ABSTRACT
Harley’s Club in the main strip of TDC – which the GIs refer to as ‘downrange’ – does not have a stage for its Filipina entertainers to perform erotic dances. It plays music and has tables and chairs where the Filipina entertainers sit with customers for drinks and a bar where customers can hang out if they don’t have money to buy a drink for one of the entertainers. Hae Mee is the only Korean women working in the club. She is twenty-six years old and is separated from her American GI husband, who is now based in Yongsan Army Base in Seoul, and to whom she has a six-year-old daughter. She has a new GI boyfriend now, Jason, who is twenty-two and also recently divorced. Jason is based at Camp Casey in TDC and told me he used to be a skinhead back in Denver, Colorado, where he dealt drugs and “shot at people for fun” until his grandparents sent him to Texas to live with his dad and stepmother. He enlisted in the army to get his life together and to escape the US for a while. Jason tells me he loves Hae Mee but that it’s hard to predict what the future will hold for the two of them. As for Hae Mee, she is figuratively and literally stuck in TDC because it’s hard for a Korean bar woman who is a single mother to a daughter who is a pan saram (lit. half person, meaning half Korean, half American) to enter normative spaces of Korean society and morality. She tells me she will remain in TDC for the rest of her life working in the clubs and making her way up the club hierarchy to manager unless she can marry Jason and move with her daughter to the United States. She does not have any Korean friends in the clubs, apart from Sunny, who is the current bar manager and also engaged to a GI based at Camp Casey.
