Feeling Toward Decoloniality

Home , Decoloniality, Slavery in Vietnam

Feeling toward Decoloniality:

Transnational Solidarity Efforts to Seek Redress for Survivors of War Violence

Soohyung Hur

A thesis

submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

University of Washington

2020

Committee:

Kim England

Victoria Lawson

Program Authorized to Offer Degree:

Department of Geography

University of Washington

Abstract

Feeling toward Decoloniality:

Transnational Solidarity Efforts to Seek Redress for Survivors of War Violence

Soohyung Hur

Chair of the Supervisory Committee:

Kim England

Department of Geography

This project investigates the recent contentious strides of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance, a well-established South Korean organization seeking redress for

Korean survivors of wartime sexual slavery. Stirring intense controversy within Korea, since 2013, the organization started expressing solidarity with survivors of massacres and gender-based violence perpetrated by Korean soldiers during the VietNam War.

This project pays attention to this rather bold development in the Korean Council’s work. It focuses on a particularly striking component called the ‘VietNam Butterfly

Peace Trips.’ Every year, the Korean Council gathers its allies to visit sites of memorialization and meet Vietnamese survivors. These trips are intended to invoke learning and alternative future imaginings through characteristically emotional experiences. Drawing on the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) framework, I first argue that modernity/coloniality is central to discourses that thwart the VietNam

War redress movement and its solidarity work with the Korean Council. This provides a stepping stone for my second argument that emotions arising from the Peace Trips behold decolonial potential. By bringing in emotional scholarship rooted in feminist struggles, this thesis demonstrates how emotion as an analytical device can sharpen the critique of modernity/coloniality. In turn, emotion, when taken seriously, can lead to buddings of radical politics.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements ·········································································································· 6 Introduction ···················································································································· 7 Chapter 1. Methodology, Methods, and Theoretical Frameworks ···················································· 13 1. Methodology and Methods ·················································································· 13 2. Theoretical Frameworks ····················································································· 23 2.1. Grounding decolonization ················································································ 24 2.2. Feeling for hope ······························································································· 34 Chapter 2. Modernity/Coloniality and Redress Movements for Survivors of War Violence ············ 38 1. Redress for ‘Comfort Women’ ············································································· 38 1.1. History of the Korean ‘comfort women’ redress movement ······························ 38 1.2. Discourses that thwart the redress of former ‘comfort women’ ························ 40 2. Redress for Survivors of the VietNam War ························································· 47 2.1. History of the Vietnamese survivors’ redress movement in Korea ··················· 47 2.2. Discourses that thwart the redress of Vietnamese survivors ···························· 49 Chapter 3. Feeling the Peace Trips ·································································································· 58 1. VietNam Butterfly Peace Trips ············································································ 58 2. Trips that Make You ‘Feel’ ·················································································· 66 Chapter 4. Complicated Feelings, Complicating Feelings ······························································· 78 1. Discomfort ·········································································································· 78 2. Love ···················································································································· 80 3. Guilt ···················································································································· 82 4. Familiarity ·········································································································· 87 5. Frustration ·········································································································· 94 Conclusion ····················································································································· 98 References ··················································································································· 105 Appendix A. Interview questions for trip planners ······················································· 113 Appendix B. Interview questions for trip participants ·················································· 114 Glossary ························································································································ 115

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Kim England, my infinitely brilliant and supportive supervisor who has been my strongest advocate since I first set foot on this campus. Even when I had difficulty believing in myself, Kim made sure that I know she believed in me. Always, I am in awe of her incredible generosity, with her time, insight, and trust in what I can do.

I also thank Dr. Vicky Lawson, my committee member, who, with such warmth and grace, continuously pushes me to be a more thoughtful scholar. When I felt lost with this project, Vicky was there. She helped me find my way. I deeply appreciate her patient guidance as I stumble through my journey of becoming a geographer.

My gratitude for Dr. tish Lopez has not wavered since my days as an undergraduate geographer. As I was thinking through this project, tish had carefully nudged me toward Sara Ahmed’s work on emotions. Her advice has yet again saved my project.

I would be remiss not to mention Sam Thompson, a dear friend and scholar I respect immensely. The countless times I tied myself in a knot over this project, she handed me a warm cup of tea. Then, she would sit across from me at our kitchen table and help sort through the mess of my thoughts. It is a kind of magical talent she has.

This thesis would not have existed had it not been for the activists and scholars who shared their wisdom and experiences with me during my time in Korea. I am especially indebted to my interviewees, the Peace Butterfly Network, Hae-seul Kim from the Korean Council, Dr. Su-jeong Ku from the Korea-VietNam Peace Foundation, and Dr. Na-young Lee whose scholarship continues to powerfully inspire me. My cautious hope is that this project contributes to the incredibly meaningful work these activists and scholars have undertaken long before me.

This project has been generously funded by the Howard Martin Fund, without which the thesis would not have come into fruition, quite literally. I am grateful to the Department of Geography at UW for this financial support.

Lastly, everything I do is made possible by the ferocious love and quiet bravery of my parents; and this thesis is no exception.

Introduction

In 1992, South Korea and VietNam established formal diplomatic relations. Vows were made to only talk of good things to come: economic partnership and prosperous futures. Over the promise to “put the unfortunate past behind and go into the future,”

Vietnamese and Korean state officials shook hands (Yoon, 2010, p. 150). Done were the days of mourning over the wounds of the VietNam War, in which Korea had enthusiastically supported the U.S. Since then, Korea and VietNam have developed strong bilateral relations that are also largely unequal. Today, Korea is one of the most influential foreign investors and aid donors to VietNam. Each year, a staggering number of Vietnamese enter Korea as migrant laborers or as spouses to rural Korean men via marriage agencies.

This geopolitical present grows directly out of the violence of the VietNam War.

Between 1965 and 1973, Korea dispatched approximately 320,000 GIs to VietNam to support the U.S. (Hwang, 2016). On the anti-communist side, Korea was the second largest foreign troop presence in VietNam after the U.S. The primary agenda of the then authoritarian Korean regime was accomplishing rapid economic growth and modern development. The VietNam War was a heaven-sent opportunity. Backing the U.S. in the war killed two birds with one stone; it established Korea as a trusted partner of the U.S. empire and brought in U.S. funding to finance Korea’s militarized industrialization.

Indeed, by the time Korean soldiers withdrew from VietNam in 1973, Korea’s

GNP per capita had increased by more than five times during the nine-year involvement

(Y.-H. Choi, 2008). Furthermore, the VietNam War became a handy narrative to uplift nationalist spirits and to ‘re-masculinize’ Korea after its Japanese occupation (1910-

1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953). The government celebrated that Korea’s ascent in the global hierarchy was evidenced by its joint effort with the U.S. to ‘free VietNam’ from the menace of communism, as the U.S. had done fifteen years ago through the

Korean War (J.-K. Lee, 2010, p. 42).

Despite the promises and handshakes exchanged between state officials, not everybody had ‘moved on’ from the war. This thesis focuses on one such community:

Vietnamese survivors of massacres and gender violence perpetrated by Korean soldiers during the war. Despite the Vietnamese state’s neglect, these survivors are seeking redress, in the form of a formal investigation and apology from the Korean state. Former

Presidents Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003), Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008), and current

President Moon Jae-in (2017 - present) made vague apologies in 1998, 2003, and 2017 respectively. However, they were neither sufficient for the survivors, nor did the

Vietnamese state acknowledge them, given VietNam’s official victory in the war. In

2018, activist/survivors successfully hosted a People’s Tribunal in Seoul, Korea, where the Korean state was found guilty of war crimes. Yet, the Korean state has not responded to this decision so far, especially because the People’s Tribunal does not have the power to enforce it.

Of efforts seeking redress for Vietnamese survivors, I focus on those of the

Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance (hereafter the ‘Korean Council’), a well- established South Korean organization seeking redress for Korean survivors of wartime sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army (otherwise known as former ‘comfort women’). Stirring intense controversy within Korea, since 2013, the organization started expressing solidarity with survivors of violence perpetrated by Korean soldiers during the VietNam War. I focus on a particularly striking component of this solidarity work:

8 the ‘VietNam Butterfly Peace Trips’ (hereafter ‘Peace Trips’). Every year, the Korean

Council gathers its allies to visit sites of memorialization in VietNam and meet

Vietnamese survivors. The Peace Trips aim to invoke learning and alternative future imaginings through characteristically emotional experiences. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, these trips are distinct from tourist ventures as such in their purpose and design.

This project is driven by two aims. First, it strives to paint the ‘comfort women’ and VietNam War redress movements as a connected front by drawing out continuities between them. The intent behind this is to contribute conceptually to the solidarity that the two movements are already fostering on the ground. Second, this thesis uses emotion to sharpen the critique of modernity/coloniality and imagine possibilities beyond modernity/coloniality. In doing so, this project continues the legacy of feminist scholars of emotion in various geographical contexts who time and time again show us the political and epistemological power of feeling. To achieve these two aims, this project is animated by the two following questions:

1. How can decolonial thought help connect movements fighting for the redress

of two separate groups of wartime survivors?

2. In the Peace Trips, what role do emotions play in unveiling and resisting

modernity/coloniality and imagining decolonial otherwise(s)?

I seek inspiration from decolonial studies and emotional scholarship to think through these questions.

Overall, my thesis is structured around the two questions outlined in the previous paragraph. However, before starting to answer these questions, I first introduce the set- up of the project in Chapter 1 by elaborating on my methodology, methods, and the

9 theoretical grounding of my thesis. This project utilizes three research methods: secondary discourse analysis, semi-structured interviews, and content analysis. It is theoretically informed by decolonial studies and emotional scholarship particularly rooted in feminist struggles. In my discussion of decolonial scholarship, I also delve into my positionality and the epistemological location of my project, being institutionally based in the U.S. and empirically in Korea.

Chapter 2 begins to answer the first question: how can decolonial thought help connect the ‘comfort women’ and VietNam War redress movements? To do so, this chapter draws more heavily on decolonial studies than emotional scholarship. In this chapter, I argue that modernity/coloniality should be positioned at the center of discourses silencing the ‘comfort women’ and VietNam War redress movements and threatening solidarity between them. These discourses are tinged with nation-building, which, in postcolonial Korea, has anti-colonial roots of resisting Japanese colonialism and U.S. imperialism (Kwŏn, 2004, p. 19). By examining the sinister entanglements between gender and nation, feminist scholars writing on the ‘comfort women’ issue masterfully navigate this sticky discursive terrain (E. Kim & Choi, 1997). Separately, scholars of the VietNam War have powerfully argued that the civilian massacres during the VietNam War were a deathly manifestation of heteropatriarchal nationalism against the backdrop of U.S. imperialism (Cho, 2019; H. Kim, 2004; J.-K. Lee, 2010). However, despite their shared commitment to a steadfast critique of heteropatriarchy, colonialism/imperialism, and global capitalism, these two bodies of literature have yet to engage directly in conversation with each other. This thesis bridges this gap by leveraging modernity/coloniality as an analytical device.

Here, I limit my discussion to the domestic discursive landscape of South Korea, while acknowledging that the ‘nation’ is already inevitably transnational (Faier, 2009).

In addition to practical considerations, the domestic frame of reference is informed by the redress movements’ strategy, which is to mobilize public support within South

Korea. Put differently, engaging with the nation-state is driven by a desire to readily communicate with movements on the ground. In doing so, I am careful not to let nation- state as a concept bind our imagination for world-making. I wish to recognize it to the extent of deconstructing it as an unquestioned unit of liberation, as is sometimes assumed in decolonization efforts. However, this comes with the qualification that my project is not to demonize the nation full stop, as it can also be conceptualized as a liberatory community in some contexts (Simpson, 2017).

Chapters 3 and 4 address the second question: what role do emotions play in sharpening the critique of modernity/coloniality and imagining possibilities beyond it?

In these two chapters, I engage more directly with emotional scholarship. In Chapter 3, I introduce the Peace Trips and argue that ‘feelings’ are central to the purpose of planning and attending them. I further argue that the trips’ focus on emotion makes visible and challenges modernity/coloniality that thwarts the redress of Vietnamese survivors.

Chapter 4 extends and complicates my argument in Chapter 3 by exploring specific emotions, such as discomfort, love, guilt, familiarity, and frustration. These various emotions hone our sensitivity to power inequalities and techniques of separation that are not immediately apparent. To be clear, my aim is not to show that emotions are always inherently decolonial or liberating. Rather, taking emotions seriously renders modernity/coloniality visible as well as possibilities that fall outside it. I tie the thesis

11 together with the Conclusion, where I draw out the intellectual and practical contributions of this project and make future research suggestions.

Chapter 1. Methodology, Methods, and Theoretical Frameworks

In this chapter, I explain my methodology and research methods. Next, I dive into the two bodies of literature that conceptually frame my project: decolonial studies and emotional scholarship. While this project draws most explicitly from the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) framework within decolonial studies, I also engage with Global North Indigenous scholarship and Asian decolonial scholarship.

This engagement is guided by the location of this project, institutionally based in the

U.S. while being empirically concerned with Asian geographies. Within emotional scholarship, I join company with feminist scholars who think through the liberatory work that emotions can do.

1. Methodology and Methods

This project utilizes three research methods: (1) secondary discourse analysis; (2) semi-structured interviews; and (3) content analysis. Chapter 2 draws on secondary discourse analysis and lightly on the interviews, and Chapters 3 and 4 draw on the interviews and content analysis. According to Dittmer (2010), discourse analysis is a two-step process (or three, depending on who you ask, as the first step can be split into two): the first is analyzing the text in question “to understand the content, mode of address and authority, organization, and other aspects of language-in-use” (p. 280); and the second is “connecting the data set analyzed earlier to the broader realm of geographical practice” (p. 282). These two steps can be differentiated by scale. If the

13 first is the micro- and/or meso-scale process of making sense of the text itself internally and in relation to other texts, the latter is more macro, which is contextualizing the text against the larger geographical backdrop. Through the second step, “one hears of structures, power, and identities” (Dittmer, 2010, p. 282).

For this project, I conducted a secondary discourse analysis of discourses that obstruct the redress of former ‘comfort women’ and the Vietnamese survivors. As I observed in the Introduction, as it stands, scholarship on the ‘comfort women’ redress movement and the VietNam War redress movement exist independently from one another. From the two bodies of work, I compiled research that uncovers the diverse discursive maneuvers used to impede the redress of both groups of survivors. Then, I conducted a secondary analysis to tease out the common thread that connects these discourses. I consider this ‘secondary,’ because I do not treat the research I analyze as primary texts.

In conceiving the project, I compiled and reviewed all information about the

Peace Trips that was available online. This included advertisement and recruitment material from 2015 to 2019 posted on various platforms, such as the Korean Council’s website, Daum and Naver (two major Korean search engines) blogs run by the Korean

Council, and the Facebook page of the Peace Butterfly Network, which is a network of allies supporting the Korean Council.1 In 2015 and 2016, the Korean Council had also arranged online fundraisers on KakaoTogether, a Korean crowdfunding platform,

1 The Korean Council’s Naver blog: https://blog.naver.com/war_women/221446974479; The Korean Council’s Daum blog: http://cafe.daum.net/hopenabi/Zbgs; Peace Butterfly Network Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/peacetoher/photos/a.1465486813667072/1855342388014844/?type=3&the ater

14 outlining the project and following up with reviews from participants after the trips.2 I also read participant reviews from 2014 and 2015 posted on the Korean Council’s Daum blog, from 2015, 2016, and 2019 on the Peace Butterfly Network’s Facebook page, and from 2019 on the Korean Council’s Naver blog. This preliminary research helped me understand the overall format and atmosphere of the trips and shape the general outline of my project.

However, a number of questions remained. For instance, who were the people who went on these trips? Why did they decide to go? How much previous knowledge do they have about the VietNam War and the violence that ensued? How did the trips change the participants and their thinking, if at all? Were there any follow-up efforts after the participants returned from the trips? To answer these questions, I selected semi-structured interviews as my research method and conducted six interviews. Table 1 below provides a quick break-down of my interview population. Interviews are conducive to exploring complex emotions and personal narratives and collecting diverse experiences. The semi-structured format lets the researcher delve into matters of interest to the researcher, while also making space for the interviewee to guide the conversation into different directions (Longhurst, 2010). In my case, the freedom provided by semi-structured interviews helped reframe my project to reflect the six participants’ lived experiences over my own assumptions about what is important.

Affiliation Name Experience with Peace Trips

Korean Council Mi-gyeong Attended and planned trips 2014- 2019

Seung-hee Attended and planned trip in 2019

2 The Korean Council’s KakaoTogether page: https://together.kakao.com/teams/570

Peace Butterfly Network Jin-sun Attended 2019 (Branch A) Sol-hee

Ha-yeong Attended 2017

Peace Butterfly Network Sun-mi Attended 2019 (Branch B) Table 1: Break-down of interview population

With insight from the interviews, I conducted a content analysis of the online trip reviews from 2019. In total, I analyzed six trip reviews written by five different people.

Table 2 below provides a quick break-down of the trip participants who wrote online reviews in the year 2019. Methodologically, I prioritized the interviews to guide my research over the online reviews, as interviews allowed space for the participants to reflect on the trip overall whereas the online reviews are closer to daily reflections and less a reflection on the entire trip. In sum, from the interviews, I was able to gather what themes to pay particular attention to when analyzing the reviews.

Name Affiliation Age group Review Day & (in 2019) Date

Ji-yeon Peace Butterfly Network Early to mid 20s Day 1 (Jan 17, (Branch undisclosed) 2019) & Day 5 (Jan 21, 2019)

Mi-seon Peace Butterfly Network Early to mid 20s Day 2 (Jan 18, (Jeju Branch) 2019) & Day 6 (Jan 22, 2019)

Ji-han Peace Butterfly Network 17 years old Day 3 (Jan 19, (Jeju Branch) 2019) & Day 4 (Jan 20, 2019) Hyeon- Peace Butterfly Network 17 years old woo (Jeju Branch)

Gwang- Peace Butterfly Network Early to mid 20s chul (Branch undisclosed)

Table 2: Break-down of trip participants who wrote online reviews in 2019

Between July and September 2019, I conducted interviews with six people who have attended the Peace Trips: two associates of the Korean Council (Mi-gyeong and

Seung-hee) and four associates of the Peace Butterfly Network (Sun-mi, Sol-hee, Jin- sun, and Ha-yeong).3 The Korean Council has one office located in Seoul, but the Peace

Butterfly Network is much more spread out, as a nation-wide ally network of the Korean

Council. The Peace Butterfly Network is an alliance of multiple regional branches with a central leadership. Branches are located within various regions, including Seoul (both city and province), Wonju (city), Gangneung (city), Gyeonggi (province), Chungcheong

(province), Jeju (province). Although the main Facebook page of the Peace Butterfly

Network defines itself as an intercollegiate network, membership extends beyond the undergraduate population.4 For instance, neither Sun-mi nor Jin-sun became involved with the Peace Butterfly Network as college students. Sun-mi joined as an already experienced organizer, and Jin-sun was a high school student when she joined the regional branch in her hometown. At the time of interview, Jin-sun, Sol-hee, and Ha- yeong were all college students or very recent graduates affiliated with Branch A of the

Peace Butterfly Network. Sun-mi is a seasoned activist and director of Branch B of the

Peace Butterfly Network. 5

3 For confidentiality reasons, names of interviewees are all pseudonyms. 4 https://www.facebook.com/peacetoher/ 5 For confidentiality reasons, I do not specify which regional branches my interviewees belong to and refer to the branches as Branch A and Branch B.

