Author’s novel is inspired by his nomadic childhood
Heinz Insu Fenkl’s autobiographical novel “Skull Water” (Spiegel & Grau, $28) was 25 years in the making. Born in South Korea and raised there, as well as Germany and the United States, the author said that being a biracial child made him stick out wherever he was. In the 1970s, his family took a crosscountry road trip from Washington state to New Jersey to catch a (Military Airlift Command) flight to Germany. “We weren’t allowed to enter diners in the South because we were taken for Native American,” said Fenkl, who’s a professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz. “It made my father furious that we would all have to sit in the station wagon to eat. It was also very hard for us to find motels that would allow a white man with a Korean wife and four mixedrace children to stay. So we spent some nights all sleeping in the car.”
The author resides with his family in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Q: Did you write any of your novel away from home?
A:
I was fortunate to be on sabbatical for a semester when I wrote most of “Skull Water.” My daughter happened to begin college that semester, so I would sometimes have lunch with her on the Vassar campus and then spend the time between lunch and dinner in the basement of the beautiful (Frederick Ferris) Thompson Memorial Library writing at some of the same desks I used when I wrote my undergraduate
creative thesis back in 1982. That undergraduate thesis was the beginning of my first novel, “Memories of My Ghost Brother” (which is) the prequel to “Skull Water.”
Q: You lived in South
Korea until 1 9 7 2 . How much of “Skull Water” is based on memories versus research?
A:
My memory of that time is very vivid, but I did end up doing a fair amount of research mostly to confirm my recollections. “Skull Water” is set in the 1950s and 1970s, so for the Korean War sections, I had to do some archival research to confirm some of the background details. I had visited Korea in (the mid ’80s) and then again in 1996. By 1984, some of the settings had been entirely changed because of development, but much of the Yongsan Garrison — the U.S. Army base in the middle of Seoul — was virtually unchanged from the 1970s. That was a great memory refresher as well as a source of nostalgia. My mother’s village, on the other hand, was pretty
much gone by that time.
Q: What was it like moving from country to country as a child?
A:
(We lived in) Baumholder, the largest U.S. Army base in Germany, before moving to the
U.S. (when I was 16). Our family lived in an Army base just north of Monterey in California. I went to high school at Seaside, which was a town where lots of former military families had settled. The community was largely African American and other people of color, and the school I attended was very diverse. But race relations among the various minority groups in the high school were very tense, even while each of these groups were discriminated against by the white community. My group of friends seemed to reflect the diversity of military families: Japanese American, Korean American, German American, Filipino American and two WASPs.