Category: Arts & Culture

SKULL WATER is the story of Insu, the son of a Korean mother and a GI father in the U.S. Army, and the intertwined tale of his Korean Big Uncle

“The novel in your hands is something I never knew I’d see, born from things at least two governments hoped to hide. A mixed German Korean boy in 1970s Korea undertakes a quest to save the living with what the dead might know, and he tells us stories across time of this almost-vanished world, and the lives of those thrown away by Korean society and American military forces—his family. Precious, life-altering, rebellious, funny, and full of a necessary truth.” — Alexander Chee

Twenty-five years in the making, Heinz Insu Fenkl‘s ambitious, darkly funny, sweeping novel SKULL WATER is a haunting inter-generational coming-of-age story that grapples with identity and displacement in South Korea in the 1950s and 1970s, and reveals a history both countries would prefer to conceal. Born in South Korea to a German father and a Korean mother, Fenkl grew up in Korea, Germany, and the U.S., and his own experience informs this deeply autobiographical novel.

SKULL WATER is the story of Insu, the son of a Korean mother and a GI father in the U.S. Army, and the intertwined tale of his Korean Big Uncle, who has been exiled to a mountain cave near the family village to die from a gangrenous foot. Growing up near the army base in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Insu and his two best friends, also “half and halfs,” spend their days skipping school, selling scavenged Western goods on the black market, and testing the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. When Insu hears an old legend that water collected from a dead person’s skull will cure any sickness, he vows to collect some to heal Big Uncle’s mysterious injury. His quest takes him and his friends on a sprawling journey into some of South Korea’s darkest corners. Meanwhile, Big Uncle, a geomancer uprooted by the Korean War, has embraced his solitude and fate and attempts to teach his nephew that life is not limited to what we can see or think we know.

In his interview with The New Yorker, Fenkl said; “It’s a Korean folk belief that stories are meant to be told, and that if one keeps them to oneself and hoards them, there will be terrible consequences.”

Join us for a conversation with Heinz Insu Fenkl about his latest book.

The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

About the Author:

Born in South Korea to a German father and a Korean mother, Heinz Insu Fenkl grew up in Korea until he was twelve, and then in Germany and the U.S. A professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, he teaches creative writing, Asian and Asian American literature, and film. He’s the author of the novel Memories of My Ghost Brother, a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. He is also known internationally for his collection of Korean folktales and translations of classic Buddhist texts. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and daughter. heinzinsufenkl.com