Of the two Korean Council associates, Mi-gyeong has attended and planned the

Peace Trips since their inception, and Seung-hee, as a relatively new staff member, assisted with logistics for the first time in 2019. I had one list of interview questions for the two who were involved in the planning process (See Appendix A) and another for those who participated, but did not plan the trips (See Appendix B), Jin-sun, Ha-yeong,

Sol-hee, and Sun-mi. All participants had gone on the Peace Trip in January 2019, except Ha-yeong who had attended in 2017. This means that, at the time of interview, most participants were reflecting on their trip experiences from half a year ago, whereas for Ha-yeong, it had been two years since the trip. Considering that I also draw on the trip itinerary from 2019, my project focuses more heavily on the most recent trip during the time of data collection. This was not an intentional choice but turned out to be beneficial because the trip was relatively fresh on the interviewees’ memories.

To recruit interviewees, I contacted the Korean Council and the Peace Butterfly

Network via email. After my initial communication with a staff member at the Korean

Council and Sol-hee at Peace Butterfly Network, they introduced me to other interviewees who were willing to speak with me. My group of interviewees ranged from first-year college students to activists who have been organizing for nearly twenty years.

All of my interlocutors were women. Interviews were about an hour long and conducted in Korean. I recorded, transcribed, and translated all interviews and took notes during the interview with the participants’ permission. Interviews were held in the location of the interviewees’ choice, which ended up being either in a cafe or an office space. At the time of data collection, the number of people I interviewed comprised about 4-5% of the total population who had ever been on a Peace Trip, as twenty to thirty people make it to the trips each year.

After conducting the interviews, I went back to the online reviews of the trips. I chose to closely analyze those from 2019 to build on the interview data I had already collected about that year. The reviews were publicly available on the Korean Council’s

Naver blog.6 These are daily reflections written by trip participants by five participants altogether, and there were six reviews in total for each day of the trip. In seven to eight paragraphs, each post reflects on the activities that trip attendees participated in the day before. Thus, compared to the interviews, the online reviews speak to the participants’ more immediate reactions in the midst of the trip. They provide a different temporal perspective from the interviews which were conducted about six months, and in one case, nearly two years, after the interviewees went on the trips. Each review consists of twenty or so pictures taken throughout the day, but at the time of writing, the images are no longer available. As the reviews are all publicly available, in my discussion, I use the actual names of participants who wrote them. Reviews for Day 1 and Day 5 were written by Ji-yeon, Day 2 and 6, by Mi-seon, and Day 3 and 4 were written collectively by Hyeon-woo, Ji-han, and Gwang-chul. In their reviews, Mi-seon, Ji-han, and Hyeon- woo note that they are affiliated with the Jeju7 branch of the Peace Butterfly Network.

Through email exchanges with the Korean Council in March 2020, I learned that at the time of the trip, Ji-yeon, Mi-seon, and Gwang-chul were in their early to mid twenties, and Hyeon-woo and Ji-han were 17 years old. In the reviews, Hyeon-woo and Ji-han

6 https://blog.naver.com/war_women/221446974479 7 Jeju Island is located at the Southernmost end of South Korea, and has a population of approximately 700,000, which is around 1.3% of the entire population in Korea. As the largest island in Korea, Jeju is a self-governing province among nine provinces in Korea. It is one of the farthest regions from Seoul, where the Korean central government is and has been located historically.

19 were identified as men, but the gender of other participants was not made clear. Table 2 above provides a break-down of the population who wrote the online reviews I analyzed.

In addition to interviews and online reviews, I draw from the 2019 trip itinerary shared with me by the Korean Council. This extensive document helps better understand the trip structure and provides important context for the interviews as it is a device that sets the tone of the trip. I explore the document in more detail in Chapter 3 while introducing the Peace Trips.

Decolonial and feminist scholars have critically examined the exploitative nature of academic research as a process of ‘mining’ information from the ‘field’ (Patai, 1991;

Smith, 1999). Many of these scholars who share the liberatory goals of their participants think through how to leverage their research and researcher position to prioritize the benefits to the community (Cahill, 2007; Pulido, 2008; Nagar, 2002; Nagar and Geiger,

2007; Villenas, 1996). During my research, I had hoped to get involved with the organizations in a volunteer capacity so that I could directly be of use to the organization. Admittedly, volunteering as a method is itself riddled with ethical quagmires (Goerisch, 2017). That said, in my project, volunteering seemed to be one way to make up for the literal time and labor my participants were spending on me. I expressed this desire more than once, but neither of the organizations seemed interested in this possibility. I did not push any further, as I did not want to impose the burden of having to create and manage an unnecessary volunteer position. After conducting all of the interviews, however, the Korean Council reached out to me about translating some

20 of their press releases, articles, and videos from Korean to English.8 Of course, I happily complied.

Learning from decolonial and feminist scholars, I wanted my research to hopefully be useful, and at the very least, not harmful to the Korean Council’s work.

While this is crucial to working with any organization, this is particularly pertinent to the Korean Council. For instance, during my fieldwork, it came to light that Japanese state authorities had submitted scholarly research as evidence to lobby the U.S. government to discredit the Korean Council and hinder their organizing (Kim et al.,

2019). I was mindful of this political reality when starting out with my research project.

While in Korea, I was extremely fortunate to meet with a scholar-activist who has been long involved with the Korean Council. She advised me that the Korean Council could benefit from feminist scholarship that documents its rich history and contextualizes the significance of their ongoing work. Though I am cautious to assume that she speaks for everyone at the Korean Council, I kept her advice in mind while working through the project. This goes hand in hand with Nagar’s (2004) emphasis on methodological openness that allows researchers’ theoretical priorities to shift based on locational context and politics. Thus, through my research on the Peace Trips, I aspired to tell a small piece of shared history between the Korean Council and the Vietnamese survivors and bring out its significance within broader decolonization efforts.

The theoretical framework for this project had evolved significantly over time, which is reflected in the interview questions and my coding methods. Initially, my

8 Translated materials: http://womenandwar.net/kr/the-korean-council-responds-to-lai-dai-hans-open- letter-and-the-south-korean-governments-response%ef%bb%bf/; https://youtu.be/WxKwnTdxFNQ\; https://n.news.naver.com/article/607/0000000288 ; https://youtu.be/0CgfZEQcqFA

21 research questions inquired into people’s expectations and experiences of the Peace

Trips, meanings of solidarity emerging from them, and their role in creating solidarity across borders. Accordingly, I planned to code the interview transcript using five themes: solidarity, expectation and reality, power differentials, structural violence, and sense of self. The focus on solidarity arose from the intersection of particular empirical and theoretical contexts. Starting from the 2010s, the Korean Council expanded its transnational solidarity work with survivors of wartime gender violence more broadly, beyond the specific issue of the ‘comfort system.’ I identified the Peace Trips as an important part of this development that warranted close attention from a geographical perspective. Theoretically, I was heavily influenced by transnational feminists, whom the Korean Council is thinking with, who rigorously examine notions of solidarity across difference.

However, as I talked with interviewees and analyzed the transcripts over and over again, I could not ignore how salient ‘feelings’ were in our conversations. Naturally, my questions followed their lead. The reason participants went on the Peace Trips, their experiences, and the way they reflected on it, all overflowed with emotion and embodied feeling. The participants were curious, confused, shameful, apologetic, shocked, and yet hopeful. They wanted to see, listen, and experience. As I leaned into the interviews, these emotions were at the core of the Peace Trip and how it moved participants. In other words, it revealed itself as a site that calls for engagement with emotional scholarship.

In that sense, my methodological approach is inspired by feminist scholars such as Cahill (2007) who emphasizes “knowledge ‘from below,’ [and] takes lived experience as the starting point for investigation” (p. 268). For analysis, I utilized an open-coding

22 method to tease out prominent themes from the interviews. This was an iterative process where I revised the set of themes as new ones arose and reanalyzed already coded transcripts with newly emerging themes. By the end of the coding, I had the following four themes: (1) desire to see, listen, meet, and feel; (2) feeling to action; (3) painful or uncomfortable feelings; (4) feelings of connection. I used the same four themes to code the six online reviews as well.

In addition to finding patterns among participant experiences, I am as much interested in exploring the variations and divergences among them. Through each participant’s unique insights, I aim to deepen our understanding of diverse emotions, contextualize the Peace Trips within larger structures, and find pockets of decolonial potential through the Peace Trips.

2. Theoretical Frameworks

In what follows, I first introduce decolonial studies through which

I reconceptualize the discursive landscape in South Korea that thwarts redress for wartime survivors and threatens solidarity among them. I take time with this literature, because it is integral to my epistemology and positionality in this project. I intentionally discuss decolonial studies and my positionality in one breath, as my engagement with this body of scholarship is bound with my relationship to it. Next, I introduce and put emotional scholarship in conversation with decolonial studies to make sense of the political significance of the Peace Trips. In particular, I focus on scholarship rooted in feminist struggles, given the political priorities of my research context.

2.1. Grounding decolonization

Decolonization is grounded. “The decolonial shapeshifts depending on the land you stand upon, including the differential decolonize desires layered into a place,”

Daigle and Ramírez (2019) beautifully wrote (p. 78). As such, Naylor et al. (2018) urge geographers to rigorously examine their decolonial commitments by centering their multiply situated realities. Given its political roots in diverse localities, decolonial scholarship insists on contextualization and resists a singular narrative. Thus, I discuss scholars who inspire this particular project and my thinking at this point in time. By no means is this an all-encompassing review of the vast body of scholarship working through the difficult questions of decolonization. First, I introduce decolonial thought stemming from Global North Indigenous studies as well as from Asian geographies.

Considering where this project is located, both institutionally and empirically, I look to these scholars to inform how to responsibly engage with decolonial theory. Second, I outline the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) project stemming from Latin

American decolonial struggles, which I adopt as the central theoretical framework.

Given decolonial studies’ emphasis on place and praxis, I also explore why I take on the

MCD framework and the implications of doing so.

I am a non-Indigenous person currently based institutionally on the Duwamish lands on Turtle Island, whose settler denomination is Seattle, Washington. Given this and my engagement with decolonial thought, I am indebted to Global North Indigenous scholars who push me as a scholar to be responsible and accountable to place. Smith

(1999) wrote about the perils of research to Indigenous communities particularly by non-Indigenous researchers who make claims that augment settler colonialism through

24 epistemological violence. At the same time, she argues that research can be leveraged for resistance with a deep commitment to Indigenous sovereignty. Along those lines,

Simpson (2017) and Coulthard (2014) emphasize conceptualizing knowledge and ethics that is rooted in and in relation to place. Coulthard calls this, “grounded normativity.” In that sense, both reject a politics that seeks recognition from the settler state; in its stead, they insist that Indigenous communities must foreground liberation on their own terms, a politics that Simpson dubs “radical resurgence.” In their powerful piece,

“Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Tuck and Yang (2012) drive home the importance of being accountable to place. Their argument is painstakingly simple yet challenging. They incisively critique social justice movements and scholarship that engage the idea of

‘decolonization’ without taking seriously their relationship to Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonialism. Tuck and Yang demand those who preach ‘decolonization’ to also pay attention to what ‘decolonization’ looks like beyond the realm of metaphoric devices. In essence, they refuse to decontextualize decolonization from land, place, and politics. With that in mind, Simpson (2017) proposes Indigenous internationalism as a way of relating to other First Nations, of building solidarity, and of resurging collectively, with ties to land and community at the forefront. Together, these scholars guide my thinking on how to engage decolonial ‘theory’ while being true to place.

The intimate relationship between place, decolonization, and knowledge is also of central importance to scholars in South Korea and in Asia more broadly. This is the geography my project most directly engages with. Chae (2019) traces the lineage of scholarship in Korea thinking through decolonizing knowledge production. He dates this discussion back to the 1990s as Korean scholars increasingly questioned their unequal exchanges with foreign scholars and scholarship, especially with those in the

Global North. Feminist thinkers played a key role in pushing these conversations forward by prioritizing the lived experiences of Korean women (Chae, 2019; N.-Y. Lee,

2006). In so doing, they revealed how the ivory tower of the university, in dividing theory from praxis, fortifies colonial modes of knowledge production. These scholars have found postcolonial feminism useful in sharpening their critique, in addition to the transnational feminist framework of thinking with other grassroots communities who grapple with similar struggles (Moon, 2015; N.-Y. Lee, 2006; Yang, 2006; Yook, 2010).

With postcolonial, U.S. Women of Color, and Third World feminists, transnational feminists challenge the problematic overstatement of Western liberal feminism that all women, regardless of their differences such race, class, sexuality, and nationality, are universalizable through sexual difference (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997;

Grewal & Kaplan, 1994; Kaplan et al., 1999; Mohanty et al., 1991). As an outgrowth of liberal feminism, global feminism evokes an illusion of a ‘global sisterhood’ that flattens vast differences that exist amongst womxn. While sharing the critical vision of postcolonial, U.S. Women of Color, and Third World feminisms, transnational feminism is distinct because of the specific way in which it disputes the homogenizing discourse of global feminism. Grounded in the everyday struggles of women living in the Global

South, transnational feminism draws attention to “scattered hegemonies,” the multiple structures of oppression that manifest and are (re)produced differently depending on locality (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997). Through their articulation of ‘transnationality,’ transnational feminists assert that resisting scattered hegemonies requires fostering transnational solidarity takes these differences seriously. In her research on the transnational ‘comfort women’ redress movement, Shin (2013) effectively grapples with this notion of solidarity across difference. She details the conflicts that arose in the

26 movement, because of diverging political priorities dependent on different national contexts (p. 296). In short, solidarity is an ongoing struggle to stand together in spite of incommensurable differences.

Such contributions of transnational feminists are incredibly relevant to ‘inter-

Asian decolonial scholarship,’ which emerged as a distinct body of literature in the late

2000s. The desires that fuel inter-Asian decolonial studies are at once deeply political and epistemological (Budianta, 2010; Chen, 2010). The political impetus is to build decolonial solidarity within Asia to construct a collective critique of westernization and global capitalism. In discussing inter-Asia solidarity, Chen (2010) emphasizes the need to be mindful of the diversity and inequality within Asia. Epistemologically, inter-Asia decolonial scholars question ‘Asia’ as a geography imagined and produced by the West and aim to destabilize it. Chen (2010) urges Asian scholars to produce narratives and theories about Asia that stems from within. Importantly, Muto (2010) warns against the co-optation of inter-Asia solidarity by the troubling, yet burgeoning discourse of ‘rising

Asia’ as the poster child of modern development and global capitalism. Thus, in its distinct way, this scholarship foregrounds place and politics in decolonization, echoing

Indigenous scholars in the Global North.

Even still, Tae (2011) points out that inter-Asia studies is largely dominated by male academics and treats gender, sexuality, and other axes of difference as an afterthought. She is also critical of the overrepresentation of East Asia in the field. Thus,

Tae argues that a decolonial feminist framing is crucial to address these shortcomings. I note that Tae’s (2011) intervention is largely shaped by engaging with postcolonial and transnational feminist thought. In that sense, decolonial conversations within Asia are unfolding through a collaboration between decolonial scholars and postcolonial and

27 transnational feminist scholars. Albeit indirectly, Shigematsu and Camacho (2010) respond to some of Tae’s worries by centering Indigenous and feminist scholarship as well as the Pacific region which oft gets marginalized within discussions of the Asia-

Pacific. In this way, Asian decolonial scholars are building solidarity in place, careful not to reproduce colonial structures in the process.

Global North Indigenous and Asian decolonial scholarship, in addition to the

MCD framework, shape how I engage with decolonial theory in this project. As they argue, at the heart of decolonial thought is place and praxis. Thus, it is imperative that I hold myself accountable to the geographies where this project is embedded. First, that means acknowledging that my project is enabled by the university, a settler colonial institution on Indigenous lands. Against this backdrop, being a responsible researcher entails resisting settler colonial modes of thinking which renders theory separate from place. I take inspiration from how Coulthard (2014) reads Fanon, whose work is rooted in African decolonial struggles, to theorize Indigenous sovereignty in the Global North.

Coulthard draws on Fanon’s decolonial theory to the extent that it resonates with the political priorities within his research context. In this way, he bridges Indigenous and

Global South decolonization thought, without decontextualizing either of them.

Following his lead, this project is intent on using theory situated in place and praxis.

Second, my project must produce knowledge not only ‘about,’ but ‘with’ Asia.

Thus, while drawing on decolonial theory originating from Latin American geographies,

I am mindful of how doing so fits into decolonial conversations within my research context. Rather than ‘apply’ MCD ‘theory’ to ‘empirical data’ from Korea, my project attempts to facilitate a dialogue between two different geographies in the Global South.

This responds to desires within Asian decolonial scholarship to think with other

28 communities particularly in the Global South (Chen, 2010; N.-Y. Lee, 2006; Tae, 2011).

Specifically, Kang (2008) urges Korean scholars to look towards the MCD framework as a potential alternative to postmodern and postcolonial thought that are of Western lineages.

In this project, I draw heavily on the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) framework spearheaded by Latin American scholars for multiple reasons (Lugones,

2007, 2010; Santos, 2014; Walsh & Mignolo, 2018). First, its articulation of modernity/coloniality as an intermingled concept is useful to understand the discursive terrain in which former ‘comfort women’ and Vietnamese survivors are fighting for redress. Second, its framing of and distinction between ‘decolonization’ and

‘decoloniality’ helps untangle ethnonationalist decolonization from the decolonial visions of the Korean Council and the Vietnamese survivors. Third, positioning the

VietNam War redress movement in solid opposition to modernity/coloniality is a move to firm the movement’s rhetorical grounds against the political milieu of contemporary

Korea.9 In that regard, my motivation to focus on modernity/coloniality is not so much to establish it as an explanatory superstructure (rather than, for instance, capitalism, patriarchy, or racism), but for a political purpose. Lastly, as mentioned previously, this is one attempt to spark dialogue among Global South movements that strive to engage with each other more deeply. As Kang (2008) observed, the MCD framework provides a robust and creative re-reading of world history from the standpoint of the Global South.

From this, it builds a rich critique of the modern, Western knowledge system as

9 Given Korea’s geopolitical history, anti-colonial narratives function as a powerful organizing force on the discursive terrain of Korean politics. This is telling, for instance, in how effective a trigger anti- Japanese and anti-U.S. sentiments are in mobilizing mainstream public opinion (G.-I. Lee, 2010).

29 inseparable from coloniality. Thus, he urges Korean decolonial scholars to seek collaboration with MCD scholarship. One example of such collaborative work, albeit rooted in South Asian geographies, is the recent collection of articles in Third World

Thematics guest-edited by Hussein and Hussain (2019). In introducing the collection, the editors take care to draw on the MCD framework as a theoretical partner grounded in Latin American decolonization struggles, rather than as an abstract, rootless theory.

