Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War

by Clara Han, Richard Rechtman (Foreword)

Winner, 2022 Senior Book Prize, Association for Feminist Anthropology
Finalist, 2022 Victor Turner Prize

An utterly original and illuminating work that meets at the crossroads of autobiography and ethnography to re-examine violence and memory through the eyes of a child.

Seeing Like a Child is a deeply moving narrative that showcases an unexpected voice from an established researcher. Through an unwavering commitment to a child’s perspective, Clara Han explores how the catastrophic event of the Korean War is dispersed into domestic life. Han writes from inside her childhood memories as the daughter of parents who were displaced by war, who fled from the North to the South of Korea, and whose displacement in Korea and subsequent migration to the United States implicated the fraying and suppression of kinship relations and the Korean language. At the same time, Han writes as an anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to the devastated worlds of her parents―to Korea and to the Korean language―allowing her, as she explains, to find and found kinship relationships that had been suppressed or broken in war and illness. A fascinating counterpoint to the project of testimony that seeks to transmit a narrative of the event to future generations, Seeing Like a Child sees the inheritance of familial memories of violence as embedded in how the child inhabits her everyday life.

Seeing Like a Child offers readers a unique experience―an intimate engagement with the emotional reality of migration and the inheritance of mass displacement and death―inviting us to explore categories such as “catastrophe,” “war,” “violence,” and “kinship” in a brand-new light.

Genres: Ethnography, Anthropology

208 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2020

Reviews

[Ethan Park · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a third-gen Korean immigrant, I did not find myself relating to the affect experienced by Han in her exploration of her childhood, but I still cried probably about four times while reading this. Truly incredible insight, always preceded by rich prose and story-telling. This is wonderful intellectual work. Passionate, curious, well-intentioned, and painstakingly critical of the theories we as adults (those who engage with theoretical constructs to define our experiences) use that might overwrite the meaning of one’s formative experiences that, surely, eludes capture by a formalistic “reflection.” Reflection is mere philosophical abstraction if it remains outside of affect. I felt this book. I felt Han. One of the most striking insights is her reflection on the “lethality of care.” Making sense of the double binds that followed her throughout her entire life reflects a mind involved in manners far beyond a project of self-actualization. She makes sense of her life for all of us. A great gift to us all.

[Yara Changyit-Levin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for an anthropology class in college, and it was one of the most striking readings we've had all semester. At first I was intimidated that we had to read an entire book in a short amount of time, but now I'm glad that the professor asked us to read the whole thing rather than an excerpt.

Most of the book consists of beautifully written, detailed memories. Then, the interludes reference the wider field of scholarship and analyze the memories academically. I was very interested in these balances, between personal and scholarly writing, first person and third person, and present and past tense.

[Antoinette Moros · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complex yet interesting auto- ethnography