Black Market Intimacies: Rethinking Black Markets in the Korean War
Authored by Emma Sciarretta
With her new book, Black Market Intimacies: The Transpacific Sexual Economy of the Korean War (Stanford University Press, 2026), Dr. Jeongmin Kim offers new analytical insights on how we think about black markets. In post-World War II East Asia, there existed an interlinked system of sexual mediation and interactions between US soldiers and Korean and Japanese women. At her book launch on October 7, 2026, Kim read from the introduction of Black Market Intimacies, presenting the story of American officer, William C. Trolinger, who was caught delivering cases of US army whiskey to a Korean woman named Sur Soon Hi:
Trolinger had started seeing Sur in mid-1951, soon after he was assigned to the K-10 base. For those ten months, Trolinger “had been staying” in Sur’s place, had brought her whiskey and other ration supplies from inside the camp, and they had also exchanged military notes and Korean cash from time to time… Sur took these items to local markets, resold them, and often shared a portion of her sales with the officer. (Kim 2026, 1-2)
When asked if during her research there was one story that had stood out to her, Kim said it was this one involving Trolinger and Sur. The two exemplify the interlinked markets for transactional sex and goods during the Korean War, and their story sheds light on countless other ambiguous relations between US soldiers and Korean and Japanese women. However, Kim asserted that the role women played in the wartime economy cannot be reduced to only sexual transactions. She reminded us that women worked as cleaners, cooks, dancers, or barkeeps while they acted as mediators and speculators for soldiers. Army supplies were, of course, free for soldiers, but women were responsible for determining an item’s monetary value, rematerializing army supplies as a commodity. Women circulated commodities and secured their own payments, the profit realized only after they closed the sale and paid what they owed to the soldier. Black Market Intimacies demonstrates that black markets do not exist strictly outside the formal economy and legal regulations, but rather that they were a part of everyday civilian life.
During the Q&A of the book launch, Kim was asked what led her to pursue this topic; she answered that it started with a visit to the archives. She was unable to find the information she wanted and was left wondering, why is the war all about black markets? The documents revealed that staying within the boundaries of social, economic, political, or cultural history would not work for her project. Kim noted that many of the sources used in Black Market Intimacies are new, not because they were inaccessible to scholars, but that they had previously been considered miscellaneous or unimportant. Black Market Intimacies raises questions about how value or significance is assigned to primary sources, who was involved in facilitating illicit transactions of commodities and sex, and what enables the formation of black markets. In a wartime economy, women’s labour and negotiation mattered. They were not taking advantage of soldiers, but the relationship between US soldiers and Korean and Japanese women was one of intimacy, risk, and violence.