Moreover, they bring in the MCD framework into conversations already happening within South Asian geographies, rather than apply MCD ‘theory’ to South Asian

‘empirics.’ In this project, my engagement with MCD scholarship resembles Hussein and Hussain’s (2019) approach to it. Admittedly, the geography of my research context does not readily mirror that of Latin America (Kang, 2008, p. 353-4). Importantly, this necessitates maintaining an attitude of ‘dialogue’ without taking for granted the similarities between these colonial geographies.

MCD scholars argue that modernity and coloniality have been conjoined since their birth. More specifically, coloniality is the dark underbelly of modernity, a linear mode of thinking that heralds ‘progress’ and ‘reason.’ MCD scholars make this argument through a novel reading of the global history of modernity (Escobar, 2007). Often, the origin of modern thinking is traced back to the Enlightenment Era. However, MCD scholars observe that modernity predates the 17th century and emerged with the

Spanish colonization of the Americas in 1492. By taking seriously the colonial history of

Latin America, MCD scholars show that modernity and coloniality have historically gone hand in hand. With that, MCD scholars not only caution against colonialism, but also modernity that penetrates the world’s diverse knowledge systems. In their framework, there is no social justice without epistemological justice.

Expanding on this articulation of modernity/coloniality, Lugones (2007) argues that there are two sides to coloniality: the “light” and the “dark.” If the light side depicts the production of hierarchy for colonial control, the dark side refers to violence that penetrates epistemologically and ontologically. In that sense, the dark side of coloniality again highlights the inseparability of modernity/coloniality. For instance, if the light side renders gender into a hierarchized system, the dark side creates gender itself as an ontologically separate axis of categorization. By distinguishing the light and dark sides,

Lugones creates a useful device to speak distinctly of social, epistemological, and ontological decolonization. More crucially, she brings gender and sexuality into understanding the core logics of coloniality, not as a mere addendum.

These conceptualizations of coloniality allow MCD to theorize decolonization at the nation-state level as a process distinct from, albeit connected to, social, epistemological, and ontological decolonization. The latter is what they term,

“decoloniality.” According to Walsh and Mignolo (2018), decolonization (hereafter denoted as ‘‘D’ecolonization’ for sake of clarity) is “focused on specific colonization” and is still limited by modern thinking (p. 112). ‘D’ecolonization in this sense is often associated with dewesternization as a form of oppositional politics. In contrast, decoloniality exposes the inseparable link between coloniality and modernity, thus opening up spaces for “thinking and doing otherwise” (Walsh & Mignolo, 2018, p. 113).

This entails a fundamental reimagining of community, of what counts as knowledge, and of what constitutes a good way of being. In that way, decoloniality asks difficult questions about what collective thriving looks like beyond doing away with the current oppressive hegemony.

Claiming its roots in Latin American decolonial movements, MCD emerged, in part, as pushback against postcolonial literature. This is important to note, not only to better understand the MCD project, but also because many scholar(-activist)s studying the Korean Council (see Kim & Toshio, 2008; N.-Y. Lee, 2010; Yang, 2006) have long aligned themselves with postcolonial feminists (for example, Chatterjee, 1989; Mohanty et al., 1991; Spivak, 1994). MCD scholars take issue with postcolonialism on three fronts.

First, they argue that postcolonial scholarship omits Latin American colonization from the global history of colonialism. Second, they critique that postcolonial thought, despite its critical edge, fortifies the walls of the ivory tower, given its heavy focus on cultural studies and Eurocentric lineage of thought. In contrast, MCD scholars argue, MCD originates from activist spaces in the Global South. Lastly, while postcolonialism operates within the modern knowledge system to dismantle colonialism, MCD stresses investment in thinking outside modernity/coloniality (Mignolo, 2007). In short, if postcolonialism can be understood as a deconstructive venture, decolonial thought emphasizes constructing alternative worlds.

However, MCD’s critiques of postcolonialism must be taken with a grain of salt. Asher (2013) challenges this stark distinction and urges MCD scholars to pay closer attention to the nuances of postcolonial feminism in particular. She argues that postcolonial feminists are as committed to building alternative futures, but recognize deconstructive work as an important part of this process. Moreover, Asher (2017) observes that MCD scholars are also strongly connected to the Global North academy.

This, she observes, clashes with MCD scholars’ charge against postcolonial scholars for being out of touch with Global South realities given their privileged location as academics based in the West. Asher’s skepticism resonates in my research context in

South Korea. Postcolonial feminists have been deep in conversation with social movements and at the forefront of chipping away at the walls of the university.

Moreover, they have worked with movements not only to critique colonialism, but also to envision decolonial futures. Hence, I bring the MCD project into this context as a collaborative partner of postcolonial feminist thought, rather than as its replacement.

Compared to Asher (2013, 2017), Rivera Cusiqanqui (2012) is even more scathing in her critique of MCD scholars, as well as of postcolonial academics. She argues that

MCD scholars, mostly cis male academics, appropriate the work of scholar-activists who have long worked with Indigenous and African-descended people. Further, as MCD scholarship got translated into English, it gained increasing recognition within Global

North academic circles, despite its unsatisfactory engagement with pre-existing decolonial conversations within Latin America.

I acknowledge these debates, because it visibilizes the unequal power structures this project itself is embedded in. Given my location in a Global North institution, as

Rivera Cusiqanqui (2012) points out, I came across the MCD project because of its accessibility in English and growing recognition in decolonial conversations here. In other words, this project is not exempt from the epistemological blind spots resulting from the unbalanced “‘political economy’ of knowledge” (Rivera Cusiqanqi, 2012). In addition, being transparent about the political economy of knowledge warrants me to explicitly acknowledge my positionality as a U.S.-based researcher studying Korea.

While being Korean, I am currently pursuing my graduate studies in the U.S. As Chae

(2019) shows, Korean scholars have problematized the unearned advantage given to degrees granted by Global North institutions and to scholars based in the Global North even when studying the Korean context. I am a beneficiary of the systematic inequalities

33 these scholars critique. This awareness requires that I take particular care in my work to engage with Korean scholars and activists who share similar research agendas.

In short, decolonial thinking demands a rigorous accountability to place, location, and the way both are riddled with power. As a modest step in that direction, this section laid bare the ‘where’ of this project. Geography informs not only which strands of decolonial thought I draw on, but also why and how I engage with them.

2.2. Feeling for hope

Feminist geographers have persistently pushed geography to expand its conceptualization of emotional scholarship. In geography, many situated institutionally in EuroAmerica declared the early 2000s as its “emotional turn,” oft citing Anderson and Smith (2001) as one of its precursors (Bondi, 2005). Bondi (2005) responds with intrigue to the sudden interest in emotion within the broader discipline. She argues that feminist geography, with feminist scholarship in general, has long paid attention to emotion as a politically weighty subject of inquiry. Bondi’s (2005) insight echoes similar questions raised within other fields of study, such as cultural studies and neurology

(Gorton, 2007). These scholars sharply draw attention to the shared history of emotional scholarship and feminism. In that vein, Wright (2010) warns against limiting the purview of emotional geography to those that explicitly identify as such. With an eye on social justice, she highlights scholarship whose immediate concern is to mobilize emotion as means to think through struggles for a better world. Following Wright

(2010), I also take inspiration from such scholars without imposing disciplinary boundaries. While I am aware of the valuable debate between emotional versus affectual geography (see Pile, 2010), for the purpose of this paper, I choose to speak of feeling,

34 emotion, and affect in one breath. This is because this theoretical distinction does not translate so neatly to the body of emotional scholarship I engage with.

Feeling is knowing. England (1994) and Lawson (2007) beautifully articulate this in the realm of scholarly research. Feelings of vulnerability and care are at the heart of doing research that is critical, ethical, and all the more powerful. Simply put, research is emotional. In extension, Nagar and Sangtin Writers (2006) challenge what counts as

‘research’ and ‘knowledge.’ Allowing their everyday emotions and experiences to take center stage, these thinkers illustrate that, beyond lending itself to knowledge, feeling is knowing. Their voices join Moraga and Anzaldúa (1981) and Anzaldúa (1987) who have made such arguments against the backdrop of connected, albeit disparate political struggles. Together, these feminists push back against the myth of objectivity and rationality that are upheld by racist, casteist, colonial, and heteropatriarchal logics.

Bringing feeling into the realm of knowing equips feminists with the language to critique these very systems of oppression.

Emotion emerges between and amongst bodies; it creates their very surface.

Lorde (1984) recounts a painful encounter on a subway as a young girl. She sat next to a white woman who stared at the space between her and Lorde’s coat with disgust. Young

Lorde wondered if the woman had seen a cockroach between them. As soon as their coats touched, the woman pulled away. The object of the woman’s scorn was Lorde herself. The chilling gaze and the bodily act of moving away etched into young Lorde the feeling of racist hate. In her compelling study of texts, Ahmed (2014) looks closely at visceral emotions encompassing hate, shame, pain, fear, disgust, and love. She argues that the surface of the skin, the body of the personal and collective ‘we’ is made through emotion. In turn, this means that emotion shapes futures, as the feeling that ‘we’ are a

35 collective body is continuously re-made through subsequent encounters (Ahmed, 2004).

The key is that emotion arises intercorporeally, not originating ‘in’ or ‘outside’ the body.

There is no body that inherently contains a certain kind of feeling. Importantly, Puar

(2009), who conceptualizes affect as a “bodily capacity” toward “hope,” draws from disability studies to steer away from an individuated notion of bodies.

Lastly, feeling moves bodies towards activism. Moraga and Anzaldua’s (1981) groundbreaking book reveals how love, pain, and companionship budding from the experiences of U.S. women of color radicalize them. Moraga opens the anthology with:

“I have had enough of this. I am involved in this book because more than anything else I need to feel enlivened again in a movement … that can finally ask the right questions and admit to not having all the answers (emphasis mine; p. xiv-xv).” The impetus to act reverberates through her feelings. Along these lines, Murrey (2016) observes that “acts of resistance have emotional roots” (p. 226). She investigates the emotional geographies of communities along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline who experience(d) loss because of it. Murrey (2016) uses the concept of “slow dissent” to argue that emotions, granted not in an organized manner, enable deep structural critique that suggests potential for organized resistance.

Not only can emotion propel resistance, but it also sustains it. hooks (1993) argues that, for Black women in the U.S., emotional healing is part and parcel of political action. In the most generous terms, structural racism and sexism have no consideration for the emotional well-being of Black women. With love, hooks (1993) shows that healing happens through finding the language to name these structures and articulate how they wound Black women; vice versa, emotional recovery is crucial to resisting these structures. Beyond the personal, N.-Y. Lee (2017) argues that empathy

36 can be a powerful tool to create a steadfast movement, such as the ‘comfort women’ redress movement in South Korea. At the same time, Pratt (2009) is cautious of how and what kinds of emotions are mobilized to garner public support. With the Kalayaan

Center in Vancouver, BC, she carefully attempts to retell stories of loss, grief, and trauma of Filipina domestic workers without reducing them into one tightly packaged narrative.

Together, emotional scholarship makes important interventions in epistemology and highlights relationality and praxis. This opens up emotional studies to be in generative conversation with decolonial studies. This paper aims to weave them together through the case of VietNam Butterfly Peace Trips.

Chapter 2. Modernity/Coloniality and Redress Movements for Survivors of War Violence

In Chapter 2, I trace how modernity/coloniality insidiously threads through discourses that thwart the redress movement for the survivors of sexual slavery and of the VietNam War. Here, I draw on the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) framework with the aim of reconceptualizing both redress movements as a connected struggle against modernity/coloniality. To do so, I conduct a secondary analysis of discourses that thwart the redress of the former ‘comfort women’ and the Vietnamese survivors. I also draw on my interviews to take stock of the pushback the Korean Council received about their work towards the redress of Vietnamese survivors. The main objective of this chapter is to theoretically contribute to the solidarity that the Korean

Council and the Vietnamese survivors are already forging on the ground. Moreover, it helps position the redress movements in steadfast opposition to ‘coloniality,’ which carries much rhetorical weight in the Korean political context. Ultimately, this chapter sets the stage to look for decolonial alternatives within the two redress movements. This is what Chapters 3 and 4 set out to achieve.

1. Redress for ‘Comfort Women’

1.1. History of the Korean ‘comfort women’ redress movement

From 1930 to 1945 marking the end of World War II, the Japanese Imperial

Army drafted tens of thousands of women from what is now known as the two Koreas

(forming the majority), China, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, East Timor, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and Taiwan to work at ‘comfort stations.’ At this time, Korea as an

38 undivided nation had been under Japanese occupation since 1910. Women were drafted through various routes — either sold by parents struggling with poverty, trafficked, abducted, or deceived into this work. The comfort stations were designed to ‘comfort’

Japanese soldiers in combat, which usually meant fulfilling their sexual demands, mostly against the women’s will. The horrific treatment of these women is now well- documented and has received global attention since the 2000s (See for example: Chŏng,

2004). As the global women’s rights agenda made its way into mainstream conversations, the international community recognized the ‘comfort system’ for what it has always been: sexual slavery. Despite the strides the movement made against insurmountable obstacles, seeking redress for survivors is heartbreakingly an unfinished project. Since the movement’s inception, the survivors demanded that the Japanese government issue an official apology with legally bound reparations. While there have been attempts to appease the movement, these attempts skirt around the movement’s very specific asks that hold the Japanese state legally accountable. At the same time, the cruel reality is that the number of survivors is dwindling, as many have passed away. By

March 2020, only eighteen survivors were still alive.

The ‘comfort women’ issue came to be a strong rallying cry among women’s movements in Korea in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the time, Korean feminists were mobilizing around various forms of violence against women they believed arose at the nexus of militarism, imperialism, and patriarchy. They called this structure, “sexual imperialism,” resulting from 35 years of Japanese colonialism and ongoing U.S. neo- imperialism (J. Park, 2014). Against this backdrop, the sexual enslavement of Korean women was taken as a chilling and undeniable manifestation of sexual imperialism. In

November 1990, 37 women’s organizations banded together to found the Korean

Council to fight for redress of former ‘comfort women.’ At this time, the Korean Council did not include any of the survivors, as none of them had spoken out publicly about their forced involvement with sexual slavery. The organization set up a call line, hoping that, one day, a survivor would trust them enough to reach out for assistance.

In August 1991, with the Korean Council as her ally, 67-year old Kim Hak-sun

(1924-1997) became the first person to testify publicly as a survivor of sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. Since then, more than 200 women in Korea have bravely come forward. Most, though not all, survivors came to be represented by the Korean

Council, and they grew to be the leading voices of the Korean Council’s activism. Given the wartime recruitment schemes for ‘comfort women,’ the vast majority were of lower socioeconomic background (SNU Human Rights Center Chin-sŏng Chŏng Research

Team, 2018). A lot of them suffered from decades of severe emotional, financial, and health-related burdens, ever since their release upon Japan’s defeat in 1945 (Min, 2003;

Yang, 2006). This was a consequence of the intense trauma of sexual slavery as well as the subsequent neglect and exclusion by the Korean state in addition to their familial and local communities. Moreover, the women were discouraged from seeking justice for sexual enslavement and its ongoing ramifications, particularly because of heteropatriarchal logics which would punish the survivors for being ‘sexually impure’ and thus ‘broken.’

1.2. Discourses that thwart the redress of former ‘comfort women’

Drawing on feminist scholar(-activist)s of the ‘comfort women’ issue, I highlight three discourses that posed significant barriers to building a stalwart redress movement for ‘comfort women’ (Korean Council 20th Anniversary Editorial Committee, 2014; N.-

Y. Lee, 2010). The first two stymied the formation of the movement itself and the third

40 clouded the movement’s sharp critique of patriarchy alongside imperialism.

Nevertheless, as the survivors and their allies have shown, these discursive tactics ultimately failed to stop the redress movement.

Even before the launching of the Korean Council, the ‘comfort system’ was no secret. However, this awareness never crystallized into mobilization or open support.

Scholar-activists diagnose two discourses that created the 50 years of public silence around ‘comfort women’ after the Second World War. The first discourse is the belief that it is indecent to talk openly about the breach of ‘women’s virtue.’ The second discourse came through the language of ‘urgency.’ In this discourse, there were more pressing matters at hand in Korea than ‘women’s issues,’ such as democratization and economic development. Despite these challenges, a redress movement was able to take shape and increasingly gained momentum. The third discourse emerged in response to the movement’s growing visibility. Despite its previous attempts to silence the redress movement through the logic of urgency, ethnnonationalism reconfigured itself to instrumentalize the sexual slavery issue for its own benefit. It flattened the movement’s multi-dimensional critique of colonialism and heteropatriarchy, molding it into a rhetorical tool through which to unite and incite ethnic Koreans through the rallying cry of ‘D’ecolonization. Underlying this is the deeply troubling logic that equates ‘women’s virtue’ with ‘national honor.’ In what follows, I bring these three discourses together to argue that modernity/coloniality weaves through all of them, even as they share an intimate relationship with ‘D’ecolonization.

Regarding the first discourse, feminists have well established that the notion of

‘sexual im/purity’ and ‘woman’s virtue,’ especially in the context of ‘comfort women,’ functions as the right arm of heteropatriarchal control (N.-Y. Lee, 2010; Min, 2003).

Here, Lugones' (2007) classic work on the conceptual framing of the “modern/colonial gender system” comes in handy to reorient heteropatriarchy to the optic of coloniality.

Calling on Quijano to seriously engage with women of color and Third World feminists,

Lugones (2007) argues that beyond its hierarchizing logics, gender itself as a category is a weapon of colonialism. Instituting gender as ontologically independent, and hence, as another way to categorize, creates fissures among colonized subjects to further convenience the colonizers. The implication of Lugones’ argument is that when the subject of critique can be registered through the analytical mode of heteropatriarchy, it also becomes legible to modernity/coloniality as a mode of critique.

In the Korean context, this has been proven by scholars and activists who rallied against (and successfully abolished) the patriarchal and patrilineal family-head system

(S. Kim, 2005; Korea Legal Aid Center for Family Relations, 2005). S. Lee (2004) shows that the family-head system can be traced back to the Japanese Meiji Civil Code implemented in Korea during the Japanese colonial period. The purpose was to take account of the Korean population to better manage them and extract labor. In the family-head system, the one read as the ‘father’ in Korean familial custom became the

‘head of the household’ by law with various entitlements to ‘rule’ his family. Inheritance of these rights followed a patrilineal order. In this structure, the family became encoded as a unit that reports directly to the Japanese emperor; and within the family, the

‘members’ became subordinates of the ‘head of the household.’ Scholars and activists argue that this modern/colonial gender system has seeped into every corner of Korean society (Korea Legal Aid Center for Family Relations, 2005; S. Lee, 2004). Essentially, it morphed the ‘father’ into an unchallengeable authority figure that has a vertical relationship to the state. In extension, it endowed men, who were expected to fulfill a

42 fatherly role, with the birthright to rule, as the Japanese emperor does in his colonized nations. In sum, Japanese colonialism not only created hierarchies based on gender, but also produced the category of gender as uniquely tied to authority and state power and transformed what it means to be read as a gendered subject. Bringing Lugones (2007) into dialogue with Korean feminists unveils the shared lineage between heteropatriarchy and modernity/coloniality.

