Jung-hyun(Nam Chŏnghyŏn)’s novella, Punji (Land of Excrement, 1965), is a sardonic allegory of Korea’s subjugation expressed through its protagonist, Hong Mansu, as the representative emasculated Korean man whose mother is raped and sister is prostituted at the hands of American soldiers.2 Mansu’s raping of a white American woman to reclaim Korea’s wounded masculinity, however, is a contradictory expression of anti-colonial nationalism that exposes “the Korean male’s split subjectivity,” according to Chungmoo Choi.3 The focus here, thus, is to examine this re/formulating of masculinity among Korean laboring men in South Korea’s American military camptowns.
In a previous study, I conceptualized American military camptowns (kijich’on) in South Korea as “borderlands” between two sovereign states, located on the peripheral edge of Korean society, marginalized as places of “dispensable” people, yet also representing an “indispensable” loci for the nation’s economic development.4 Camptowns also have been described as “base living zones” — “formed by a network of ‘discriminatory inclusion’ for the purpose of the US base operations”5— or as “hybrid or ambiguous spaces,” stigmatized by the larger Korean society and where American imperial power was exercised.6 In a more recent study, Jodi Kim further expands camptowns as part of “US militarist settler imperialism, or the conjunction of US settler colonialism and military empire.”7 Kim contends that camptowns, in particular, undergo “a deterritorialization from the Korean nation that results in the loss of civil protection and social recognition,” and yet its laboring bodies “are subjected to its governmentality as brokered through the transpacific masculinist compact between the South Korean and US governments.”8 Despite variations in terminology, these accounts consistently characterize camptowns as interdependent contact zones between foreign soldiers and local civilians as well as spaces in which both American imperial power and Korean state’s governmentality were enacted.
And in these camptowns, militarized masculinity—the hegemonic, hyper-masculine culture and practices fostered by the inherent militarism of military institutions—expounded. The culture and practice of militarized masculinity are often characterized as traits of aggressiveness, destructiveness, and sexualization, including “sexualization of violence” and “violent sexuality.”9 Studies on militarized masculinity, however, also recognize that it is not “a coherent whole, which is fixed and stable,” but rather a set of complex practices “that allow for change and negotiation” depending on the specific context and groups.10 In South Korea, American military personnel constructed a stratified form of militarized masculinity not only through their relationships with Korean women, but also in relation to the Korean male Other—figured as their “lesser” counterparts; these included roles such as the altruistic patriarch to the hapless houseboy, the superior older brother to the inferior Korean soldier, and the above-the-law disciplinarian to the menacing slicky boy.11 By contrast, how these local Korean males laboring in this stratified and hyper-militarized milieu negotiated and secured their masculinity have received comparatively little scholarly attention.
Pioneering feminist studies have made visible women’s labor contributions in the global network of military bases, and, in turn, to international relations as well as the pivotal impact of camptown women on ROK-US bilateral relations and on transpacific migrations.12 Other key studies have documented the South Korean state’s systemic governmentality over camptown women’s labor as part of its nation-building efforts or have argued that critically historicizing the entanglement of colonial and imperial violence—from the Japanese ‘comfort women’ system to US military prostitution—with localized structures of domination is essential to dismantling Korea’s enduring coloniality.13 Despite the richness of existing scholarship, Korean men working in the camptowns have received limited focus, as their labor was often considered secondary and dependent on both more powerful American male counterparts and Korean women in the service economies.14 The purpose of this study, thus, is to complicate the discourse on gender and camptowns by examining how Korean men laboring in camptowns reformulated their own masculinity and reclaimed a place in the patriarchal normative. The contention of this analysis is that through varying methods, such as conscientious self-distancing from camptown economies, mimicking American practices of militarized masculinity, or by systematizing the control over women’s labor, the seemingly marginalized Korean camptown men redefined their own militarized masculinity and thereby participated in the “transpacific masculinist compact.”15
The period of study is the 1960s, when the Pak Chŏnghŭi regime (1961–1979) systematized camptowns to extract foreign currency earnings for the national development. And through camptown literature and oral histories, both a top-down and bottom-up perspectives of the subjects are examined. In applying postcolonial theory, which subscribes “to Benedict Anderson’s insistence upon the textual underpinnings of nation-ness,” the novel is one of the “principal print forms capable of containing and representing, in one place, the impossible diversity that is the nation.”16 Literature as historical texts representing the nation, moreover, offers a counter-hegemonic space against the censored, official narrative, such as the novella by Nam. Then I assess the oral history collection, “Changes in the Camptowns in Northern Kyŏnggi Province and the Lives of the Local Residents,” conducted in 2022 by the National Institute of Korean History, that captures common agents and their everyday actions in the midst of top-down changes.17 Through examining camptown literature and oral histories together, this research seeks to locate a more nuanced contours of the camptown system and complicated tensions among its male residents through the critical lens of their re/constructed militarized masculinity.
