Army brat returns to home he no longer recognizes
Insu, the 14- year- old narrator of Heinz Insu Fenkl’s autobiographical novel, “Skull Water,” is mourning the Korea of his memory. The son of a Korean mother and a German father — a sergeant in the U. S. Army — he has just returned with his family to the Seoul region after a year in Germany, where his father had been stationed after service in the Vietnam War. Back in his native country, Insu feels a “profound disappointment” in its “new density,” noticing “the summer sweat on my flesh sticking with a different thickness.” His gaze remains this specific and melancholic throughout the novel.
Unfolding between the summers of 1974 and 1975, “Skull Water” is more contained than the average coming- of- age novel, offering a discrete window onto the trials of adolescence. Insu is often naïve to his own desires. The teenager cannot name what he hopes to find when he visits Big Uncle, his mother’s ailing brother who lives like a hermit in the woods. When Insu then recruits his friends to search for “the water that soaked down into a human skull after the body had been buried” — a traditional remedy that might cure his uncle — the errand seems, at first, to be more about the thrill of the adventure.
While Insu is focused on logistics, Fenkl intervenes with intermittent chapters written from Big Uncle’s point of view, revealing parallels between the two characters that Insu cannot yet perceive. Big Uncle flashes back to 1950, the first year of the Korean War, when he eats the same military rations that Insu eats 24 years later, both living beneath the U. S. military’s shadow. Big Uncle observes crows feasting on the corpses of neighbors; Insu watches crows descend on a dead dog. Knowingly or unknowingly, Insu is tethered to his family and to history, even when he feels disassociated from them.
Fenkl depicts Insu’s mixedrace experience with equal nuance, revealing how his appearance grants him broad access to both Korean society and the military community. When Insu translates for an American G. I. photographing a Korean farmer, he has the trust of both parties, opting not to convey the farmer’s insult to the American. The position may come with its own alienation: Insu mentally catalogs every article of the farmer’s clothing with the fastidious eye of an anthropologist. But Fenkl doesn’t force Insu, or the reader, to make any quick judgments on the politics of the interaction.
Despite his meticulous attention to detail on the scene level, however, Fenkl sometimes neglects the more macroscopic continuities of plot and character. Insu begins the novel, for example, intent on visiting the grave of Gannan, a cousin who died by suicide years ago. What is surprising is not that he never reaches it, but that halfway through the book Gannan disappears from his mind altogether. Readers of Fenkl’s first autobiographical novel, “Memories of My Ghost Brother,” will know the depth of Gannan’s story, but for the uninitiated her treatment here is cursory. There are other more mundane inconsistencies: Fenkl haphazardly characterizes Insu as a bookish teen who goes everywhere with a “Pilot fountain pen” in his shirt pocket, but although Insu picks up pulp fiction here and there, he never uses the pen or demonstrates an attachment to books or writing. Even if such elements of “Skull Water” are based on the author’s life, Fenkl doesn’t manage to integrate them into the fabric of fiction.
“Skull Water” therefore feels realistic to a fault, Insu’s preoccupations coming and going, abandoned or cut short by the cruelty of circumstance. At the end of the novel, his reacquaintance with Korea is interrupted by his father’s relocation to California. Insu will suffer, again, “a goodbye to all the people and places I knew, a powerless endurance of unwanted events, one after the other, endless packing and unpacking.”
Though Insu remains at sea in his alienations — of geography, adolescence, race — the reader can detect the latent pattern between grieving loved ones and grieving a home that no longer exists. Near the novel’s end, Insu learns of Big Uncle’s death, reflecting, “I felt numb and empty.” Then he leaves the house and one mourning seeps into another, for Korea: “The unpaved street I took would be asphalt soon. … It would happen to every dusty street eventually.” Seeing such personal and national sorrows side by side, the reader appreciates how any kind of loss is ultimately made up of everyday, nameable parts.