Seeing Like a Child

An original blend of autobiography and ethnography that re-examines violence and memory from the perspective of a child of Korean War survivors.

This “deeply moving” narrative (Heonik Kwon, author of After the Korean War) showcases an unexpected voice from an established researcher. With an unwavering commitment to a child’s perspective, Clara Han explores how the catastrophic event of the Korean War is dispersed into domestic life.

Han writes from inside her childhood memories as the daughter of parents displaced by war, who fled from the North to the South, and whose displacement in Korea and subsequent migration to the United States implicated the fraying and suppression of kinship relations and the Korean language. At the same time, Han writes as an anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to the devastated worlds of her parents—to Korea and to the Korean language—allowing her, as she explains, to find and found kinship relationships that had been suppressed or broken in war and illness. A fascinating counterpoint to the project of testimony that seeks to transmit a narrative of the event to future generations, Seeing Like a Child sees the inheritance of familial memories of violence as embedded in how the child inhabits her everyday life.

Seeing Like a Child offers readers a unique experience—an intimate engagement with the emotional reality of migration and the inheritance of mass displacement and death—inviting us to explore categories such as “catastrophe,” “war,” “violence,” and “kinship” in a brand-new light.

“An extraordinary book, bursting with critical insight and affective power.” —João Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment