In Minor Salvage (2022), Stephen Hong Sohn theorizes a mode of Korean American life writing he defines by the process of salvaging the forgotten and unrecorded lives of civilians on the margins of the Korean War. Expanding upon Angela Naimou’s definition of salvage as ‘a creative and critical practice that animates every encounter with the ruined, junked and trashed’, Sohn applies this mission of recovery and excavation to the experiences of Korean women, children, and refugees that survive primarily through individual memory. The work of writers Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi, and Diana Khoi Nguyen embodies Sohn’s project of salvage through the interdisciplinary merging of fragmented images and texts with poetic forms. This disconnected juxtaposition of text and image, combining memories and personal experiences with documents salvaged from the wreckage of history, exemplifies what Sohn terms ‘proximate memory assemblage’. Dictée (1982) by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; Hardly War (2016), DMZ Colony (2020) and Mirror Nation (2024) by Don Mee Choi; Autobiography of Death (2018) by Kim Hyesoon; and Ghost Of (2018) by Diana Khoi Nguyen engage in proximate memory assemblage by merging autobiographical writing with the collective cultural memory of the trauma and displacement resulting from the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The destruction and division of Korea and fractured diasporic identity as a consequence of forced migration is represented through literary and formal rupture, juxtaposing text with the often fragmented and contextless quotations, images, documents, and drawings salvaged from the wreckage of war.
Eliza Browning (Fri,) studied this question.