Multipolarity and Cold War Traces in Paul Yoon’s Fiction

• In Event: Asian American Formations and the Literature of Late-Stage American Empire

Abstract

This paper examines the Korean American writer Paul Yoon’s two novels—Snow Hunters (2013) and Run Me to Earth (2020)—as examples of contemporary Asian American fiction that belong to the time of late-stage American empire. While Yoon’s novels thematically revisit the Cold War— particularly the hot wars of the Cold War waged in Asia—stylistically they advance a cultural memory that is attuned to a multipolar world. In Snow Hunters, Yoon imagines the life of a North Korean ex-POW of the Korean War in Brazil. The historical repatriation debates during the Korean War involved the option of repatriation to a “third” country, a symbolic opting out of the bipolarity of the Cold War chosen by a small minority of POWs. Yoon’s novel uses the historical event to imagine a non-aligned space free from the strictures of the Cold War for potential healing. In Run Me to Earth, Yoon sheds a light on a little-known tragedy of the Second Indochina War, the massive US air bombings of Laos through the perspectives of young, orphaned Laotians. By following the trajectory of one orphan out of Laos to France, Yoon ponders the legacy of Western imperialism in Southeast Asia. Both novels render in beautiful prose and images the struggles for survival on the part of the people impacted the most by wars. Ideology is hardly what motivates people in these novels. As one character in Run Me to Earth puts it, “So many didn’t even know the difference between a Communist and an anti-Communist, they just wanted to survive” (155). The paper queries how Yoon imagines the basis for individual action and for social relationships outside the terms of Cold War ideologies. Does Yoon’s vision of humanity and social relations in his novels recuperate the complexities of Cold War conflicts long suppressed in the Cold War episteme? Or does it muddy the waters regarding the legacy of these wars on Asian victims and end up supporting liberal triumphalism at the end of the Cold War? The paper works through these questions to think about the aesthetic possibilities of a post-Cold War Asian America.

Author

• Jeehyun Lim, University of Texas, Austin