User:Cjhanley/Choi's 'Communicating Trauma'

Suhi Choi's "Communicating Trauma" paper, 2010 (see Further Reading)

Abstract

In 2000, the Associated Press investigative report team won the Pulitzer Prize award for reporting on the No Gun Ri incident in which American troops during the Korean War killed innocent civilian refugees who had taken shelter near and under the bridge called No Gun RLAs the primary witnesses of the No Gun Ri killings, female survivors have courageously communicated their unutterable trauma through both scripting and exorcizing. Through oral history interviews with survivors in South Korea, this article examines how the Confucian script of motherhood (i.e., mothers as reproducers, protectors, and expandable assistants of the male blood line) has enabled the No Gun Ri female rhetors on one hand to weave trauma into plausible stories, yet on the other hand provoked them to reflect on their memories with a sense of culpability. The findings of the study also suggestthat the oral form of communication has facilitated the female rhetors to exorcize inarticulable memories which cannot be subject to the Confucian script of motherhood.

Keywords memory, female rhetors, Korean War, motherhood, trauma

In autobiographical acts, narrators become readers of their experiential histories, bringing discursive schema that are culturally available to them to bear on what has happened. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 2001

Introduction

Since the War ended as an armistice in 1953, the U.S. collective memories of the Korean War rarely have contested the popular notion of sacrificial soldiers who risked their Jives to protect the innocent from the communists' inhumane actions. Until recently, atrocities committed by both South Korean and American troops have been barely introduced to American public. Thus, it was a surprising moment of memory when the Associated Press (AP) on September 29, 1999 wired the No Gun Ri story, a tragedy in which American troops killed innocent civilians during the early stages of the Korean War. The AP reporters cautiously collected testimonies from discrete memory sites including declassified military records aswell as testimonies from survivors and victims' relatives and from American veterans who had never met with Korean survivors since the war but surprisingly corroborated what they had witnessed (Hanley, Choc, & Mendoza, 2001). The newspaper story headlined with "War's Hidden Chapter: Ex-GIs TellAP of Korea Killing" and began with the following lines:

It was a story no one wanted to hcar: Early in the Korean War, villagers said, American soldiers machinegunned hundreds of helpless civilians under a railroad bridge in the South Korean countryside. When the families spoke out, seeking redress, they met only rejection and denial, from the U.S. military and their own government in Seoul. Now a dozen ex-Gls have spoken, too, and support their story with haunting memories from a "forgotten" war. American veterans of the Korean War say that in late July 1950, in the conflict's 'University of Utah, Salt Lake City Corresponding Author: Suhi Choi, Department of Communication, University of Utah. 255 S. Central Campus Drive. Salt Lake City, UT 841 12 Email: suhLchoi@utah.edu first desperate weeks, U.S. troops killed a large number of South Korean refugees, many of them women and children, trapped beneath a bridge at a hamlet called No Gun Ri. (Hanley, Choe, & Mendoza, 1999).

Echoing the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam War, the No Gun Ri killings did not leave any pictures that captured the moment of the atrocity. Rather, for more than five decades, the story has been remembered solely through the survivors' wounded bodies and minds. The AP's No Gun Ri report immediately was syndicated in numerous newspapers throughout the United States. On September 30, 1999, both the New York Times and the Washington Post placed the story on their front pages. Although the news about the American atrocity faced skepticism and ideological reservations, the veracity of the story ultimately sparked the Pentagon to dispatch official investigators to No Gun Ri village and won the AP reporters the 2000 Pulitzer Prize award for investigative reponing. However, the story has faded away from the public's attention since January 200 I, when Clinton's official statement brought a symbolic closure to the remembering of the No Gun Ri killings. Framing No Gun Ri as an unfortunate, accidental tragedy in a chaotic battlefield, the U.S. government decided not to give a formal apology to the South Korean people, nor would it ever offer financial compensation to the survivors and victims' relatives. Since then, many critiques have suggested that the U.S. official investigation intentionally overlooked significant testimonies and documents CHanley et al., 2001; Young, 2002), that No Gun Ri has to be reexamined within a larger context of the Korean War in which the U.S. myopic policy forced American soldiers to commit inhumane actions against Korean civilians (Conway-Lanz, 2005; Cumings, 2001; Hanley & Mendoza, 2007), and that the U.S. media's rhetorical construction of the No Gun Ri story largely silenced survivors' voices that would have contested the official accounts of the Korean War (Choi, 2008). Thus, the controversy surrounding the No Gun Ri story has not ended yet.

Encountering With the Female Narrators

In the summer of 2005, with the hope of grasping the No Gun Ri text on a deeper level, I conducted oral history interviews in South Korea with survivors and victims' relatives whose testimonies were the primary ones that were used in the U.S. media coverage of the No Gun Ri incident. T first encountered them at the memorial ceremony which took place in the very tunnel of the tragic incident. The No Gun Ri Bridge that I witnessed in July of 2005 was no longer a secret, hidden, Of silenced place. The memorial ceremony, organized by survivors and victims' relatives, was publicly July 28, 2005. picture taken by the author advertised with brochures that invited villagers, artists, local officials, and journalists. In contrast to the memory of the chaotic cave with defiled bodies, blood, and groaning, the tunnel as a site for the memorial looked very orderly. I saw the bridge filled with people in suits, lined chairs, and a neatly decorated altar embellished with flowers and incense. There, I could recognize familiar faces whose photos appeared in the U.S. media coverage of the No Gun Ri killings.

Since the beginning of the interview process, No Gun Ri narrators welcomed me as an attentive listener to their stories as well as a potential conveyer of their trauma to the American public. It was clear that they hoped that my research would contribute to challenging the public amnesia in the United States that surrounded the No Gun Ri incident. They welcomed me to their homes where I could encourage them to recollect the incident within their most comfortable context.

As each narrator has a different volume of memories- memories that they wanted to share-the length of the interview varied from about 1.5 to 3 hr. The interviews took place with an incredible flow: once started, the long threads of their stories poured out like streams of water. I was convinced that these survivors were actually very experienced narrators who seemed to have had considerable training in relating stories through their past participation in interviews conducted by media practitioners as well as by official investigators.

