Jenn Thảo Nguyễn

In watching Tour of Duty (Kim and Park, 2012), I was deeply moved by its evocation of “memory particles”. This idea conjured scenes from our course material: Rama’s Medea Castaway; the archival reenactments in Stories We Tell; Finding Christa’s mother-daughter recital; and Omah Diegu’s tale of the snake. Each gestures toward Abraham and Torok’s notion of “transgenerational haunting”, and how fabulation — “building walls of delusion and hiding under dark oblivion” — seeks to release the deep kinetic energy of pain. They articulate “the unassimilable of trauma” and form an artistic archive of the labor mothers and children undertake to liberate the past from its living hosts.

In discussing the shift from Japanese colonization to U.S. military dominance, Grace M. Cho writes, “It was a psychic space between two wars, one of which would be forgotten”. We spoke of how silenced histories, once barred from public discourses, are displaced into the domestic sphere, intensifying the invisible labor of the mother. This forgotten war — still ongoing — is similarly etched onto the bodies of the yanggongju, refracted through a logic that recasts collective trauma as personal shame. This shame, carried in the softened body, is allowed release only when performed on behalf of the nation. To be erased, made blank, and re-screened through narrativization — no wonder the individual cannot find expression within this register. In turning to an affective and spectral epistemology, we glimpse how exhausting and unjust it is to be an emblem.

Tour of Duty’s resonance lies in its commitment to depicting the labor of continued living. Resilience is not a single act of reckoning, but dwells in the mundane: preparing meals, taking medication, stretching, drawing, singing. The film’s performance art sequences, constrained lighting, and static framing conjure a voyeuristic and uncanny affect. They reveal that rallying behind a figure does not resurrect the lost or repair the broken; that task remains with the women inhabiting a liminal estrangement, existing both within and without, as specters. Though they never sought the burden of holding the nation’s hard secrets, the leakage of this burden — through silence or second-generation disidentification — may still yet mark them as having failed in some alternate regard.

Fabulation re-emerges a method of surviving a subjectivity. Grace M. Cho’s navigation of gaps in visibility and autonomy echoes Bechdel’s way out and mirrors Ocean Vuong’s Künstlerroman, where reimagining our histories introduces a new logic: the rested rise, drinks refill, broken things mend. By invoking the phantasmatic, fabulation offers a glimpse into an otherworldly realm where the failures of the secular world might be rectified. Yet I wonder: do these creative acts of compensation sharpen criticality, or do they continue the haunting? By placing the labor of imagining wholeness onto mothers and children, do we inadvertently absolve policymakers from addressing pain before it becomes memory particles? Must we wait for time to pass through the woman, until she resembles the figurative mother or grandmother, before we return care to her? Or is she, too, entombed in a narrativized container, summoned as an unknowable known, an Argonaut for our epistemic violence?