Memories of My Ghost Brother

by Heinz Insu Fenkl

A young Amerasian comes of age as he grows up in the Korean city of Inchon and struggles to come to terms with his own identity and with his memories of a lost half-brother, whom his Korean mother sacrificed to marry his American father.

Genres: Memoir, Asian American, Nonfiction, War, Asia

288 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Heinz Insu Fenkl, born in 1960 in Bupyeong, Korea, is a novelist, translator, and editor. Fenkl is a professor of English and the director of the Interstitial Studies Institute at SUNY New Paltz.

His autobiographical novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, was named a Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection in 1996 and a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist in 1997, and his prose translation, Yi Mun-yol's short story, "An Anonymous Island," was published in the The New Yorker—the first Korean fiction to appear in that publication. Fenkl was guest editor for the special section on North Korea in the journal AZALEA, published by Harvard's Korea Institute. His translation of the classic 17th-century Korean Buddhist novel The Nine Cloud Dream by Kim Man-jung (Penguin Classics) was published in 2019.

Reviews

[Brand E with a Why]

What can I say? This is one of my faves of all time. I had the privilege of interviewing the author for my master's thesis, and our conversation added an incredible amount of depth to an already complex and moving book. This book is so haunting, even more so on a second read. I don't often read books more than once, but this is one of those to which I turn now and again.

[Jalilah]

This is a difficult book to rate. Parts like the mythical stories, are beautiful and spellbinding but the realistic parts often ugly and disturbing. ( comparisons to The Painted Bird are accurate) The author who is half American half Korean accurately and honestly conveys the multiethnic experience. In the case of this book it can be painful to read about.

[Brooke]

Wonderful narrative. Touching, real, eye-opening. But somehow the author makes it all feel like a distant memory. I wrote my senior thesis in college on this novel, and it is truly one of the better ones I've come across as far as I'm concerned. It's ghostly, funny and very human.

[Tom]

Wonderful childhood memoir.
Potentially lethal encounters with high speed trains and older neighborhood kids; some parts of this story could have happened anywhere. Also, for the author's boyhood self, mythological animals were real. At night, the countryside and the streets of Bupyeong were teeming with ghosts, goblins and other demons (of course not to be confused with Christian demons). Some aspects of the story are firmly rooted in Korea such the feeling of floor blankets shared with both family and extended family including a drunken and questionable uncle and a beloved Aunt that died too young.
Themes running the length of the book include collisions between culture and growing up with very flawed parents in a flawed society. For Insu to keep himself going he holds on tight to potential sources of stability and respectability when he comes across them such as his leather work teacher and the old men who teach him to chant the chonjamun.
Sadness pervades every part of the narrative. Insu is wracked with undeserved guilt that manifests as mysterious dreams. He catches hints of the family secret. When the truth comes to light, he finds more reason to hate himself, his parents and the world around him. This book then seems to be an exploration of the author's feelings of guilt and anger over experiences he was far too young to have been able to process. The book then deserves some kind of follow-up. It suggests that the events involving his brother can only be understood in one context, but has maturity and experience enabled him to understand events differently?

[Ri]

Honestly, I didn't really have high hopes going into this book. I had picked it up a few months ago at a book sale for charity. But ended up only reading it now and in 4 days!!!

I loved how it was lyrical it was. How beautifully everything was described. I loved how some, quiet moments, were remembered.

I feel that we all listen to our mothers' or grandparents' stories and think about how we are the result of all that. It has boiled down to you. And at the time you don't really think of continuing it.

One of my favourite quotes was on the last page;

"He is turning away from me when I see him, and he is always in white, a pure white that seems to throw of more light than the sun, and the air around him is bluish and darker than the rest of the world, like the air in a tunnel, like the air at night between the treetops and the moon, like the air between our two worlds. He is walking away from me into that next world, and I cannot see him emerging. He recedes into that fixed direction, and always, no matter how brave I have made myself by that time, I am too terrified to run forward and look at his face because I know it will look too much like my own. Kuristo, my ghost brother, has already gone into the Westward Land. Kuristo, a family dream from a time before my golden-haired GI father. This was the dream that had affixed itself in my mind, and I would wonder - could my mother have known that she would be standing with me and my sister looking up at the belly of a giant white serpent with scaly wings of silver."

[Luka Bam]

This book is the reason why I fell in love with reading

[Elisa]

Interesting details of a childhood in 60's Korea near an American Army base.

[Joe]

Really drags you into the mystical world of the author, however, I found it quite confusing and depressing at times. I guess it was an ok "one-time" read.