The Good Parts To Life In North Korea

Posted on 2 October 2012 by admin

http://www.nknews.org/2012/10/the-good-parts-to-life-in-north-korea-2/

Question: Was there anything good or positive about living in North Korea? All we hear about are the bad things. Do any of the DPRK’s citizens benefit from the state?

Maxwell B.

Jae-young: Although media and news only show negative aspects to life in North Korea, there are actually positive and good aspects about life in the DPRK. Of course there are differences between individuals, but compared to my current life in the South, life in North was mentally rich – even if it was materially insufficient. The reason for this is because of the pure heart and affection of North Koreans. Here, in South Korea, there are lots of people with affection, but in North Korea, especially in rural areas, affection between neighbors is very pure and deep.

In North Korea, on birthdays and national holidays, families and neighbors gather and share with each other. My mother used to cook a lot and share food with neighbors. She didn’t have to cook a lot for my family, but because neighbors had a lot of family members, she had to cook a lot. Even though she had to wake up early and cook, she never refused. I used to wake up early and help my mother. On major holidays, we invited our neighbors (we used to call my mother’s friends “aunt”), shared food and stories with them. My mom was really good at making ‘Jong-Pyun rice cake’ and I can still remember my aunts exclaiming how good they tasted. During nights, we gathered together, turned music on and danced. On days when electricity went out, we used to play the accordion, sing, dance and have fun. I used to have so much fun and danced so hard that my socks had holes when I checked them in morning. My father used to be respected as a gagman (comedian). Also on national holidays, North Koreans visit their parents, teachers and alumnus. In South Korea, people do the same, but I think it was deeper in North.

Moreover, North Korea’s excellent natural environment is another nice aspect of life in North Korea. Air in North Korea is very fresh. In spring and fall, my school used to go on field trips. Every year, we went to a cool valley. Water was very fresh and lots of flowers were in bloom. For the whole day, we played scavenger hunt, swam, then ate packed lunch, cooked by my mother. I bragged about how my lunch tastes better than others’. After lunch, we had talent shows. I remember bragging about earning prizes for my skills and getting praised.

Although from a material perspective things were often lacking, I sometimes miss the pure heart and sharing affection so common to my life in North Korea.

To the second part of your question… In North Korea, although it isn’t common, there are some ordinary people who receive gifts directly from the state. Some people earn the “hero” title and receive televisions and other goods. These people get better gifts than other people on national holidays. But there aren’t many of these people – I rarely saw a “hero” in my town. There was one, but he didn’t get as many benefits as other “heroes”. Really, the main people who really get benefits from the government are civil servants, such as party officers, police officers, government agents and few other people. These are the people who get to live with consistent privileges and get to live an easy life.

On the other hand, benefits that common people get include free health care and education. Schools are free. Unlike in South Korea, if a student falls behind, teachers help them after school hours. Moreover, students who are good at school work to help other students. In addition, if a student wants to learn how to play an instrument or certain sports, they can learn for free. I used to learn how to play the guitar and accordion. I also think that I didn’t have to pay for books. However, the government didn’t pay for them either. But because the government didn’t provide enough funds for books and uniforms, my teacher gave them to us, according to our grades. I had a friend who was mad at the teacher for not giving him books, because his grades weren’t good enough. Our predecessors gave us books and we gave them to our successors. That’s why we used them as carefully as we could and studied as hard as we could. Because of that, I still can’t write or draw on books. Education is free in North Korea, but lots of people had to buy books and uniforms by themselves.

Health care was free as well. According to an acquaintance of mine, she gave birth in a maternity hospital for free. I didn’t have to pay for treatment either. Operations, checkups and medicines were free as well, but lots of people had to pay, since this was in theory only. Lots of state provisions for common people were in theory only, so people had to pay for them.

Everything was suffocating and pitiful in North Korea, but it is a country that I have many positive memories from. So if someone asks me ‘What is North Korea like?’ then I say ‘North Korea is a nice place with plenty of love.’

South Korean host bars – for women

Posted on 18 September 2012 by admin

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19570750

Red Model Bar

South Korea’s rapid economic development has meant some startling changes within its conservative social structure, including the rise of so-called host bars, where wealthy women pay the equivalent of thousands of dollars for male company.

In the dim light of an underground room, a dozen perfectly groomed young men kneel in rows, calling out their names.

Muscular, with shiny boy-band hairstyles, they cram side by side into the narrow space, waiting for us to make our choice. Outside in the corridor, more of their colleagues are arriving for another night at work. It is 2am, and we are their first customers.

Hidden beneath the pavements of Seoul’s ritziest postcode, Gangnam, the men at Bar 123 are part of a growing industry, which grew out of the long traditions of Japanese geisha and Korea’s kisaeng houses but with one crucial difference – the customers here are all women.

Known as “host bars”, these all-night drinking rooms offer female customers the chance to select and pay for male companions, sometimes at a cost of thousands of pounds a night.

One of the women I meet at Bar 123 is Minkyoung, a waitressing manager for a five-star hotel. She says she comes to host bars once or twice a month.

Minkyoung is very pretty and her clothes are immaculate. She does not look like someone who would need to pay for male company. But the allure of host bars can be subtle. Here, she says, she has more attention from her male companions, more choice and, crucially, more control.

“In regular bars the guys who drink with me have only one goal – to have a one-night stand. But I don’t want that, so that’s why I come here, I want to have fun,” she says.

Hosts are hired by bars like this one to provide companionship and entertainment. Officially that means pouring drinks for their customers, talking and dancing with them, and singing karaoke.

Sex is not officially on offer in most host bars. That would be illegal but even Minkyoung seems happy to touch and flirt with her host, and the men here estimate that around half the customers want to pay for sex, either on or off the premises.

James has been working at Bar 123 for a couple of years. In Korean culture, he says, there is a lot of pride and negotiating a price for sex is never done explicitly. Instead, he tells me, it is all down to the host’s own assessment.

“The guys here are pros – we know what we’re doing,” he says.

“After talking to a girl for an hour we basically know how much money she makes and what she does for a living. We’ve already analysed her personality and what she’s willing to give.”

James and other hosts say their customers include some of South Korea’s elite, and that the money and perks on offer are unbelievable. One client James met, during his first week in the job, asked him to sign himself over to her for two years.

“She said ‘let’s make a contract. I’ve got this piece of paper and I’ve numbered it 1-5. Whatever you write down next to those numbers, I’ll get you.'”

James says at the time he took it as a joke but since found out the same woman spent £60,000 ($97,000) on another host.

“If it happened now, I’d do it – I’d be thinking straight.”

Ironically perhaps, host bars grew out of one of Korea’s most entrenched and, some say, misogynist business traditions – the room salon. These are private drinking rooms where groups of men select, and are served by, attractive female hostesses.

It was the hostesses’ need to let off steam after work, says veteran host Kim Dong-hee, that created the initial demand for host bars, with all-male staff.

“What these hostesses want is to [make us] do the same thing they had to do in their own workplace. These girls are forced to do things they don’t want to do for money.

“I think a lot of them are in pain, and a lot feel lonely. Simply put, they want to buy our time and our bodies.”

Hostesses still make up a large percentage of the customers at host bars here, but at Bar 123, for example, up to 40% of the customers on a given night are now from other walks of life.