During the interview process, I followed several techniques that oral historians have developed to balance the power between researcher and narrators. In particular, I strove to share the authority of structuring the interview processthe format, flow, and questions-with the narrators themselves. Although I prepared a basic questionnaire that provided subjects with guidance as well as evoked their memories of the incident, I let the narrators choose where to begin their long stories and in what part of the stories theyenabled me to recognize an incredibly skillful group of rhetars of trauma: the female narrators of the No Gun Ri killings.

As eloquent speakers of their war experiences, the No Gun Ri females contest the notion that maJes-because they traditionally are more involved in warfare-are more entitled to or better equipped than females in communicating about war. In fact, the No Gun Ri females' testimonies suggest how women, unlike their male partners who highlight the historical and political backdrops of their memories, tend to contextualize trauma in terms of their relationships with loved ones as well as their location in the multiple settings of daily life and how they by doing so become competent communicators of the complexities and intricacies of trauma. In addition, these women did not end their stories at the last day of the No Gun Ri; rather, female rhetors became more intense and expressive when they recalled the days after the War.

What has powerfully emerged from the female rhetors' reflections on the aftermath of war is the endurance of trauma. Perhaps, my societal identity, that of a female researcher who grew up in South Korea, could be somewhat conducive to interaction between myself and the female rhetors. They seemed to acknowledge me not as one of the removed interviewers who was collecting their stories but as one of their own kind who could relate to their identity as mothers in a Confucian culture and who thus would be more likely to validate their long-ignored trauma. It was also interesting to note that female rhetors tended more than their male counterparts to make encouraging remarks about my identity as an academician. It gave me a sense that they might have recognized me as a symbolic icon who has vicariously fulfilled their longing for education, a goal that female survivors hardly could have achieved midst such turbulent life circumstances,

The ultimate goal of this essay is to deconstruct the ways in which female survivors witness their trauma. In their analysis oflife narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2001) note that trauma is not merely remembered; instead, it is an abstract cluster that can be "scripted and exorcised" (p, 23). Smith and Watson's insight has provided frames within which to examine how the texture of trauma has unfolded in rhetorical practice.l argue that the female rhetors in the No Gun Ri story became vocal and eloquent because they were able to read and speak their trauma through the filter of motherhood, the most plausible script of women's experiences under the legacy of Confucianism. By securing rhetors' locations (as mothers and mourners), the script of Confucian motherhood enabled female survivors to vehemently carry out their legitimate sorrows and pains. Reflected in Confucian heritage, however, the script also invited judgmental tonalities in the memories of female rhetors. Furthermore, the No Gun Ri female testimonies suggest how effective the oral form of communication can be for describing trauma. In recalling the incident, survivors not only scripted their stories but also exuded "inarticulable-and thereby deep" memories that oftentimes were incompatible with their narratives (Young, 2003, p. 277). Granting rhetors a variety of nonverbal means of expression, the oral form of communication not only facilitated female rhetors to exorcize inarticulable memories which could not be subject to scripting but also allowed them to manifest through their wounds the incommunicability of the repressed trauma.

The list offemale narrators whom I interviewed included Park Sun-Yong, who lost both her 5-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son; Chung Myong-Ja, whose mother and sister died and whose brother was severely wounded; Yang Hae- Sook, who lost her left eye and whose mother was seriously injured; Chun Chun-Ja, who lost her mother, brother, and grandfather; Chun Ok-Boon, an aunt ofChun Choon-Ja; and Keum Cho-Ja, whose right hip was disfigured in the incident.

At the time of the No Gun Ri incident. female survivors' ages ranged from l l years to 25 years. Except Park Sun-Yong, who was a young mother with two children, five narra tors survived the incident as daughters who witnessed their mothers' desperate protection of their children. Therefore, the identities of these interviewees as mothers were formulated not in the space of witnessing but in the subsequent rhetorical space in which they have constantly reflected on their memories of their mothers in the past while experiencing their own motherhood in the present. In the following section, I will introduce three types of stories identified in these female survivors' testimonies. Each story reflects how the female survivors recalled their memories as a way of reflecting on their thoughts as to what it means to be a good mother. I here remind readers that the survivors' testimonies in this article are presented in a culturally edited form that unavoidably reflects not only a linguistic incompatibility in the process of translating the words from Korean to English but also the researcher's own cognizance in the process of selecting original utterances.

The Three Types of Stories

Dedicated Mother

Mothers in the No Gun Ri incident in the past have made the most concrete and vivid testimonies about the incident because they happened to witness detailed images with their vigilant eyes while they desperately attempted to protect their children from bombs and bullets. After more than half a century later, however, these dedicated mothers have passed away. Many still-surviving narrators of the No Gun Ri incident were at that time children who barely survived beneath their parents' bellies and their neighbors' dead bodies. Chun Chun-Ja, who was I I years old, recalled haunting moments of how she witnessed her loved ones killed at the incident:

My mom was breastfeeding my baby brother (on the railroad). Since she skipped several meals, her breast milk was dried up. She asked me to get her water. She seemed to believe that if she drunk water, she could breastfeed her baby again. I was going to leave my mom to find water, but I couldn't. All of sudden, an airplane appeared making a big explosive noise. Ashes came down from the sky ... it was strangely dark ... I couldn't see my family. Soon after, I found my mom dead ... she had been bombed on her head. My baby brother was still alive suckling my mom's dead breast. (ChUBChoon-Ja, in an interview with author)

In this testimony, Choon-Ja's mother appears as an emblem of a dedicated mother who wants her worn body to be dedicated to the survival of her baby who was starving and distraught within the barren space of war. In the No Gun Ri story, a baby clinging to her dead mother's breast is a visual icon that shows how life and death are entangled with the civilians' vulnerable bodies amid the guerilla tactics of the war. It is a montage that contrasts life (a living baby) against death (a dead mother) as well as a symbolic binding of loved ones that protects life (the family) against a villain (the war) that is destroying that bond.

