Reading primers told stories of children who were beaten, bayoneted, burned, splashed with acid, or thrown into wells by villains who were invariably Christian missionaries, Japanese bastards, or American imperialist bastards. In a popular reader, a young boy was kicked to death by GIs when he refused to shine their shoes. American soldiers were drawn with beakish noses like the Jews in the anti-Semitic cartoons of Nazi Germany. Mi-ran had heard a lot about U.S. atrocities during the Korean War, but she wasn’t sure what to believe. Her own mother remembered the American GIs who drove through
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