The reasons for that growing appeal are tied up in South Korea’s rapid economic rise. Within 50 years, the country shifted from post-war devastation to OECD member.

But, according to Jasper Kim, head of the Asia-Pacific Global Research Group in Seoul, something important was lost along the way.

“I think that with all this fast growth comes fast change, and Koreans just don’t know how to cope with it. Increasingly, capitalism is overtaking basic societal norms that you would expect a couple of decades ago.”

Jasper Kim says South Korea’s notoriously long working hours have left many Korean women feeling lonely, while the country’s technical advance has left many people feeling detached.

“The human element of Korean society that existed before simply doesn’t exist today. People are focused on technology, people are focused on their jobs, they aren’t focused on human relations anymore.

“In many ways, Korean society today kind of reminds me of 1960s society in the US, where it’s on the verge of some type of cultural revolution.”

The grandfather of Seoul’s host bar scene, Kim Dong-hee, agrees that many of the women who come to host bars are not paying for sex but for companionship, which is why he opened a new chain of freshly-marketed outlets aimed at the mainstream market – called Red Model Bars.

“Men want to have visual pleasure and want to feel things, they’re tactile. Women like to talk and to listen. And that’s why I thought of opening a bar like this – a kind of dialogue bar.”

Red Model Bars are different to traditional host bars in one key respect – there is a no-touching rule. Hosts sit on one side of the table, customers on the other, and no physical contact is allowed, and certainly no sex.

Perhaps as a result there is a lack of furtiveness among the people who work or drink here – the lights are low, the decor mainly dark red and the space is divided into discreet booths, but it is an open-plan room and hosts and customers are divided in each booth by a large table.

This new business model depends entirely on women paying the equivalent of hundreds or even thousands of dollars to talk to good-looking young men over a drink. Still, it seems to be working – three new branches are due to open this year.

Sitting at a table at one end of the bar was one of their regular customers, a florist called Kim Nayu. She tells me she comes here every day to meet her favourite host and discuss issues she is having at work.

The price for this slice of male attention is $487-650 (£300-400) a day.

“Talking to friends would be cheaper” she admits, “but they don’t listen as much. They’re busy, and in a hurry to talk about themselves. Here, people will pay attention to me and they’ll listen to me.”

“I spend a lot of money but it’s worth it for what I get emotionally. People pay to go to see a psychologist or psychiatrist, so it’s similar but less stressful.”

Nayu’s favourite host Sung-il says it can be hard to keep his personal and professional life separate.

“Honestly I’d be lying if I say I haven’t been tempted to take things further with some customers, because we’re human, we’re men, but there are rules.”

One of his customers talked a lot to her husband about him and when the three of them met, Sung-il and the husband became close friends.

“No one hides – the workers don’t hide that they work here, and customers can be open too.”

This openness is posing a new kind of challenge to South Korean society, different from the sometimes seedy underworld of traditional host bars and their hinterland of male prostitution.

By offering women a “respectable” way to challenge traditional gender roles and flex their economic power, these new bars ask questions of Korean society that are becoming harder to ignore.

Hwang Ji-hae: “I get inspirations from the gardens I saw while growing up.”

Posted on 8 September 2012 by admin

Hwang Ji-hae: “I get inspirations from the gardens I saw while growing up.”
http://www.koreafocus.or.kr/design2/layout/content_print.asp?group_id=104282

Kim Yun-deok
Staff Reporter
The Chosun Ilbo

“Can you make me look attractive to investors?” Everyone laughs when Hwang Ji-hae (Jihae Hwang), 36, the “queen of the Chelsea Flower Show,” makes this odd request as she poses for the camera. But it is understandable, considering the anguish money has caused her this year. Though she has won a gold medal two years in a row at the world’s most prestigious garden show, she has fallen into debt. “Participating in the flower show twice has cost me my car and my house,” she says with a laugh.
　
“Quiet Time: DMZ Forbidden Garden,” her entry for this year won the Royal Horticultural Society President’s Award, the highest honor in the Show Garden division (for gardens covering 200m²) of the Chelsea Flower Show, held in May in London, but it almost did not come into being. Three weeks before the show was set to open, when the garden was about 40 percent complete, Hwang realized that she did not have enough money to continue. But like a miracle, two construction companies from her home province of Jeolla in Korea came forward as patrons. British visitors to the “DMZ Forbidden Garden” were duly impressed with the treasure trove of plants that have paradoxically survived thanks to the division of the country after the Korean War. Some of the more famous visitors to the garden were Prince Phillip, Princess Anne, and fashion designer Paul Smith.

We met Hwang when she returned to Korea to participate in the Gwangju Biennale. Tanned and wearing leather boots, she looked as if she had just been planting a couple of trees. “It’s not the sun’s fault,” she says. “I’ve always been dark skinned. I must have been born with a spade in my hands.” (laughs)

The Queen of Chelsea in Debt

Q. So you mean the star of the Chelsea Flower Show has fallen into debt.

A. My family home was already mortgaged when I won a gold medal in the 2011 show with “Hae-woo-so: Emptying One’s Mind” in the Artisan Garden division (small garden of 20m²). My younger brother, who looks after the family books, is very upset with me. (laughs) I poured more than 200 million won into this year’s garden, “DMZ.” The remaining 500 million won came from two construction companies in the Honam region, Hoban Construction and Namkwang Engineering & Construction, which gave 300 million and 200 million won, respectively. The economy’s not good right now, so I was just very grateful. As I am a Honam native, the city of Gwangju also helped me. When I came home a month ago I was busy going around visiting all the people I am indebted to.

Q. Is the Chelsea Flower Show so important that it’s worth going into debt?

A. The Chelsea Flower Show began in 1827 and is the biggest show of its kind in the world. A royal event organized by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), it is the dream of all garden designers. I learned about the show 10 years ago. I had been active as an environmental artist and always had a thirst for nature. When I saw the Chelsea show, I was convinced that a garden was the perfect medium for fusing nature and art. Vaguely I believed I would do well, and it seems it was fate. How can I put it? It was like meeting a long forgotten first love again.

Q. You received gold medals for both your first and second entries in the flower show, even though you were a newcomer.

A. To prepare for the show I first went to stay in London in 2007. At first, I didn’t even dream about entering. I wanted to build my skills first and set out to apply to the faculty of garden design at the Inchbald School of Design. But one day the vision of a traditional Korean toilet, haewooso, came to me. Not because I’m particularly patriotic. But I was lonely and tired in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language, and I kept looking back on myself, wondering who I was. I realized we didn’t need to envy the formal gardens of Europe, and found myself remembering the natural gardens that I saw while I was growing up. I recalled the night stars I saw on my way to the outhouse at night, the breezes at dawn, and the smell of the earth. It was now or never, I thought, so I gave up the idea of going to school and sent my design plans to the Chelsea Flower Show.

Q. What are the judging procedures?

A. First you have to submit to the RHS your landscaping blueprints, gardening plans, drawings, and 3D images that show what the garden will look like. If you make it to the second round, you are judged on the rarity of the plants chosen, and the artistry of the design. Receiving a notification on site allocation means you’ve made it to the third and final round.

A. For the DMZ garden you were allotted the site in front of the Queen’s Garden, which is the highlight of the Chelsea Flower Show.