As determined protectors of children, mothers often seemed to commit heroic actions. As another example of a heroic mother, Yang Hae-Suk proudly recalled how brave her mother was at the moment of the air strafing that took her left eye: "I had seen airplanes t1ying in the sky those days, but that was the first time that I heard such a loud sound from airplanes. Planes flying toward us walking along the railroad tracks poured out something like fire. They were flames of fire," In the next moment, she found that her mother was dragging her two younger brothers under an acacia tree, She quickly followed them. While the strafing continued, Hae- Suk's mother desperately protected her sons and daughter from the barrage of bombs by covering them with her own body. Hae-Suk recalled that her pregnant mother laid face down with her two sons underneath her stomach. From fear, Hae-Suk also was hiding herself inside her mother's hemp skirt. When the sound of bombs exploded near them, Hae-Suk began to hear her mother's groaning. Her mother had gotten severe wounds on her legs but did not change her position of covering her children.

For Hae-Suk, the world outside her mother's hemp skirt became gruesome. She was devastated on seeing her uncle's body torn apart right outside her mother's skirt. The very moment that she heard her mother saying "why don't you lie on your face?" she felt something burning in her left eye. Hae-Suk said, "I cried out to my mom, saying 'mom, fire hit my eye ... something keeps coming out of my face.' I couldn't see anything ... I couldn't even see things oozing out from my eye." With other refugees' help, Hae-Suk, her mother, and her two younger brothers barely made their way to the No Gun Ri Bridge. Underneath the bridge, the baby brother died, but Hae-Suk and her younger brother Hae-Chan survived. Hae Suk's mother had suffered with wounds until she passed away.

In both Choon-Ja and Hae-Suk 's memories, mothers appear as protagonists whose heroic actions not only guided their children on the chaotic battlefield but also ultimately helped their grown-up children to make sense offragmented images and words in their recollections of the war. Moreover, the plausibility and poignancy of motherhood as a cultural script empowered the female rhetors to be vocal about how the war had actually devastated their loved ones as well as themselves. Evoking a sacred icon of Pietas, the No Gun Ri stories thus have become a robust collection of antiwar statements which commemorates dedicated mothers who heroically fought against the violence, destruction, and death that the war had created.

Disappearing Mother

A fierce war does not always render females good mothers in the eyes of their culture. There were females who could not fulfill their society's expectations of lofty motherhood. Keum Cho-Ja was one of the victims shot by American machine guns that had been aimed at refugees who frantically were running for cover behind trees and rocks when the air strafing began on the railroad. She was 12 years old at that time. When the bombs fell on the railroad, she, her mother, along with her younger brother and sister ran into a small cave near the No Gun Ri tunnel. However, as happened to many families, Cho-Ja's family was driven out of the cave and onto the street by the shooting: "As I followed my mom fleeing from the cave, I got a shot here ... (she pointed to a ball-sized lump on her hip) ... see, I have a bump here ... I saw my intestines come out from this spot."

Cho-Ja cried for her mother but could not stop her mother to get her to take care of her wounds. "1 shouted, 'Mom, I got shot' .. , however, my mom, carrying my brother on her back and my sister on her side, did not slow down her walk and told me 'if you can follow me, follow me. '" It was not possible for Cho-Ja to follow her mother who walked as fast as possible to save her two other babies. Ironically, with American soldiers' help, Cho-ja made it home safely. Later, Cho-Ja's mother, who had abandoned her during their flight, also returned home with her two babies. Although everyone survived, Cho-Ja's family was no longer the same as it had been before the incident. Cho- Ja's father harshly blamed his wife for leaving her wounded daughter behind alone. Cho-Ja said, "It was the first time that I saw my father slap my mom's check. He yelled at my mom that she should never have left her own child behind even if she herself would have died."

Like her father, Cho-Ja also found herselfdistanced from her mother. Since the incident, a hurt feeling of abandonment has kept Cho-Ja from repairing the relationship with her mother. Also, her wounded body, a bumpy scar on her hip with no feeling, has hurt her relationship with her husband throughout their marriage: " ... whenever he drank, I had to hear him saying 'I got married to a deformed girl.' 1 could not respond to him for thirteen years until he died." That was the first and last marriage in her life. As a single mother, Keum Cho-Ja bas raised four daughters by herself. She has worked as a door-to-door saleswoman peddling different articles from tofu to fish. She never left her daughters alone until they all found their soul mates and settled down in happy marriages.

Like previous narrators, Cho-Ja's story revolves around the theme of motherhood. Motherhood in Cho-Ja's story functions as a strong rhetorical device that makes sense of both her traumatic memories as well as their influence on her life. Yet in Cho-Ja's testimonies, what made C1lO-Ja's mother leave her own child behind remains unclear. Cho-Ja, however, heard that when her mother was trapped in the barrage of shots with responsibility for three children, a neighbor next to her quickly gave her the advice: "Your daughter seems to be shot badly. She won't survive. Let's leave here quickly to save your sons." Despite her eJTOIis, the story of Cho-Ja's mother seems to echo the didactic message that women should not abandon their loved ones in any situation, even on the verge of losing their own lives. Women who failed this lofty mission will not be recalled with pride. Rather, such survival will be remembered as a stigmatic mnemonic that reminds the next parental generation of what they should not do.

Survived Mother

Here is another story about persistent motherhood. Park Sun- Yang was 25 years old. She is one of the few surviving parental witnesses. She lost her 5-year-old son, Goo-Phil and 2-year-old daughter, Goo-Hi, at No Gun Ri. She recalled the moment of air-striking, an inferno-like scene on the railroad: "a dead cow spouted out a bloody flame," "bullets flew though the air like streaks of rain," and "people kept falling down dead." As ifshe were still on those railroad tracks, her words were stirring. When she arrived inside the tunnel, Sun- Yong found her sleeves had turned red with blood from her aim that was wounded by debris, but she did not feel any pain: "1 was just so happy to see that my babies, such poor creatures starving all day under the hot sun, were still alive." This incredible joy that numbed her physical pain, however, did not last. At sunset, her mother-in-law, who was carrying her 2-year-old daughter, Goo-Hi, informed Sun-Yang that her little girl had just been shot in the neck at the entrance of the tunnel. ;'1 became insane ... I felt like my soul was departing me ... " said Sun-Yang. For the rest of her life, Sun-Yang never asked her mother-in-law the details of how her baby daughter was shot.