Land of Excrement: Camptowns as Landscapes of Postwar Neocoloniality
Among the unique literary genre of military camptown novels, Nam Jung-hyun’s Punji is considered representative of the first generation of kijich’on sosŏl that relies on camptown’s sexual symbolism as an allegory for postwar Korea’s coloniality.18 Nam’s biting satire, which unabashedly criticizes both America’s neo-imperialism and the Korean state’s blind cronyism, ultimately led to his imprisonment after Punji was reprinted—without his permission—in the North Korean Workers’ Party newspaper Choguk T’ongilon in May 1965. Nam was indicted on violating the Anti-Communist Law, accused by the Pak Chŏnghŭi regime that Punji “had incited class consciousness, anti-government sentiment, and anti-American feelings,” thereby aiding North Korea’s anti-American and pro-communist propaganda.19 Punji, thus, was a precursor to the phenomenon of politicized literature of the 1970s that “became the privileged site of representing a sociopolitical reality that directly contested the official narratives of the state,” with Korean writers fully embracing their function as a “conscience” of their time.20
The story of Punji unfolds as a monologue of Hong Mansu to his deceased mother, on the brink of his own death for the crime of raping the wife of an American military officer, Master Sergeant Speed. Set in postwar Korea, Mansu aimlessly wanders after his military service and eventually drifts into a kijich’on, where he inhales “the fragrance of milk, butter, chocolate, and gum” in his sister’s living room.21 Mansu then becomes a black marketer through his sister’s extra-marital relationship with Master Sergeant Speed. From the heart of this “land of excrement,” Mansu lampoons everything from the hypocrisy of America with its imperial, genocidal origins to Korea’s blind worship of American modernity. This sardonic anti-imperial critique that can be read as a postcolonial counter-textuality, “by affirming the contiguity between the anti-colonial novel and anti-colonial nationalism,”22 also relies on familiar gendered tropes of raped mothers and prostituted sisters to protest Korea’s postwar neocoloniality under the United States.
Nam’s anti-colonial nationalism is abundantly evident throughout the novella. Hyangmi, the mountain in which Mansu faces America’s brutish show of force “to explode the entire bulk of Mt. Hyangmi” to kill him, means “toward America” and is both a satire of America’s long history of violent imperial subjugation and an allegory for Korea’s blind admiration of the United States.23 Mansu’s cursing in English can also be construed as “the project of ‘learning how to curse in the master’s tongue’… [which] symbolically illustrates the logic of protesting ‘out of’, rather than ‘against’, the cultural vocabulary of colonialism.”24 And most of all, his raping of an American woman as revenge can also be construed as an ultimate expression of this “mimicry”—that “the most radical anti-colonial writers are ‘mimic men.’”25 Mansu’s revenge fantasy of making a new flag from his Korean flag-patterned undershirt to “carefully stick this rapturous flag into the lustrous navels of women with milky skin, women lying down on that great continent”26 mimics the colonial violence against colonized women. Although this act of “a single outcry that leads to self-destruction,” contends Hun-ha Pak, “falls short of attaining a realistic and concrete understanding of masculinity,”27 Nam’s mimicry of sexualization of violence through Mansu’s violent sexuality nevertheless demonstrates key characteristics of militarized masculinity that had permeated camptowns. In this sacred mission of anti-colonial nationalism to avenge the national humiliation, colonized men colonize women via mimicking the colonizer to recuperate their own masculinity, as Choi argues, exposing “the Korean male’s split subjectivity.”28
Nam is just as critical of South Korea’s developmental state and its eager crony capitalists in his expression of anti-colonial nationalism. Master Sergeant “Speed” not only represents America’s militarized masculinity, but also indicates the speed of Korea’s capitalist development, which has left Mansu feeling “dizzy” with “those buildings that are rising every day, trampling all over your grave and oppressing me.”29 Mansu also deplores how these “remote shrine and high temple [are] open only to foreigners, a few high officials, and their chums,” while the lives of the “wretched” are “crumbling lower and lower the higher the buildings go and the more buildings there are.”30 Representing the “starving eyes” of the ordinary people,31 his sir name, Hong, refers to him being a tenth-generation descendant of Hong Gil-dong, a righteous bandit like Robin Hood, while his given name, Mansu, means a long life, to symbolize “the eternal nature of Korean national resistance and vitality.”32 Through resurrecting in Mansu a folk hero and by depicting a stark social binary, Nam offers a harsh criticism of Pak’s “ruling ideologies such as anti-communism, authoritarianism, and developmentalism.”33
By likening postwar Korea to a camptown, where both American neocolonialism and South Korea’s developmentalism converged, Nam effectively explicates his anti-colonial nationalism. But while Punji is a forerunner of postcolonial counter-textuality that captures the counter-hegemonic voice, this kijich’on sosŏl also falls short of “gesturing to world-making imaginaries beyond such contours.”34 It demonstrates the limitations of a camptown-outsider, writing from “above,” who reduces the camptowns into an oversimplified binary metaphor for the national subjugation. And Nam’s efforts to reclaim the masculinity of the nation by mimicking the colonizer’s sexualization of violence, if anything, merely reflect Korean men’s split-subjectivity. Turning to the oral histories of local camptown men, therefore, offers a more nuanced understanding of how they themselves re/constructed their own militarized masculinity and practiced their split-subjectivity while living and working in the very heart of US militarist settler colonialism during the 1960s.
