Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother: An Amerasian Rewriting of Rudyard Kipling's Kim

Abstract

Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother is an Amerasian rewriting of Rudyard Kipling's Kim. Fenkl transforms the adventures of a white boy in colonial India into those of an Amerasian boy in post-/neocolonial Korea and changes the Russo-British rivalry of the nineteenth-century Great Game into the Russo-/Communist-American competition of the twentieth-century Cold War. He resurrects the native voice silenced by colonial discourse and highlights the dilemma of Asian women and their biracial children. He ultimately denounces the troubling legacy of the US military presence in Korea and critiques the centuries-old Western imperialist project in Asia.