“Address Unknown,” directed by Kim Ki-duk, depicts the wounded life of a half-black, half-Korean man who lives in a quiet village across from a U.S. military base in the 1970s.

Firstly, USFK itself is often depicted as an “Axis of Evil,” but it has also been depicted as providing for the people who lived outside the bases and the “foreigners’ whores” (Korean: yang-gongju) a place to carry on their rough, daily lives.

There were many works written after the war that depicted the dark atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s in which children who should have been going to elementary school instead were working as U.S. military houseboys and pimps. Yet more works, despite featuring stories that take place is or around U.S. bases, stressed the social corruption that they claim forced us into such a situation.

The publishing of Nam Jeong-hyeon’s short story “Bedpan” (Korean: Bunji) in 1965 led to a two-year legal mess. Nam was widely criticized for his story in which the main character’s mother is raped by a U.S. soldier and dies and his little sister suffers abuse as the concubine of another U.S. soldier.

The “base town” (Korean: gijichon) is the most common topic of discussion in novels that deal with USFK. Representative works of this line are Cheon Seung-se’s “Cry of the Yellow Dog” (Korean: Hwangu-eui Bimyeong) and Gang Seok-gyeong’s “Night and the Cradle” (Bam gwa Yoram). In “Cry of the Yellow Dog,” the protagonist goes to Paju in search of a U.S. military prostitute who ran off with his wife’s money.

There have been instances when writers have aimed their arrows directly at the U.S. military. Shin Sang-ung’s novel “Diary of Fury” (Korean: Bunno-ui Ilgi) and Jo Jeong-nae’s short story “Tiger Major,” feature Koreans soldiers taking resolute actions to secure equality with U.S. soldiers.

Kim Myeong-in’s poetry collection entitled, “Dongducheon,” the city of Dongducheon itself is described as an injury inflicted upon the Korean people. In that place where the U.S. military, which intervened in a tragic war between members of the same people, still remains, one could find the sad fates of those women who had to sell themselves to the soldiers and the mixed-race children who were born of their relationships.

Meanwhile, the base town is an unavoidable chapter in our modern history that helped to define our daily lives. Pak Wan-seo’s novel “Leafless Tree” (Korean: Namok) features a protagonist who works in a U.S. 8th Army PX in Myeong-dong, Seoul during the Korean War. Oh Jeong-hui’s “Chinese Street” (Korean: Jungguk-in Geori) paints a typical picture of the post-war era, filled with pleasant childhood memories of the base towns and U.S. camps.

With the publishing last year of Choe Ik-seok’s novel, “The Spy From a Strange Country”(Korean: Isang-han Nara-eseo On Suipai) the stage moved to Itaewon and Haebangchon. The protagonist, who escaped from an orphanage, finds work in an U.S. military nightclub in Itaewon. There he comes into contact with a much more vile world as he gets mixed up with black marketing PX goods, adultery, marijuana and group sex. His girlfriend from the orphanage, whom he meets in Itaewon, was a plaything in an occupation army service club.

Literary critic Hwang Gwang-su said, “USFK was dealt with much in novels in the 1950s and 1960s, but since then it has been dealt with less and less... In order to break through the literary limits set after the 1990s in which everything is too personal, there is a need to actively make this issue food for literary thought.”

(Choi Hong-ryeol, hrchoi@chosun.com )