Reconstructing Militarized Masculinity in the “Living Spaces” of Camptowns
The US military built a concentration of camps bordering the DMZ in the northern Kyŏnggi Province during the Korean War, including Camp Howze (1953–2005) in P’aju, Camp Kaiser (1952–1970) in P’och’ŏn and Camp Casey (1952-present) in Tongduch’ŏn.35 Subsequently, clusters of camptowns developed in conjunction, including in Sŏnyu-ri (near Camp Howze), Unch’ŏn-ri (near Camp Kaiser), and Bosan-dong (near Camp Casey)—the three kijich’on of focus here. These camptowns all underwent postwar systematization in the 1960s that coincided with the US military’s postwar building of Rest and Recreation facilities around their camps and the Korean government concentrating prostitution into specific areas beginning in 1957.36 Camptowns became “designated zones” where the sex industry was exempt from the enforcement of the 1961 “Anti-Prostitution Law”; moreover, under the Tourism Promotion Law (1961), camptown clubs became special tourism facilities, enabling them to legally procure duty-free liquor in exchange for paying monthly into the government coffers.37 Through this state-led systematization, it has been estimated that industries related to the camptowns accounted for 25% of South Korea’s total GNP during the 1960s.38
Although camptown industries have declined since the US troop reductions in the 1970s, their regional impact remains significant to this day. In anticipation of troop relocations to consolidate the American military footprint on the peninsula under the 2002 Land Partnership Plan and the 2004 Yongsan Relocation Plan, the northern Kyŏnggi Province has been the subject of research attention. For instance, of the foremost challenges facing Tongduch’ŏn City was the impact that the relocations would have on the city’s service-sector heavy economy, with about 20% of the city’s population working in US military-related sectors, generating 18% of the city’s total gross regional domestic product (GRDP).39 Another research effort has been to document how the residents’ lives were imprinted by the camptowns, such as the aforementioned oral history collection. While previous researches on camptowns have primarily focused on women’s voices, this 2022 project seeks to “reconsider camptowns not only as ‘gendered spaces,’” but also as “living spaces.”40 It conducted interviews of four long-time residents, three male and one female, all selected for having had some leadership roles in the local communities. Yoon Chung Ro, the co-compiler of this collection, has since assessed two out of the four oral histories in order to analyze “the effects of the Cold War, the United States–South Korea relations, and South Korea’s modernization process on the lives of residents in U.S. camptowns...as well as their inverse relationship.”41 Although “the two life histories provide contrasting cases of upper and lower class trajectories in the camptown,” Yoon concludes that “they were situated within the convergence of the South Korean government’s security/growth-oriented policies and the American military imperialism.”42
Like Yoon’s study, this current study also engages these oral histories for a bottom-up analysis of camptowns as a converging locus of US military settler colonialism and the Korean state’s militarized developmentalism. However, it differs by emphasizing a critical gender perspective—specifically how Korean men laboring in camptowns re/constructed their own militarized masculinity, navigated their split-subjectivity, and reclaimed a place within patriarchal normativity. Among the four, the three male life stories are analyzed in order to locate how they cognized their own masculinity living in these hyper-militarized borderlands. If camptown economies can be imagined in series of concentric circles, I begin with whom I consider to have been at the outermost circle of participation. And due to the stigma still associated with kijich’on, I identify them only by their surnames that also have been changed.
