Brief Conversation with a Friendly Korean on the Jungang Line

Cheongnyangni Station

Wikipedia

Yesterday on the Jungang Subway Line as my train was just leaving Cheongnyangni Station, a Korean man approached me where I was standing engrossed in my newspaper, greeted me warmly, took my hand and shook it, and asked me if I speak English. When I had affirmed that, he smiled broadly and asked if I were American.

"Yes," I acknowledged, a bit cautious.

His smile grew, and he quietly but with emphatic certitude confided, "Koreans love Americans!"

At first, I was unsure how to respond, wondering if he were crazy or thought I was, but I finally replied, "Some do."

His smile faded, and he looked concerned as he insisted, "All Koreans love Americans. The Americans helped in 1950. Many died. Perhaps some of your uncles?"

I nodded. "Some fought," I revealed, "but lived."

"Koreans and Americans have a blood relationship," he told me, "so Koreans love Americans." But he seemed to reconsider, for he added, "Some Koreans don't. A few. They are 'Advanced.'" He looked at me to see if I understood.

"Progressive," I corrected, knowing that the Leftists in Korea call themselves that.

"Yes," he agreed. "Progressive. But they are traitors."

I didn't follow up on the possibility of a political discussion, but asked him what he does and found out that he teaches English linguistics in a university. He said that he likes Chomsky's linguistic theories.

I wondered what he thought of Chomsky's politics, but our conversations soon ended anyway as the man bade me farewell and exited the train at Hoegi Station.

Death of an Old Friend . . .

Yesterday morning, I received the sad news that my old Scoutmaster and good friend Mr. Albert Holland has died. My brother John will perform the funeral service in his capacity as minister, and John's wife Sandy informs me:

John . . . said he visited with Mr. Holland quite a bit this past week and he was strong and brave about his condition. Told John he'd lived a good life. There was no man he needed to make peace with and he was at peace with God.

Sandy also told me that John asked if I'd like to offer any words, so I wrote a reply for my brother's consideration in preparing the funeral service:

Dear Sandy,

John might want to take a look at this blog entry on Mr. Holland:

The best words about him in that entry were written by Sun-Ae, who had taken the kids and visited him the summer of 2009 (when I had to stay in Korea) and had remarked on how well he was doing for a man around 90:

"He uses the hearing equipment, so most of the time, he hears well. He is still very talkative and remembers a lot of things from his long life. He is a good storyteller, and what he tells is all very interesting. He is witty, wise, warm-hearted, and I really like him. En-Uk said, 'Because you are so healthy for your age, you can live until 100.' Yes, I wish him those years and more. His dog takes care of him well so do other people around his area."

I told En-Uk this morning about Mr. Holland passing away, and I asked him what he liked about visiting with Mr. Holland. He liked the fact that Mr. Holland had a good dog, "Lady," who was smart and could retrieve sticks from the pond (like in the photos in the blog entry). I asked Sa-Rah also, and she liked Mr. Holland because he was a very nice man and told such good stories, especially about the Korean War.

For me, Mr. Holland began as my Scoutmaster and ended as one of my best friends. When I was no longer in the Scouts but still in Salem, he asked me to help him with some farmwork. He drove the tractor while I stood next to the tractor seat with a sprayer and doused the weeds in one of his fields. That would have been about 1974, I reckon. A few years after that, in the early 1980s, Mr. Holland and his wife lost their only son, Herman (to an aneurism), and many years later, though still too soon (in the mid-1990s), Mr. Holland lost his wife (to Alzheimers), but despite these tragic losses, he remained open to life and to people. He loved my wife and kids and felt a connection to them not only through me but through his own time in Korea during the Korean War. He had a high opinion of the Koreans whom he had known during the War, and he remembered many details even the last time that I saw him, which was last summer (2010).

I should add that he was not only a veteran of the Korean War but was also a veteran of the Second World War, serving in the Pacific as a Marine (I think). He was thus one of what has been called "the Greatest Generation," and when the Korean War started, he didn't rest on those laurels but volunteered because one of his officers from WWII contacted him and said, "We need you."

That the sort of man he was: When you needed him, he was there.

Mr. Holland was a good, decent, warm-hearted, intelligent, hospitable man, and I'll miss him every time that I visit Salem.

Love,

Jeff

P.S. I hope that somebody will give his dog "Lady" a good home.

I have lost a good friend whom I had expected to see again. My Ozark community has lost a good man. America has lost an old soldier. And South Korea has lost a hero it didn't even know.

Until, perhaps, now.

Acta Koreana, Volume 12, Number 2 (December 2009): Review of Park Wan-suh

Acta Koreana

Vol 12, Nr 2, Dec 2009

(Image from Seoul Selection)

I've recently received notice -- and hard copy -- of a book review that I wrote for Acta Koreana:

Who Ate Up All the Shinga?
By Park Wan-suh. Translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen Epstein.
Horace Jeffery Hodges 229–234

To whet the appetite of those with faint hunger, here's the opening to my six-page review:

Park Wan-suh: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl

(Review of Who Ate Up All the Shinga?)

Horace Jeffery Hodges

Ewha Womans University

"O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

1. Introduction

Although a highly respected and very popular writer in her native Korea, Park Wan-suh is less well known in the English-speaking world, but that relative anonymity is gradually changing, and will surely continue to do so with this excellent translation by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein of the autobiographical 'novel' Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, which tells Park's story from her earliest memories of life in a tiny agricultural hamlet, through her elementary school years of Japanese education in Seoul, on through the uncertainty of WWII and the immediate post-liberation years, and finally into the horrors of the Korean War, all of which she speaks on as a voice of conscience.

