10/22/2026
“The Korean Wave crashes onto the shores of history, washing away the shame like a baptism in the river Jordan — opening up the world to the reality that when we confront our past, speaking truth to power, we can break the haunting."
Last month, Sias Graduate Fellow Whitney Yi Knapp read from and discussed his creative dissertation "To Understand Everything," a novel that confronts South Korea’s state-sanctioned military s*x industry that served U.S. troops and subjected over one million women to s*x work over several decades. Knapp noted that Korean American literature often addresses the comfort women of the Japanese occupation, but rarely acknowledges this later industry or the yanggongju, a pejorative term meaning “Western princess” used for women who associated with U.S. servicemen.
Drawing on his own family history, he described how this unprocessed trauma can pass unconsciously from one generation to the next as a kind of haunting. Knapp set this history against the global rise of the Korean Wave, or "hallyu," including Parasite’s Best Picture win and the popularity of K-pop groups such as BTS.
