Omissions, contradictions, haste: Triangulated Korean War knowledge in Still Life with Rice

Helie Lee’s family memoir Still Life with Rice (1996), which recounts her grandmother’s life, uses a polyphonic structure that interweaves divergent perspectives whose internal tensions mount a meaningful yet ultimately limited challenge to the American narrative of benevolence in Korea. Given its negotiation of multiple perspectives, Lee’s memoir can be read as a triangulated act of knowledge production about the Korean War situated at the crossroads of three positionalities: the refugee bearing embodied memory, the Korean American navigating inheritance and racialization, and the American imperial discourse that casts America as a saviour. The memoir bears witness to the costs of the US air war and expands Korean War memory by incorporating voices from the Korean diaspora in China as well as the Baik family’s relatives in North Korea. Yet it also displaces American responsibility, framing US military actions with omissions, contradictions, haste, and only muted critique. Through a triangulated lens, these ruptures appear less as flaws than as productive tensions among embodied, inherited, and imposed forms of knowledge.