The author herself appeared somewhat late on the Korean literary scene with her first novel, Namok (The Naked Tree), published in 1970, when she was nearly forty, and though one might imagine that she had also come late to recognize her vocation as a writer, Shinga informs otherwise. In the penultimate paragraph of the final chapter, significantly titled "Epiphany," the bewildered and frightened Park finds herself and her family caught up in the wartime chaos, confronted with the threat of the South’s imminent reoccupation by Communist forces, and trapped in an utterly abandoned Seoul, apparently a cul de sac:

But an abrupt change in perspective hit me. I felt as though I’d been chased into a dead end but then suddenly turned around. Surely there was meaning in my being the sole witness to it all. How many bizarre events had conspired to make us the only ones left behind? If I were the sole witness, I had responsibility to record it. (248)

In the passage that follows, which is the final paragraph of the book, Park adds, "From all this came a vision that I would write someday, and this premonition dispelled my fear" (248). The abruptness of her epiphany might suggest that Park's development as a writer stemmed from that moment as its initiatory point, but the author herself shows us that the process was already long in motion. Five extended experiences, which can be only briefly outlined here, contributed toward her early development as a literary artist, a process that the literary critic Kyeong-Hee Choi has elsewhere described as "A Portrait of the Artist as a Little Girl."

Those interested in reading the entire review will need to go to the Acta Koreana website and order a hard copy . . . though if you search for Park Wan-suh on this blog, you'll find many of my ideas worked out through various entries.

Tomorrow, back to my regular blogging . . .

Park Wan-suh: A Writer's Vocation

Park Wan-suh

(Image from Amazon.com)

As some readers have probably noticed, I've been working to finish a short review of Park Wan-suh's autobiographical 'novel' Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, and I've now completed a rough draft, from which I provide the following material that makes up part of my introduction:

The author herself appeared somewhat late on the Korean literary scene with her first novel, Namok (The Naked Tree), published in 1970, when she was nearly forty, and though one might imagine that she had also come late to recognize her vocation as a writer, Shinga tells otherwise. In the penultimate paragraph of the final chapter, significantly titled "Epiphany," the bewildered and frightened Park finds herself and her family trapped during the Korean War in an utterly abandoned Seoul confronted with the threat of its imminent reoccupation by Communist forces, apparently a cul de sac:

But an abrupt change in perspective hit me. I felt as though I'd been chased into a dead end but then suddenly turned around. Surely there was meaning in my being the sole witness to it all. How many bizarre events had conspired to make us the only ones left behind? If I were the sole witness, I had responsibility to record it. (248)

In the passage that follows, which is the final paragraph of the book, Park adds, "From all this came a vision that I would write someday, and this premonition dispelled my fear" (248). The abruptness of her epiphany might suggest that Park's development as a writer stemmed from that moment as its initiatory point, but the author herself shows us that the process was already long in motion.

The remainder of my short review looks briefly at this process, but I'll report on that after the review is published . . . if it gets published.

One never knows . . .

Park Wan-suh Interview: Missing Paragraph 'Restored'

Shin Junebong and Park Wan-suh

(Image from LTI Korea)

In looking again at the online interview with the author Park Wan-suh by Shin Junebong for the autumn 2009 issue of the quarterly journal -list: Books from Korea, which is published by LTI Korea, I noticed that the final paragraph is missing due to some sort of glitch reproducing part of the interview's penultimate paragraph (and immmediately prior to the biographical information titled "About Park Wansuh"). I therefore offer the 'ultimate' paragraph of the interview here, 'painstakingly' typed from the hardcopy by Gypsy Scholar, for the benefit of interested readers:

When asked which of her works have been introduced to overseas readers, Park said, "I think it's very difficult to understand the literature of a country without having an understanding of its history." As an example, she told of how even in the case of Japan, a country extremely close to Korea in terms of culture and history, it is difficult for her works to be accurately translated into Japanese. "When the prose of my fiction is translated into a foreign language, the particular flavor of the words seems to be lost," she continued. In which case, it seems that complete understanding and appreciation of Park's works by foreign readers can only be possible in one of the following two ways: either such readers must acquire by themselves a broader understanding of Korea's history and culture; or a "perfect translation," like that described by Walter Benjamin, where a work's vital poetic features, down to its most mystical elements, are transferred intact, must be produced. Neither of these can be achieved in a short period of time. (page 31)

The English translation of Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein, may not be a 'perfect' translation of the sort required by Benjamin, but it comes rather close enough in our less-than-perfect world . . . at least for a reader like me. But that's in part the case because I'm one of those readers who has acquired a somewhat "broader understanding of Korea's history and culture," though mostly secondhand since I know very little Korean.

And unlike many Americans, the Korean War was for me not 'the forgotten war' because I grew up hearing about it. My Uncle Leon Ferguson served in the army during the Korean War -- as a conscripted infantryman if I recall, but he wouldn't talk about his experiences. My eighth grade science teacher, Mr. Coy Ferguson, also served -- and told a few stories of the hardship. My Boy Scout leader, Mr. Albert Holland, served as well -- as a sergeant with even more stories of the suffering.

I therefore cannot read passages about the Korean War in Park Wan-suh's Shinga book without thinking, "Uncle Leon, Mr. Ferguson, and Mr. Holland were all there, too, and probably passed through Seoul while Park Wan-suh was struggling at day-to-day survival."

Maybe that's in part what makes the book so fascinating for me to read.

UPDATE: I contacted LTI Korea, and they have now corrected the glitch that had lost the final paragraph.