At dawn the next day, Sun-Yong decided to escape from the tunnel as she could see no hope for her only remaining child, Goo-Phil, She woke up the servant boy, Hong-Ki, had him cany Goo-Phil on his back, and they all took off from the tunnel. When they were about to reach the bottom of the mountain, a crackle of shooting came toward them. Frightened, the servant boy left Goo-Phil and ran away alone. Sun- Yong found that bullets had tom a big chunk of flesh off Goo-Phil's thighs. Grasping her wounded baby with one arm, Sun-Yong tried to walk again, but the bullets were pouring again along the way. She recalled a flash of memory: "I saw a black soldier shooting toward us ... then, a bullet hit my abdomen. It seemed that the same bullet went through my son's body." Waiting for death, Sun-Yong was lying still on the hill. Her baby Goo-Phil was lying beside her. Later on, they were approached byAmerican soldiers who buried Goo- Phil's dead body on the hill and took Sun-Yong to a modern military hospital. Since that day, she never has returned to the No Gun Ri area where her baby was buried. In her memories, it was she who should have saved her children from the lethal weapons. She said, "It was my fault. I killed them. If I were protecting them better, they wouldn't have died. It was my responsibility." Despite public recognition of No Gun Ri, her own guilt has never seemed to fade away.

Females, the Primary Witnesses of the No Gun Killings

During the interviews, what struck me the most was the vivacious utterances of the female narrators about their own traumas. Traditionally, women's voices have not been included in war literature because "women are presumed to be absent from war" (Hanely, 1991, p. 7). Such a presumption about women's absence in war not only denies their actual presence as both civilians and soldiers on the battlefield but also symbolically eliminates "the proofofbeing there" which Zelizer (1998) argues would give rhetors the authority to relate their war stories. Yet the voca I female narrators of the No Gun Ri story resisted the conventional idea that women are either silent or modest rhetors in an androcentric discourse of war. In the No Gun Ri case, women were surely the primary witnesses of the kilLings as most patriarchs already had left their homes before the village turned into a battlefield. The extreme polarity of political ideology during the Korean War placed patriarchs' status in a highly vulnerable position. Although they were not associated with any political position, the harsh battlefield reality forced even ordinary Korean males to take a stand on one side or the other. Thus, family members all together were vigilant in protecting patriarchs, including the lives of young males who comprised the future patriarchs and therefore would CaITYon the family heritage as well as the lineage. In fact, when caught undemeath the No Gun Ri Bridge, elders and family members encouraged young males to escape from the tunnel. With their families' support on the first night under the bridge, several young males did succeed in making their way out of the tunnel. The elders, women, and children did not dare follow them because they worried that their clumsy movements would interrupt the young men '8 rapid escape.

After the young males' flight, one of the female survivors Chung Myoung-Ja recalled that the tunnel was full of women and children. She particularly remembered the presence of two female cousins who later died in the tunnel: "I was too young to follow the male escapers, but my female cousins could have escaped from the tunnel with the male adults; then they would be alive now. I am so sorry for their deaths at such a young, beautiful age" (in an interview with author). Without patriarchs, the women had to go through the nightmare of these 3 nights and 4 days during which they desperately sought any protection for the children. It is interesting to note that in the context of war, the somewhat paradoxical concept of manhood in Confucianism forced women to be the sole protectors of their children and-among those who survived-to be the primary witnesses to detailed images that the patriarchs never saw.

Nonetheless, seeing or experiencing docs not always result in bearing witness. It is not easy for witnesses of traumatic events to reconstruct the story of an incident because, as many scholars argue, traumatic memories (i.e., images etched in their bodies and minds) are "unreadable," "unsayable," and "incommunicable" (Caruth, 1991; Edkins, 2003; Smith & Watson, 200 I). Moreover, rhetors in trauma are caught in a paradox in that since the time of the disturbing events, they have been asked to relate the deadly moments of trauma (destructiveness) via their living, perhaps ever-recovering bodies (constructiveness). Thus, as Cathy Caruth (1991) puts it, we would benefit from analyzing survivors' utterances within a sense that death and survival are equivocally and yet inexplicably intertwined in their traumatic experiences: Trauma is not simply an effect of destruction but aIso, fundamentally, an enigma of survival. It is only by recognizing traumatic experience as a paradoxical relation between destructiveness and survival that we can also recognize the legacy of incomprehensibility at the heart of catastrophic experience. (Caruth, 1991, p. 58) Having arisen from a paradoxical junction between death and survival, the fragments of traumatic memories are blended together in a chaotic manner. In fact, during the interviews, I sensed that the No Gun Ri females' memories consisted of fragmented images and sounds such as foreign language, menacing commands, toru and swollen fleshes, and the bursting noise of shooting and bombing. What also struck me was that the survivors did not seem to lose their way amid such a maze of'rnemoncs. They instead were skillful and composed rherors who were capable of transforming entangled wads of "unspeakable" memories into lucid "speakable" ones.