Mr. Ku: “Since I’ve never done that, so I don’t really know...but that’s what I know”43
Mr. Ku was born in 1946 in P’aju, one of the northernmost counties that borders the DMZ and home to Camp Howze. Of note, P’aju had 35 out of its 220 village units classified as camptowns in the 1970s and among them, Sŏnyu-ri, where Mr. Ku was a former village head, was one of them.44 Although a farmer most of his life, Mr. Ku also worked as a security guard on a US military base in P’aju in the early 1980s and participated in the Korea-US Friendship Association (Hanmi ch’insŏn yŏnhap’oe; hereafter KUFA). Mr. Ku described the camptown areas and the surrounding agricultural villages as being completely separate neighborhoods. When explaining the difference between Sŏnyu-4-ri and Sŏnyu-5-ri, he described that “the area around the stream didn’t have many American soldiers or yangsaeksi [literally “western brides,” indicating female sex workers who serviced foreigners]...In contrast, there were a lot of yangsaeksi there.”45 He recounted the entwined living and working spaces over “there,” where “almost every household had them [women]... They were often referred to as ‘business owners,’ or ‘proprietors,’ who would take a few women in and run a business. Since I’ve never done that, so I don’t really know...but that’s what I know.”46 In contrast to these “proprietors,” Mr. Ku identified himself foremost as a farmer, who “didn’t really know much about these things because we were farmers, and life was going well in the village.”47 By repeatedly insisting that farmers like himself had little interest in or knowledge of what was happening in the neighboring camptowns, Mr. Ku distanced himself from any direct involvement in the camptown economies.
Mr. Ku also claimed that the notorious camptown violence was perpetuated by outsiders and not by natives of the area or even Americans. He described that, “we live on the other side over there, so at night, I used to hear rumors of soldiers fighting, but I never actually saw that...”48 Mr. Ku indicated that those who had relocated from elsewhere, “what you’d call ‘gangsters,’ ... would go around here and there, having fights or something like that,” while the “dangerous part wasn’t much with the US soldiers or the local people.”49 All of his recollections on the workings of camptown economies along with its infamous association with violence were told with aloofness of an outsider rather than a native to the region.
And even as a subcontracted security guard for the US military base or as a member of the KUFA, he described his experiences in terms of cooperation and harmony with the Americans. “The members were mostly cooperative,” Mr. Ku stated of his participation in KUFA; and even though there “were some issues like sexually transmitted diseases, and the women were occasionally restricted from going out,” he insisted that, “overall, there wasn’t much trouble.”50 Initiated in the early 1960s under the Pak regime’s directives to promote better relations between Koreans and Americans in camptowns, the political left has criticized KUFA as “a political maneuver aimed at covering up the friction and conflict arising from the subordinate nature of the Korea-US relationship” and a front for “this land known as ‘Colony Number One.’”51 For Mr. Ku actually living in this “Colony Number One,” however, while the Korean women’s labor was contained “over there” and could be distanced from himself, Americans were good, benign neighbors, contrary to their violent reputation. The US military presence, moreover, provided a valuable livelihood for him as a subcontracted security guard.
Mr. Ku appears to claim his masculinity through his honest work as a farmer and being paid an official salary as a subcontracted security guard, in juxtaposition to the dishonest, unofficial work of camptown industries. He was not alone in wanting to distance himself from the ill reputations of camptowns. This lingering stigma that overshadowed Tongduch’ŏn as a camptown was among the challenges facing the city, besides the economic losses, identified by the aforementioned Tongduch’ŏn City study. This camptown association was so strong that in order to re-brand the city, this study even suggested that the city erase its name by changing it or be absorbed into another municipality.52 At the same time, Mr. Ku’s insistence on peaceful co-existence between Americans and Koreans, while containing and dismissing camptown women’s labor, suggests that his reconstruction may be an attempt to normalize camptowns by countering their violent imaginary. Mr. Ku’s re-imagining the camptowns as not so extra-ordinary “living spaces” further validates his quite ordinary life and participation in the gender normative as an honest farmer.
Mr. Yu: “So, this is where I ended up losing my life. Coming to the camptown...”53
Expressing somewhat more conflicted identification with camptown economies is Mr. Yu. Born in Ch’ŏrwŏn in 1943, which is now part of the DMZ, Mr. Yu spent his childhood in North Korea and fled to the South during the Korean War. Starting in 1964, in his early twenties, he began visiting Unch’ŏn-ri, near Camp Kaiser and home to one of the largest camptowns in the northern Kyŏnggi Province until camp closure in 1970. Mr. Yu began the interview by explaining that he had no formal education and that was the reason why he had led a life of regrets in the camptown:
If I had gone to at least middle school, I wouldn’t have had to suffer like this...I dropped out after first grade in elementary school... So, I ended up coming here because there was nothing to eat in the countryside...Back then, there was a lot of firewood in the mountains, right? I would break it up, dry it, and sell it...The prostitutes were all over. The firewood was used for heating. So, this is where I ended up losing my life. Coming to the camptown... honestly, I would have been better off going to the countryside, but instead, I came here... If I had gone to school to some degree, I might have [worked on the US military base] and done some errands or worked as a houseboy, but I couldn’t do any of that. I just lived this way.54
Cast outside of mainstream economic opportunities, Mr. Yu was drawn to these peripheries like “a moth drawn to a flame” to the bright “lights of the Yankee base” and the exotic sites of a camptown.55 But even in Unch’ŏn-ri, he worked in the outer edges of the camptown economies, selling firewood to the women because he could not get employment even as a houseboy on a military camp due to his lack of formal education.
