Table Of ContentSEEING LIKE A CHILD
Thinking from Elsewhere
Series editors:
Clara Han, Johns Hopkins University, and
Bhrigupati Singh, Ashoka University
International Advisory Board
Roma Chatterji, University of Delhi
Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University
Robert Desjarlais, Sarah Lawrence College
Harri Englund, Cambridge University
Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study, Prince ton
Angela Garcia, Stanford University
Junko Kitanaka, Keio University
Eduardo Kohn, McGill University
Heonik Kwon, Cambridge University
Michael Lambek, University of Toronto
Deepak Mehta, Ashoka University, Sonepat
Amira Mittermaier, University of Toronto
Sameena Mulla, Marquette University
Marjorie Murray, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Young- Gyung Paik, Jeju National University
Sarah Pinto, Tufts University
Michael Puett, Harvard University
Fiona Ross, University of Cape Town
Lisa Stevenson, McGill University
Seeing Like
a Child
INHERITING THE KOREAN WAR
Clara Han
fordham university press new york 2021
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Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
23 22 21 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
For Mom 차정화 and Dad 한숙종
For Ella
Contents
Foreword by Richard Rechtman ix
Introduction 1
Part I: Loss and Awakenings 35
Interlude 1: Affliction and War
in the Domestic 61
Part II: A Future in Kinship, a Future
in Language 65
Interlude 2: Homeward Bound 87
Part III: The Kids 93
Interlude 3: Siblings and the Scene
of Inheritance 119
vii
viii Contents
Part IV: Mother Tongue 125
Epilogue: Seeing Like a Child 153
acknowl edgments 157
notes 161
works Cited 167
Foreword
Richard Rechtman
Has anybody has ever lived The Big Story the way it is
written in books and printed for collective memory? Of
course not. It does not exist. History, with a capital “H,” is
just an artifact to build a collective story that never actually
happened that way for the individual. Of course, each indi-
vidual participates and contributes to The Big Story. Each
experience possesses ele ments of The Big Story. But the way
each one lives it remains a purely subjective experience that,
sometimes, has very little in common with what we call The
Big Story. It is pos si ble to understand and write The Big Story
precisely because science has been able to extract out the sin-
gular and subjective experience of major events.
Thanks to research in history, sociology, anthropology, po-
liti cal science, and so on for bringing us an understanding
of our collective past, and sometimes our pre sent. There
is no better way to describe how we proceed to grasp this
sense of collective destiny than Claude Lévi- Strauss’s con-
cluding remarks of The Naked Man, the fourth volume of The
Mythologiques. What he says about myth and its complex
ix
x RICHARD ReCHtMAn
relationship with subjectivity can be extrapolated to collective
memory and to The Big Story. Both are individual, complex
expressions, but they become collective through the pro cess
of erasing all individual subjectivity. If myth exists and spreads
over time, Lévi- Strauss writes, it is not so much b ecause it
was in ven ted by Man or someone, as great as he or she could
be. On the contrary, it is the narrative form that owes noth-
ing to an enlightened or poetic consciousness— that is, to the
expression of a subjectivity (Rechtman 1996). Myth is pre-
cisely dif fer ent from other oral or literary narrative forms. It
derives its permanence from internal logic alone, not emo-
tional or semantic involvement, which is other wise attached
to these forms. Lévi- Strauss explains this masterfully by em-
phasizing that every myth has its origin in an individual cre-
ation, but “to pass to the state of myth,” he adds, “it is precisely
necessary that a creation does not remain individual and
loses, during this promotion, the essential f actors due to the
probability that would initially impede it and that one could
attribute to the temperament, talent, imagination and per-
sonal experiences of its author” (Lévi- Strauss 1971, 559). We
could replace myth by The Big Story and then get a clear
definition of the pro cess through which a sense of collective
memory is created. Collective memory is much less the prod-
uct of individual consciousness than the narrative framework
that allows each individual to format his or her unique expe-
rience in accordance with that of his or her home group. And
this is precisely what we do as researchers: we try to discover
how p eople interact with the collective narrative of The Big
Story or collective memory and then express their own des-
tiny through this pattern. But in ordinary life, this is not the
way it really works.
In real life, p eople do not make a clear hierarchy between
what affects them in ordinary life for inner reasons and what
