Summary of SEAA Reads, session 18 from October 3, 2026

Seeing like a Child, Inheriting the Korean War by Clara Han (Fordham U. Press)

The fall book club was hosted by Nan Kim for the ten colleagues across several time zones. With the prospect of the author joining the online discussion after the first hour an innovation was to invite readers to send in a question or impression to the host ahead of time so the author would have a sense of the group. One of the recurring topics in those responses was “inheritance” (emotional, cultural, familial, historical, and so on), which also formed the subtitle to the book. The main title points to the mode of absorbing one’s surroundings and forming ideas about how this world works - not with neat categories, published theories, or other grown-up methods, but in the emergent way that a child’s understanding and level of trust shapes the subject at hand. In other words, much of the book is formative rather than summative; more participant than observation. Readers, much as the author herself, grow page by page to understand the nature of trauma from war and displacement, immigration, and ties to the old country. She lets readers into the realizations as they are emerging in her mind.

    Compared to traditional ethnographies that thread together scenes and meanings, build on native keywords and ideas [e.g. ‘han’ in Korean language and society for grief unrequited; ‘uri’ for us/ours as boundary], and sometimes reconstruct dialogue or visual illustrations, Seeing like a Child is closer to First-Person point of view. Readers process the scenes and significance partially and without completion, even as the meanings take shape in the mind of the writer. From the author online we learned that the cinematic telling came from memories, not from diaries or fieldnotes as such. Primary documents like family photos and letters sent by relatives remaining in Korea contribute to the vividness, too. Only near the end of the book does the author come to the realization that the many pages of letters now in her possession form a familial archive that none of the cousins back in Korea know about. 

    One thing about the disarming writing is that the writer’s voice is akin to the trust held between friends, rather than a formalism typical of academic persuasiveness. As such the reader becomes part of the sense-making and worldview creation across the pages and the years recounted. No matter how painful, personal, or intimate the lines on the page, somehow the author holds a certain distance from being swept up or being swept away. 

    As for the question about how this book fits into the larger literature on wartime aftermath, diaspora and internal displacement (North to South Korea, and sometimes the reverse, too, at first), one reader pointed out how the point of view of expat Koreans like the author’s family in USA, is particularly valuable for articulating the many strands and layers so that Koreans remaining on the Peninsula can understand these complicated factors that they also may be affected by and yet may not be able to articulate in the same way. Another reader noted the many fragments forming the author’s experience do somehow form a whole toward the end of the book in an arc of redemption or “making sense in the end.”

    When Clara Han joined the online circle the discussion turned to the making of the book; how it came into its final shape and the working methods for describing in such vivid clarity the complicated experience of being raised by war-displaced immigrant parents, distant relatives, pressures of the host society norms in addition to traces of Korean expectations that lingered. Later came the premature death of her mother and ultimately the decline and care of the father. It turns out that the entire manuscript came together in the summer after he moved in with her partner and child. The writing came in bursts during brief stretches of respite from the intensity of caring for her father in dementia. Significantly, the writing gave shape to the things she was experiencing not just on her own but in dialogue with Andrew Brandel, whose own inheritance is of European Holocaust survivors. The underlying theme of displacement worked back and forth in their informal discussions, entering in some way into Seeing Like a Child.

    The online session normally ends around then, but the author was able to extend her time and most readers were keen to learn more, so the book club went into overtime to hear the idea of a “feminine region of ethnographic writing” in which episodic things, emotional swells, experiences small and large are not neatly ironed out, categorized, or filtered away. Not the standard participant-observer adopting the voice of “let me see if I can explain this thing I am documenting.” Not taking up the subject of displacement to answer “what” and “why,” but instead to dwell on HOW to enter into the subject; and HOW to move around that terrain once in it. Displacement means your home is gone while you are still in it; physical traces are mostly absent, but mental markers live on.

     Near the end of the evening discussion the question of publishers and being able to see this book into its finished form came up. This led to a larger discussion of the fraught 2026 climate of federal funding quixotically being rescinded, proposals ‘not being aligned with current goals of [oligarchs]’ and so on. Pr. Han ended by saying she was disappointed with the ever narrower gate for publishing; disappointed with our [higher education] institutions –how they are speaking to us [intellectuals].

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The next session of SEAA Reads will be the first part of 2027.