A. It was a difficult site, triangular in shape and open on all three sides. It was a little daunting to be under the spotlight next to the Queen’s Garden, but I took the site allocation as recognition of the quality of my design, which gave me confidence. The DMZ garden aroused a lot of interest in the first two rounds of judging.

Q. The work must have been difficult considering the great size of the site.

A. The garden required native plants from home to be brought to London, so freight costs were three times higher than usual, and getting them through customs was also an ordeal. There are no specialist garden construction companies in Korea so our team did all the work ourselves. We had to make all the flowers bloom at the same time for the opening of the show on May 20, and we ran our feet off taking care of 10,000 plants at the same time. And our funds had run dry.

Q. I can imagine the RHS would have been disappointed if you had given up on your garden due to lack of funds.

A. That’s not the case. The RHS has held successful shows for 185 years. It makes thorough preparations, and if I had given up another team would have been ready to replace me right away. Lots of artists were probably waiting for me to give up. Three weeks before the opening, when the notice came asking me to sign forfeiture papers, I exhausted myself with anxiety until I felt blank. When I emptied my mind and resigned myself to the situation, a miracle happened. (laughs)

Changing Trends in Garden Design

“Quiet Time: DMZ Forbidden Garden,” comprised of 10,000 plants of 300 species, is not a neat, pretty garden. The grass and trees seem to grow haphazardly and are not trimmed to any particular size. “Instead of prestige trees and flowers, I planted wildflowers. Sixty percent are indigenous Korean plants,” says Hwang. “I planted mugwort, which our soldiers used to stop bleeding; plantain, which was squeezed for juice to treat stomachache; and plants that could be used for food such as wild grapes, hardy kiwi, shepherd’s purse, and dandelions.” The high watchtower and barbed wire that runs around the garden are reminders of the war. Bottles containing letters from separated families, a path paved with thousands of uniform buttons, and a bench made with the ID tags of 8,000 British veterans of the Korean War… A stream runs through the middle of the garden.

Elizabeth Banks, president of the RHS, praised the garden, saying it was the most profoundly moving garden she had seen in her life. The Times introduced it as a garden featuring a watchtower and barbed wire and the most original that the queen would see this year, while the Guardian said the weeds had become jewels. In addition, a British gardening magazine said that the messages of reconciliation and healing in the DMZ garden made all the other gardens pale into pretty insignificance.

Q. Both the Hae-woo-so and DMZ gardens are filled with nameless wild grasses and wildflowers.

A. I was born in the countryside, so I’m not used to roses and lilies. The only ones I saw were in the school flowerbeds. The fields where I played were covered with wildflowers like river bulrushes, touch-me-nots, burnets, and the smartweeds called myeoneuri mitsitgae [daughter-in-law’s toilet paper]. Nobody cares about the wildflowers, but when they are planted together in clumps they are really beautiful. I love their lines and shapes, their clear colors.

Q. What is it about the DMZ garden that moves people?

A. As everyone knows, Europe is having a hard time right now. It’s not only the economy; the people are also exhausted. In Europe gardening is an upper class pastime. In the way they change their brand name clothes every season, the rich newly decorate their gardens every season with expensive plants and flowers. At the Chelsea Flower Show also there has been a preference for gardens featuring rare plants, newly developed species, and beautiful luxurious flowers and trees. But Korean gardens like “Hae-woo-so” and “DMZ” shook them up. They were astonished by the simplicity and roughness of the Korean garden, which was nevertheless overflowing with life and energy. The Europeans, who cringe at the word “toilet,” discovered in it truthful stories about real life.

Q. So you’ve changed the trend of European gardens?

A. The garden that won the gold medal for best show garden this year in the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, one of the three top flower shows in the world, was titled “Bridge over Troubled Waters.” It’s hard to say they were not influenced by the Hae-woo-so and DMZ gardens. When I submitted my blueprints to the Chelsea show, people scoffed at first. Bets were placed before the show and it was predicted that a pyramid garden for parties by British star designer Diramuid Gavin would be the favorite. But against expectations DMZ was the winner. People were moved by the simple spirit of the garden.

Q. Members of the royal family including Prince Phillip, Princess Anne and Prince Edward have visited the garden.

A. Prince Phillip thanked me and said it was an honor to see such a garden before he died. Paul Smith said it was fortunate both for himself and for England to have discovered Hwang Ji-hae. He was a very sexy and witty person. One other visitor said that standing in the garden made him feel a sense of peace. When one of the volunteers who helped make the garden said “I’m eating food for the soul,” I almost burst into tears.

Q. I hear that some Korean War vets also played a part in completing the DMZ garden.

A. When the garden was in danger of being discontinued, they wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth and to our presidential office, Cheong Wa Dae. They hoped to see the garden completed to ensure that the Korean War did not end up being a forgotten war. Many of them wept when they came to visit the garden at the show.

Strength from Deficiency

In the garden design and landscaping world, Hwang Ji-hae belongs to the minority. A graduate of Mokpo University where she studied Western painting, Hwang was active for a long time in the Gwangju area as an environmental artist. Her artistic inspiration comes from her childhood in the country town of Gokseong and her mother, who was a typical country woman. “When I design gardens I always think of my mother,” she says.

Q. Did you show artistic talent as a child?

A. Drawing was the only thing I did well as a child. In our poor country neighborhood my mother was the only one with a real passion to see her children educated, so I often used the whole art room in my school by myself. (laughs)

Q. What kind of person was your mother?

A. She was a tough person who had to raise three children on her own and made a living by running a restaurant and a hair salon. But she was also a woman who on windy days would take a chair out into the yard and close her eyes to enjoy the wind. She had great sensitivity to such things, unlike most country women. She knew how to use nature to deal with the fire in her heart. She gave me my name Ji-hae, which means “wise sea.”

Q. You majored in painting, so how is that you’ve found success as a garden designer?

A. The kitchen garden that my mother cultivated was my first garden and my treasure trove. The garden had all kinds of fruits and vegetables growing in it, so many that there are few fruits that I have not tasted. I would play in the garden and fall asleep there, and was constantly bitten by insects. My childhood of playing in the fields is my source of inspiration and energy. Once I decide on the theme, it’s easy for me to see which plants will look most natural in the garden.

Q. A lot of people are surprised that the star of the Chelsea Flower Show is from a provincial university.

A. I wanted to attend an art college in Seoul but I didn’t get in. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to take any steps backward, even drive in reverse, so instead of repeating I decided to attend a university close to home. But there were a lot of excellent professors there who gave us experience in a lot of different genres. My experience with gardens in university, which called for a variety of skills and even made me want to get a driver’s license for heavy equipment, laid the ground for my current work.

Q. Can you tell us about Muum, the environmental art group that you formed?

A. My eyes were opened to environmental art thanks to a professor who had studied the subject in Paris. When I was a student teacher, I once painted a mural at a country school. When I saw the children clapping and jumping with joy, I decided to form a group of volunteers and we went around painting murals at country schools and medical centers. That was the start of Muum.

Q. Why the name Muum?

A. The look of the name [뮴 in Korean] is artistic! (laughs) There is no special meaning. If you look at the word, it looks like a person sitting with knees bent. From childhood I liked to see my mother praying on bended knee. Although it’s a local artists’ group we have worked not only in the whole Honam region but also in Seoul. We’ve also done a whole lot of apartment complex landscaping work, though we were only subcontractors.

Q. Do you think you would have found sponsors more easily if you had come from an elite university?

A. I don’t know. But I do know that my drive for life comes from deficiency, from my complexes. (laughs)

Q. I hear you are planning to enter the Gardening World Cup at Huis Ten Bosch in Nagasaki, Japan this September.

A. I have been getting a lot of calls since I won an award at the Chelsea show. The world’s top 10 garden designers are invited to the World Cup, so it is a great honor, but to tell the truth, I’m very tired.

Q. Are you planning to enter the Chelsea Flower Show again next year?

A. No. The experience this year was so hellish I don’t think I’ll be returning next year. (laughs) If no corporate or government sponsor appears and offers to help first, then definitely not. Ha-ha!
[September 8, 2012]

A Writer Evokes Loss on South Korea’s Path to Success

Posted on 7 September 2012 by admin

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/world/asia/shin-kyung-sook-mines-south-koreas-sense-of-loss.html

LIKE so many South Korean parents at the time, Shin Kyung-sook’s mother saw education as her daughter’s best chance of escaping poverty and backbreaking work in the rice fields. So in 1978 she took her 15-year-old daughter to Seoul, where Ms. Shin would lie about her age to get a factory job while attending high school at night to pursue her dream of becoming a novelist.

Seoul-bound trains at the time, like the one mother and daughter boarded that night, picked up many young rural South Koreans along the way — part of the migration that fueled South Korea’s industrialization but forever changed its traditional family life.

It is that social upheaval that Ms. Shin evoked in her most famous novel to date, “Please Look After Mom,” which earned her the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize and a commercial success attained by few other Korean writers. (Sales in South Korea passed two million this spring, and the book has been published in 19 other countries, including the United States.)

That book and a more recent one, “I Will Be Right There,” about friendship and love set in the country’s political turmoil of the 1980s, are part of a body of work over three decades that has set Ms. Shin apart as one of the most accomplished chroniclers of modern South Korea.

“In her novels, readers have the chance to pause and reflect upon the other side of their society’s breakneck race for economic growth, what they have lost in that pursuit and upon people who were left behind in the mad rush,” said Shin Soo-jeong, a professor of Korean literature at Myongji University in Seoul.

In “Please Look After Mom,” an elderly woman from the countryside travels to Seoul to visit her adult children and gets lost in what is quite literally a mad rush: the scramble to get on a Seoul subway. Reviewers have called her disappearance a metaphor for the profound sense of loss in a society that hurtled from an agrarian dictatorship to an industrialized democracy within a single and often tumultuous generation.

That feeling has not overwhelmed South Koreans’ pride in their country’s accomplishments, notably its rise from abject poverty to the world’s 13th-largest economy. But the sense of loss taps into a growing unease over some of the costs of that success, especially a widening gap between rich and poor and a generation of elderly people left largely to fend for themselves as their adult children work in cities.

The filial guilt that suffuses the novel is universal, but also has a particularly Korean spin.

Until a generation ago in South Korea, at least one adult child — usually the eldest son and his family — lived with aging parents until their deaths. Now, a growing number of older people live alone in their rural villages or in the nursing homes that are springing up across the country. Often, they have little money left, having invested their savings in their children’s educations with the expectation that the children would prosper and eventually care for them.

The children, meanwhile, living in a hypercompetitive society where people work some of the longest hours in the world, often lament that they are too harried to visit their elderly parents. Many also fear using too much vacation time, afraid of being seen as disloyal to their companies.

IN what Ms. Shin says is probably the most important sentence in her novel, the missing mother expresses what many guilt-ridden readers imagine as their own mothers’ sense of helplessness at having been effectively abandoned by their children. In a scene in which the old woman imagines meeting her own dead mother, she wonders: “Did Mom know? That I, too, needed her my entire life?”

Ms. Shin’s life, which tracked the trajectory of her country’s rise, prepared her well for her role as an interpreter of her generation. Born in the countryside like so many characters in her novels, Ms. Shin, 49, now lives in an expensive residential district in Seoul. Her husband is a college professor as well as a poet and literary critic. They have no children.

From an early age, she was a voracious reader, hiding herself away with books her elder brothers brought home. (She was the fourth of six children.) By the time she was 15, she was increasingly certain she wanted to write for a living.

After their arrival in Seoul on that night train in 1978, her mother left her in the care of an older brother in a crammed room in a slum. While he worked in a government office by day and attended college at night, Ms. Shin worked in an audio and television parts factory and attended high school in the evenings.

She was one of the youngest employees in the factory, where she witnessed the labor discontent that sometimes rocked South Korea as its economy galloped ahead but many workers toiled in sweatshop conditions.

“The girl sitting next to me at the night school had no fingerprints; she worked all day wrapping candies in a confectionery,” Ms. Shin said in an interview. “Most of my classmates sent part of their meager wages back home to support their little brothers’ and sisters’ education. When they came to class, they were so tired most of them dozed.”

At her own factory, a clash involving one of the country’s growing number of labor unions turned violent as managers deployed their own security guards, who joined with the police in cracking down on workers organizing for higher pay and better conditions.

Ms. Shin stayed inside, amid the idled conveyor belts, taking her mind off the mayhem by copying a new novel about the urban poor in longhand.

In the end, Ms. Shin was the only one in her high school class to win admission to college, as a creative writing major. She eventually wrote about life at the factory in “A Lone Room,” one of her most acclaimed novels. Its French translation won the Prix de l’Inaperçu in 2009.

“I wonder what would have become of me in those days if I hadn’t had the goal of becoming a writer to hang on to,” she said. “I was determined that one day I would write about what I saw and felt.”

FOR several years after college, she supported her writing with odd jobs: writing scripts for a classical music radio station and reading books to blind people. But by 1993, she was successful enough to be able to write novels and short stories full time.

She also was able to fulfill a personal promise: to repay her own mother’s sacrifices for her children. The day they went to Seoul, she remembers, her mother’s face was etched with weariness.

“I promised myself then that one day I would write a beautiful book for Mom,” she said.

That book, “Please Look After Mom,” solidified her standing as one of South Korea’s finest living novelists and won her accolades.

Her mother’s reaction was decidedly more muted, typical of a generation of women who pushed their children hard to succeed but were accustomed to restraining their own emotions, even when those children met or exceeded their family’s high expectations.

As Ms. Shin recounted, “She only said, ‘My dear, you have done well.’ ”

A North Korean Corleone

Posted on 3 March 2012 by admin

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/a-north-korean-corleone.html

WHAT kind of deal do you make with a 20-something who just inherited not only a country, but also the mantle of one of the world’s most sophisticated crime families? When Kim Jong-un, who is thought to be 28 or 29, became North Korea’s leader in December after the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, he became the de facto head of a mafia state.

How the new leader combines the roles of head of state and mafia don will influence the regime’s future behavior. Crime bosses have different incentives, and dealing with them requires different policies. And any deal — including last week’s agreement by North Korea to suspend its nuclear program in exchange for American food aid — will eventually falter if that reality is ignored.