The second discourse that appeals to ‘urgency’ actually originates from two groups that stand in opposition to each other: one espousing economic development, and the other, democratization. The former is driven by Korea as a developmentalist state, whereas the latter stems from civil society pushing back against the Korean dictatorship regime. Third World and transnational feminists fighting against colonialism in various geographies showed how these two clashing narratives work in concert to marginalize women and discussions of gender (Kaplan, Alarcon, & Moallem,

1999; Mohanty, Russo, & Torres, 1991). In his project to build epistemologies from the

Global South, Santos (2014) helps us bring out how coloniality is entangled with the language of urgency. He argues that a key characteristic of coloniality is that it contracts the present and expands the future. This is intertwined with the logics of modernity, which understands itself as the only possible mode of being, and the linear conceptualization of time. Along these lines, the language of urgency throws away diverse experiences in the present and delays what is good for all to an unknown future.

However, by neglecting to take care of the present, modernity/coloniality in fact strays farther away from nurturing a future in which all can thrive. To be clear, economic development and democratization do not share the same visions for the future.

Regardless, divergences aside, in moving towards their visions, both squander the richness of the present in exchange for a future only some had a say in.

In addition, discourses of economic development and democratization can each be analyzed through the lens of modernity/coloniality. Walsh and Mignolo (2018) argue that ‘development’ has been a core project of modernity/coloniality since the late twentieth century (p. 110).10 Kwŏn (2004) illustrates this specifically in the context of

South Korea during the developmentalist regime of the 1960s and 70s. In arguing that developmentalism is colonial by nature, he spotlights Korea’s involvement in the

VietNam War. The war was fueled by the state’s modernist desires which necessitated the rendering and sacrificing of colonial subjects, which was VietNam in the state’s imaginary (also similarly argued by: G.-I. Lee, 2010). Yu (2014) extends this analysis into the more recent state of affairs. When enmeshed with developmentalist logics,

Korean nationalism, which matured through national decolonization efforts, manifests in horrifying ways. Essentially, it becomes the handmaiden for the ugly colonial scheme of Korean state and capital, especially concentrated in Southeast Asia, which is emerging

10 Development can be a slippery concept, as a “complex, contradictory and powerful term that takes on particular meanings in the context of specific intellectual, institutional and political moments” (Lawson 2007, 5). Thus, it is worth clarifying what Walsh and Mignolo (2018) and Kwŏn (2004) each mean by “development.” Mainstream modern development gained momentum in the post-World War II period. Driven by structuralist approaches such as dependency theory and global Keynesian reformism, modern development heralds GDP growth as the first and foremost marker of development (Pieterse 1998). Given Kwŏn’s (2004) focus on Korea's state-driven, export-led development, he is likely thinking of modern development as the target of his critique. Modern development has received much skepticism for its exclusive focus on economic growth and disregard for other factors of well-being, such as liberty, environmental concerns, and self-reliance. As an alternative to modern development, some scholars espouse “alter-development” as a more holistic model. However, Pieterse (1998) argues that modern development has appropriated “alter-development” through the language of “community partnership” and “human development.” Thus, it still falls short of acknowledging the deep structural inequalities between the Global North and South. In that vein, Escobar (1995) intervenes that “development” should be examined primarily as a discursive practice that epistemologically privileges the Global North. In essence, Escobar (1995) is thinking with Walsh and Mignolo (2018) who argue that “development” as a concept is an invention of modernity/coloniality.

44 as a spitting image of Japanese coloniality. Korea’s neo-imperialist desires are demonstrated through rampant, uncaring expansion overseas that exploits cheap labor, the transactional strategy behind foreign aid, and dehumanization of foreign migrant workers in Korea on whose labor the economy is increasingly relying.

On the flip side, challenging the developmentalist state was the democratization movement of the 1960s to 1980s. During this time, the sidelining of the ‘comfort women’ issue should be contextualized against the backdrop of the relationship between the democratization and women’s movements (Korean Council 20th Anniversary

Editorial Committee, 2014). The democratization movement rendered the issue of gender as a separate and secondary fight for liberation (Lee-Park, 2001). In doing so, it fractured the existence of women fighting the anti-colonial fight, demanding that they leave a part of them behind in the process. According to Lugones, coloniality operates exactly through such fragmentation, by deploying the “logic of purity” (Carastathis,

2019). In other words, it produces various “axes of difference” such as gender and race as a tool to differentiate, disrupt communities, and sever relationships. Coloniality distracts us from realizing our “long and wide” selves, creating an illusion of zero-sum competition, when in fact collective thriving is a realistic option (Lugones, 2007, p. 189).

The third discourse is characterized as hungry nationalism that eagerly co-opts the ‘comfort women’ redress movement for its own convenience (P. Kim & Toshio,

2008). This claim is an especially contentious one, even among scholars in the feminist camp. While strongly supporting the redress of ‘comfort women,’ some of these feminist scholars worry that the movement itself takes advantage of and further emboldens uncritical ethnonationalism fueled by anti-Japanese sentiments (Soh, 2008; Varga,

2009). Speaking to their concerns, Herr (2016) deftly extricates what she calls

“polycentric nationalism” of the ‘comfort women’ movement from “essentialist nationalism” of which these scholars are wary. She argues that the former, unlike the latter, is malleable depending on context and has the potential to be “reimagined as a more egalitarian and inclusive community” which can “then serve feminist purposes” (p.

45). Most importantly, she makes a powerful epistemological intervention: that what redress looks like for the ‘comfort women’ should be on their own terms, even if it involves a heavy focus on the state. N.-Y. Lee (2010) offers a more empirically oriented response to the same worries. She assesses that the movement has tried ceaselessly to resist being overshadowed by the nationalist agenda. In her view, the resilience of nationalist discourse despite such efforts brings to bear the very “gender-blind nationalism and remnants of coloniality” in Korea (p. 52).

This ethnonationalist discourse is particularly difficult to critique because of the

‘D’ecolonial impetus that largely shaped contemporary Korean nationalism. Kwŏn

(2004) argues that nationalism in Korea is uniquely positioned, because of its anti- colonial roots resisting Japanese colonization and undergoing the Korean North/South divide resulting from broader Cold War politics. In this context, the nation-state became an entity that could not, and should not be questioned. Any skepticism of the nation was anti-liberatory and treasonous. Since Korea’s independence, skeptics were seen as co- conspirators of Japanese colonizers, and since the dictatorial regime in the 1960s and

1970s, as pro-North Korean communists. This was no less true among various social movements critical of the state. In fact, the more critical a social movement was of the state, the heavier it tried to lay its claims on the idea of the ‘nation.’

MCD scholars’ distinction between ‘D’ecolonization and decoloniality provides a useful tool to parse out the nuances here. As Walsh and Mignolo (2018) argue,

‘D’ecolonization is still limited by the framework of a modern nation-state, whereas decoloniality questions this unit itself as a liberatory community. In the midst of

‘D’ecolonization struggles in Korea, ethnonationalism became well-versed in the mechanisms of modernity/coloniality. To illustrate this point, I draw on Santos (2014) who details the limiting ontological condition modernity/coloniality creates.

Foregrounding epistemologies of the Global South, Santos (2014) argues that Western rationality (which is inextricable from coloniality) has a “lazy” habit of assuming its totality. In its hegemonic imaginary, there is no other possible way of being that lies outside its limits. It cannot engage with other modes of being, because it does not register them. In that way, coloniality/modernity creates, in Walsh and Mignolo’s

(2018) words, a tunnel vision of “good things to come” (p. 113). Ultimately, this creates an ontological problem, which is that other visions for the future simply do not register.

I argue that in its appropriation of the ‘comfort women’ movement, the mainstream

Korean nationalist agenda operates similarly. The ‘comfort women’ movement (a part) only exists in relation to the nation (the whole). In this way, there is no space for the

‘comfort women’ movement to exist independently, in all of its integrity, brimming with liberatory expansiveness beyond the parameters of ‘D’ecolonization.

2. Redress for Survivors of the VietNam War

2.1. History of the Vietnamese survivors’ redress movement in Korea

In Korean public discourse, 1999 marked the beginning of the redress movement for survivors of violence perpetrated by Korean soldiers during the VietNam War. From

1999 to 2000, a series of exposés were published in a major left-leaning Korean newspaper, Hankyoreh 21. Under the catchphrase, “We must ask for forgiveness for our

47 shameful history: Korean soldiers committed civilian massacres during the VietNam

War,” the weekly articles were published for 46 weeks, between September 1999 and

September 2000. By reader demand, the exposé series was soon accompanied by a fundraiser, which lasted until February 2003 even after the articles had stopped publishing. Since then, mobilization within civil society has been led primarily by the lineage of scholars and activists who were heavily involved in the fight for democratization between the 1960s and 1980s. Some others were seasoned mobilizers who came of age through movements seeking redress for Japanese and U.S. military violence before and during the Korean War. Given these continuities, redress for survivors of the VietNam War shaped around demands that the Korean state investigate the massacres, issue an apology, and make reparations (Yoon, 2015).

The Korean Council has also been part of the redress movement, albeit to a limited capacity. In 2000, based on the financial donations of Myŏngkŭm Mun (1917-

2000), survivor of sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army, there were plans to found a “history museum of regret and apology” in places that suffered most from the violence of Korean soldiers (Yoon, 2015). In 2006, Chung-ok Yun, former co-president of the Korean Council from 1990 until 2004, founded Korea-VietNam Friends to join redress efforts for survivors of the VietNam War.11 I learned through Mi-gyeong, one of my two interviewees at the Korean Council, that it was with Yun’s urging that the

11 Chung-ok Yun co-founded the Korean Council with Hyo-jae Lee in 1990. At the time, both were professors at Ewha Women’s University in South Korea. Yun started her research on ‘comfort women’ in 1980. She was the first ever Korean scholar to conduct research on the “comfort system.” In 1988, she presented findings from her extensive research at a conference organized by and for Korean women activists to end sex tourism in Korea. This presentation was the first instance in which the ‘comfort system’ was discussed on a public platform in Korea.

Korean Council made a trip to VietNam sometime in the early 2010s.12 Mi-gyeong is part of the Korean Council’s leadership and had planned and executed the Peace Trips since its inception. According to her, partly the reason that Yun pushed the Korean

Council to be involved with the Vietnamese survivors’ redress was because she had discovered that many survivors of the civilian massacres committed by Korean soldiers were also survivors of gender-based violence perpetrated by them. Thus, Yun felt that it was the Korean Council’s imperative to build solidarity with Vietnamese survivors, especially those who survived gender-based violence. In that spirit, the Korean Council visited sites memorializing the massacres committed by Korean soldiers during the

VietNam War and met survivors of massacre and gender-based violence. With the initiation of the Butterfly Fund in 2012, the Korean Council soon started to provide individual financial support for eleven survivors of gender-based violence in VietNam.

Additionally, they established funds to benefit surviving communities of massacres as a whole, such as providing bicycles for children who have to travel far to get to school. The

Korean Council frames these funds altogether as building solidarity among survivors of gender-based violence to ensure that the sharp focus on gender does not get lost.

2.2. Discourses that thwart the redress of Vietnamese survivors

Scholars have extensively argued that the state played a deeply significant role in forming the Korean public memory of the VietNam War (Kwŏn, 2004; G.-I. Lee, 2010;

Yoon, 2016). This was done through the powerful discourses of economic development and anti-communism and even maintained through force during the dictatorial regime that continued until the 1980s. The VietNam War was only to be remembered as the

12 For confidentiality purposes, I use pseudonyms for all of my interviewees; mentioned in this chapter are Mi-gyeong, Seung-hee, and Sun-mi.

49 catapult that launched Korea into an advanced economy and elevated its geopolitical standing as a U.S. ally and protector of ‘democracy.’ Through these logics, casualties of the war were to be erased from public memory (Choi, 2009). As I later discuss in

Chapter 4, the state’s intentional siloing of other, contradictory accounts of the war appears to have been shamefully successful. The people I interviewed shared guilt and frustration about their ignorance about the terrible violence that ensued during the

VietNam War.

Even more than state narratives of the VietNam War, I am interested in the counter-narratives that emerged in response to, and in spite of, the state’s seeming monopoly over remembering the VietNam War. Unlike the U.S., where the VietNam

War caused enormous public outcry, the Korean state more or less quelled voices that did not sing its tune – but it did not succeed entirely. This resonates with decolonial scholars who together argue that state logics never are nor can ever be all-encompassing despite their hegemonic desires. From Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) as a

Global North Indigenous scholar-activist to Muto (2010) in Asia and Rivera Cusiqanqui

(2012) in Latin America, their decolonial visions are grounded in already existing movements and ‘alternative’ ways of being in the world. In that sense, decolonial thinking directs our attention to the ‘other’ narratives that stir the waters of the hegemonic discourse.

Two clashing counter-memories of the VietNam War emerged in pushback against the state narrative. One brought forth the suffering of the veterans, during and after the war. This discourse painted the veterans as mercenaries for the U.S., whom the

Korean state sacrificed to appease the geopolitical superpower. The other, with much pushback from all sides, insisted that the Korean public confront the civilian massacres

50 that the Korean soldiers committed in VietNam. Interestingly, despite their shared marginal relationship to state narratives of the VietNam War, the former further marginalizes the latter to augment itself. In doing so, I argue that the veterans’ counter- memory reproduces modernity/coloniality through its relationship with the countermemory of the Vietnamese survivors.

K. Lee (2016) found that Korean veterans’ suffering from the war is given meaning and depth by instrumentalizing the violence perpetrated in VietNam as a mere literary device. He conducts a textual analysis of a 1989 novel called “White Badge” by

Jung-hyo Ahn, which critically recounts the war and its aftermath from the perspective of a Korean VietNam War veteran. In the novel, the violence and survivors of that violence functioned either as symbols of the veterans’ painful experience of the war or as triggers to the veteran protagonists’ reflection on the brutalities of the war. This leaves no space for the very material and ongoing suffering of the Vietnamese survivors, both of the massacres and the gender-based violence, and their demands for redress, to be recognized in their own right. This has echoes of ‘D’ecolonization narratives that attempted to usurp the ‘comfort women’ redress movement for its own ethnonationalist agenda. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind the differences. Notably, compared to ethnonationalism’s relationship to the sexual slavery redress movement, the veterans’ instrumentalization of Vietnamese survivors constructs a racialized gender system that enables Korea’s own imperial desires.

I argue that this instrumentalization is made possible through what Lugones

(2007) dubs the modern/colonial gender system. The modern/colonial gender system exposes how gender and coloniality cannot be made ontologically separate, despite the illusion that they are. Cho (2019) and J.-K. Lee (2010) convincingly argue that

51 masculinity is central to the Korean veterans’ instrumentalization of the pain of the

Vietnamese survivors. In their analysis, violence towards the Vietnamese, especially gender violence perpetrated against women, was in part a ‘re-masculation’ process for

Korean men, to compensate for their ‘emasculation’ in relation to the U.S. geopolitically and to U.S. GIs in the battlefield. In other words, U.S. imperialism was made legible in deeply gendered terms, and Korean masculinity was provable by partaking in imperialist practices such as participation in the VietNam War.

At the same time, sexuality and gender are also made legible through deeply colonial terms. Scholars point out that in novels and movies, Korean veterans are repeatedly seen recounting romance with ‘native’ Vietnamese women with nostalgia, which, in many cases, were likely gender violence in actuality (Cho, 2019; J.-K. Lee,

2010). This troubling misrepresentation was possible because of the anti-communist justification of the VietNam War; the soldiers, despite the horrendous reality of the war, were told that they were rescuing Vietnamese women and children from the monstrous grasp of communism. Through the colonial lens, violence is interpreted as romance and

Korean men come to see themselves as saviors of Vietnamese women.

These dynamics grew even more stark as the Korean state acknowledged

VietNam War veterans as persons of distinguished service in 2011. In doing so, the veterans’ counter-memory became ingredients to further cement the colonial state narratives of the VietNam War. The veterans became the heroes that uplifted Korea to prosperity and sacrificed themselves to save VietNam from the grasp of evil communists. In the process, as Kangyu (2013) observed, veterans’ organizations were molded into steadfast supporters of conservative Korean politics. Moreover, to uphold

52 their characterization as ‘heroes,’ veterans’ organizations were incentivized to be at the forefront in squashing the counter-memory of civilian massacres.

This discursive battleground textualizes the Korean Council’s solidarity work with

Vietnamese survivors. According to my interviewees, veterans’ organizations were outraged when the Korean Council started putting its weight behind the redress movement for survivors of the VietNam War. A few years ago, Sun-mi, director of

Branch B of Peace Butterfly wanted to open a local exhibit about the violence perpetrated by Korean soldiers during the VietNam War, with displays from the Korea-

VietNam Peace Foundation. She told me that she had brought up this idea in a meeting with other civil society organizations in her region. Others in the meeting wondered aloud whether she could handle the enormous backlash she would undoubtedly receive from veterans’ and other conservative-leaning organizations. Sun-mi did not mention who in the meeting voiced those concerns and which organizations they were affiliated with. Nonetheless, she eventually decided against the exhibit.

This well illustrates the tensions surrounding the redress for Vietnamese survivors, especially given the uniqueness of the organizing landscape in Sun-mi’s locality. In Sun-mi’s city where Branch B is located, groups usually work well together beyond traditional political loyalties. For instance, typically conservative organizations, including veterans’ associations, were one of Peace Butterfly’s strongest advocates when it started raising funds to establish a Statue of Peace, a symbolic statue dedicated to

Korean sexual slavery survivors, at a sculpture park in the city center. This is noteworthy because the Korean Council has a generally antagonistic relationship with the political right. Sun-mi, however, was on friendly terms with the membership of the conservative organizations which also tended to be of an older generation. Overall, they have been

53 supportive of her work at Peace Butterfly, which she acknowledged was a curious regional anomaly, compared to political dynamics at the national scale. Against this local milieu, sensitivities around the VietNam War exhibit highlight how challenging it is to open conversations about the violence of the VietNam War.

More importantly, in Sun-mi’s local organizing landscape, building solidarity with Vietnamese survivors may also entail a rearranging, or even severing, of other alliances. In this way, the VietNam War redress movement brings to bear how different political communities are continuously in the making. This echoes Harsha Walia’s

(2013) argument that solidarity for decolonization is an ongoing and active praxis.

Based on her work at No One Is Illegal, a migrant justice organization in Vancouver, BC,

Canada, she illustrates that alliances have to evolve continuously to simultaneously address settler colonialism, capitalism, and border imperialism. In addition, these dynamic struggles for alliance, even those characterized as transnational, are incredibly local, as revealed by Sun-mi’s acute awareness of regional relations. In practice, transnational solidarity unfolds by navigating and challenging alliances and relationships in place. In that sense, Sun-mi draws attention to the importance of place and praxis in fostering decolonial solidarity across borders. Such attentiveness is important, because it alerts us to possibilities for intervention. By highlighting the uniqueness of her local political landscape, Sun-mi actually finds an opening from which unlikely alliances could be sought between veterans, the Korean Council, and the

Vietnamese survivors fighting for redress.

Working at the Korean Council, Mi-gyeong had encountered much harsher backlash from veterans’ organizations over the years, compared to Sun-mi. In her interview, Mi-gyeong shared:

The Park Geun-hye administration (2013-17) built a lot of monuments to commemorate our VietNam War veterans and celebrate Korean participation in that war. The Korean Council had issued a statement saying that monuments like that send a dangerous message. As a result, we had some veterans call our office and insult us using vulgar language. In 2013, as we started the Butterfly Fund to VietNam, we started to speak out about the Korean society’s responsibility towards the violence in VietNam. We also demanded that the state take responsibility for the civilian massacres. We started getting complaint calls again.