Although excluded from both mainstream and camptown economies, Mr. Yu briefly escaped his limitations that he faced in Korea during his one-year military deployment to Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1973, South Korea sent 300,000 soldiers to Vietnam, providing the largest contingent of allied troops to assist the American war in Vietnam. The Pak regime won renewed American political backing, a continued US troop commitment in South Korea, while war participation also generated an infusion of over one billion US dollars into the national economy.56 Jin-kyung Lee conceptualizes this link between militarism and industrialization, this ideological motivation behind Pak’s push to deploy South Korean soldiers to Vietnam, as “militarizing development and remasculinizing the nation.”57 This exporting of South Korean military labor, moreover, was based on “stratified masculinity and class surrogacy,” recruiting and attracting many working-class men with limited economic options in Korea.58 Mr. Yu, too, was clearly aware of this stratified system, observing that, “those who hadn’t learned, the uneducated, were the ones sent to the military. That’s how it was, at least from what I saw. Honestly, it was unfair.” Mr. Yu, however, still volunteered because he “was so desperate that [he] was eager to enlist for Vietnam.”59
During his deployment to Vietnam, Mr. Yu briefly participated fully in camptown economies and mimicked the militarized masculinity practiced by American soldiers in Korean camptowns. Mr. Yu drew multiple parallels between his observations of Americans’ militarized masculinity in Korea’s camptowns to his own experiences in Vietnam. For one, it was there that he was given access to PX goods, which in turn enabled him to arrange for domestic services. He described that, “When we entered the PX, if the women asked for a ride, we would tell them to hop in. We had a small mess hall, and the ladies would cook for us for a set amount per month...They didn’t need a salary, they only wanted rice and C-rations.”60 Then this access to the PX allowed him to partake in and profit from selling these American goods in the Vietnamese black-market. Mr. Yu recalled that “honestly, we ate a lot [profited]” from this system.61 And making this pocket money enabled him to save most of his salary, which was about US$53 a month as a sergeant, of which he “spent a little and then the government automatically deposited some into the Korean bank.”62 He also gave away part of his C-rations to local Vietnamese children because he “couldn’t eat half of it. So, when I went to get water, I would load it into the car...and then I’d give it away to the kids in the village. They really liked it.”63 This act of being “providers,” in turn, enabled good relations with the local villagers. He recalled how “when we passed through the village, they’d come out and wave. It was like that. If they ever came across a suspicious person, like a VC (Viet Cong), they’d tell us...That’s how we made connections with them.”64 In Vietnam, Mr. Yu participated in reproducing similar camptown economies and their associated relationship with locals—a system from which he had been marginalized in Korea. Through this mimicry, he expressed his militarized masculinity—having access to the PX goods made him an essential laborer, he also exercised his “extraterritoriality” by profiting from the illegal black-market, all the while being a provider to local women and children made him a temporary patriarch and practitioner of gender normative.
