Growing up in the US education system in the 1990s and early 2000s, I was told that the United States was the greatest country on earth. From preschool, I was taught to recite the Pledge of Allegiance with zero comprehension of what I was saying. (I recall, for instance, thinking that the line “and to the Republic, for which it stands” was “for witches stand”.) I remember being shown the portraits of President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush while seated on the rug of my preschool and being told to memorise their names and faces. Years later, when the Twin Towers were attacked on 11 September 2001, crowds chanted “USA! USA!” when President George W. Bush told them that “this nation will not live in fear. We have awakened to a new danger, but our resolve is great and the spirit of America is incredibly strong.” President Bush’s assertion of “weapons of mass destruction” would later be used as justification for a decades-long occupation of Afghanistan that bore eerie similarities to that of the southern portion of a divided Korea in the lead up to the Korean War.

In A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under US Occupation, diasporic Korean historian and author Kornel Chang paints a picture of a post-Second World War Korea, finally free of Japanese colonial rule, searching for a singular vision of what independence looks like. Although anything seemed possible for a brief period in time, the ongoing rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union led not only to the indefinite division of the Korean peninsula into a “North” and “South” but also to the shattering of dreams of democracy and freedom for Korean people themselves.

For the Korean diaspora (which includes both Chang and myself), the mirror of US history does not reflect back to us the image of John Wayne riding over a hill on his horse to save the day, but rather a bewildering portrait of racism, displacement, sadness and urgency—a portrait without faces like ours. Chang is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark, with a research focus on US–East Asia relations. His academic background comes through exceedingly clearly in a narrative that’s well-researched, compelling and unapologetic in its addressing of uncomfortable truths. Chang skillfully illustrates the ways in which the US government weaponised Korean people against themselves to further propel the US’s Cold War anti-Communist aspirations while, at the same time, horrifyingly employing Japanese colonial techniques of governance to weaponise the southern portion of the Korean peninsula as its own Eastern Hemisphere chess piece.

• Tags: Issue 39, Kornel Chang, South Korea, Taeyeon Song