These particular veterans used what decolonial scholars call the logic of fragmentation to justify their opposition to the Korean Council’s work with Vietnamese survivors

(Carastathis, 2019; Lugones, 2007). Decolonial scholars argue that coloniality gains strength by creating fissures within communities can together fight against colonial violence. Illustratively, Mi-gyeong told me that the main concern of the veterans who called was:

Why are you talking about VietNam when you should be focused on ‘comfort women’? Don’t you think Japan will be overjoyed if you do this?

In their comments, the callers assume a false scarcity of redress. In their worldview, there is a long line of survivors who have to compete against each other to earn recognition from state entities. In this scenario, forming solidarity with Vietnamese survivors will take away from, rather than strengthen, the ‘comfort women’ movement.

This is precisely the limit of “politics of recognition” that Simpson (2017) draws attention to. In her discussion of resistance among Indigenous communities in Canada, she argues that communities should ultimately aim to exist in their Indigenous ways of life, rather than seek inclusion into the system of the settler state. She calls this “radical resurgence,” resurgence from the roots. In a sense, the veterans calling are operating within the politics of recognition model, where liberation is only achievable through the state; in contrast, the Korean Council and the Vietnamese survivors, through their

55 attempts for solidarity, shake up taken-for-granted configurations of a political community defined through the state.

Seung-hee had recently joined the Korean Council as a staff member and had only attended the 2019 Peace Trip. During her interview, she told me that the office also received calls with completely opposite concerns:

After the documentary, “Shusenjo: The Main Battleground Of Comfort Women Issue,”13 was released, some people called saying that they felt betrayed by the Korean Council. They didn’t think Korea deserved to talk about ‘comfort women’ if we weren’t doing anything about the Vietnamese survivors.

These antagonistic responses were echoed by foreign sources. Korean Council associate,

Mi-gyeong also told me, “There was so much responsibility put on us [by outside media], that there were times I thought, ‘why are we expected to take on the work for everything?’” Sometimes, this attention warranted suspicion. Seung-hee confessed, “It is a bit intriguing when suddenly an organization pops up in the United Kingdom advocating for the redress of Vietnamese survivors and the Japanese media takes so much interest in the VietNam War.” Seung-hee’s wariness stems from the very real possibility that outsiders will intentionally highlight and weaponize the atrocities committed during the VietNam War to delegitimize the Korean Council’s efforts to seek redress for Korean survivors of sexual slavery. Ultimately, the Korean Council was caught in a bind in trying to build solidarity with Vietnamese survivors.

That said, the Korean Council is caught in a discursive bind in its efforts to forge solidarity with Vietnamese survivors. As Seung-hee insightfully notes, this “comes from equating ‘the (Korean) nation’ with the survivors of the ‘comfort system.’” If one takes the survivors merely as symbols of national honor, the consequence of state decisions

13 “Shusenjo” is a documentary released in 2018 and directed by Japanese American director Miki Dezaki.

56 fall upon the survivors, not on the state itself. Simply put, a ridiculous situation occurs, in which the violence during the VietNam War led by the Korean state suddenly becomes the fault of former ‘comfort women’ from the Second World War.

Consequently, rather than hold the state accountable, the survivors are withheld from their own redress, while being demanded additional labor to redeem ‘national honor.’

Further, this discourse overlooks and dismisses solidarity that has already been building between the survivors, rendering invisible any efforts for redress beyond the scope of the state.

Chapter 3. Feeling the Peace Trips

In Chapter 3, I direct my attention to the Peace Trips as a particularly intriguing piece of the Korean Council’s work to build solidarity with the redress movement of

Vietnamese survivors. First, I introduce the history, structure, and mission of the Peace

Trips. Second, I explore the trips’ significance, especially against the modernist/colonial logics that try to obstruct possibilities that emerge from the very emotionality of these trips. Talking with interviewees, I found that there is no way to do justice to the Peace

Trips without paying attention to how deeply emotional they are for the participants.

Building on the groundwork in Chapter 2, I argue that the Peace Trips’ focus on feeling both makes visible and challenges modernity/coloniality. I take inspiration from scholarship on emotion, centering but not limited to geographical work, that directly engage with on-the-ground struggles for a better world.

1. VietNam Butterfly Peace Trips

In 2012, the Korean Council launched the ‘Butterfly Fund,’ starting with donations from ‘comfort system’ survivors and human rights activists Kim Bok-dong

(1926-2019) and Kil Won-ok (1928-Present). As an effort towards transnational solidarity, the funds go to communities abroad who survived gender-based violence perpetrated during wartime. The Butterfly Fund is named after the Korean Council’s symbol, the yellow butterfly; it represents survivors’ desire to fly freely despite structural violence that hinder redress and borders that threaten solidarity-building. Since its inauguration, the fund has supported communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo

(through a collaborating organization called REMED), Uganda, Nigeria, and VietNam. It is in part maintained with donations from various individuals and organizations, and the co-founders, Kim and Kil, have vowed from the start to contribute all financial reparations they receive from the Japanese government once that fight is won.

The Butterfly Fund’s support of the Vietnamese survivors officially began a year into inception. The Peace Trips were introduced in 2014 as part of this work. Trip participation is open to the public, though actual participants are mostly allies of the

Korean Council in different forms. The trips are arranged annually, for a week usually in

January or February. During my fieldwork, which took place the summer of 2019, the most recent trip had taken place between January 17 and 23, 2019. Thus, most of my data is also from the 2019 trip. During the writing stage, I had received an invitation to the 2020 trip which was planned for February 20 to 26. However, given the global

COVID-19 outbreak and the absence of online updates on the trips, it is unclear whether the trips were able to proceed as planned.

Twenty to thirty participants attend each trip, coming from different walks of life, including middle school, high school, and college students, staff of the Korean Council and their family members, corporate employees, labor activists, and left-leaning teacher activists. The trips can be a bit costly; for 2020, the fee is 1,780,000KRW per person

(with room for fluctuation), which translates to slightly more than 1,500USD. This covers almost all expenses incurred during and in preparation for the trips. The trip schedule document for 2019, which a Korean Council associate generously shared with me, states that the rest of the fees will benefit the work of the Korea-Vietnam Peace

Foundation, a co-sponsor of the Peace Trips.

The trip schedule, given to all participants, is a very detailed 28-page document.

It includes extensive information, ranging from basic logistics to the history of monuments, museums, and survivors that the participants will visit during the trip to

VietNam. It also lists three to four required readings before embarking on the trips.

They consist of academic articles (one from a Korean scholar and the other from a

Japanese scholar)14, a book (from a Korean scholar)15, and a set of poems (from a

Vietnamese poet and former guerrilla fighter)16 that recount the violence during the

VietNam War from different angles. One of my interviewees joked about grumbling over the amount of reading, but, once the trip started, being glad to have done them. Seung- hee, a Korean Council associate, playfully recalled a handful of participants hurriedly finishing their readings on the flight to VietNam.17 The trip schedule is tightly packed; it includes visits to three museums and four monuments that commemorate the war and victims of the Korean GIs’ violence, meetings with two Vietnamese artists whose work focus on the VietNam War, and time with five survivors of massacres committed by the

Korean military. It also notes that the schedule is subject to change. Based on my conversations with interviewees, I quickly learned that meetings with survivors were particularly vulnerable to being cut. Mi-gyeong, a Korean Council member who planned the trips, emphasized that the busy, education-oriented itinerary differentiates Peace

14 Ito (2010); Yoon (2010). Participants were given a Korean translated version of Ito (2010). Translator unknown. 15 H. Kim (2004) 16 Lê (2002) 17 For confidentiality reasons, all names of interviewees are pseudonyms: Ha-yeong, Jin-sun, Mi-gyeong, Seung-hee, Sol-hee, and Sun-mi. I use the actual names of participants who wrote the online reviews, as those are all publicly available information.

Trips from “regular tourism” and speaks to the intentionality behind participants’ choice to embark on them.

While hosted by the Korean Council, the Peace Trips follow a model established by an organization called the ‘Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation.’ In fact, Ku Su-jeong, a current board member and founding member of the nonprofit, serves as the tour guide for the Peace Trips hosted by the Korean Council. Ku is famously known as the reporter behind Hankyoreh’s first shocking exposé in 1999 on the Korean military’s atrocities during the VietNam War. She, with other Korean thinkers/activists, established the

Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation in 2016, with one branch in Seoul, Korea and the other in Ho Chi Minh, VietNam. In a sense, this organization is a culmination and consolidation of the loose coalition of multiple groups that have been working on the question of VietNam War redress since 1999.18 The Vietnamese branch of the Korea-

Vietnam Peace Foundation evolved out of a longer standing social enterprise called A-

MAP, which Ku has been chairing since 2010.19 Currently in Korea, the Korea-Vietnam

Peace Foundation is the most visible group organizing around redress for Vietnamese survivors. Its activities loosely fall under two categories. The first is documenting personal histories of survivors and raising awareness among the Korean public. The second is providing financial support to regions in VietNam where the massacres took place, through the form of scholarships, erecting commemorative statues, or building schools.

18 See Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation’s website for the extensive list of groups in Korea who have been involved in varying capacities in the redress movement for Vietnamese survivors of massacre committed by Korean soldiers: http://kovietpeace.org/p/page14 (only available in Korean). 19 A-MAP was founded by Ku in 2010 originally as a social enterprise in VietNam that connects Korean companies with various Vietnamese communities to facilitate fair trade. Currently, it also functions as the Vietnamese branch of the Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation.

On the side of the Korean Council, Mi-gyeong has been doing the heavy-lifting in bringing these trips to life. I met her inside her office, which I wondered might also double as the Korean Council’s archive. She pulled out a folding chair for me to sit with her in the small desk area, which was sandwiched between the wall, door, and rows of bookshelves that reached the ceiling. The space felt cramped (or intimate? I couldn’t decide) with the three of us: Mi-gyeong, Seung-hee, another Korean Council associate I was to interview, and myself. I offered two cartons of banana milk I had prepared for both interviewees. They were politely refused. Mi-gyeong asked, “It’s okay if Seung-hee stays for the conversation, right? I mean, if she wants to.” Seung-hee, who had recently joined the Korean Council, nodded yes. I noted that I usually conduct interviews one on one, but that she was welcome to sit in if Mi-gyeong didn’t mind.

Per the Korean Council’s request, I had sent my interview questions to Mi-gyeong before our actual meeting, with the addendum that it was not a fixed list. As I opened my notebook, Mi-gyeong started, “I read the questions over. Well, actually, how about you just kick us off?” Sheepishly, I said that we have to go over the consent protocols first. “Yes, yes, sure,” she responded. She quickly but thoroughly read and signed the form and nodded “sure, sure” as I verbally summarized the document. Mi-gyeong had an air of someone who had given a lot of interviews, given her ease and seeming familiarity with the process. She spoke with much passion and eloquence, I felt as if I was part of an audience at a private talk.

The interview started with me asking her about how the trips were conceived. Mi- gyeong answered matter-of-factly:

As you know, it’s impossible to talk about the VietNam redress movement without mentioning Ku Su-Jeong. When we [Butterfly Fund] started our work with Vietnamese survivors and planning these Peace Trips, we of course reached

out to Ms. Ku. She has been leading such trips for years since the A-MAP days and knows VietNam better than anyone.

Soon, it became clear to Mi-gyeong that there were a myriad of barriers for the

Korean Council to take complete charge of these trips and design them as they wished.

She explained:

I’d say the only reason the Vietnamese government is allowing these trips at all is because of Ms. Ku. She knows the region well and is close with the locals there. But there are structural limitations that even someone like her cannot surpass.

Among other logistical obstacles, those imposed by the Vietnamese state bureaucracy were most nonnegotiable. On the surface, these obstacles seem to be inconsequential inconveniences; however, it became clear that they were experienced as subtle ways in which the state thwarts possibilities to build meaningful relationships. In particular, it does so by constraining which bodies can go where, especially those that push against geopolitical borders, such as the Korean Council’s Peace Trip participants.

Mi-gyeong has planned and attended every single one of the Peace Trips, but only the first ever group in 2014 was able to meet the actual recipients of the Butterfly Fund.

Mi-gyeong said:

Because VietNam is a socialist country, you can’t just go anywhere you’d like without the state’s permission. That’s why we recruit trip participants two to three months in advance [to assemble and process the relevant paperwork.

Moreover, any visitation with survivors is supervised by local government personnel.

Given the strict restrictions set by the Vietnamese government, she described that even that one meeting was a miracle. Since then, though Peace Trip participants get to meet several massacre survivors, none of them are direct individual beneficiaries of the

Korean Council. The latter involved too many hoops to jump through, potentially because of the politically sensitive work of the Korean Council, as I explain in the

63 following paragraph. There were a couple of trips in which meetings with the beneficiaries’ children had been arranged, but government restrictions have gotten increasingly stringent. Mi-gyeong attested:

When we started out with these trips, of course we wanted a trip that’s uniquely designed for the Butterfly Fund. We wanted to meet the beneficiaries, with an itinerary that focused much more on gender-based violence during conflict. That was what our first trip looked like. For the past three or so trips, though, our Butterfly Peace Trips have more or less been the same as the ones run by A-MAP and the Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation.

Meetings with survivors are relatively brief compared to the week-long trip duration. In total, they range between one to five hours, depending on the permits the Korean

Council was able to get that particular year.

Perhaps naively, I was shocked to learn that the Korean Council is not registered as the official sponsor of the Butterfly Peace Trips when visiting VietNam. “Because of the government,” responded Mi-gyeong to my surprised look, “You can’t go anywhere without their permission.” I must have looked confused. Mi-gyeong elaborated:

Rumor has it that during the Park Geun-hye administration, the Korean government told the Vietnamese state to beware of the Korean Council — that we are an organization politically manipulated by the Korean and Japanese governments, that we are somehow dangerous to the Vietnamese state, or something of that sort.

Mi-gyeong complained that such politics heavily interferes with the Butterfly Fund’s activities in VietNam. Since 2015, the Vietnamese state has required the Butterfly Fund to register as a nonpolitical charity organization in VietNam in order to continue its financial support to survivor communities. Thankfully, the Butterfly Fund was approved and allowed to carry on its projects. However, it curtailed the Butterfly Fund’s ability to address issues on a more structural level.

The restrictions posed by the Vietnamese state, possibly informed by urgings of the Korean state, are the everyday tools through which geopolitical borders are created.

By controlling which bodies can go where and interact with whom, mundane bureaucratic measures function as border-making technologies because they delineate the realm of possibilities for feeling. To explore this further, I draw on Ahmed (2014) who compellingly argues that feeling shapes the very surface of bodies, instead of residing in them to then spread outward. In other words, it is through emotional encounters that bodies of the collective ‘we’ and ‘them’ get defined. Thus, to manage the movement of bodies means to discipline the possibilities for emotion. It is in this vein that Laketa (2016) argues that emotions and affect are central to the materializing of

“geopolitics of bordering” (p. 663). Studying the divisions between Croat/Catholics and

Bosniak/Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, she found that borders take shape via people’s emotional understanding of space and identity. Further, these emotions circulate through bodies and everyday sensorial experiences, echoing feminist geopolitics which brings attention to embodied and grounded understandings of geopolitics. This entails that the states’ control over which bodies can go where is an act of geopolitical space- making. It involves identifying certain bodies, and their encounter with certain others

(not limited to humans), threatening to state-driven geopolitics. Then, if emotions can

(re)create bodies, through the surveillance of intercorporeal encounters, state powers attempt not only to maintain their dictatorship over geopolitics; they also try to stunt possibilities for embodiment that give life to new configurations of space.

Yet, the trips went on. The limitations posed by the Vietnamese state were indeed limiting, but also strengthened unintentional alliances. The Korean Council chose not to associate their name with the trips and instead operate under the Korea-Vietnam Peace

Foundation’s name. Choosing this strategy certainly did mean compromising on designing a trip that perfectly fulfills the Korean Council’s visions. However, at the same time, it still made possible arranging a trip to VietNam specifically for allies of the

‘comfort women’ movement. Moreover, it brought with it an opportunity to develop a sustained relationship with the Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation, beyond the very first stages of conceiving the VietNam Butterfly Peace Trips.

2. Trips that Make You ‘Feel’

As much as the State considers such intercorporeal encounters dangerous, these encounters are at the heart of planning and going on the Peace Trips. In other words, the intention behind these trips is deeply charged with ‘feeling,’ both emotional and sensorial, an embodied experience. “We wanted to do this, because there is tremendous value in seeing for ourselves and apologizing in person,” Mi-gyeong emphasized.

Recruiting youth was particularly important in planning these trips. She said, “If we’re going to raise activists who will fight for the future, young students have to see with their own eyes, feel with their own bodies.” Thus, the Butterfly Fund provides scholarships and raises funds to cover a big portion of the trip fees for student participants. In some years, as many as ten students participated. Mi-gyeong noted:

Usually, different people go each year because of financial and time constraints. However, we have had a few students who come back for the second time, saying that they did not feel it the first time they went.

Every Peace Trip, at least two students from the Peace Butterfly Network20 come along, with financial help from the Butterfly Fund. Amusedly, Mi-gyeong observed those who participated in these trips ended up in leadership positions in the Network, which was also confirmed by other interviewees.

My first interviewees were three women who joined the Peace Trips as members of the Peace Butterfly Network: Ha-yeong, Sol-hee, and Jin-sun. They were all heavily involved with the organization. When I reached out to the Network, Sol-hee had emailed me back and also introduced me to Ha-yeong and Jin-sun, whom she befriended through the Network. The three were all in college or had recently graduated. Sol-hee and Jin-sun had been together on the same trip in 2019 and Ha-yeong had gone two years prior. We met on a scorching summer day, right after the Wednesday

Demonstration held weekly by the Korean Council.21 It was July 17, 2019: Constitution

Day in South Korea, the 1396th Wednesday Demonstration, and also the first

Wednesday Demonstration I had ever attended. I was able to meet all three of them that day, because the Network branch to which Ha-yeong, Sol-hee, and Jin-sun belonged was

20 A national network of ally groups of the Korean Council. While the Facebook page of the Butterfly Peace Trips states that it is an intercollegiate network, membership seems to extend beyond college students. Even within my data set of interviews and online reviews, there were Peace Butterfly

Network members who were high school students or were seasoned activists well in their 40s, such as Sun-mi. 21 The first Wednesday Demonstration took place in front of the Japanese Embassy in Korea on January 8, 1992 when then Prime Minister of Japan, Kiichi Miwazawa was visiting Korea. Since then, every Wednesday at noon, the Korean Council and its allies gather in front of the Japanese Embassy in Korea to demand justice for the survivors of sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. Only once did the Korean Council skip the demonstration, which was when Kobe earthquake hit Japan in 1995. What started out as a gathering of twenty or so activists grew into a well-established event that attracts thousands of people in some weeks. The 1400th demonstration was held on August 14, 2019 and thousands of people filled the narrow street in front of the Japanese Embassy.