Kim Jong-un confronts the same problem faced by every dictator: how to generate enough money to pay off the small group of elite supporters — army generals, party and family — who keep him in power. Other autocrats use oil wealth or parcel out whole industries to cronies.

But whoever rules North Korea has less to work with than most. The country defaulted in the 1970s, losing access to international credit, and Soviet subsidies ended with the cold war. In the 1990s, the founder and “eternal president,” Kim Il-sung, died just as a series of natural disasters devastated food production. The country has been an economic and humanitarian basket case ever since.

Kim Jong-il, who began training to run the country in the 1970s and inherited it after his father’s death, came up with an unconventional solution: state-sponsored organized crime. Counterfeit cigarettes and medicine, drugs, insurance fraud, fake money, trafficking people and endangered species — for decades, the Kim regime has done it all. Its operations became so extensive and well coordinated that American officials nicknamed it the “Soprano state,” after the hit HBO television series.

In the 1970s, after the default, North Korea used diplomats as drug mules to keep embassies running. When that got them kicked out of multiple countries and the economy tanked in the 1990s, Kim Jong-il began producing drugs at home, thereby avoiding a major cost plaguing drug lords elsewhere: law enforcement.

He managed these operations through Bureau 39, a mysterious office under the Central Committee of the Korean Workers’ Party. But to create plausible deniability, he outsourced distribution to Russian mafia, Japanese yakuza and Chinese triad gangs, who met North Korean military forces for drug drops at sea. The regime also manufactured the world’s best counterfeit dollars — so good that they reportedly forced the Treasury to redesign the $100 bill — and used a crime ring connected to the Official Irish Republican Army, a Marxist offshoot of the I.R.A., to launder them in Europe. They even made fake Viagra.

The Agreed Framework that froze North Korea’s nuclear program in October 1994 didn’t stop these activities; they actually increased. Despite its other benefits, the framework didn’t address the fundamental hard currency needs of the North Korean leadership.

This criminal legacy means that Kim Jong-un has even more on his plate than one might think. In addition to running a country that is an economic and humanitarian disaster and a geopolitical hot spot, he also has to manage a global criminal racket. That’s a lot for any 20-something to handle. (As “Sopranos” fans know, A. J.’s taking over for Tony might not have been good for business.)

Despite the seemingly stable transition so far, Kim Jong-un is under pressure. Elite party members who supported his father will be skeptical of his untested ability to fulfill his side of their cash-for-support bargain. And North Korea needs more money than usual this year to celebrate the anniversaries of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. (In the ’70s, one of the first things Kim Jong-il used foreign currency for was a campaign to glorify his father.) Any sign that Kim Jong-un can’t satisfy supporters could crack the facade of elite solidarity.

What’s an aspiring kingpin to do?

First, find the money. Kim Jong-un seems to have done that. One of the last photos released of Kim Jong-il shows him riding a supermarket escalator. Behind him are Kim Jong-un and Jon Il-chun, manager of the infamous Bureau 39.

Second, control the people who earn the money. Illicit activity brings the risk of freelancing, especially when you’re forced to let others do the distribution. As North Korea outsourced the drug trade, its profit margins dropped — and more and more insiders skimmed off the system to line their pockets. Today, reports indicate that methamphetamine is widely used in North Korea (partly because it dulls hunger pains), and the state is cracking down on the trade it once monopolized. Even Kim Jong-il couldn’t maintain perfect control and had to send operatives abroad to retrieve misbehaving agents. These are delicate tasks easily botched by a novice.

Finally, keep the money coming. Criminal activity was never North Korea’s ultimate objective; the aim was always hard currency. Kim Jong-un needs cash without political conditions to stay in power. But there aren’t many good options for getting it these days, which is why North Korea is likely to pursue new and expanded forms of illicit activity.

Criminal activities are attractive because other sources of money have strings attached. Remittances from defectors, which have risen recently, don’t go to leaders, and they let in information. North Korea could bank on economic reform or Chinese aid, but reform won’t necessarily provide money for the elite, and aid makes Pyongyang uneasily dependent on Chinese patronage.

The cardinal fear of national security experts — which partly motivated last week’s agreement — is that Pyongyang will make money through nuclear proliferation. After all, North Korea is alleged to have helped build the Syrian nuclear reactor that Israel destroyed in 2007. But it may be hard for North Korea to find a buyer; tests of its plutonium warheads have been a questionable technical success, and their uranium-enrichment program may not be advanced enough to make them an attractive seller.

That leaves crime. Last week’s deal does not change the probability that North Korea will engage in it. And new lines of business probably won’t look like the old ones; North Korea’s schemes are creative and highly adaptable.

When drugs and counterfeit dollars got too much exposure, the regime shifted toward cigarettes and insurance fraud. Last summer, South Korean authorities discovered North Korea’s involvement in a hacking ring that exploited online gaming sites to win points and exchange them for cash, making $6 million in two years. Given that cybercriminals across the world gross over $100 billion annually, a country with decent cyberwarfare capabilities could probably do well for itself.

Or could North Korea go legit? Publicly at least, there haven’t been major seizures of its drugs or counterfeit currency in several years, leading analysts to speculate that targeting the country’s illicit finances successfully crippled those particular earning schemes. And Kim Jong-il’s death does give North Korea an opportunity to get out of the game.

BUT legitimacy won’t solve Kim Jong-un’s problem. Right now his survival is guaranteed by hard currency, and the best source of it is illicit activity. That’s why previous American efforts sought to shut off these activities: to convince the regime it had to reform itself to survive.

That didn’t go quite far enough. Shutting down those activities works only so long as North Korea can’t find new ones. The key to survival was not any one illicit activity but the ability to adapt from one to another — an ability that, with Kim Jong-il gone, likely rests with just a few trusted people. Those people, their loyalties and their relationships are now Kim Jong-un’s biggest vulnerability. If North Korea loses its capacity to adapt, it will lose the ability to make money illicitly — and will have to choose reform.

For America to make successful deals with North Korea, we must first grasp that its leader faces not just a dictator’s problems, but those of a mafia boss. And if you make a deal with the Godfather, you must not overlook the interests of the consigliere standing behind him.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens is a doctoral candidate in government at Harvard and a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and at the Miller Center, University of Virginia.

Thug for Life

Posted on 5 February 2012 by admin

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2012/02/123_104180.html
Hanwha avoids delisting, but unruly boss could be its ruin

By Kim Tong-hyung

The widening fraud and embezzlement scandal surrounding Hanwha Chairman Kim Seung-youn further disgraces the legacy of one of Korea’s richest men and touches off questions on whether his waywardness is beginning to take a toll on the company. / Korea Times file

The massive corruption scandal surrounding Hanwha Chairman Kim Seung-youn cements his status as Korea’s most loathsome business figure and underlines the fragility of the company’s future under its wayward owner.

Hanwha, one of the country’s top-10 business groups, breathed a sigh of relief Sunday after the Korea Exchange opted not to delist the group’s holding company in a much-anticipated decision, despite Kim potentially facing a lengthy prison term over widening fraud and embezzlement charges. However, the damage to the confidence in the conglomerate’s future could be irreversible.