Scripting "Unsayable" Memories With Motherhood

Images and sounds of trauma are often incomprehensible. They are primarily archived in living, yet wounded survivors' bodies and minds. Therefore, it is the survivors themselves who have exclusive and intimate access to reservoirs of unsayable memories. Yet such a privilege of access to reservoirs bestows survivors with the unique burden of relating "suffering that defies language and understanding" (Smith & Watson, 200 I, p. 22). Perhaps, posttraumatic stress disorder is not the condition of illness but a reflection of "our inability to allocate meaning to the event" (Edkins, 2003, p. 39). It is also critical to note that survivors' witnessing trauma is paradoxical because on one hand the deed decodes memories (substantiating the utterance oftrauma by scripting them with sets of narratives) and Oil the other hand the action encodes memories (weakening the utterance of trauma by arranging them with limited linguistic signs and structures). As rhetors performing such a paradoxical act, survivors somehow seem to find a unique way to navigate the complex sea of memories. Survivors locate, identify, and discover cultural scenarios which make sense of their memories particularly to other members of society who otherwise would not easily fathom the depth of their trauma.

Motherhood Under the Legacy of Confucianism

Since the Chosen Dynasty (1392-1910), Korea has adopted Confucianism as a ruling state ideology. Having indoctrinated the virtues of filial piety as well as rigid hierarchical relationships based on gender, age, and class, Confucianism in Korea has functioned as a cultural and political apparatus that has fostered absolute obedience to the elder, the patriarch, and the state. In Confucian culture, a woman is confined to a patriarchal family that permits her only "a contingent identity as wife and mother" (Choi, 1992, p. 107). The central role of women is to look after their husbands and parents-in-law with the virtue of submission and to nurture children with selfless dedication. Especially, given the Confucian patrilineage, the most expected duty for a woman is to give birth to sons who will carry on the family lineage as well as the heritage. Thus, a son resides in the core of a mother's identity. Only by producing and nurturing sons will her duties as wife and mother be fully credited (Choi, 1994).

Such traditional values of Confucianism are still deeply entrenched in modern South Korea. In the process of rapid modernization, South Korea has rejected some Confucian concepts such as monarchical government and anticommerciaiism that are incompatible with the path to capitalism yet still has maintained the traditional norms of social and family relationships (Duncan, 1997). As a salient example of surviving values, the Confucian notion of gender roles (i.e., the male as breadwinner and the female as reproducer) has been well preserved as an effective support for patriarchal ideology that naturalizes the gender-discriminatory labor market in the process of economic mobilization (Choi, 1992; Duncan, 1997). In particular, modem gender hierarchy in South Korea has been consolidated with the male-only military conscription, an institution that has reinforced the notion of gender division between "dependent housewife" and "provider husband" (Moon, 2005).

Such a strong legacy of Confucianism in modem South Korea has been the cultural context for the upbringing of the No Gun Ri female rhetors. Throughout their lives. they have been taught the virtue of self-deprecation, one of the Confucian notions of womanly behavior that asserts that a chaste woman is not supposed to "make her concerns, let alone her feelings, known to others" (Deuchler, 2003, p. 143). In keeping with these somewhat extreme, yet popular expressions of womanly behavior, the traditional Korean society has reminded women that they deserve being divorced by their husbands if they commit any of tbe seven evil actions tbat include "failure to give birth to a son; disobedience to parentsin- law; talkativeness; stealing; jealousy; adultery; and hereditary disease." Violation of any of these transgressions can validate a husband's initiation of divorcing his wife (Choi, 1994, pp. 191-192). Given tbis tradition, women are taught that reticence rather than talkativeness is a virtue. Besides Confucian virtues, the male dominancy in contemporary war discourse also has contributed to the presumption that women are modest speakers in communicating any aspects of war. Thus, witnessing the killings at the No Gun Ri Bridge has required the female rhetors to breakthrough dual conventions that are imposed by both Confucian codes and the androcentric discourse of war. Yet it is worth noting that Korean society's skepticism about women's authority over speaking could motivate female rhetors to seek out means that legitimize their voices (Campbell, 1989). Ironically, the No Gun Ri female rhetors did work to locate means available within those very traditional values that restrained their voices. They have voiced their trauma through the script of Confucian motherhood. As mothers whose identities are solely secured by their dedication to reproducing and looking after their families, the No Gun Ri female survivors have adamantly spoken out against the war which challenged them to fulfill such critical duties. In other words, the script of Confucianmotberhood (i.e., motbers as reproducers, protectors, and expandable assistants of the male blood line) has strongly positioned females as legitimate mourners who are entitled not only to vehemently cry out over the loss ofloved ones but also to rightfully partake in the act of soothing their pain and SOITOW.

Moreover, the women's witnessing of No Gun Ri inevitably resulted in actually altering the script of Confucian motherhood. Although a chaste woman under Confucian codes is expected to practice and claim her motherhood in a private, secluded corner of the family circle, the No Gun Ri female rhetors have let their images and words be widely displayed through the media which have brought their untold stories to the attention of international audiences. Tnwitnessing the killings, therefore, the female rhetors have modified a reclusive motherhood into a demonstrative motherhood that publicly pronounces their unyielding prerogative to protect their loved ones. As unreserved speakers, the female rhetors have performed in public spaces an intense lament for their losses. Such adamant testimonies also have echoed dissident voices that denounce the government's long oppression of counrermernories of past events. It is an ironic moment that Confucian motherhood, though altered, has contested another Confucian notion offilial piety: absolute obedience to the state.

Motherhood as a Double-Edged Rhetorical Device

The female survivors' memories seemed to have achieved a degree of articnlation when their stories are juxtaposed against the Confucian theme of motherhood that upholds that good mothers are reproducers and protectors of children (especially of sons). Characterizations of mothers in the females' testimonies are uniform in that they portray the incredible dedication and courageous actions that these women took to protect their sons: a mother who was looking for water only to enable her destitute body to breastfeed her starving baby son (Chun-Ja's story); a mother who shielded her sons underneath her stomach and would not budge even after fragments of bombing wounded her body (Hae-Suk's story); a mother who left her injured daughter behind to take her SOilS out of a dangerous battlefield as fast as she could (Cho-Ja's story); and a mother who dauntlessly escaped the tunnel to spare her SOil from seemingly unavoidable carnage (Sun-Yong's story). Certainly, mothers are the protagonists of these female survivors' stories, whereas their desperate actions for saving their sons comprise tbe axes of these stories through which the rest of their memories are interwoven and clarified.