67 in charge of organizing that week’s Demonstration. We grabbed a table inside a large, crowded cafe with blasting air-conditioning. The three of them took turns talking with me one-on-one while the other two chatted in different corners of the cafe.

All of my participants, including the three I met that day, shared that ‘feeling’ was a chief motivation for going on the Peace Trips as well as the biggest take-away. In this section, I focus on the centrality of feeling in understanding these trips, rather than the diversity among the feelings that arise. Three themes emerged from participants’ experiences and from Mi-gyeong’s hopes for the Peace Trips: (1) feeling comes into being between and among bodies; (2) it is a way of knowing; and (3) it moves bodies, orienting them towards activism. As I show below, these findings resonate profoundly with arguments made by scholars of emotion/affect, especially those rooted in feminist struggles, which I outlined in Chapter 1. Drawing on and extending their contributions, I argue that in the case of Peace Trips, the centrality of feeling makes visible and challenges coloniality. It fractures coloniality, first, by pushing back against state-centric geopolitical time. Second, feeling brings into the present multiple narratives that are made invisible within modernity/coloniality. Third, feeling has the potential to create a

‘we’ that is not defined through the state. Through the cracks it makes in coloniality, no matter how small, feeling lends itself to decolonial otherwise(s).

Participants’ desire to ‘feel’ through the trips was tied to particular intercorporeal encounters, such as “seeing,” “meeting,” and “listening.” To illustrate, Ha-yeong shared:

When I first signed up [for the trips], I had heard there were monuments and wanted to see them with my own eyes. I also heard the survivors are still alive, and I wanted to meet them myself. I was not charged with a sense of mission to make this history known. (emphasis added)

At this stage, Ha-yeong expresses a primary desire to encounter others for the sake of feeling. By going on the trips, she opens herself up to whichever direction that feeling might move her, without yet knowing what that feeling beholds. It was after coming back from the trips, she shared, that she began to feel that sense of mission.

The encounters Ha-yeong was looking for are different from, for instance,

‘observing’ or ‘hearing about,’ in that they imply bidirectionality, however fleeting or skewed. This bidirectionality becomes especially apparent in Ji-yeon, Ji-han, and

Hyeon-woo’s reviews. They were acutely aware of how they are received by the locals, although their interpretation may not exactly mirror the locals’ account of their interaction. Recounting his visit to an elementary school in Hòa Hiệp Nam, Đông Hòa

District, Phú Yên Province, Ji-han wrote:

When we first met the locals of the town, some people didn’t seem thrilled to see us. Or maybe it [their reaction] wasn’t that bad? There were still adults who warmly welcomed us. The children seemed shy and awkward around us at first, but acted friendlier to us after some time.

Feelings arose as trip participants sensed others actively responding to their presence, whether that be with skepticism or with open arms. After visiting the elementary schools, the trip participants went to the Korea-VietNam Peace Park established in 2003 with the funds raised by reader donation following the exposé series in Hankyoreh. According to Hyeon-woo, Ji-han, and the trip itinerary document, the park was barely being maintained, because of financial strains and dwindling visitation.

Notably, after the park was first built, some locals had trashed it resenting that it was founded with donations from Koreans. The park was restored thanks to funding by the township, but in a sense, the apologetic gesture by Koreans had become a financial burden to the local government. Moreover, the area had suffered from multiple floods

69 and storms which uprooted the vegetation in the park repeatedly. The trip group met the park manager, without whom, Ji-han emphasized, the park would not exist. Ji-han wrote:

The several locals we met at the park were incredibly welcoming. Seeing how welcoming they were, I realized that it was due to their efforts that so much was able to change. I feel grateful towards them.

I cautiously suspect what Ji-han meant by “change” is how the local community was able to rebuild despite and through the resentment and hardship. In Ji-han’s comment, this is signified through the locals’ positive reception of the Koren visitors and the survival of the park. Met with warm welcome by the locals, Ji-han felt gratitude. These feelings were shared by Ji-yeon, upon meeting the Vietnamese survivors who greeted her with a warm embrace and told Ji-yeon that she was not to blame for their suffering.

These encounters illustrate that feelings emerge as bodies interact and respond to each other. Even more, for the trip participants, these encounters involved an element of surprise that their bodies were in fact not inscribed with hate and resentment in the eyes of the locals. In turn, the locals’ emotional generosity stirred a feeling of indebtedness within the trip participants. In this way, feeling has the power to destabilize. Puar

(2009) articulates a politics that cherishes such moments of unraveling. She names this, a politics of “conviviality.” Through this framework, Puar resists an individuated and stable notion of the body and envisions a “futurity [that is] enabled through the open materiality of bodies as a Place to Meet” (p. 168). Thus, by bringing together embodied notions of affect and disability studies, Puar artfully charts out the relational makings of the body through emotion. Thinking in step with Puar, trip participants’ awareness of others’ feelings toward them and theirs toward others entails a potential to shake up static notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

While visiting monuments and museums were also important, many described the “highlight” as meeting the survivors. Perhaps because they were looking for these encounters, participants shared that meeting survivors made the biggest impression on them. It stirred in them sadness, guilt, anger, frustration, as well as a sense of solidarity vis-à-vis their allyship towards ‘comfort women.’ Ha-yeong, Sol-hee, Jin-sun, and Ji- yeon all had a strong memory of the embrace they shared with the Vietnamese survivors. Sol-hee described the moment as, “This person and I, we are connected. Our hearts are connected.” Borrowing Ahmed’s (2004) language, feelings of the collective

‘we’ emerged as skin pressed upon skin.

However, not all feelings are immediately legible. Sun-mi, the last person I interviewed before returning to the U.S., shared with me a visceral memory she had from the trips. The group was joined by a survivor who lost a part of her leg from bombings of the Korean military. They were told by the guides that her thigh gets itchy when it rains and that it helps when other people massage it. Sun-mi had brought her college-aged daughter on the trip, whom I did not get a chance to talk to, as my stay in

Korea was coming to an end by the time of my interview with Sun-mi. Sun-mi was struck by how unhesitatingly her daughter, like everyone else, massaged this old woman’s leg. People cried as they listened to the survivor’s story. However, Sun-mi simply could not get herself to touch the woman’s leg. To this day, she is unable to explain why, however many times she thinks back to it. “It was everyone, except me,” she said. Was her reaction a sign of discomfort with touching a stranger’s body? Was it the shock of confronting the physicality of geopolitical violence? Was it subconscious repulsion? As Lorde (1994) described her racist encounter on the subway, whatever

Sun-mi felt at the time manifested firstly through the bodily act of moving away.

However, there was no way of knowing what it was that Sun-mi had felt. At the very least, her encounter with other bodies left a vexedness with her. As Ahmed (2004) argues, feeling builds on the “past history of readings” (p. 30). Perhaps Sun-mi’s inability to make sense of this encounter indicates that it significantly disrupts her history of feelings or that it forges untrodden grounds. While ambivalent on its own, the feeling of confusion signals potentiality, leaving a mark that could further be carved and molded into new, more solid configurations of ‘us’/’them.’

The reason that my interlocutors ascribe so much value to the Peace Trips is because of the understanding that feeling is knowing. Participants often mentioned

‘feeling’ in contrast and even superior to “learning through textbooks.” Feeling ran through every limb of your body. Sun-mi had organized and participated in many such trips that memorialize violence. She told me:

It’s like swimming. Even when your memory fails you, your body will remember. If you learn how to swim when you’re young, once you’re thrown in water, your body will start swimming, even if you don’t swim for many many years.

To her, going to interactive museums that memorialize violence, meeting survivors, and visiting monuments were all part of the process of remembering with the body.

This epistemological intervention is at the crux of the redress movements of both the Korean ‘comfort women’ and the Vietnamese survivors. Importantly, it brings coloniality into the spotlight in making sense of the atrocities during the VietNam War.

Mi-gyeong shared:

The Vietnamese survivors ask us, “How can the Korean state deny this violent history when we are still here?” They tell us to bring any Korean state official along, that they are more than ready to tell their version of history, even though it’s a painful one. The survivors’ voices are so rich and diverse, but there’s no system in place for them to be heard.

Mi-gyeong’s comment perfectly mirrors Yoon (2016) who argues that, like the ‘comfort women’ redress movement, the redress movement for Vietnamese survivors insists on listening to “memories of the body” over “memories of the Cold War” (p. 81-84).

According to Yoon, the Korean state and several vocal veterans’ organizations summon

“memories of the Cold War” to erase or even justify the atrocities of the VietNam War.

By repeating the script of anti-communism, they maintain that the VietNam War was a noble fight overall and even that some civilian massacres were unavoidable to get rid of

Viet Congs in hiding. In contrast, survivors recount the war through “memories of the body.” As survivor-activist Nguyen Tan Lan testified in 2015, the war is remembered through pieces of an exploded grenade that were never removed and through the pain in his leg that keeps him up at night. Highlighting these testimonials, Yoon (2016) writes that “memories of the massacre live on as numerous fragments that float around and within the survivor’s body” (p. 84). The redress movement for Vietnamese survivors starts from the fundamental assumption that intimate feelings and experiences are legitimate forms of knowledge about the war.

Similarly, but with a sharp focus on gender, H. Kim (2004) writes a painstakingly raw account of women Vietnamese survivors of the massacres and gender-based violence during the VietNam War. By doing so, she pushes back against masculinist narratives of the war that invisibilize women and ignore gender. H. Kim’s (2004) work is based on visiting various surviving communities in VietNam between 1999 and 2004.

These visits were facilitated by a Korean organization called Nawawuri, one of several organizations that had been involved in the Vietnamese survivors’ redress movement since 1999. This group, still active today, is mentioned in the list of organizations that

73 had led to the founding of the Korea-VietNam Peace Foundation in 2016.22 With Yoon

(2016), H. Kim (2004) also thinks through clashing ‘memories’: particularly those of women survivors in contrast to how the Korean state remembers the VietNam War.

Insisting to hear the survivors’ testimonials as legitimate forms of knowledge about the war, H. Kim (2004) foregrounds visceral, bodily accounts of the war and how war is experienced in everyday lives.

Yoon (2016) and H. Kim’s (2004) framing of the VietNam War echoes a key contribution of feminist geopolitical scholarship: that intimate violence is not merely an unfortunate side-effect of war, but its very essence (See, for instance, Pain, 2015). In that vein, as explored in Chapter 2, Cho (2019) and J.-K. Lee (2010) have shown that war and gender co-constitute one another. They argue that U.S. imperialism and neo- imperial desires of the Korean state manifested through gendered interpersonal violence against the Vietnamese during the VietNam War. Ultimately, this reveals that the

VietNam War is a prime example of Lugones’ (2007) “modern/colonial gender system” at work. In other words, gender is not only deployed for neo-imperialist purposes, but rather, constructed as a distinct ontological category through neo-imperialism. Naming the modern/colonial gender system unmasks the penetrating ontological reach of modernity/coloniality which produces categories that fragment communities. Thus, articulating the VietNam War through the language of modernity/coloniality helps us see the deep epistemological and ontological interventions made by the Vietnamese survivors’ redress movement.

22 See Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation’s website for the extensive list of groups in Korea who have been involved in varying capacities in the redress movement for Vietnamese survivors of massacre committed by Korean soldiers: http://kovietpeace.org/p/page14 (only available in Korean).

The Vietnamese survivors’ pain pushes back against desires of the Korean and

Vietnamese states to move on, towards hopeful futures of economic growth built on

‘forgetting.’ It throws a monkey wrench into the clockwork of geopolitics. As Mi-gyeong says, survivors tell “rich and diverse” histories of war and stories of the present.

Borrowing from Santos (2014), when feeling is valued as knowing, the present expands.

Feelings chip away at the fairytale of modern development so carefully maintained by the Korean state, an innocent story of a nation that smoothly integrated into the global economy. Feelings expose the violent present that this narrative omits. In fact, the survivors’ frustration with the Korean state reveals that its very denial is essential to its ongoing neo-imperialist relationship to VietNam. Only by denying the violent history can Korea maintain its belief in modern developmentalism, which justifies its current investment in and expansion into the Vietnamese economy. The survivors’ outrage uncovers the veil masking modernity/coloniality. By doing so, they cautiously crack the future open for possibilities that fall outside the narrow linearity of modernity.

Finally, feeling ultimately orients the interviewees toward activism by creating feelings of a collective to fight for and with. This was partly the reason that Jin-sun attended the trips in the first place. She shared:

As you work for some time on the ‘comfort women’ redress movement, you kind of get numb to it. But every time I met the survivors, I could feel my emotions bubbling back up. Going on the Peace Trips was kind of similar to that.

As mentioned earlier, before going on the trip, Ha-yeong was not charged with a sense of mission to advocate for the Vietnamese survivors. However, after meeting them, she promised to do everything in her power for their redress. Jin-sun described solidarity as

“feeling how they must have felt.” As others, she often drew on the ‘comfort women’ to make sense of the emotions of Vietnamese survivors. According to N.-Y. Lee (2017),

75 emotions are central to the widespread support for redress for ‘comfort women.’ Taking inspiration from Ahmed (2004), this means that the impression the ‘comfort women’ movement made on the participants primed how the Vietnamese survivor movement press upon them.

After returning, Ha-yeong finds herself often wondering how the survivors would feel towards various news about Korea-VietNam relations. This signals that Ha-yeong sees herself as feeling with the survivors as a collective ‘we.’ This new collective changes her feelings toward Korea’s geopolitical relationship with VietNam. It is important to acknowledge that this ‘we’ is tenuous and complicated with power. Regardless, through feelings emerge a ‘we’ not defined by state-imposed boundaries, but instead rooted in desires to push against colonial logics. These collective feelings not only resist modernity/coloniality, but even more, mobilize imaginative futures that exist beyond modernity/coloniality. I draw on the insights of Walia (2013) as she reflects on her work at No One Is Illegal (NOII), primarily a migrant justice organization in Vancouver, BC,

Canada. She argues that only by forming relations outside of state institutions can we start building concrete political visions that go beyond the current system (p. 11). Walia

(2013) practices such relationship-building through NOII’s broad-based solidarity with other Indignous, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and feminist organizations.

The new collective feelings that my interviewees spoke of are all the more significant, because of their contemporary implications within the broader sociopolitical milieu of Korea. Since the 2000s, as Korea saw a huge influx of migrant women from

VietNam, most, if not all, media representations of them follow legacies of the VietNam

War (Yook, 2010). Yook analyzed major Korean documentaries, TV dramas, and movies released in Korea between early 1990s and 2010 featuring a Vietnamese woman

76 character. He found that Vietnamese women were portrayed either as scheming enemies or as damsels in distress awaiting rescue from Korean men. Always, they were hyper- sexualized. H. M. Kim (2006) found similar stereotypes circulating through advertisements for marriage brokerage between Vietnamese women and rural Korean men. This illustrates that notions of race and gender produced through the imperialist

VietNam War persist, while being morphed into formations befitting the most urgent sociopolitical project in contemporary Korea.

This begs an engagement with Stuart Hall (2016) who explores the discursive transformation of ‘blackness’ across time and space as ‘blackness’ becomes a site of ideological struggle. Countering a static notion of ideology, he argues that “shifts of accentuation in language and ideology [which] is a constant, unending process” (p. 154).

Moreover, he emphasizes that recognizing ideology as a site of struggle not only has discursive implications, but more importantly, reveals that social reproduction itself is a contested process. Bearing this in mind, the trip participants’ affinity to Vietnamese survivors uncovers the VietNam War and the colonial gaze through which it is remembered and lives on as sites of ideological struggle. With that, newly emerging feelings of the collective ‘we’ bring a potential to destabilize configurations of ‘us’ and

‘them’ that serve as the bedrock of modernity/coloniality. By doing so, these feelings also possess the potential to shake up racial and gender formations in contemporary

Korea.

Chapter 4. Complicated Feelings, Complicating Feelings

This chapter draws on interviews and content analysis of the online reviews and explores the diversity of emotions that arise from the Peace Trips: discomfort, love, guilt, familiarity, and frustration. Through this exploration, I complicate the discussion in Chapter 3, where I show that the centrality of emotions in the Peace Trips challenges modernity/coloniality. Here, I pay close attention to the origins and implications of various emotions to reveal broader modernist/colonial structures in which the trip participants are embedded. By doing so, I also examine wherein lies the potential for futures outside the limits of modernity/coloniality. Thus, in Chapter 4, I argue that leveraged as an analytical device, emotions help hone the critique of modernity/coloniality and reveal possibilities for decolonial otherwise(s).

1. Discomfort

Sun-mi, introduced to me by Seung-hee, chairs Branch B of Peace Butterfly

Network. She also served as director of the region’s women’s organization, to which she invited me for the interview. I found my way to a two-story building that looked like a house in a narrow alleyway. I walked up to the second floor where the organization was located. There were several flower pots in front of a door draped with beaded curtains, half ajar. According to the building sign, this was clearly the office. However, standing in front of it, I dreaded the possibility that I might be standing in front of someone’s home.

“Can I help you?” a woman opened the door. “I came for an interview with Sun-mi

Kim?” I squeaked. From inside, someone called, “Come in!” I nodded a bow to three women organizing stacks of documents on a large table in what looked like a living

78 room. Sun-mi’s office was the only separate room in the space. There was one large lap- height table with documents strewn all over. She was busily typing away on her laptop.

“Let me finish this one quick thing?” she asked, while I sat down on the floor.

Sun-mi had brought her college-aged daughter to the Peace Trip. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to interview the daughter as my departure flight from Korea was scheduled shortly after my meeting with Sun-mi. “I wanted my daughter to see and feel things out there,” Sun-mi said. Sun-mi had more mixed feelings for herself. Her dad was a proud VietNam War veteran. When her relatives learned she was going to VietNam, they teased, “What are you going to do if you meet your long lost siblings there?” At first, the jokes did not bother her, but as the date neared, she found herself thinking, “What am I going to do?” Her dad had been in the height of his twenties then, she thought, and the more she lingered, the more likely it seemed that she may meet someone related to her by blood. Her heart felt heavy with worries such as, “If there is someone out there like that, how should I think about our relationship?”

Listening to Sun-mi, I was struck by the fraughtness of her emotions which was noticeably absent from other interviews. It was the fear of having been confronted with knowledge that completely shakes up one’s sense of self. Through her father’s involvement in the VietNam War, Sun-mi felt a personal connection to this violence associated with the past that may considerably reshape her present. As Sun-mi struggles to come to terms with “our relationship” — between herself and the potential person who shares her biological father — she calls into existence a ‘we’ that is deeply intimate and familial. Through the intense feeling of discomfort, Sun-mi brings forth the impossibility of relegating this geopolitical violence to the ‘past’ and to ‘elsewhere.’ To her, that violence resonates at the very core of who she is. By doing so, she summons a

‘we’ that confronts the horrific violence implicated in ‘our’ uneasy birth story. In essence, this ‘we’ shares the problematic of colonial violence and illusory promises of modernity. Thus, it also beholds potential to imagine different configurations of community that provide the soil to grow different futures.

2. Love

In contrast, Jin-sun had not felt too troubled while she waited for the departure date. In fact, she had been looking forward to participating in the trip for a couple of years. She said:

I know some participants felt shameful about Korea. To be honest, I did not have that. For me, it was more about what I am going to do from now on, having learned about this history. I love our country, and as much as I love it, I will try to change it for the better.