Kim, who recently turned 60, was indicted last year for unlawfully breaching Hanwha’s corporate coffers to plug losses from a number of ill-advised business projects he had been running personally on the side. The Seoul Western District Prosecutors’ Office last week said it would demand a nine-year jail term for Kim atop of a 150 billion won (about $134 million) fine.

The murky allegations surrounding Kim come at a time when the families behind the country’s chaebol, or family-owned conglomerates, are facing increasing scrutiny for abusing corporate wealth as politicians move faster to massage voters’ egos as poll days near.

Kim has been denying the charges against him, but not many seem willing to grant him the benefit of the doubt when he has more baggage than an airport terminal. And as rich as he is, he won’t be able to pay enough goons to find and assault every critic.

“Until now, prosecutors have been politically prevented from properly punishing wrongdoings of chaebol chairmen. As in tough times, they would say we are making it worse, and in good times, they would say we are spoiling the mood,’’ a senior prosecution official told reporters.

“If we continue to make excuses to let chaebol leaders find an easy way out, this country has no future.’’

Korea certainly has developed a reputation for employing lax justice on chaebol leaders. Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee, Hyundai Automotive Chairman Chung Mong-koo and SK Chairman Chey Tae-won are among the corporate bigwigs pardoned in recent years for a broad range of crimes that include illegal wealth transfers, tax evasion, bribing and embezzlement.

However, the leash apparently isn’t long enough for some tycoons like Hanwha’s Kim and SK’s Chey, back on the grill for allegedly abusing corporate wealth to soften personal losses from futures investment, a duo leading a list of CEOs who appear to have blown their second chances or even their third.

Interestingly, Hanwha and SK both have a lot in common in terms of where they are as a business group. They both benefited from their strength in the domestic market, with Hanwha excelling in chemicals, explosives and financial services and SK dominating the telecommunications and energy sector.

Despite this, the companies have been struggling mightily to rebuild themselves on the global scale and the dual reputation of their leaders as successful businessmen and troublemakers certainly doesn’t help.

Since succeeding his late father, Kim Chong-hee, at the helm of Hanwha in 1981, Kim has developed a character that is more frequently compared to Don Corelone than Jack Welch.

In 1993, Kim became the first leader of a top-10 business group ever to be arrested after prosecutors charged him for smuggling dollars to help purchase a lavish mansion in Los Angeles.

Kim was also questioned by prosecutors during an investigation of Hanwha between 2004 and 2005 over suspicions that he created a slush fund of about 9 billion won and used the money to bribe politicians ahead of the group’s acquisition of Korea Life Insurance in 2002.

Kim’s most famous dust off with the law came in 2007 when he had his bodyguards kidnap and beat up some bar workers who had attacked his son, and at the heat of the moment, assaulting one of the victims himself with a metal pipe. He was convicted for the incident but was pardoned by President Lee Myung-bak the following year.

The current investigation on Kim is based on allegations that he spent hundreds of billions of won in company funds from 2004 to 2006 to repay hidden private business debts. Prosecutors since last year have been tracing the money flowing in and out of some borrowed-name bank accounts Kim has been controlling.

The investigation is a public relations disaster for Hanwha and could end up hurting the firm. The conglomerate has been scrambling to secure revenue sources aside from its bread-and-butter businesses in chemicals and explosives. Its attempt to acquire a controlling stake in Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering fell through in 2009.

When opposites attract (a preview of Ahn Eun-me’s Princess Bari at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival)

Posted on 18 July 2011 by admin

Tradition and the avant-garde clash in Korean choreographer Ahn Eun-me’s gender-busting new show, hears Mark Brown

The Herald

IT’S REIGNING MEN: Androgyny and gender play are to the fore in Princess Bari, with male and female dancers wearing the same costumes and a male lead, Hee-Moon Lee. ‘He has a voice like a female,’ says Eun-Me Ahn.

ARRIVING at a beautiful traditional Korean restaurant in the centre of Seoul to meet the renowned choreographer Eun-Me Ahn is a deeply confusing experience. On the one hand, the restaurant — which is called Pulhyanggi (meaning “the scent of grass”), and decorated with delicate images of flying cranes and other pastoral scenes — is a haven of tranquillity in the midst of one of the world’s most buzzing cities. On the other, Ahn — her head shaved, resplendent in bright green and red, her fingers adorned with huge floral rings — is the living embodiment of that cliche, a force of nature.

The choreographer is a woman of extraordinary personality, colour, humour and energy; elements very pany presents at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival.

The Princess Bari story is a central narrative in Korean culture, with shades of the Greek tales of Oedipus and Orpheus, and even of Alice In Wonderland and Pinocchio. Thrown to the sea by her father, the King, because she is the seventh daughter of a queen who bore no son, Bari (the word means “discarded” in Korean) is saved and raised by a fisherman. In her teens, the intrepid girl learns of her regal origins and undertakes an epic journey to the royal palace. And that is as far as Ahn’s Edinburgh production (the first of two pieces telling the entire story) takes us.

However, as Ahn is keen to emphasise as she holds court in the restaurant (seeming very much like a precocious, somewhat mischievous princess herself), the key to the show is not the tale, but the highly imaginative way in which she has recreated it for the 21st century.

The piece is an irresistible combination of the traditional (including the song of Korean pansori and the movement of Japanese butoh) and the avantgarde, the minimal and the exuberant, the anguished and the comic.

It is typical of Ahn’s sense of artistic freedom that Ban is played not by a woman, but by the multitalented and remarkably androgynous young male singer Hee-Moon Lee. “He looks like a girl,” the choreographer agrees. “He’s a small man, and he has a voice like a female. Sometimes he looks like a baby, sometimes he looks like a girl, and sometimes he looks like a man. It’s amazing. He’s a good actor.”

Androgyny and gender play have long been of interest to Ahn, in her life (she started shaving her head to make her own gender more ambiguous) and her work. It’s an attitude which infuses Princess Bari, in which male and female dancers perform in the same brightly coloured dresses and spotty underpants.

“I don’t want to divide costume between women’s and men’s,” she explains. “The dress is very convenient to dance in, and allows for very quick changes.” Her choice of costumes is also a delight for the male members of the company. “Men love dresses. It’s something they never experienced before.”

If playing with gender is part of her aesthetic, Ahn also sees a thematic justification for casting Lee in the title role. “I figured out why Princess Bari was thrown out,” she declares. “It’s because she had both female and male sex organs.”

It will, no doubt, come as something of a shock to generations of Koreans to discover that Bad — a much-loved figure from their childhood —is, in fact, a hermaphrodite. Which is not to say that Ahn’s reinterpretation is an act of disrespectful iconoclasm. Rather, like her wonderfully rich and diverse show as a whole, it speaks to the choreographer’s intelligent and fascinating combination of the traditional and the modern.

This is exemplified in her approach to traditional Korean music and song, which is used in truly astonishing ways in the show. Although Ahn’s background is in dance, she is not afraid — any more than was her late friend, the great German dance director Pina Bausch — to roll up her sleeves and mould other forms to the requirements of her choreography.

“We love this [traditional Korean] song,” Ahn says, “but we have been listening to this one song for ever. So, we are also getting sick and tired. I’m trying to achieve a different sound from the traditional vocal techniques.”

