kangmi: learning korean

Reality

When I lived in Korea, I found it necessary to adopt an artificial sense of reality about the state of relations between the two Koreas. In order to live well, it was better to forget that the two nations were still technically at war. The 1994 nuclear crisis became a blip on my radar only because of calls from parents concerned about their adult children teaching at the language institutes. There was little to say, beyond assuring them that the American embassy would issue instructions for civilians in the event of attack (not that all of our teachers were Americans, but I can’t remember any other sort of parents contacting us. And I wasn’t personally too confident in the American embassy).

That unreality (which I still maintain, although it’s at a much lower level) always gets punctured whenever talk turns to family members separated by the war. Death is bad, but not knowing whether your brother or sister or mother and father lived or died is worse. Knowing that they lived, but that you can’t see or communicate with them is something else.

I’m a sucker for those reunion scenes that pop up in documentaries now and then, which is why I liked the History Channel documentary Inside North Korea (broadcast last night…thanks to Joshua for the heads up). I wept and cheered for the elderly sisters who discovered their brother living in the north and got to see him again during one of those family reunion programs.

Inside North Korea was followed by The Real Dr. Evil. On the whole, there wasn’t much new to me in either documentary…plenty of the usual “The Kims are bad and here’s why: cult of personality/famine/multiple human rights abuses/energy problems/privileges for Pyongyangers” but “aren’t those stadium card displays cool?” (well, they are, but thinking about the logistics required for successful displays boggles my mind.) The pieces of interviews with defectors were fascinating, but of course focused only on their life in North Korea.

All this North Korea talk made me do a quick re-read of Bruce Cumings’ North Korea: Another Country. I read it during summer vacation and found it to be a new (to me) perspective on North Korea.

I found Cumings to be somewhat irreverent, as well as overly fond of Kim Jong Il. He blasts the American government for their lack of insight into the Korean mind. (On a side note, the book needs an index…I frequently found myself wishing to recheck parts and having to dig to find them.)

In his preface, he writes:

I have no sympathy for the North, which is the author of most of its own troubles, specializes in self-defeating behavior, treats like children the masses of its own population unlucky enough to be excluded from the elite, and indulges in such stereotypical hero worship, grandiose exaggeration, and wretched excess as to make even a scholar of East Asia reach for dusty old tomes with titles like “Oriental Despotism.” (xi)

He’s consistent in his criticism of American government and media in their refusal to learn about North Korea:

Predicting the behavior of crazy people is by definition impossible, and American officials constantly harp on Pyongyang’s unpredictability. I would argue, to the contrary, that North Korean behavior has been quite predictable and that an irresponsible American media, almost bereft of good investigative reporters, often (but by no means always) egged on by government officials, obscures the real nature of the United States-Korean conflict. The media has had the wrong stories in the wrong place at the wrong time; the absurd result is that often one has to read North Korea’s tightly controlled press to figure out what is actually going on between Washington and Pyongyang. (47-48)

Napalm’s use in the Vietnam War is well-known in America, but it was also widely used in the Korean War (this was the book’s biggest shocker for me, as I was completely ignorant of this. But how did else did I imagine that Korea was essentially deforested by the end of the war?). He says (without giving total figures, an unforgivable lapse) that:

Far more napalm was dropped on Korea, however, with much more devastating effect, since the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) had many more populous cities and urban industrial installations than did North Vietnam. (17)

Daily Life in North Korea (chapter 4) is my first look at this topic and would have been worth the price I didn’t pay for this book (library). I was especially interested in his examination of the changes that communism brought to the Korean class system.

But his attempts to humanize Kim Jong Il in chapter 5 left a bad taste:

What can he possibly be thinking, standing there in his pear-shaped polyester pantsuit, pointy-toed elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses of malevolent tint [ooooohhh, I’m afraid of his sunglasses?], an arrogant curl to his feminine lips, an immodest potbelly, a perpetual bad hair day? He is thinking, get me out of here. It is a cruel fate to have but one country to give for your family; even crueler is to be born into that wrong family, in the wrong country, in the wrong century. (155)

And:

Kim Jong Il is not the playboy, womanizer, drunk, and mentally deranged fanatic “Dr. Evil” of our press. He is a homebody who doesn’t socialize much, doesn’t drink much, and works at home in his pajamas, scribbling marginal comments on the endless reams of documents brought to him in gray briefcases by his aides. He most enjoys tinkering with his many music boxes, sitting on the floor and opening them up with screwdrivers; at other times he would sit with Jong Nam [his son] and play Super Mario video games. He is prudish and shy, and like most Korean fathers, hopelessly devoted to his son and the other children in his household—vastly preferring to sequester himself with them, rather than preside over the public extravaganzas that amaze visitors to the DPRK. (163)

I tried, but I still don’t feel sorry for Kim Jong Il.

Posted by kangmi on August 25, 2004 at 2:00 PM0 comments