Expressions of Mr. Yu’s militarized masculinity can also be located through displays of aggressive “fierceness” and sexualization of brutality by Korean soldiers. Athough Koreans did not have official access to the PX stores on a US airbase in Cam Ranh, Vietnam, he described how they “just went in. We’d go in and buy whatever we wanted” because even though “they told us to leave our guns there and go in. We’d say ‘No,’ then buy stuff and come out.”65 He further recounted the reactions that Korean soldiers drew when they entered bars and clubs for foreigners—places that he could not access in Korean camptowns: “it’s noisy with people drinking and music playing, and the Vietnamese girls are dancing. But when we walk in, it gets quiet. They stay still when Koreans arrive. Why do they stay still? Because we bring our guns in with us. The others can’t bring their guns in, but we do. We’re the only ones who bring guns in.”66 Mr. Yu also relayed anecdotes of Korean soldiers’ legacy of sexualization of violence in Vietnam: “I asked why they were so scared [of Koreans] in Cam Ranh. They said the Marine Corps was there...The women...when they pointed a gun at them, they said they even took their clothes off and spread their legs, thinking they wanted something like that. That’s how scared they were.”67 Although the history of South Korean military’s brutality and civilian massacres in Vietnam has received extensive investigative, academic, and activist attention, to extensively discuss them here is outside of the scope. Among them, however, a compelling explanation is that as a “neocolonized surrogate force” fighting a war that was not theirs, while occupying the ambiguous and unstable “semi-colonial position” between the Americans and the Vietnamese, Koreans could more easily dehumanize the Vietnamese.68 Caught in the precarious middle of a racialized and stratified militarized masculinity, Korean soldiers became, in Jin-kyung Lee’s term, “sub-imperialists,” who had to distinguish themselves from the Vietnamese by demonstrating their hyper toughness and brutality.69 Mr. Yu’s experience “also shows how the violent structure surrounding South Korea’s camptowns was externalized and reproduced in Vietnam,” according to Yoon.70
Upon his return to Korea from Vietnam, Mr. Yu quickly used up all of his savings of US$500, which “was considered a lot, at the time...a huge amount of money,” spending “all that money foolishly... wandering around Korea,” then drifting from one temporary job to another before returning to Unch’ŏn-ri.71 The over one billion US dollars that the war generated, including the US$500 in savings that Mr. Yu spent on the Korean economy, subsequently helped finance major infrastructure projects, contributed to domestic production, and increased exports that spurred South Korea’s industrialization.72 Besides working as a member of the “neocolonized surrogate force,” 73 Mr. Yu further participated in this national developmentalism as one of the construction workers in the building of the first highway between Seoul and Pusan. He remembers the foreman asking, “‘Why is a guy who went to Vietnam and came back working here?’ So I said, ‘Well, if I went to the countryside, there’s no rice field, so I came out to work. ’”74 But Mr. Yu eventually returned to the camptown in 1968 because “Unch’ŏn-ri was still a place where things were happening, so it seemed better than the countryside.”75 And he rhetorically asks, “Where else could I go?”76
Throughout his relationship, Mr. Yu expressed his conflicting relationship with the camptown, both a place where he “ended up losing [his] life,” yet also where he returned to because “it felt like home.”77 Mr. Yu considered camptowns as a place of survival for someone like him in Korea’s peripheries, but found himself still marginalized even there. It was not until his deployment to Vietnam that he was able to briefly mimic the militarized masculinity that he had observed of Americans in Korea. While living in a Korean camptown, he had consumed C-rations that Americans had discarded, but in Vietnam, he became providers of these C-rations to women and children. His recounting of his many exploits with Vietnamese women and strutting of his weapons further expressed his participation in the aggressive, hyper-sexualized form of militarized masculinity. Mr. Yu’s brief mimicry of this militarized masculinity was also not in a fantasy, like that of Mansu’s in the Land of Excrement, but very much grounded in the reality of occupying the violent sub-imperialist position between the American colonizers and the colonized Vietnamese. Upon his return to Korea, however, he once again found himself at the bottom of the stratified masculinity, despite having been at the heart of the nation’s militarized developmentalism as one of its “neocolonized surrogate force.” Mr. Yu’s bittersweet relations with camptowns and reformulation of his militarized masculinity through mimicry, in sum, were replete with contradictions.
Mr. Cho: “So, out of all the hall owners, I was the top. I made the most money.”78
By inserting himself into the core of camptown economies, Mr. Cho lived and worked in the very heart of the borderland. Although born in Ch’ungbuk Province in 1932, Mr. Cho grew up in Tongduch’ŏn and considers himself a native to the region. After serving in the Korean War, he returned to Tongduch’ŏn, only to find that his home had been expropriated by the US military to build its camps during the war. Despite this initial displacement, Mr. Cho later became instrumental in systematizing the early economic structure of camptowns, such as by operating one of the “Special Tourism Halls” in Bosan-dong, by starting the “ticket pay system” particular to these clubs as well as by serving as the president of the local Special Tourism Association and KUFA. Mr. Cho’s profiting from his multiple roles in the camptown were further facilitated by the state that reciprocally benefited from the great flow of American dollars from these borderlands. Both his leadership roles in the camptown and his contributions to the developmental state’s goals enabled Mr. Cho’s participation in the mainstream gender normative.