I asked Jin-sun why she felt such strong patriotism. Her answer was simple:

I just do. I like Han-geul (the Korean language), I like how complicated Korea is as a nation — I feel like there is a lot of work that could be done.

Her love towards the state becomes the lens through which she sees the way forward.

Her narrative is that ‘we’ made a horrible mistake in the past so ‘we’ must take responsibility for it. At the same time, ‘we,’ also as victims of Japan, can build solidarity with Vietnamese survivors and show ‘them’ they can garner public support for their own redress. Here, Jin-sun leaves intact a ‘we’ (and ‘them’) that is identified (and made separate) primarily through the nation-state. Her narrative flattens the drastically different positionalities people hold in relation to the VietNam War and ‘comfort women.’ In doing so, it puts limits on the experimental horizon to forge ‘we’s’ that transgress national borders that are realized through shared visions and mutual care.

Jin-sun’s love for the nation stands out in contrast to Sun-mi and Sol-hee, who expressed skepticism about the Korean state. In particular, Sun-mi said:

Sometimes, I wish I could run away from all the problems with Korea. I know it’s ridiculous, but I wonder if I lived in a different country, I could just think back to Korea with nostalgia. But, I can’t run away and I’m still a member of this society, so I have to do something to change it.

Sun-mi’s impetus to assume responsibility for the harm caused by the Korean state is markedly different from Jin-sun’s which is rooted in affinity for the nation.

Ahmed (2014) argues that feeling shameful of one’s nation reaffirms love towards it (p. 106). She closely examines the performance of ‘shame’ by a majority-white

Indigenous reconciliation movement in Australia. In addition, Ahmed analyzes similar demands made to Europe and the U.S. to apologize for the ‘past’ of colonialism and slavery. Based on these discussions, she demonstrates that shame in fact confirms one’s belief in a national ideal and commitment to restore it. If that were true, how do we understand Jin-sun’s comment? Although she feels responsible for righting the ‘past wrongdoing’ of the nation, her love trumps shame. Despite the violence committed by the state, Jin-sun considers it peripheral, rather than integral, to the state’s identity. In a sense, as long as the state owns up to the atrocities it committed, the part that Jin-sun feels accountable for, it is absolved from the benefits it raked from the VietNam War that shape the present.

S. Kim (2011) studied comments responding to an online petition in 2009 demanding that the civilian massacres committed by Korean soldiers during the

VietNam War be incorporated into the official school curriculum.23 In these comments,

23 The petition was registered on an Internet bulletin board called ‘Agora,’ run by Daum, a major online portal operator in Korea. Agora closed down in January 2019, so I was unable to access the petition itself. Information about the petition all comes from S. Kim (2011). According to S. Kim, the petition was titled,

S. Kim observed that love for the nation was maintained amongst Koreans through their horrified reactions to the atrocities of the VietNam War. This harkens back to Ahmed’s

(2014) argument that the national ‘we’ is continuously generated through feeling, as emotions stick to bodies who are felt to be ‘with’ or ‘against us.’ Her argument echoed through the online comments responding to the petition about the VietNam War civilian massacres. Many individuals writing the comments distanced themselves from the perpetrators, by sticking hate and disgust onto the veterans who “bring down the nation.” The people commenting were able to easily decry the violence, because they saw themselves completely removed from it—or perhaps, as a performance to prove their distance and more importantly, blamelessness. Through this rhetoric, the bodies that raped and killed are singled out. Hate sticks onto them. Through this, ‘they’ are expelled from the ‘we’ of the nation, and in turn, the ‘we’ could claim innocence from their structural implication in geopolitical violence as well as the benefits they reaped through it. At the end, love for the nation prevails.

3. Guilt

Participants often talked about feelings of guilt towards the Vietnamese survivors. This aligns with the emphasis on ‘apology’ of both the Peace Trips and the general redress movement for Vietnanemse survivors. Following the origins and extent

‘교육청에 고합니다. 한국군, 베트남 민간인 학살사건 교과서에 실어주세요 [Tell the Board of Education to include the Korean soldiers’ VietNam War civilian massacres in national textbooks].’ It opened on May 21, 2009, ten years after the expose on Hankyoreh, and aimed to collect 5,000 signatures. However, the petition was only able to meet 35% of its goal, with 1743 signatures supporting the cause (S. Kim, 2011, p. 218). To date, none of the textbooks popularly used in Korea mention the civilian massacres perpetrated by Korean soldiers during the VietNam War.

82 of these guilty feelings opens the door to larger structural critique about Korea’s neo- imperialism and state narratives that erase the violent underbelly of modern development. On one hand, participants felt guilty by virtue of their association with the

Korean state and thus their connection to this violent history, however indirect. On the other, they felt guilty about contemporary public discourse about Korea-VietNam relations that appeared to be based on deliberately obscuring this violent history.

Multiple times during the interview, Sol-hee described herself and fellow participants as “children of the perpetrator nation” in the eyes of the survivors. Seeing

Sol-hee cry listening to the survivors’ stories, the survivors had comforted her saying that she is not to blame. She wondered, “How can they treat us with so much warmth, when we are children of the perpetrator nation?” I asked why she felt such personal guilt. Put bluntly, after all, she was not the direct perpetrator. Partially, she felt bad for having been unaware of the civilian massacres that happened during the war. Moreover, she felt that her “inescapable Korean identity” and “membership in the nation” made her responsible for both the history and not knowing about it.

Regarding her ignorance, Sol-hee admitted that the media or school curriculums did not provide resources to think more critically about the VietNam War. Indeed, this continues to be the case in Korea today. “I think we are often taught to honor the veterans for fighting the communists, but never about the casualties that ensued,” she said. Given that Sol-hee is a college student, it is less likely that she had paid much attention to the Hankyoreh expose series that ran from 1999 to 2000, because she was too young. It was only through her involvement with the Peace Butterfly Network that she learned about these atrocities. By articulating guilt about her ignorance, Sol-hee makes an important observation about public discourse around the VietNam War. Even

83 though she would have wanted to learn about this history, how could she learn about it when simply not many people were talking about it? Sol-hee’s observation raises questions about what popular narratives about the VietNam War are in circulation, who tells these narratives, and who benefits from them.

Indeed, Ji-han, Hyeon-woo, and Mi-seon all mentioned fostering awareness as a critical element of bringing about redress for the survivors. They identified Korean people’s ignorance, including their own, as one of the main obstacles to the VietNam

War redress movement. All three of them are within the same or slightly younger generation than Sol-hee. Regarding his own role in the redress movement, Hyeon-woo shared:

To support the survivors’ healing, no matter how small my impact might be, I have to continue learning and remembering [this violent history]. That is what I can do right at this moment.

Their emphasis on the ignorance regarding the violent history unveils that Koreans, especially those two or more generations removed from the VietNam War, are unaware of this history in the first place, rather than made to forget.

Note that ignorance as the obstacle to Vietnamese survivors’ redress, as flagged by Ji-han, Hyeon-woo, and Mi-seon, is distinct from discourses explored in Chapter 2 that actively thwart the redress of Vietnamese survivors. Compared to active hindrance, ignorance is much more insidious in its work to thwart redress. Framing ignorance as the culprit obscures the agency behind the active erasure of history that produced this very ignorance. By doing so, Ji-han, Hyeon-woo, and Mi-seon risk losing sight of someone or something they can hold accountable. Thus, I suggest that naming ignorance should accompany a close examination of the making of that ignorance. In the case of the VietNam War redress movement, this entails not only highlighting the

84 atrocities of the war, but also laying bare the discourses that hindered the redress movement, which I discussed in Chapter 2. Moreover, as I explore in the following section, ‘Familiarity,’ it also entails deeply engaging with the geopolitical inequalities that discourage Vietnamese survivors from forming a stalwart redress movement in the first place. Rethinking ignorance as constructed makes visible the structural inequalities that hinder certain horrific losses, such as the massacres and gender violence during the

VietNam War, from achieving public visibility. Additionally, it restores the agency of actors who (re)produce discourses and structures that create the very condition for ignorance.

Upon learning about the atrocities during the VietNam War, Sol-hee felt implicated in the violent history by virtue of her membership within Korean society.

However, she had difficulty articulating how exactly her “Korean identity” entailed personal connection to this history. Sun-mi and Jin-sun shared similar feelings of guilt which became particularly salient when juxtaposed to common contemporary perceptions about VietNam. For instance, their acquaintances only knew of VietNam as a cheap tourist destination. They were also told that Koreans are well-reputed there because of a Korean soccer coach who recently led the Vietnamese national soccer team to unprecedented victories, receiving enormous attention from Korean media. Both these popular presentist narratives have a troubling neo-imperialist undertone, in which

Koreans try to exert their economic and social superiority over the Vietnamese.

Combined with these comments, Sol-hee’s strong sense of guilt, despite her struggles to explain why, brings attention to the uneasy relationship between Korea and VietNam.

Perhaps her discomfort is because of the suspicion that legacies of the VietNam War, as

Korea’s neo-imperialist mission vis-à-vis the U.S., structure the geopolitically unequal

85 present which fortifies the Korean popular imaginary of VietNam as less than. Thus,

Sol-hee’s feeling of guilt, when pushed further, helps connect the dots between the various ways in which the Korean state perpetuates modernity/coloniality across time.

Participants understood their guilt by putting it in terms of how former Korean

‘comfort women’ must feel toward the Japanese government. Now they see themselves in the position of Japan and want the Korean state to do things differently. In that way, as the ‘comfort women’ movement puts much emphasis on the denial of redress, my interviewees’ emotions towards the violence of the VietNam War also focuses heavily on the moment of redress. While centering redress is unquestionably crucial, especially to uphold the demands of the survivors, it admittedly leaves less room to address how the VietNam War, and denial of redress, is tied to the ongoing neo-imperialist project of the Korean state. In other words, this entails a risk that the state’s admittance of the atrocities, emblemized as the ‘ultimate moment of justice,’ will close the door to larger structural critiques.

I argue that foreclosures to such critique can be avoided by conceptualizing the

VietNam War redress movements through decolonial thought. In particular, I am inspired by Simpson (2017), writing on struggles for Indigenous sovereignty in the

Global North, who is highly skeptical of the “politics of recognition.” In her view, the politics of recognition leaves intact the unquestioned power of the State to grant recognition to ‘oppressed’ groups seeking liberation. In the context of the VietNam War redress movement, Simpson’s critique highlights that a formal apology and investigation of atrocities issued by the Korean state is a necessary step, but not the end point of challenging Korea’s coloniality. Her critique begs a deeper interrogation of the continuing neo-imperial dynamics between Korea and VietNam, beyond Korea’s

86 admittance of the violence of the VietNam War. Along with Simpson, decolonial thinking, more broadly, questions the very colonial structures that endow entities such as the State or the West with the authority to ‘set the rules of the game.’ For Global

North Indigenous scholars such as Simpson, this means resisting the urge to prioritize legibility to settler states when envisioning Indigenous sovereignty. For MCD scholars, this is expressed through insisting that social justice necessitates epistemological justice that decenters the West. For Asian scholars, this entails practicing inter-Asian solidarity among communities that share similar struggles, outside international connections driven by state interests. Albeit from different geographies and political contexts, these decolonial thinkers collectively push back against the “politics of recognition” in

Simpson’s sense of the term. Thus, conceptualizing the VietNam War redress movement through a decolonial framework sustains the sharp focus on broader modern/colonial structures that do not simply dissipate upon Korea’s admittance of the massacres and gender violence perpetrated during the war.

4. Familiarity

For the trip participants, feelings of familiarity arose in two ways: first, by sharing emotional experiences; and second, by identifying similar histories of violence. In either case, while interviewees and online reviews mentioned feelings of connection with

Vietnamese survivors, feelings of dissimilarity were hard to find. In this section, I critically engage with feelings of familiarity to call attention to the silence around the unequal power relations undergirding the Peace Trips. In part, this section helps unpack the brief qualification made in the Introduction that my aim is not to suggest that emotions are inherently decolonial. In short, feelings of familiarity do not necessarily

87 lead to decolonial possibilities. Rather, taking feelings seriously as forms of knowledge can open up new avenues to critique modernity/coloniality. In extension, it can expose potential cracks to pursue decolonial otherwise(s). To facilitate this discussion, I argue that it is crucial to couple the MCD framework with postcolonial and transnational feminism. In essence, for my empirical context, I heed Asher’s (2013) urging that MCD scholarship should think with postcolonial and transnational feminists rather than declare a wholesale rejection of them. Importantly, this reflects the dynamics of decolonial studies within Asia, where decolonial thought and postcolonial and transnational feminist thought work together, as I laid out in Chapter 1.

For some trip participants, familiarity was experienced through sharing emotions such as joy and sadness. For instance, in her interview, Sol-hee shared:

Before meeting them, I thought the survivors would be very different from me, given our radically different backgrounds. But when I met them, we joked, laughed, and cried together. I was surprised at how similar we were.

In her account, Sol-hee felt affinity toward the Vietnamese survivors through moments of “jok[ing], laugh[ing], and cr[ying] together.” Given my research methods, there was no way to confirm whether these intense feelings of connection are reciprocated. That said, for a variety of reasons, it would be unsurprising if the survivors experienced these meetings differently.24 In my interviews with Sol-hee and others, I was struck by how strongly participants identified with the survivors, to the extent that they had nothing to say when asked if they felt different from the survivors at all. There was no mention of the very salient differences in regard to nationality, mobility, and relationship to the

24 Schwenkel (2009) studied U.S. VietNam War veterans who traveled to VietNam to heal from their post-war trauma. Examining the solidarity arising between Vietnamese and American veterans, she argues that this solidarity carried different meanings for the two groups. For the U.S. veterans, healing had more to do with mending “past” wounds, whereas for Vietnamese veterans, healing meant addressing ongoing poverty and global inequality extending from the VietNam War.

88 atrocities of the VietNam War, which were apparent even without deep knowledge about the Vietnamese survivors' everyday lives. For instance, no one noted the deeply unequal yet intertwined bilateral relationship between Korea and VietNam which is directly connected to the silence of both states around the atrocities of the VietNam War. No one called out the privilege of mobility which enables numerous Korean allies to travel to

VietNam for the Peace Trips each year or their acquaintances to think of VietNam as a

‘cheap tourist destination.’ Despite recognizing the ongoing trauma the VietNam War left in the survivors and their communities, my interviewees spoke more about ‘sharing’ the survivors’ pain, rather than highlight the incommensurability of their experiences.

Trip participants also felt familiarity toward the Vietnamese survivors through similar histories of violence they understood more intimately. In his online review,

Hyeon-woo, a trip participant from Jeju Island25, compared the VietNam War massacres to the Jeju ‘April 3 Massacre.’26 Hyeon-woo is two to three generations removed from the April 3 Massacre, but this history still loomed large in his

25 Jeju Island is located at the Southernmost end of South Korea, and has a population of approximately 700,000, which is around 1.3% of the entire population in Korea. As the largest island in Korea, Jeju is a self-governing province among nine provinces in Korea. It is one of the farthest regions from Seoul, where the Korean central government is and has been located historically. 26 The Jeju ‘April 3 Massacre’ refers to the mass killings that happened in Jeju Island between 1947 and 1954, around and amid the Korean War. The series of massacres is named after the date, April 3, 1948, when local armed militias attacked 11 of 24 police stations in Jeju, in response to increasing military control and police brutality in Jeju. The US military labeled this incident as a Communist uprising and used brute force to quell the Jeju Islanders’ resentment toward the US and the separatist government being established in what is now South Korea. As a result, an estimate of 30,000 Jeju residents, accused of being Communisit rebels, were murdered by the police, soldiers, anti-Communist vigilantes, and paramilitary forces dispatched from the mainland. Fatalities amounted to one-tenth of the Jeju population at the time. The massacres were sanctioned by the US military and the American-backed right- wing government settling in Korea’s Southern peninsula, in opposition to the Soviet-backed Communist government forming in the North. In 2006, the Korean government officially apologized for the atrocities. Currently, family members of the massacre victims are continuing to demand the US government for a formal apology. However, to date, the demand has not yet been met. For more information on the April 3 Massacres, see: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/world/asia/south-korea-jeju-massacres.html. For deeper discussion on the involvement of the US military in the massacres, see: http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/838533.html. For Jeju Islanders’ demand toward the US government, see: http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/839789.html.

89 consciousness. Notably, it directly informed his understanding of the VietNam War massacres. For instance, Hyeon-woo wrote:

When I think about the atrocities of the VietNam War, I am immediately reminded of the April 3 Massacre. Both in Jeju and VietNam, civilians were sacrificed in the hands of powerful countries. Like we [the Jeju Islanders] remember the April 3 Massacre, the Vietnamese survivors remember the massacres during the VietNam War.

This comment illustrates that Hyeon-woo’s feeling of connection toward the Vietnamese survivors is firmly rooted in place. Moreover, this rootedness prompts Hyeon-woo to notice the power differential between Korea and VietNam, parallel to that between the

U.S. and Korea. Along these lines, Mi-seon, also from the Jeju Peace Butterfly Network, wrote:

The brave activism of the Vietnamese survivors reminded me of the survivor- activists of the ‘comfort women’ redress movement. After meeting the Vietnamese survivors, I promised myself to think more deeply about what I can do from Korea to stand with them. … Through my activism in Jeju, I will push the Korean society to remember the histories of the VietNam War, apologize for the atrocities, and help restore the honor of survivors. [emphasis mine]

Similar to Hyeon-woo, Mi-seon is very aware of her location and how that shapes her role in the Vietnamese survivors’ redress movement. Her work is solidly based in Jeju, and her audience is the Korean public. It is not changing the Vietnamese state’s response to the survivors or initiating mass mobilization among the Vietnamese public.

By articulating the location of her activism, Mi-seon implicitly acknowledges the positionality she holds within the redress movement. Thus, while expressing feelings of familiarity, Hyeon-woo and Mi-seon demonstrate awareness of the differences between themselves and the Vietnamese survivors along the lines of nationality. However, despite this initial awareness, neither Hyeon-woo nor Mi-seon expands on these differences and the intertwined unequal power relations. In that sense, similar to Sol-

90 hee, they focus disproportionately on the feelings of familiarity, rather than the power imbalances that importantly shape their efforts to build solidarity with the survivors.

I argue that participants’ lack of awareness regarding differential power prompts closer attention to the systematic erasure of these differences. To be clear, my critique is not directed at the individual participants or the organizers of the Peace Trips. On the contrary, I observe that trip participants have difficulty fully understanding their positionality in relation to the survivors, despite the participants’ best efforts. For one, the Peace Trip organizers provide trip participants with ample material to contextualize the VietNam War and its atrocities to prepare them for the trips. Furthermore, Ha- young, Sol-hee, and Jin-sun, as members of the Peace Butterfly Network, had attended special seminars on the topic to learn more. Thus, if anything, the trip participants’ unawareness of unequal power relations speaks to the pervasiveness of discourses that silence the neo-imperial relations between Korea and VietNam, to which the VietNam

War served a foundational role. This entails that visibilizing the discourses that thwart the VietNam War redress movement, which I discussed in Chapter 2, is as crucial to the project of redress as making the atrocities widely known.

