Heinz Insu Fenkl is the son of a German-American soldier who married a Korean woman when he was stationed near Seoul. In this haunting novel he explores the coming-of-age of an Amerasian in Korea, torn between his mother's world -- haunted by ghosts, fox demons, and the specter of Japanese occupations -- and his father's transplanted America.

Young Insu grows up in the chaotic streets of Pupyong, a district in the city of Inchon, the site of General Douglas MacArthur's historic invasion. His mother trafficks in everything, skilled in manipulating the black market to support her family. Insu's arrival at the orderly American school does little to resolve the conflicts between the cultures in which he must live. He may learn the language, but his eyes will never be blue, nor his hair yellow like his father's. And always, there is the memory of his lost half-brother, the baby that his mother sacrificed to marry his father, who refused to raise another man's child.

With its ghost stories, folktales, mother-father conflicts, strange joys and violent tragedies, Memories of My Ghost Brother resonates with literary works like Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, and Gus Lee's China Boy. Evocative and compelling, and introducing a unique new voice in American fiction, Memories of My Ghost Brother provides a rare, beautiful, and sometimes painful glimpse of the creation of one young man's identity.