The Bosan-dong district in Tongduch’ŏn near Camp Casey expanded into the largest camptown in South Korea after the Korean War and Mr. Cho was very much part of this initial camptown systematization. Mr. Cho recalled that there were not many people when he first went to Bosan-dong, but that “people started coming because the US military came in.”79 He elaborated that when these “outsiders” came to Bosan-dong, they first built “halls,” and opening a hall required “the business permit that comes from the province,” which were “really difficult” to obtain.80 According to Mr. Cho, the provincial government granted 24 halls in Bosan-dong, including his, with a “Special Tourism License” that allowed for these businesses to receive a regular shipment of tax-free liquor in exchange for monthly taxes that they paid to the state. Mr. Cho claims that during the height of camptown economies of the 1960s, he paid the government $4,000–5,000 per month for this tax-free liquor license.81 The Special Tourism License system, under the 1961 Tourism Promotion Law, not only confined and regulated the sex service industries catering to the foreign military into designated camptowns, but also facilitated earning essential American dollars for Pak’s developmentalism.82
Once he obtained the necessary permit to run a hall in Bosan-dong, his business grew rapidly and Mr. Cho was made the president of the local branch of the Korean Special Tourism Association. Mr. Cho owed the success of his business to having “the only place that had a large enough space for a party,” and said the US military officers paid around US$1,000 for the usage of the space, while supplying their own food and drinks that they would subsequently leave behind after their party. “They would leave everything behind, and we got it all,” Mr. Cho proudly explained, “So, out of all the hall owners, I was the top. I made the most money.”83 His profits also increased by starting the “ticket pay system,” where women were only paid a small fraction of the liquor that they sold to foreign customers, in lieu of a salary. He elaborates that it “wasn’t a salary system. At that time, we used the ticket system for the employees.. Why pay someone with cash when you don’t have to? Yeah, I made the ticket system work [emphasis added].”84 Mr. Cho justified this exploitative compensation system that he developed, by claiming that women were not paid a salary because “they sold their bodies to make a living. These were the yangsaekshi. That’s what they did.”85 Although Mr. Cho distinguished club owners from pimps, the club owners also controlled women’s labor through the ticket payment system and also through a “debt bondage labor system,” within which women were often in debt to club owners for charges of room and board.86 This structure of exploitation of women’s labor was then protected by the Korean Special Tourism Association as the local instrument of governmentality overseen by the Ministry of Transportation.
The club owners and the members of the Special Tourism Association further inserted themselves into this developing camptown economies by also facilitating the dollar exchange system between the local economy and the national government. Mr. Cho explains this dollar exchange system in the following passage:
So, since we have dollars, and when the government looks at it, the only place dollars are coming out of the country is through us. So, what happens is that the women…make money, right? Even if they make money, they leave it with their boss...Then, the boss would take the money, exchange it, and bring back Korean won. All the US dollars would go to the Bank of Korea. So, from the government’s perspective, this was a huge amount...For example, in our house, we used to sell about 2,000 to 3,000 dollars a night at that time.87
Mr. Cho claimed that the nightly intake of dollars would be so great that they would fill up C-Ration boxes to store them and then when it was time to go exchange them in Seoul, they would put the bills in large sandbags to carry them.88 Mr. Cho also explained the extensive surveillance over this dollar exchange system by the National Tax Service that would keep tabs on the amount of dollars each establishment brought into exchange monthly. According to Mr. Cho, they would “calculate everything...They know every household.”89 And if a business did not bring in their specified amount of dollars to exchange, the National Tax Service would come investigate and that they also had the authority to suspend the tax-free liquor license.90 As evident from Mr. Cho’s participation in this dollar exchange system, the governmentality exercised over camptown economies was via both facilitation and surveillance.
The Park regime also utilized the Korea-US Friendship Association as local instruments of this governmentality. Mr. Cho explained that the local branch usually consisted of ten US military officers and ten Korean male representatives, made up of “the people who had the title ‘Jang’ (meaning a leader or director) in the neighborhood.”91 They held monthly meetings to discuss issues stemming from the military camp-camptown relations. When asked what the American military usually asked for from the association, Mr. Cho claimed that their main concerns were related to theft from the camps and the black-market system.92 For instance, when the US military’s Criminal Investigation Division chief asked Mr. Cho to come up with a solution to the problem of American soldiers smuggling out PX goods in their laundry bags with their laundry to get washed in camptowns, Mr. Cho came up with the solution of setting up a laundry service inside of the camp.93 And through operating this laundry service on base, he “made an enormous amount of money—really, a tremendous amount,” so much so that the Tongduch’ŏn branch president of the Kookmin Bank “sent a huge safe to my house, asking me to deposit the money in their bank.”94 Mr. Cho utilized his position as the head of KUFA to further expand the service economies that catered to the American military and personally profit from it. Even more than Mr. Ku, thus, the Americans were good neighbors and their partnership in camptown systematization was certainly beneficial to Mr. Cho.
