77alam, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, English and French—as
a result of her multiple migrations.
Fault Lines reflects Alexander’s struggles to come
to terms with her own body, her state of homeless-
ness amid continuous migrations, and her search
for identity. Her reflections on her life also prompt
her to examine larger themes of racism, arranged
marriages, identity crisis, diasporic consciousness,
and language retention, among others. Some of
the chapters were presented as papers before they
were compiled in the book, which is more of a col-
lection of memories than a linear autobiography.
Written in a sensitive style, the book is an easy read
and filled with poetic expressions.
Asma SayedFenkl, Heinz Insu (1960– )
A writer, editor, translator, and scholar of myth
and folklore, Fenkl is currently the director of both
the Creative Writing Program and ISIS: The Inter-
stitial Studies Institute at State University of New
York, New Paltz.
Fenkl was born in Inchun, Korea, in 1960, to a
German-American father (who was a sergeant in
the U.S. Army) and a Korean mother. Until he was
12 years old, Fenkl lived with his family in a camp
town outside an American military base near In-
chun. Following the duty stations of his father,
Fenkl spent the rest of his childhood in Germany
and in various parts of the United States, before
his family finally settled in Castroville, California.
After graduating from Vassar College, Fenkl re-
turned to Korea as a Fulbright Scholar in 1984 to
study folklore and shamanism.
Autobiographical in nature, Fenkl’s first novel,
Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996), is a bildung-
sroman of a young biracial boy, Insu, growing up in
the destitute conditions of Korea in the late 1960s.
Insu lives in a military camp town in postwar Korea
among prostitutes, black marketers, and aban-
doned Amerasian children. According to Elaine H.
Kim, the military camp town is a symbolic locus,
wherein its inhabitants must “negotiate a complex
and often shifting hierarchy of race, gender, class,
and culture that emerges in the shadow of the
American empire” (81). Insu’s world is permeated
with poignant stories of death, and the boundaries
between the living and the dead are just as blurred
as those between American soldiers and Korean
locals. Cognizant of the ghost world, Insu finds
himself confronting the specters of not only the
Japanese occupation but also of his pregnant aunt
who hangs herself after being abandoned by her
G.I. lover, his friend James, whose mother kills her
half-black son to attain a white husband, and his
“ghost brother,” whom his father sent away because
he did not want to raise another man’s son.
In Memories of My Ghost Brother, Fenkl ad-
dresses such provocative themes as Korean and
American racism, neo-imperialism, military
prostitution, and the interstitiality of Amerasian
children. However, Fenkl seemingly tempers the
political implications of such convoluted top-
ics by employing young Insu as a naïve narrator.
In tandem, numerous Korean ghost stories and
traditional folktales reinforce a sense of cultural
authenticity but obscure the themes of political
import. Fenkl’s strategic deployment of Insu as
a naïve narrator achieves the very effect he had
hoped for; readers appreciate the ethnic appeal of
the novel, and at the same time, the details that
may not befit a tale of a boy’s journey into man-
hood are downplayed. Elided are the particular
details of Insu’s narrative—such as depravities
of war, miscegenation, moral bankruptcy, and so
forth—in favor of a universalized reading of the
text as a bildungsroman.
Another critical thread that runs through the
novel is the problematic relationship between Insu
and his father. The uneasy tension between father
and son is exacerbated by linguistic and cultural
demarcations. Insu is rather aggrieved by the im-
plications behind his father’s insistence that he
read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, a story of an Irish
boy who grows up in colonized India until he is
“saved” and sent to an Irish school by his father.
Insu comes to recognize the disjunction between
himself and his father:I could not imagine my voice joining my fa-
ther’s the way [another American’s] did. I could
not imagine how I would ever understand theirFenkl, Heinz Insu 77