There is something fabulously Bauschian in Ahn’s combination of dancing singers and singing dancers (including, at points in the show, herself). Her means of auditioning singers, such as Lee, for the company is typically unorthodox. “We don’t do only dance and movement,” she says. “I don’t care about that. We go drinking and we go to karaoke. I want to see their natural power, which is their personality.”

Although Ahn, who began her formal training in traditional Korean dance at the age of 12, creates work which is strongly connected to the culture of her homeland, the comparison with Bausch’s choreography is one that she embraces. Ahn recalls her time at Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal (where she presented three solo works in 2001) with great affection. “Pina Bausch and I just loved each other,” she re-members. “We had the same female energy. As a person, she was quite slow, and I’m very fast, but the energy of our work is of a similar level. That’s why I think we could talk. She loved watching my kind of energy in talking. She loved drinking until 3am. We’d sit and talk about everything.”

Talking with Ahn, who is an extremely engaging, animated conversationalist, it isn’t difficult to see why Bausch would have found her such good and interesting company. The Korean choreographer is a constant performer, although the amazing control and geometry of her own dancing — even now, in her late forties — contrasts markedly with the marvellous gesticulations and ribald commentary of her off-stage persona.

One can’t help but wonder what shaped her strident self-confidence and endearing, high-energy personality. “As a child, we had no TV and no telephone,” Ahn remembers. “All my parents could afford was the house and food, that’s all. So, in the evening, we had to be performers for our parents and grandparents. If you did well, you got one cookie. That was my first job. I don’t remember it, but my mum told me,

`You were a really good dancer.’ She said I did whatever they asked me, and I would be given cookies.”

Which, as an account of creativity born of poverty, is as good an explanation of Eun-Me Ahn’s remarkable choreography, and equally remark-able character, as one could wish for. Not that she cares to dwell too much on the hardships of her up-bringing. No sooner has our inter-view ended than I’m packed off in a cab to her favourite Japanese pub (she travels ahead on her scooter). I, like a tourist, drink Korean beer. She, like any cool Korean, downs a couple of bottles of Tokyo’s finest. Then, after much talk of the Edinburgh Festival, Pina Bausch and the burgeoning culture of South Korea, Ahn is back on her scooter and zipping off into the flashing lights of downtown Seoul.

Princess Bari is at the Edinburgh Playhouse, August 19-21.

Hitting Below the Belt: Pyongyang Spills the Beans on Secret Summit Talks

Posted on 8 July 2011 by admin

By Aidan Foster-Carter
http://38north.org/2011/07/aidanfc070811/

Just when you thought inter-Korean relations couldn’t get any worse, they do. The North has found a fresh weapon, and on June 1, 2011 launched a sneak attack on the South—with a follow-up ambush a week later. Fortunately, we’re not talking ships sunk or islands shelled like last year. But words can do damage too, and this was a low blow.

Despite poor inter-Korean relations in the three years since Lee Myung Bak became South Korea’s president, there have been regular rumors of secret North-South talks behind the scenes. Pyongyang recently confirmed these rumors, revealing the details of these talks and destroying any basis for future trust. The North’s broadsides can be read in full at http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2011/201106/news01/20110601-29ee.html and http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2011/201106/news09/20110609-35ee.html.

It’s embarrassing hot stuff, and of course Pyongyang’s word can hardly be taken as gospel—though they do threaten to publish transcripts of the taped conversations. (Seoul says it didn’t know the meetings were being recorded.) The way the North tells it, the South had “begged” since April to have a secret meeting, which then took place in Beijing from May 9. The idea was two-fold: 1) to finally get past last year’s Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents; and 2) to hold a three-stage summit—first at Panmunjom on the border in June, followed by Pyongyang in August, with the final act in Seoul in March 2012 when the ROK will host the world’s second Nuclear Security Summit (NSS), just one month before parliamentary elections (now there’s a coincidence).

For a leader whose shtick is that he’s a practical no-nonsense business type, Lee Myung Bak’s whole North Korea policy is straight out of fairyland—and this takes the cake. Who in their wildest dreams could ever imagine Kim Jong Il venturing to Seoul, of all places (by train?), when he has steadfastly refused to do so even when friendlier folks like Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun occupied the Blue House, to deliver an abject U-turn on the North’s nuclear policy to a lame-duck ROK president in his final months in office? And all this while the North is busy gearing up for its own fairyland (or emperor’s new clothes) moment: the centenary of its founder Kim Il Sung in April 2012, when the DPRK is due to proclaim itself a “great and prosperous nation”—even while its economy is broken and many of its citizens go hungry.

Small wonder that there are calls in Seoul to sack the security troika—named by the North’s National Defense Commission (NDC) as Kim Chun Sig of the Ministry of Unification’s (MOU) Policy Office; Hong Chang Hwa, a director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS); and Kim Tae Hyo, President Lee’s security advisor—involved in this farrago. Worse yet, the North also claimed that the South offered “enveloped money”: a quaint name for a trait alas not rare in Seoul, nor indeed in inter-Korean relations. Pyongyang is being a rank hypocrite: In the past it had no qualms about trousering such well-stuffed envelopes, but this time the NDC scorned the South’s explanation that it was just offering to pay the North’s expenses.

What rich irony for a regime as secretive as the DPRK to suddenly posture as a champion of openness: a virtue in any case much overrated. As with the Wikileaks, there is both prurient and genuine interest in becoming privy to what we weren’t meant to know. But although the Iraq imbroglio has made many in the US and UK rightly mistrustful of our mendacious leaders, it would be wrong to generalize such revulsion into a blanket call for always-open diplomacy.

On the contrary. Sometimes you do need secrecy, as well as absolute assurance that the other guy—by definition, in these situations, someone you’ve no cause to trust (and vice versa)—won’t betray you. Classic cases-in-point are Henry Kissinger’s first foray to China exactly 40 years ago in July 1971, and the hush-hush Israel-PLO dialogue in Oslo during 1992-93.

But Korea itself has plenty of examples of secret talks over the past four decades. It’s worth taking a minute to recall these—many remain little-known—and how much they achieved. Here, as always, Don Oberdorfer’s book The Two Koreas is a fascinating guide through this labyrinth.

It all started with Kissinger’s visit to China, which alarmed Park Chung Hee and Kim Il Sung alike. That prompted the two Koreas to start Red Cross talks at Panmunjom in August 1971, but these got bogged down in reiterating entrenched positions. So in March 1972 one ROK Red Cross delegate, Chong Hong Jin—really he worked for the KCIA—quietly slipped out the door on the other side, and was driven to Kaesong and then helicoptered to Pyongyang. Within a month, the KCIA had a direct phone line to the North’s ruling Workers’ Party (WPK).

It was swiftly agreed to upgrade the contact level. In early May, KCIA director Lee Hu Rak secretly popped across at Panmunjom. A man who terrified and terrorized many, Lee confessed to feeling “indescribable anxiety.” He was shown the sights of Pyongyang and then, during his second night, he was woken, bundled into a car, and not told where he was going. He feared the worst, but after midnight, finally came face-to-face with an affable Kim Il Sung.