Furthermore, such mothers' selfless acts of rescuing sons from the harsh battlefield were often assisted by the daughters. Young females during the war were expected to take a supporting role in protecting their baby brothers. This expectation reflects a notion of filial daughters in the Confucian family. Daughters under the patrilineage had no rights "because they were expected eventually to marry out uftheir families, they were expendable" (Choi, 1992, p. 104). As an archetype story ofthe filial daughter, in the time of modernization, many Korean young females from rural areas worked at sweatshops in Seoul to financially support their families and especially help their brothers to get higher education. Such themes of the filial daughter are also found in Myong- Ja's testimonies of No Gun Ri. She was II years old when she witnessed her mother's death in the tunnel with her younger sister and brother. As one of the most indelible images, Myong-Ja evoked the scene of her younger sister, Young-Sook, climbing down her dead mother's back and searched for her breasts out of hunger, while her younger brother, Goo-Hak, with a bleeding face, kept crying out for water. On the last day, as the survivors made their way carefully out of the tunnel, 110 one was really willing to take care of these children who were left without parents. Myong-Ja returned home alone, leaving her baby sister in the tunnel along with her younger brother, who everyone said would not survive. It may not be surprising that Myong-Ja's return was not ardently welcomed. The l l-year-old girl was blamed for not bringing her young siblings home. She was a survivor, yet one who failed to fulfill the duty of a filial daughter. Since then, Myong-Ja continuously has felt a distance from her own family who reminds her constantly of her guilt. Worse, the aftermath of the incident has gradually weakened her body. "Sometimes I imagine," she related, "what if I had never survived in the tunnel during that time?"

Such testimonies suggest that Confucian motherhood-in its identification of women as reproducers, protectors, and expandable assistants of male blood lines--can be a doubleedged rhetorical device in communicating trauma. On one hand, the concept of Confucian motherhood has enabled the No Gun Ri female rhetors to arti.culate their otherwise unspeakable memories; yet on the other hand, it has provoked the female narrators to judge their own and their loved ones' experiences in the war through the filter of a strict morality code that leads to guilt and blame. As the most conspicuous example of such duality, Sun-Yang recalled the deaths of her babies with parallel narratives. First, she roared as a mother with indignation over the injustice that took the lives of her children: "American soldiers must have considered us no better than scum; otherwise, they could not have undertaken such cruelty as killing those poor babies." Perhaps, the death of her own children is the most difficult memory for a female witness to bear.

Second, and quite paradoxically, Sun- Yong related her stories with a composed voice but one riddled with guilt. I doubt that she would ever have been able to communicate her trauma if she had not located both herself and her stories within the theme of Confucian motherhood. In this calm tone, she expressed a deep remorse by holding herself accountable for the death of her children. What struck me is that not until recently had she agreed to revisit the No Gun Ri Bridge that still retains the bullet holes with their stark evidence of what killed her babies. Nor did she attend any memorial ceremonies that have taken place under the No Gun Ri Bridge since the AP's report. It seems that she was taking a pilgrimage not to the bridge with bullet holes but rather to her own body and mind that are scarred with self-blaming. In such rhetoric of guilt, the culpability is not directed to the inhumanities of war but to the mistakes of individuals (often family members and often the speaker herself) that resulted in the loss ofloved ones. In brief, the script of Confucian motherhood appears to be a two-edged rhetorical device: it enables female rhetors to speak up at times with an indignant, even dissident tone yet still infuses the women with a blaming self-judgment that disregards their efforts at being good mothers or filial daughters and keeps these female rhetors from reading and speaking about war as a fundamentally inhuman, destructive apparatus.

Exorcizing "Inarticulable" Memories With Orality

Although triggering mixed sentiments of anger, disapproval, and culpability, scholars noted that the very process of articulating trauma can offer female rhetors mental healing and even catharsis. In her analysis of females' autobiographical writings, Suzette Henke (2000) elaborates on this process with the term scriptotherapv that refers to "the process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactment" (p. xii). Supporting Henke's point, Smith and Watson (200 I) also state, "speaking or writing about trauma becomes a process through which the narrator finds words to give voice to what was previously unspeakable" (p. 22). Coining the term, scriptotherapy ; Henke originally emphasized that a written form can be liberating particularly to female subjects because it allows them to publicly inscribe their personal stories onto the text, a traditionally patriarch-dominated medium.

Unlike Henke's subjects, however, No Gun Ri females have shared their stories not through writing but rather through speaking out. During the time of the Korean War, women in agricultural areas of South Korea were unaccustomed to expressing themselves via written forms of communication. It is not surprising that almost every written testimonial record regarding the No Gun Ri incident has been produced by either male survivors or male relatives of victims. For example, the first book regarding the No Gun Ri incident was written by Chung Eun-Yong, whom villagers tremendously respected as a man with an outstanding education as well as high integrity. Yet the primary story of his book was based on his wife's (Park Sun-Yong) recollection of what she witnessed. Chung Eun- Yong was not in (he vi 1- lage when the killings took place. T .ike many other young male patriarchs, he had decided (0 nee from his village before it turned into a battlefield. Right before the incident, he left his family behind, including his wife Sun- Yong, a son Goo- Phil, and a daughter Goo-Hi.

In various interviews (including one with the author), Chung Eun- Yong, as if he were at the scene, narrated in the first person what his wife, Park Sun- Yong, and his children had to go through while he was not with them. The husband and wife were apart from each other during the incident, but they seemed to dwell together even as one memory agent in recalling the No Gun Ri killings. It is worthwhile to note that although he did not witness the incident in 1950, Eun- Yong was for more than five decades the only one attentive to how the traumatic memory had brought endless suffering to his reticent wife, Sun- Yong. After several years of witnessing his wife's sleeplessness every night, Eun-Yong said in an interview with the author that he had decided to let people know of her traumatic memories by writing a book titled Do YouKnow Our Pain? (Chung, 1994). Sensing the easing of the Cold War ideology in South Korea, he finally publishedthe painstaking work in 1994. Certainly his book has played a critical role in transforming the No Gun Ri story from a local memory in a rural village in South Korea into a countemarrative contesting the international memory of the Korean War. Without Eun- Yong's book, the story of No Gun Ri may have lingered midst his wife's sleepless nights and nightmares.

