Wedding Snapshots and Camptown Romance: Memory and Futurity in Korean American Family Albums

It is estimated that 50 percent of the Korean diaspora in the US is related to a Korean military bride. Through special visa status afforded to Korean women, known as yanggongju (“Western Princesses”), married to American servicemen, these women could evade stringent immigration restrictions against Asian individuals. Scholars and cultural leaders have mobilized photographs of yanggongju women with their American partners to further a gendered victimization narrative about the legacies of US military imperialism on the Korean peninsula. However, these small-scale, personal, romantic, and familial relationships between American servicemen and Korean women provide examples of women’s resistance in the wake of wartime. In this paper, I analyze my personal familial photographs from the 1960s-70s of my Korean aunt, a yanggongju, and her former military husband as a case study to complicate a broadstrokes nationalistic victim narrative. My aunt’s history begins from her experiencing a stigmatized interracial marriage, which is then followed by her relatively affluent American family life that obscured any references to escaping wartime contexts. These photographs that traveled over national borders uncover the traces of these fugitive women, normally relegated to the historical margins and camouflaged by the aesthetics of middleclass respectability. Engaging with different vernaculars of photography—including cheap studio portraits, professional wedding photography, and personal snapshots—my paper negotiates the recollection and remembrance of broader cultural, political, and social frameworks. The familial photographs saved in family albums serve as a counter-monumental site through which we uncover the hidden narratives and collective memories of an entire immigrant population.