Traditionally, the history that we know about the Korean War has focused on violations of the thirty-eighth parallel, the line drawn by American and Soviet officials in 1945 dividing the Korean peninsula. New York University professor and Korean-American Monica Kim wrote a history of the Korean War that completely shifts that perspective.
Kim's The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War refocuses history from the battlefield to inside the interrogation room, showing how the Korean War evolved from a fight over territory to one over human subjects. And Connecting Vets got to talk to her about it.
Connecting Vets: Why did you decide to write a book about this topic?
Monica Kim: I'm second generation Korean-American, and when I was growing up the Korean War was everywhere but also nowhere at the same time. My parents are children of the war and the aftermath of the war, but they didn't really speak about the experiences that they had or how it impacted our family until I grew up. So when I went to graduate school and began researching the Korean War I really wanted to do something bottom-up. Something that starts with the ordinary people's experiences — not just high-level diplomatic documents.
CV: How did you go about uncovering that narrative when no one has really studied that history before?
MK: I turned to the files of the inspector general. I just sat down and started going through these files to get a sense of how people were experiencing things on the ground. At some point, I started noticing the name of U.S. military interrogators — they were Japanese-American names. I realized no one had any idea what languages were being used in these rooms, if there were translators — none of that is present in the documents. That was really important for me because these documents are what historians all use to write these histories.
CV: So that's where it all started — with Japanese-American interrogators. Where did it take you? How long did it take?
MK: From beginning to end it took about 12 years. I interviewed 11 or 12 interrogators. I went to Korea where I did a lot of archival work. I went to the sites of different POW camps and did interviews with former POWs. One of the reasons it took so long was because I was really committed to following the paper trail.
CV: What was one of the most impactful things you learned from this research?
MK: So many of us have an idea of interrogation rooms as something hidden in some sort of darkened room elsewhere. For me, after doing this research, I really understand how interrogation was both very ordinary and very global at the same time. It's a global story. When you go inside the interrogation room, you think of it as a very specific space. But then you look at the experiences and who is actually in that room. You realize they've had experiences outside that room previously.
CV: What do you hope readers take away from your book?
MK: I think especially for U.S. readers — the American public often thinks of the Korean War as the forgotten war. I want readers to walk away understanding that this wasn't just a war that happened "over there." It deeply impacted what has happened over here.
To purchase The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War click here.
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