Vigilance to power structures and the resulting differences in positionality is essential to creating meaningful solidarity. I draw on postcolonial feminism which rigorously engages with the problem of representation and transnational feminism which has long pondered over forging solidarity across difference. Their contributions to thinking about differential power are immediately pertinent to the VietNam War redress movement. In fact, as I discuss shortly, difference along the lines of nationality, among other axes of difference, is integral to the very design of the redress movement. Thus, I argue that the redress movement calls on an engagement with both MCD scholarship

91 and postcolonial and transnational feminist thought. This is in step with the decolonial conversations in Asia which postcolonial and transnational feminists are helping to push forward.

Calling for critical engagement with nationality, I draw on Yoon’s (2019) observation that differential power according to nationality explains why the VietNam

War redress movement is unfolding the way it is. He coined the term “justice by invitation” to describe the role of Koreans in the Vietnamese survivors’ redress. This term highlights the various obstacles Vietnamese survivors face to obtain redress without others’ cooperation. In other words, it goes hand in hand with the Vietnamese government’s refusal to hear the survivors’ demands, especially given its bilateral relationship with the Korean state. The concept, justice by invitation, draws sharp attention to the marginalized status of the survivors within Vietnamese society and the privileged position of those whose voice carries more political weight than the survivors’. The survivors’ invitation to others to speak with, and sometimes on behalf of, the survivors is buttressed by structural inequalities tangled with the tricky politics of representation. In essence, Yoon (2019) echoes postcolonial feminists (see Spivak,

1994), insisting that justice by invitation unveils the troubling unequal power relations that necessitate the survivors to ‘invite’ the ‘gift’ of others’ support. The redress movement in its current form, which requires the cooperation of Korean allies, should alert Korean supporters to challenge the very structures that grant them a seat at the table of the redress movement.

I argue that transnational feminist thought helps enrich these conversations, given the tools it offers to examine nationality, among others, as a critical axis of difference. In doing so, I take up N.-Y. Lee’s (2006) urging that postcolonial feminism

92 should partner with transnational feminism to foster solidarity with communities that share similar struggles. Transnational feminist scholars Faria and Mollett (2016) and

Nagar and Sangtin Writers (2006) reflect on the difficulties involved in building meaningful solidarity between Global North researchers and organizers in the Global

South. Additionally, they rigorously examine the ways in which nationality, race, class, and caste shape the authors’ relationships with each other as well as with their partner communities. Their work shows that solidarity across difference requires critical self- reflection, not for the purpose of ‘navel-gazing,’ but to be in accountable relation to others. In her study of the transnational ‘comfort women’ redress movement, Shin

(2013) shows that nationality as an axis of difference does not only pertain to Global

North to South relations. She demonstrates that even among activists from different parts of Asia, including Japan, North and South Korea, Indonesia, and China, difference along lines of nationality cannot be brushed aside.

This combined framework is particularly useful for making sense of the Peace

Trips. The postcolonial approach helps navigate the politics of representation which

Yoon (2019) highlights. Simultaneously, the transnational framework maintains the focus on ‘solidarity,’ the proclaimed goal of the Peace Trips which was echoed by the trip participants. Moreover, transnational feminism, stemming from the rejection of the

‘global sisterhood’ discourse, more accurately depicts the relationship between the

Korean Council and the VietNam War redress movement.

Altogether, this section illustrates that postcolonial and transnational feminist approaches are indeed very pertinent to understanding the VietNam War redress movement. In particular, they facilitate a critical engagement with the trip participants’ feelings of familiarity. When familiarity goes unquestioned, it can mask structural

93 inequalities and stunt the potential for meaningful solidarity. Postcolonial and transnational feminist thought effectively alerts us to these pitfalls. This discussion of familiarity demonstrates that in my empirical context, the MCD framework must go hand in hand with postcolonial and transnational feminist thought. In that sense, I argue with Asher (2013) who urges MCD scholars to engage with postcolonial and transnational feminisms. Only through this collaboration can the MCD framework do justice to the political priorities and the decolonial thought developing within my empirical context.

5. Frustration

Despite their promise to survivors to “do something,” participants felt frustrated about the limitations to what they could actually do. This was particularly salient among my interviewees, but not as much among online review writers. I suspect there might be two reasons for this difference. First, the reviews were written while the Peace Trips were ongoing, whereas it has been six months to more than a year since my interviewees have returned from the trips. Thus, my interviewees might have had more time to experience and reflect on the difficulties of developing more sustained relationships with the Vietnamese survivors. Second, while the interviews were one-one-one conversations with me, the online reviews are open to the public. That considered, the online review writers might have been less inclined to share their practical worries about building solidarity, for the sake of the Korean Council or the Peace Trips’ reputation.

Several of my interviewees felt that any attempt for sustained solidarity, whether interpersonal or political, was nearly impossible. For instance, Sun-mi hoped there were more direct ways to support survivor communities they had visited. She also wished she

94 could develop more personal, long-lasting relationships with survivors by sending gifts or letters. However, Sun-mi was told that the delivery system in VietNam, especially to rural communities, was not so straightforward. Either ‘subversive’ material could be confiscated by inspectors along the way, or the recipient might be asked to come to an urban area to pick up the package themselves.

Sun-mi’s desire to sustain interpersonal connections resonates with Simpson

(2017) who emphasizes trusting and caring interpersonal relationships as the base for stalwart political solidarity. In her analysis, the lack of interpersonal relationships largely explains the tenuous development of the Idle No More movement in the settler state of Canada. Importantly, Roshanravan (2019) argues that building these relationships of patience and mutual trust is integral to resisting liberation within modernity/coloniality. In this beautiful piece, Roshanravan (2019) reflects on her South

Asian parents’ initial discomfort with Roshanravan’s own queerness. She critiques

Western liberal narratives which characterize her parents’ discomfort as being

‘backwards’ and ‘uncivilized’ compared to the ‘tolerant’ White liberal parent.

Roshanravan (2019) flips this narrative on its head. She asserts that her parents’ struggle to grapple with their adult child’s queerness is tied to their survival instincts within colonial and racist pressures to conform. Roshanravan (2019) insists on recognizing these multiple, and at times conflicting, forms of resistance and working through them together. She terms this, “witnessing faithfully” each other’s struggles against modernity/coloniality. In short, Roshanravan (2019) underscores the crucial work of love, patience, and trust in building solidarity against modernity/coloniality.

In terms of political solidarity, Sol-hee found it tricky to navigate the Vietnamese government’s denial of the survivors’ demands while wanting to stand with the

95 survivors. Given the norms of geopolitics, she thought that the only way for the Korean state to launch an investigation and issue an apology is if the Vietnamese government pressured them to. However, the survivors cannot comfortably make such demands to the government, considering the stringent censorship of the socialist state. Thus, Sol- hee felt skeptical about the impact she could make as a Korean ally, even as she raised her voice to the Korean state through the Peace Butterfly Network.

“Feeling stuck” despite their desire to “do something” makes participants confront the inconspicuous yet powerful techniques that impede the making of alternative political communities. In this case, distance, borders, and state bureaucracy all come together to make ongoing solidarity extremely challenging. If these obstacles are usually taken for granted, the Peace Trips, and participants’ desire to build upon them, illuminate their specific design to deter transnational solidarity. By voicing these frustrations, participants join the many activists and scholars in various geographies who work through the difficulties of forging solidarity across borders (Schulze-

Oechtering, 2016; Shin, 2013; Simpson, 2017). In novel ways, these thinkers have conceived international solidarity that leverages global inequalities and geopolitical barriers to their advantage. For instance, Tyree Scott, a Black labor activist in Seattle,

U.S., utilized his locational privilege in the U.S. to advocate for anti-war and anti- imperialist politics, demanding the U.S. government to defund warfare in the Global

South (Schulze-Oechtering, 2016). MCD scholars enrich these discussions of geopolitical inequality by complicating borders themselves (Carastathis, 2019; Tlostanova, 2019).

Extending Lugones’ (2007) conceptualization of the modern/colonial gender system, they argue that power asymmetries invoke a rigorous questioning, not only of the asymmetries, but more so, of the very axis of power. In other words, the MCD

96 framework offers an epistemological and ontological critique of borders. In sum, my interviewees’ frustration, when pushed further, leads to quite profound conclusions. It allows my interviewees to notice the technologies that separate. Within it resides the potential to propel a critical examination of geopolitical inequalities and of borders themselves.

Conclusion

This project mobilized emotional scholarship and decolonial thought, with a focus on the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) framework, to construct a two- fold argument. First, I argued that the redress movements for ‘comfort women’ and the

Vietnamese survivors are a connected struggle against modernity/coloniality. Building on this, I examined the Peace Trips, as the Korean Council’s solidarity initiative with the

Vietnamese survivors, through which I argued that emotions can hone the critique of modernity/coloniality. Moreover, engaging with emotions deeply and critically reveals how possibilities beyond modernity/coloniality can be sought.

My overarching argument is structured into four content chapters, in addition to the Introduction where I laid out the driving questions for my research. In Chapter 1, I explained my methodology and the three methods used in this project: secondary discourse analysis, semi-structured interviews, and content analysis. In the same chapter, I set up the project’s theoretical groundwork through a deep dive into decolonial studies and scholarship on emotions. In Chapter 2, where I drew primarily on secondary discourse analysis alongside semi-structured interviews, I reconceptualized the discourses thwarting ‘comfort women’ and VietNam War redress movements using the MCD framework. Through this move, I theorize these two movements as a united struggle against modernity/coloniality, reflecting the solidarity work already happening on the ground. In Chapter 3, I introduced the Peace Trips, drawing on interviews and the 2019 trip itinerary shared with me by the Korean Council. In addition, based on the interviews and content analysis of online reviews, I explored the centrality of emotions and feeling in these trips. I argued that allowing emotions to take center stage visibilizes

98 and challenges modernity/coloniality. Lastly, in Chapter 4, I paid close attention to the diverse emotions that emerged from the Peace Trips: discomfort, love, guilt, familiarity, and frustration. I argued that taking seriously the origins and implications of emotions sharpens the critique of modernity/coloniality and provides a glimpse into potential decolonial otherwise(s).

Altogether, this project weaves together decolonial studies, especially MCD scholarship, and emotional studies, with an empirical grounding in Korea foremostly.

By doing so, it makes three primary intellectual contributions. First, this project bridges the gap between scholarship on the ‘comfort women’ redress movement and the

VietNam War redress movement, by leveraging the MCD framework. By reading both redress movements through an explicitly decolonial outlook, this project makes readily available discussions around epistemological justice and building alternative worlds. In extension, it invites the redress movements to see MCD scholarship and the social movements that inspire MCD scholarship as potential allies. In other words, this thesis is a modest step toward expanding Global South solidarities.

Second, my project contributes to MCD scholarship by putting it to work in a geography outside of Latin America. By doing so, I respond to MCD scholars’ desires to think with other diverse communities fighting for decolonization (Walsh & Mignolo,

2018). In addition to facilitating this conversation, my thesis illustrates that the MCD framework must stay theoretically open to engage with other geographical contexts. As demonstrated in Chapter 4, this entails seeking alliances with postcolonial and transnational feminist thought which meaningfully challenge decolonial scholarship within Asian geographies.

Lastly, this project contributes to emotional scholarship by bringing it closer to decolonial studies. In doing so, it continues the feminist legacies of emotional scholarship, demonstrating the epistemological power of emotions to form a steadfast critique of modernity/coloniality. Additionally, this thesis lays out the groundwork for a partnership between two bodies of scholarship that share a commitment to on-the- ground struggles for social justice. In particular, decolonial studies’ fluency in accountability to place can be useful to ground the theorization of emotions.

To consider the practical contributions of my project, I lean on the insights of my interviewees and activists whom I shared informal conversations with during my fieldwork. Inspired by their comments, I observe that this project makes three practical contributions. First, it documents an important piece of the Korean Council’s transnational solidarity work that has yet to be recorded in academic publications. This project sits with the significance of the Peace Trips within the longer history of the

Korean Council, popular discourses around the VietNam War, and Korea’s contemporary political landscape. I follow the generous advice given to me by a scholar- activist who has long worked with the Korean Council. She had advised that I contribute to the redress movements by meaningfully theorizing the solidarity survivor groups are forging on the ground. In my attempts to do so, I have written a shared history of the redress movement for ‘comfort women’ and for the Vietnamese survivors. My hope is that drawing out these connections can provide a glimpse of the vast possibilities that lie beyond modernity/coloniality.

Second, this project shows that rethinking the VietNam War through the

Vietnamese survivors’ redress movement can fuel a fundamental reimagining of Korean domestic politics, geopolitics, and political communities themselves. This is done by

100 situating the redress movement within a broader resistance against modernity/coloniality. Sol-hee, my interviewee affiliated with the Peace Butterfly

Network, believes that the VietNam War redress movement shakes up the Cold War discourse that still dominates political debates within contemporary Korea. By pushing the Korean public to look beyond Cold War discourses, domestically, the redress movement unleashes political imaginaries decoupled from anti-communist logics.

Thinking geopolitically, Jin-sun, in her interview, shared that the VietNam War redress movement challenges how the Korean state relates to other states beyond Korea-

VietNam relations. Extending on her comment, the VietNam War redress movement lays bare Korea’s neo-imperialist pursuits and its denial of such endeavors. By making transparent Korea’s neo-imperialism, the redress movement destabilizes the myth of modern development through which the Korean state explains its ascension in the geopolitical hierarchy. In other words, the VietNam War redress movement exposes the lies of modernity/coloniality which throws away possibilities of collective thriving.

Instead, this project looked toward emotions to ignite imaginations for otherwise(s).

This was exemplified in the Discomfort section in Chapter 4, where Sun-mi speaks of a transnational ‘we’ that is not defined by national borders. Through feelings of discomfort, she summons a ‘we’ forged by shared understandings of the violence of modernity/coloniality. In turn, the ‘we’ she brings into being bears desires to create a world that does not take for granted such occurrences of violence.

Finally, this thesis demonstrates that documenting the VietNam War redress movement matters as much as remembering the atrocities of the VietNam War. This is crucial not to lose sight of the present-day manifestations of modernity/coloniality.

Closely examining how the redress movement is unraveling brings into view the larger

101 projects of nation-building and neo-imperialism. In the Peace Trips and the redress movement’s activism, sharing the obstacles to their work can help supporters develop a broader critique of continuing modern/colonial structures. For instance, this would equip Peace Trip participants with the tools to grasp the public ignorance surrounding the VietNam War, discussed in Chapter 4, as a political project of silencing. Ultimately, this thesis has shown that critically analyzing the trajectory of the redress movement beholds so much more political potential than is implied by the lack of scholarship writing on it.

This project was primarily concerned with the participants’ experience of the

Peace Trips as they were unfolding; but what comes after? What political impact materializes through the emotional experience of the Peace Trips? Based on my data, the answer seems a bit murky. Undoubtedly, participants had felt a lot of things.

Through these feelings emerged intense desires to ‘do something.’ However, interviewees displayed varying degrees of confidence regarding their continued efforts to push forward the VietNam War redress movement. Notably, interviewees overall had much less to say about the actions they have taken after the Peace Trips than about the

Peace Trips themselves. As evidenced in the Frustration section in Chapter 4, for some, desires to act seemed difficult to actualize because of borders, distance, and geopolitical logics. As I discuss below, these were a few among other barriers to growing tangible political action out of the Peace Trips.

My interviewees all agreed on the importance of translating ‘feelings’ from the

Peace Trips into concrete and sustained involvement afterward. Yet, currently, there is no organized support in place to facilitate this progression, either by the Korean Council or autonomously among the trip participants. To be clear, this does not mean there was

102 no follow-up whatsoever. Contacted by the Korean Council, some of the participants reunited with the Vietnamese survivors when the survivors visited Korea to testify at the

People’s Tribunal held in 2018. Given their previous involvement in the Peace Butterfly

Network, some of my interviewees brought back their desires to ‘do something’ to this work. This often meant educating their colleagues on why the VietNam War redress movement is relevant to the activism of the Peace Butterfly Network or convincing other members to attend the Peace Trips. One participant from the Peace Butterfly Network, whom I had not interviewed, actually ended up interning for a year at the Korea-

VietNam Peace Foundation after college. In spite of such engagement, taking sustained action for the redress of Vietnamese survivors ultimately seemed dependent on individual effort. Moreover, participants felt like they could do more than in the limited capacity in which they were contributing to the VietNam War redress movement on a personal scale. However, there is no system in place to crystallize these feelings into political action.

This prompts me to revisit a key contribution of emotional scholarship, that feeling moves bodies towards activism. Indeed, in the case of Peace Trips, feelings produced new collective ‘we’s whom the participants became desperately willing to fight for. Feelings primed participants to be propelled into action. Nevertheless, this seemed challenging without an organized way through which they could act on this passion.

Recognizing emotions as political then begs deliberate consideration of how to mold these feelings into sustained involvement and support participants exercise their agency. This project begins a conversation about the political potential of emotions in the Peace Trips. Humbly, I invite scholars and activists to join this conversation and

103 carefully think through what work can be done to grow action out of the fruitful, emotional grounds the Peace Trips provide.

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Appendix A. Interview questions for trip planners

1. Can you tell me a story about how the VietNam Butterfly Peace Trips came about? How did they change over time? 2. The Korean Council categorizes these trips under building “transnational solidarity.” What does solidarity mean to you, and why do you think building solidarity matters? 3. How do you see the trips fitting into the larger mission of the Korean Council? 4. In general, do you feel like the trips fulfilled the purpose you started out with? 5. In your mind, what would be the outcome of these trips if they had gone perfectly?

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Appendix B. Interview questions for trip participants

1. How many times did you go on the VietNam Butterfly Peace Trips? What made you go on them? 2. In your mind, what is the purpose of these trips, and how is that related to your choice to go on them? 3. The Korean Council categorizes these trips under building “transnational solidarity.” Do you think that happened? a. If yes: Can you tell me a time when you felt you felt this sense of solidarity? b. If no: How would you describe what the trip was about? What advice do you have for the Korean Council to make this about solidarity? 4. How have these trips changed your understanding of society and your role in it, if at all? 5. Can you tell me a time when you felt very different from the people you encountered on the trip? How did you navigate that feeling? 6. If more and more people went this trip, do you think the world would change for the better? What do you envision that world to look like?

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Glossary

A-MAP A Vietnamese social enterprise founded in 2010 by Su-jeong Ku, co-founder of the Korea-VietNam Peace Foundation. Currently, A-MAP also functions as the Vietnamese branch of the Korea-VietNam Peace Foundation.

Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance (Korean Council) A well-known Korean organization advocating for the redress of survivors of sexual slavery organized by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. The Korean Council was founded in 1990.

Korea-VietNam Peace Foundation A nonprofit organization in Korea advocating for the redress of Vietnamese survivors of civilian massacres perpetrated by Korean soldiers during the VietNam War. Established in 2016, Korea-VietNam Peace Foundation is currently the most visible Korean group organizing around this issue.

Peace Butterfly Network A loose network of groups in Korea supporting the Korean Council.

VietNam Butterfly Peace Trips A part of Korean Council’s solidarity initiative with the Vietnamese survivors. These are annual week-long trips to VietNam organized by the Korean Council. During the trip, which started in 2014. Allies of the Korean Council meet several survivors and visit sites that memorialize the massacres committed during the VietNam War.

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