As for what the association asked for from the US military, Mr. Cho answered that their primary concern was to make sure that the camptown economies functioned uninterrupted. When a major conflict arose in a camptown, the “military didn’t want the situation to become public, so…they would impose ‘off-limits,’ meaning the soldiers weren’t allowed to leave the base,” and it was the role of the association “to find a way to get them [soldiers] out [of confinement].”95 The association members would, thus, “go together, listen, and negotiate” in order to reduce the “off-limits” period because “That was crucial for us. We had to make sure the soldiers could go out as soon as possible,” explained Mr. Cho.96 The association’s greatest purpose was to mediate the conflicts and resolve disputes between the Americans and Koreans so that the camptown industries could operate smoothly. These associations facilitated the continued profits of camptown economies and, in turn, secured foreign currency earnings for Pak’s developmentalism.
Mr. Cho’s other duties as a president of KUFA included acting as “guardians” and “negotiators” on behalf of the camptown women and children. For one, he signed the marriage certificates of Korean women marrying American military personnel and transnational adoption papers for mixed-race children of camptowns: “I had to act as a protector, because someone always needed to be responsible. Even children need guardians, and women need someone to vouch for them when they get married...I signed as the president of the Korea-US Friendship Association.”97 On greatly private issues like sexually transmitted diseases, Mr. Cho acted as negotiators of women’s bodies by enforcing their examinations and determining the periods of forced quarantines.98 The role that Mr. Cho played in his capacity as a head of KUFA, in other words, was that of a patriarch—that not only women’s labor, but also their life’s major decisions like marriage as well as their bodies and health were brokered by men acting as women’s “guardians.”
Mr. Cho, thus, constructed his militarized masculinity through his economic prowess and his enactment as a patriarch. His instrumental role in systematizing the camptown industries in cooperation with the Pak regime’s militarized developmentalism secured Mr. Cho’s personal economic gains and enabled his participation in the mainstream gender normative. The fact that this camptown system was built on the exploitation of Korean women’s labor and the structural violation of their human rights by the state, now officially acknowledged,99 however, was conveniently downplayed or dismissed by all three local men. As Yoon has also observed, camptown men’s “memory of violence against camptown women remain fragmented or forgotten,” regardless of differences in their experiences or class status.100 Like Mansu’s fantasy, colonized men colonize women to recuperate their masculinity—an act that simultaneously reveals their own rendition of militarized masculinity and their split-subjectivity.
Conclusion
American military camptowns constituted exceptional borderlands as well as symbols and symptoms of South Korea’s neo-coloniality. By likening it to a Land of Excrement, Nam Jung-hyun’s anti-colonial nationalist novella makes clearly visible the contours of US militarist settler imperialism and explicitly voices its criticism of South Korea’s cronie state. But while this camptown novella does provide a counter-hegemonic space to the Pak regime’s official narrative of the 1960s, this landscape that serves as a metaphor for the national subjugation is redefined into an oversimplified social binary. The testimonies of local men, thus, complicates this counter-hegemonic space with more diverse experiences in the camptowns that shaped their own militarized masculinity. Unlike Mr. Ku, who insisted on being an outside onlooker of the exploitative economic system and the related violent imaginaries, or even Mr. Yu, whose conflicting relations with these borderlands meant vacillating between mimicking and being marginalized, Mr. Cho emphasized the important roles that he himself held and, in turn, camptowns signified for the postwar nation.
Through various ways, Korean men laboring in camptowns reformulated their own masculinity and reclaimed a place in the patriarchal normative. By primarily identifying himself as a local farmer who did not profit from exploiting the camptown system, Mr. Ku claimed his patriarchal normative by having led a not so extraordinary life in these rather ordinary living spaces. Mr. Yu’s labor as one of the “neocolonized surrogate forces” that contributed to the militarized developmentalism afforded him a fleeting opportunity to mimic American soldiers’ militarized masculinity in Korean camptowns, before once again being relegated to the bottom of the stratified masculinity. In contrast, Mr. Cho, inserted himself into the very core of the camptown economies by actively systematizing it during its heyday, which then enabled him to carve out his own militarized masculinity and participation in the “transpacific masculinist compact.” Although deemed a peripheral borderland, camptowns represented ordinary postwar living spaces that also critically contributed to the nation’s militarized developmentalism. And its “emasculated” men, rather than seeking revenge for the national humiliation like Mansu, instead claimed their own places in this fundamentally exploitative system and practiced their varying forms of militarized masculinity. All three, moreover, shared a common split-subjectivity, enacted through denial and dismissal, mimicry of hypersexuality, or patriarchal control over women.
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