The Shadow of Arms [Hardcover]

 

 

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While agreeing that South Korean author Hwang Suk-Young (Hwang) takes a long time laying out his cautionary tale, I found the book well worth the reading. I was exposed to it through a World Lit class at UCLA the summer of 2003 and found it to be a fascinating mixture of Catch 22 and The Quiet American. The three scenes that stood out were the rape scene, the "phoenix hamlet" scene and the description of the transformative power of the American PX in Danang. Hwang is the master of that Asian quiet understatement, the flat laconic narrative descriptive tone. Chalmers Johnson, the retired State Dept. Asian specialist, wrote in his now-prophetic "Blowback" ( just two years before 9/11) that most nationals have no conception of the effect an American base has on overseas peoples. Ironcially it is in South Korea (where an American soldier killed a S Korean in a car accident) that the issue of the American presence looms largest just now.
In The Shadow the American PX is the center of the action--it is an endles dispenser of refridgerators, air-conditioning machines and C-rations. The plot revolves around the main character's (South Korean Cpl. Yong Ku) attempts to find out why C-rations are leaking to the Vietcong. This leads him inexorably into the interconnected swamp of corruption that is Hwang's Vietnam. The point is that the problem is not ripping off the PX on the Black Market--everyone does that in fine Catch 22 style--it is that if the Americans find about it the South Korean/Vietnamese part of the game will have to end.
Along the way, Hwang paints some disturbing reminisciences of Lt. Calley-like abuses in the field (the rape scene), the quiet disembowelling of Western assumptions revealed in the new hamlet designed by well-meaning outsiders to resettle Vietnamese villagers in model communities with shiny white tiolets. Tiolets that the villagers will never use. Mr. Butler, the State Dept agent, gives a polite speech about "eternal peace" and the complexities of Cold War alliances but it is going over everyone's heads. Not to worry. Major Pham, another black marketeer, is mistranslating the whole effort anyway. On his way out in his Huey Pham estimates it will take a battalion to hold this region--a Billy Joel echo here perhaps--"We held the day/They held the night."
This is the quiet irony without the typical Western guilt that pervades Hwang's narrative throughout--he satirizes the surreality that was Vietnam but lets you draw your own conclusions about the feasibility of East meeting West. Though there are way too many coincidences and side shows in the narrative, this is not a bad text for high school students who want a Third World view of the Western experience in Asia. There are enough selected documents scattered throughout to give an air of authenticity to the text.

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