As reflected in the st01Yabove, the written narrative within the context of lingering Confucianism could be viewed as a patriarchal medium to which females would have access only through their male partners. Oral testimonies thus have been the exclusive means through which No Gun Ri female rhetors have been able to convey their stories to many attentive listeners, including their family members, journalists, officials, and scholars from both the United States and South Korea. The No Gun Ri case confirms many oral historians' recognition that the oral medium has been more powerful than any other medium in preserving as well as disseminating vernacular memories that arc often found in the voices of voiceless and firsthand witnesses (Bodnar, 1989; Thomson, 2000).

Besides sheltering and cultivating vernacular memories, I also learned from the interviewing process that the oral form of communication provides rhetors who have survived trauma with more inclusive means of ex pression-both verbal and nonverbal-through which they can let out inarticulable memories. As Young (2003) notes, all eyewitnesses are "not testifying to 'what happened':' but to what they saw (p. 281). Thus, it is likely that eyewitnessing is a rhetorical practice that transforms abstract images caught in one's past sights into concrete terms available in a current society. Yet there are substantial images which cannot be easily conveyed through a coherent narrative, not even through a potent script like motherhood. For example, oral historians noted that when female narrators try to express alternative concepts which do not fit dominant meanings, they often mute their own thoughts and feelings (Anderson & Jack, 1998). Muteness in oral testimonies is not considered as a discontinuity of stories but rather as a reflection that a polysemous image (an original form of memory) cannot be expressed through words alone.

In the No Gun Ri case, however, female survivors hardly muted themselves. Regardless of the duration ofthe interview, they were lively, expressive, and fully present up to the final word. In particular, they continuously broke through the moment of incompatibility between images and words in testifying trauma. In fact, the constraint of words in oral communication seemed to force these rhetors to more aggressively use a wide range of nonverbal means of expression, which resulted in their engaging with the past in a more dramatic as well as intimate way. During the interviews, I noticed that the female rhetors, either unconsciously or consciously, exuded their feelings through multiple communicative modes which included a variety of body movements, fragmented sounds, sporadic pauses, and facial expressions.

As the most dramatic nonverbal action, several survivors voluntarily exposed their wounds, the living mnemonics of trauma that continuously have been remolded through their aging bodies. They recalled how wounds stigmatized and humiliated them, both in public and private spheres, and how hurtful experiences taught them that the display of wounds would provoke only disdainful looks and treatment from others. For more than five decades, the No Gun Ri female rhetors have practiced the masking of their wounds. In witnessing their trauma, however, they have willingly drawn interviewers' attention to the wounds as visual proof of their testimonies, as inexorable indictments for the war that unjustly consumed their bodies and psyches, and finally as voices over the inexplicability of trauma through vocality alone.

Masked wounds seemed to become unmasked, especially when the female rhctors felt pressured to condense their stolies within limited, allotted times. Hae-Suk, who lost her left eye at the incident when she was 13 years old, recalled how she could not resist exposing her private wounds to public eyes during her trip to America. She was among the six survivors and victims' relatives who came to America in the fall of 2000 to participate in a reconciliatory prayer service in Cleveland that was organized by the National Council of Churches; with the others, she also attended a news conference at the Pentagon. She recalls with a discontented tone, "At the Pentagon, each of us was allowed to have only twenty minutes to speak. Do you think it's possible to tell our story within twenty minutes?" Her deep frustration sparked her to take n surprising action in front of the officials: "I am a very proud lady. I never showed my glass eye to anyone, But in the Pentagon, I couldn't tight my anger ... my voice was choked.I couldn't tell things, J couldn 't hurry my words. So, (pulled out my eye, and put it on the table!" Her exasperation exploded again when the Pentagon investigative teams came to the survivors in South Korea. An advisory panelist documented Hae-Suk's ire in an account of his impressions of the No Gun Ri inquiry:

Seated across a long table opposite a dozen Koreans in a municipal building inYongdong, a few miles from No Gun Ri, we heard tales of horror. Most of the Koreans with whom we talked had been children in 1950, but their memories, while inconsistent in some instances, had the ring of truth ... (abbreviation) ... A stunning and unnerving moment came when one women, now middle-aged, plucked a glass eye from its watering socket and exclaimed, 'This is what I have lived with all these years. ' When we left the interview, so did our sense of detachment. We were a subdued group. (An advisory panel; Trainor, 2001) Hae-Suk's action expounds an inseparable link between trauma and body. By granting rhetors immediate access to their wounds, the oral form of communication has enriched a rhetorical space of trauma where survivors' intense body gestures potently implicate the meanings that their words evoke, As semiotician Roland Barthes (1964/1977) noted, visual utterances often can be anchored by verbal utterance in any rhetorical space. Yet female rhetors' nonverbal expressions are often solid enough to complement, complicate, and even contradict what was said in oral testimonies. In the survivors' oral testimonies, the power relationships between images and words seem to be contested, if not reversed. By dialectically linking bodily signals with words, the No Gun Ri female survivors communicated not only coherent narratives but also paradox, irony, incoherence, and disjuncture, all of which are essential textures of traumatic memories.

In brief, the No Gun Ri females' testimonies show that the act of communicating trauma takes place through both scripting and exorcizing. Although the script of motherhood (rhetorical device) has allowed the No Gun Ri female survivors not only to negotiate with given cultural norms but also to transform their "enigmatic" trauma into "intelligible" stories to which anyone can relate, the form of oral communication (rhetorical space) has enhanced the performative dimension of testimonies by providing rhetors with the means to exorcize trauma which cannot be entirely subject to the act of scripting. As noted before, scripting is therapeutic because it provides the narrators with an opportunity to associate words with seemingly unidentifiable images of trauma. I argue here that exorcizing can elevate such therapeutic effects by enabling survivors to extend their access to their trauma, even to inarticulable ones. Thus, therapeutic effects are not only the result of "articulation" but also the reward for "letting out."

