hankyoreh

By Daniel Y. Kim, Associate Professor of English at Brown University

I was fortunate enough to participate in the Peace Tour Marking the 60th Anniversary of the Korean War Armistice which was organized by the Institute for Korean Historical Studies, Human Rights Foundation Saram, People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, the May 18 Memorial Foundation and the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea. While the tour culminated in the issuing of a Peace Statement Declaration another of its aims was to instill those who took part with a more intimate awareness of injustices that took place in this country as direct and indirect consequences of the Korean War and of those that are currently taking place. I believe that all of us who took part in the Tour were hoping that the knowledge we gained would help us further the cause of peace in Korea in whatever ways we can in the various national and institutional locations in which we work. Rather than a policy piece, I offer here some personal reflections on what I gained from the Peace Tour and how it will shape my research and teaching back in the United States. For most Americans the conflict in Korea remains very much a forgotten war and fewer still are aware of the toll that the continuing US military presence on the peninsula exacts on the lives of many ordinary Koreans. I hope my work as an American academic can help in some way to reverse that historical and political ignorance and further the cause of peace.

One specific reason why I wanted to participate in the Peace Tour was the opportunity to visit the site of the No Gun Ri massacre with a group of progressive academics, artists and activists. What took place in those tunnels was something I had been familiar with since first reading the Pulitzer Prize winning AP series that was published in 1999. I had become especially absorbed by that tragic historical event in the past few years, in the course of my research and teaching on journalistic and literary depictions of the atrocities that were inflicted by US soldiers on the civilian population during the Korean War. My sense of what took place in those tunnels had been particularly shaped by Lark and Termite, a hauntingly beautiful magical realist novel by Jayne Anne Phillips, a writer from the American South, a region of the country that is still shaped by the legacy of America’s own civil war.

Many in the United States are aware of similar events that took place during the Vietnam War and have continued to take place in the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the basic facts of what took place in No Gun Ri were known to me before the trip. What I could not have known however was how deeply I would feel the impact of actually entering into the tunnel where so many died. The weight of that unspeakably awful event was made palpable to me in a way I could not have anticipated. I can only hope that something of this deeper knowledge will shape my writing and teaching. What was also memorable about this particular experience was the discussion that many of us on the tour had about this and other sites of massacre. These conversations made me aware of the ethical and political complexities involved in various strategies for memory and redress with a depth that would not be possible by simply reading about that event from afar.

As moving as the experience of visiting No Gun Ri was for me, however, I have known about such actions on the part of the US military for most of my adult life--such events are, as I have mentioned, sadly familiar to most Americans. What was more discomfiting to me as a Korean American was the visiting of sites where atrocities had been committed by Koreans against their countrymen. Prior to this trip I did have some historical awareness of the events that took place in Gwangju and on Jeju. The experience of visiting those memorial sites, including Geochang which I had not known about, was powerful to me, however, not just for the facts they filled in, but for the ways in which we were able to feel the horrific weight of what took place. What left the deepest impact on me was not only the brutal intimacy of the fratricide that was involved -- that it was friends, neighbors and family who killed friends, neighbors and family -- but also the surreal juxtaposition of those obscene events and the serene beauty of the landscapes in which they occurred. These experiences instilled in me a more a more intimate awareness of how versions of this past enmity persist in present, in the division between North and South, and they brought home for me the urgent need for a reconciliation of the two Koreas.

Other sites we visited make dramatically apparent to me that the violence inflicted by US militarism and politically regressive forces within Korea is not simply a relic of the Cold War or of the era of the military dictatorships. In Pyeongtaek and Gangjeong Village on Jeju Island we became aware of the continuing presence of that violence and the struggle against it. In our interactions with local activists there I was introduced to a Korean idiom -- which I understood as throwing eggs against a boulder -- which conveyed the enormity of the challenges they face. But the lasting impression I will take away with me is of the endurance, heroism and astonishing capacity for hope that I saw in those who are battle against some of the same forces that caused such devastation and heartache during the Korean War -- forces that continue to stand in the way of bringing peace to the Korean peninsula.

What I hope to take back with me when I return to the United States is not just a deeper historical knowledge, but also a greater sensitivity to the human dimensions of that history. I hope too that some portion of the passion and commitment of those I met on the tour will travel into my own research, writing and teaching. If nothing else, this experience has given me a greater sense of purpose and a desire that I might contribute in some modest way to the struggle for social justice that all of us who came on the Peace Tour are in various ways engaged in. What this means in the context of contemporary Korea is, of course, advocating in any way possible the cause of peace, encouraging the resumption of any intergovernmental negotiations that will help bring a formal end to the Korean War. What this will involve for Americans at the very least is a greater awareness of their complicity and responsibility for the current situation in Korea, which stems from their actions dating back to the Korean War and the original division in 1945.

In closing I should perhaps offer a word of explanation for why an English professor from America would have been involved in this tour. My area of specialization is actually American literature and my focus more precisely is on Asian American and African American literature. As a literary scholar, one of the things I have found most powerful about American literature is the mirror it holds up to certain difficult truths about our society, including those concerning the legacy of racism. I have been working for several years on a book on the cultural and historical significance of the Korean War. When I first began this research project, my focus was solely on its meaning for Americans, which I sought to illuminate through the coverage of the conflict in the American media, its depiction in Hollywood films and in literary works -- particularly in those written by US minority writers. One of the things about this conflict that has been forgotten by many Americans is the crucial role it played in the history of US race relations. The Korean War was the first US military conflict in which African American and Japanese American soldiers served side-by-side for the first time with white soldiers and it officially began a year before the Supreme Court Decision that brought racial segregation to an end -- Brown v. Board -- was issued.

But if issues of social justice as they pertain to US domestic race relations have always guided my research and teaching on American literature, the connections I started making with progressive Korean Studies scholars -- a number of whom were involved in organizing this tour -- encouraged me to think about these issues in a broader, transnational context. Through my interactions with a number of ASCK members -- especially Henry Em, Suzy Kim and Youngju Ryu -- I began see how my scholarship could more directly engage with the difficult truth that a war that promised greater opportunities for US minorities, suggesting a way of overcoming the racism they had faced through much of the country’s history, was one that brought so much suffering and tragedy to the Koreans they ostensibly came to protect and save. While military service has long been offered as a path to greater opportunity in the US for black, brown and yellow Americans, it has often entailed the killing of black, brown and yellow people in the Asia Pacific, South America and the Middle East.

So, as a scholar of American literature and culture, I came on the Peace Tour for the chance to learn more about Korean perspectives from the war from the Korean scholars, artists and activists who would be taking part in it. I was unsure, however, of whether my research would be of interest or use to them. In that respect, what has been most gratifying about this experience as an academic -- and also, I would have to add, as a Korean American -- were the expressions of appreciation I was fortunate to receive for a short presentation I made during the tour. One activist thanked me for helping her to understand and feel what it must have been like for African American, Japanese American and Mexican American soldiers to fight on behalf of a country that did not fully recognize their own humanity. For the inspiration that exchange will provide me as I work in my own small way to help other Americans become more aware of the violence that is a central component of their long involvement in Korean affairs I am deeply grateful.

The views presented in this column are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Hankyoreh.　

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]