Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Tribune
January 31, 2023
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 cross-country 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 mixed-race 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. Readers may pre-order copies of “Skull Water” here.
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: What foreign languages do you speak?
A: I speak [fluent] Korean and [some] German. Now that I’m past 60, it’s much harder to retain new vocabulary, but I used to be good with languages in my youth!
Q: What is your best and/or worst vacation memory?
A: One of my best vacation memories is my wife and I wheeling our baby daughter down the street in Cape May with nearly every passerby stopping to say hello to her. We were on our way to eat at a restaurant and taking our daughter along in a deluxe high chair that had wheels like a stroller. My worst vacation memory is of tripping and nearly falling off a 1,000-foot cliff in Yosemite wearing a 60-pound backpack. I survived with some minor injuries, but I still have scars.
Q: What would be your dream trip?
A: I would love to take my wife and daughter on a long cultural vacation to visit major museums and then rural landscapes in Korea, Japan and Europe. Our list of cities would be Seoul, Daegu, Busan, Jeju, Tokyo, Kyoto, Paris, London, Munich, Berlin, Prague, Barcelona, Madrid, Florence, Venice and Bern.
Q: What is your guilty pleasure when you’re on the road?
A: Sampling local coffees and street food.
Q: You lived in South Korea until 1972. 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.
Q: What are your five favorite cities?
A: Toronto, New York, Seoul, San Francisco, Paris.
Q: Where would you like to go that you have never been to before?
A: I’ve always wanted to see the Diamond Mountain in present-day North Korea.
Q: When you go away, what are some of your must-have items?
A: Ziploc bags, contractor’s black garbage bag, Swiss Army knife, rope, water bottle.
Q: Did your family travel around Korea much when you lived there?
A: When I was a kid, the only two cities I ever visited in Korea were Seoul and Incheon. Bupyeong, where I grew up outside the ASCOM army base, is technically a district of the city of Incheon. I remember Seoul for its frenetic energy, but my memories of Incheon are of overcast, rainy and slushy winter days, with lots of frozen mud. In 1985 when I was in Korea on a Fulbright, my wife and I were able to tour the entire country, because she was the director of the Fulbright Summer Seminar on Korean History and Culture. I finally got to see what I had only heard about as a kid – the diving women on Jeju Island, the Busan fish market, the museums in Gyeongju, pottery kilns, the tidal flats of Incheon, the remaining old-growth forests and the Buddhist temple at Haeinsa, Pohang Steel Works, the Hyundai Factory, Andong – the Confucian village where people still live as if they were in the 19th century, the Korean Folk Village and lots of other places.
© 2023 JAE-HA KIM
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