Concluding Remarks

The No Gun Ri female survivors whom I met during the summer of2005 were no longer mere victims of the traumatic incident; rather, they were vigorous rhetors who actively navigated the incredibly complex sea of traumatic experiences. They also were skillful choreographers in a rhetorical performance in which they proficiently dealt with disparate paradoxes, tensions, and ironies that arose in the process of relating trauma: the rhetors' enigmatic existence between death and the survival; their paradoxical acts of both encoding (substantiating) and decoding (emasculating) trauma; the tension between judgmental tonality and semantic plausibility in the script of motherhood; and finally the pull between images (bodily gestures) and words (narratives) in the oral form of communication.

Their remarkable eloquence is even more impressive when we realize the set of rhetorical constraints that prevented these women from being vocal rhetors in the first place. Until the beginning of 1990s, the authoritarian regime 0(' South Korea symbolically annihilated any stories that implied the killings of civilians by the U.S. or South Korean troops. The situation was not much different in America. Given the official account of the Korean War that glorified American troops as saving agents in 1950s' Korean peninsula, stories like 0 Gun Ri could hardly find any place in U.S. collective memories of the War. Although such political sensitivities have been alleviated to the point that No Gun Ri finally found media outlets, conventional codes from both the legacy of Confucianism and the androcentric discourse of war have not encouraged the No Gun Ri female survivors to initiate testimonies nor to take as active a role as did their male partners in conveying their stories to others. As a clear example, Park Sun-Yong's memories that make up the backbone ofthe No Gun Ri story were not communicated by her; rather, her memories at first were introduced only through her husband's writings. Even now, female survivors' public exposures (interview schedules) are mainly mediated by the No Gun Ri Committee whose leadership is composed of male survivors and male relatives of victims.

Remarkably, however, such rhetorical constraints have not muted the female survivors. Rather, as Campbell (1989) originally notes, both prejudice against their stories and cultural expectations of modesly seemed to have motivated the female rhetors to be more cautious about "how to voice" as opposed to "what to voice" in their testimonies. Particularly, the No Gun Ri female rhetors have made use ofthe theme of motherhood to render their unbearable traumatic experiences as plausible and humanistic stories to which everyone, regardless of their political predisposition, could relate. With the Confucian seript of motherhood, the No Gun Ri female survivors have successfully negotiated given cultural norms, whilc turning themselves into vigorous rhetors who read, script, and ultimately cry out their long-ignored sufferings to others. The No Gun Ri females' testimonies also corroborate that well-woven stories in memory construction render "the contingent and discontinuous facts of the past" to be "intel! igible" (Lowenthal, 1985, p. 218). Through the process of transforming enigmatic texts in the past into plausible narratives in the present, female narrators have shifted their relationships with their own suffering. In the past, they were passive, even hopeless pain takers who could not resist the strike of suffering at the moment of the incident. Yet they, in their present recalling, appear to deter the momentum of trauma by identifying and locating the implication of their suffering within the larger context of both their personal and social lives. Most of all, through the implicated manifestation oftheir suffering, female rhetors resist "the myth of a protected zone for women and children" that has been nourished in an androcentric discourse of the war (Hanley, 1991, p. 134).

In contrast to the macro, hero-oriented statistical readings of war, female survivors' memories filtered through motherhood have revealed how a war can boldly and intricately devastate each individual's life. The No Gun Ri females' testimonies also have exposed how scripting of memories can be subject to society's conventions that have produced the very script. The three types of stories--dedicated mother, disappeared mother, and survived mother-have reflected with varying degrees the conventional narrative of patriarchal ideology: a polarization of motherhood to the heroic saga or to the guilty loss of loved ones. Although this process has empowered female rhetors to articulate their unspeakable memories, scripting through Confucian motherhood has not brought immunity to the patriarchal ideology in constructing narratives.

Besides scripting, the No Gun Ri female rhetors also have made an effective use of nonverbal means of expressions that were largely available in the oral form of communication. Through their bodily performance (gesture, movement, and facial expression) and their low definition of vocality (stuttering, mumbling, pause, and muteness), survivors have exorcized (let out) their inarticulablc memories which could not easily have been subjected to scripting. Their testimonies have reminded us that human bodies are the oldest yet still the richest medium for a complex subject like trauma, even among the dazzling list of new media. Most of all, it was thrilling to note that the survivors' exorcizing through oral testimonies transformed their fragile bodies into the most formidable means for sternly indicting the very war that shattered their bodies. It was at the moment of overdue exasperation that the female survivors proclaimed their long-hidden trauma, and it was also at the moment of overdue reclamation that they restored the ownership (that is, the rights to read, speak, and mourn) of their own suffering that had been appropriated both by the war and by the androcentric discourse of the war.

Through this research, I have come to realize that what survivors really wanted to communicate with the rest of us was not necessarily what really happened in the past but the perplexity ofrelating trauma in the present. In fact, one can only begin to communicate trauma when he or she recognizes the inexplicability of traumatic experiences. As Caruth (1991 ) notes, the truth of trauma is linked not solely to "what is known" but also to "what remains unknown in our very actions and language" (p. 4). Perhaps, the enigmatic cluster of feelings that survivors exude through exorcizing simple signals suggests that there are only tenuous rhetorical resources in communicating trauma. Perhaps, the plausibility of female survivors' testimonies implies not how much they can articulate their trauma but bow much we can grasp the trauma of others. To understand such a grasp more fully, one must peruse not only what was uttered but also how, in what context, against what constraint, and finally with what script and medium such traumatic memories have been communicated to us.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

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Bio

Department of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. Her current research focuses on the countermemories of the Korean War that emerge from various forms of media including the documentary, news media, oral testimonies. memorials, and statues. Her scholarship has appeared in Asian Cinema, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and Media Culture and Society.