Lee Hu-rak

What did they talk about? Nationalism, of course. Oberdorfer has fascinating excerpts. Lee assured Kim that Park Chung Hee “detests foreign interference most” and boasted: “In the future the big powers will yield to us [meaning a united Korea].” Kim even apologized for the 1968 commando raid which tried to kill Park—they got within a mile of the Blue House—claiming not to have known about it. Yeah right, but that’s how you get past obstacles and move on. Just as his son Kim Jong Il would assure Japanese premier Junichiro Koizumi 30 years later in 2002 that he hadn’t known about DPRK abductions of young Japanese. It may stick in the craw, but diplomacy does need face-saving formulae (i.e. lies) as well as secrecy.

All this led to the first North-South joint statement on July 4 (note the date!) 1972, signed by Lee Hu Rak and Kim Il Sung’s brother Kim Yong Ju, then seen as his successor, as director of the WPK’s organization and guidance department (rather than by the two governments as such). (Incidentally, Kim Yong Ju is still with us, and Lee Hu Rak died only in October 2009.)

In autumn 1972, Red Cross delegations visited each others’ capitals for the first time. Sadly the bonhomie didn’t last, though this is not the place for a full chronicle (read Oberdorfer). The point is, even to get this far required secret talks too—and it was vital that they stayed secret.

Fast forward over a decade. Park Chung Hee is dead, shot by the head of his KCIA (Lee’s successor), and another general has seized power in Seoul. Chun Doo Hwan will forever be rightly excoriated as the butcher of Kwangju in May 1980.Yet his diplomacy showed more subtlety. In September 1984, less than a year after KPA commandos nearly blew him up in Rangoon, killing 17 elite South Koreans and four Burmese, Pyongyang offered aid after floods in the South. Presumably, it expected Seoul to refuse. Chun, imaginatively, said yes.

Thus, we had the amazing sight of hundreds of Northern trucks rolling across the DMZ in peace. The cargo revealed much about the North’s economy: wormy rice, feeble cement, and dodgy drugs (which the South quietly warehoused). But it was the gesture that counted. This ushered in a year of wider contacts, including the first ever family reunions, talks between lawmakers, five economic meetings, and more. It didn’t last, but it was a real breakthrough at the time.

All of that was public, but once again, this was accompanied by secret talks behind the scenes. Remember Park Chul Un? A bright young Blue House aide, only 42 in 1985, Park blazed an extraordinary covert trail not only with Pyongyang, but later in Seoul’s wider Nordpolitik.

His WPK counterpart, Han Si Hae, was an urbane diplomat who would later be the DPRK’s ambassador to the Unite Nations. Here I must quote Oberdorfer directly. Just imagine this, today:

Park and Han established a direct telephone connection between their desks in Seoul and Pyongyang, on which they had frequent conversations. The two met face-to-face a total of forty-two times between May 1985 and November 1991 in a wide variety of places, including Pyongyang, Seoul, Panmunjom, Paektu Mountain in North Korea, Cheju Island in South Korea, Singapore and elsewhere. Some of the meetings lasted as long as five days, but except for a few sightings, most of this diplomacy remained secret. (2001 edn., p. 150)

What followed is especially interesting and very relevant now. Like Lee Myung Bak, Chun Doo Hwan wanted an inter-Korean summit. To that end, former DPRK foreign minister Ho Dam—with Han Si Hae in tow—secretly visited Seoul and met Chun in September 1985. I recall that visit being rumored at the time, so the secrecy wasn’t watertight. But everyone thought it was a hopeful sign, so nobody made political capital of it or spilled the beans. Of course, Chun was a dictator who had the press strictly under control, which made it easier.

Ho Dam

Among much else, Ho Dam insisted that the Rangoon bomb “had nothing to do with us.” If Seoul had demanded an apology there would have be no more talks. Chun seems to have let that go, which was big of him. Lee could learn a lesson from this. The recent NDC revelations do suggest that the South was trying to find a way past the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents.

But back to 1985. A month later in October, Chang Se Dong, head of the Agency for National Security Planning (NSP, the rebranded KCIA) went North with Park Chul Un and met Kim Il Sung. Again, Oberdorfer’s account is fascinating. He quotes a US intelligence source, who saw the transcripts, as saying the two sides got bogged down in detail as well as “linguistic tangles” over how they would describe any summit: “The North was not very interested in making progress, and the South was also bringing up things that would irritate the North.”

A major irritant was the Team Spirit joint US-ROK war games, bigger each year and which Chun refused to cancel. Kim Il Sung once told the East German leader, Erich Honecker, that mobilizing reserve forces to counter these exercises cost the DPRK six weeks of GNP in lost labor time. Whether Kim genuinely feared an invasion or was just spooked and angry, at all events in January 1986 the North denounced this “nuclear war maneuver” and broke off all dialogue.

All public talks, that is. But Park Chul Un and Han Si Hae’s contacts continued, even after Chun Doo Hwan conceded democracy and the people elected his fellow ex-general Roh Tae Woo (because the two leading democrats, Kim Yong Sam and Kim Dae Jung, ran separately). It did Park no harm that he was a nephew of Roh’s wife. Under Roh, Park served as sports minister and was even seen as a potential successor—though he also made enemies: read on.

Widely reviled as mul (water; Margaret Thatcher used “wet” as a similar term of abuse), Roh deserved better. History will respect him as Korea’s Gorbachev, another man much traduced. Such rare leaders—South Africa’s F.W. de Klerk is another—who were both bold and skilled enough to see that the old order had to go, and who successfully and peacefully transformed a failing or noxious political system into a better one, surely deserve our praise, not blame. But Korea, like everywhere, is full of stubborn fools who see constancy, at all costs, as a virtue.

Park Chul Un’s six-year role as a secret conduit to the North eventually helped lead to a third round of inter-Korean dialogue: 1990-92’s eight mutual visits of prime ministers, including the epochal (if unfulfilled) general and nuclear North-South agreements of December 1991.

By then, Park had other fish to fry too. He was also Seoul’s point man on what was to prove the surer bet of Roh’s wider Nordpolitik. North Korea might blow hot and cold to this day, but communist regimes elsewhere—themselves moribund, but who knew?—were by this time, ready to face world and peninsular realities, especially if offered financial inducements. By now, a master of secret diplomacy, Park Chul Un was the obvious man for the job.

July 1988 found Park secretly in Budapest. After 10 days of hard bargaining, plus a fat loan, Hungary became the first communist state to recognize the ROK—just in time for the Seoul Olympics. The same summer saw Park also in Moscow, bearing a letter from Roh Tae Woo which praised perestroika. Gorbachev’s Krasnoyarsk speech followed, and in 1990 came the unthinkable: the USSR recognized the ROK. (Again, be it said, a large loan was involved, on which, Moscow defaulted not long after, somewhat souring the party mood.)

The rest is history. For Park Chul Un things went less well. The flair he showed in diplomacy deserted him on home turf. He made the error of strongly opposing Kim Young Sam, when the latter changed sides in a blatant and successful bid to succeed Roh Tae Woo as president in 1992. Kim was not the forgiving sort; few in Seoul are. Park was indicted for receiving a bribe from a businessman who sold slot machines and spent 16 months in jail.

Park protested his innocence and claimed persecution—which now seems to be the general view—but this finished his political career, even though he was barely 50. (For that matter, Han Si Hae, his erstwhile Northern counterparty, hasn’t been heard of since 1998 either.)

That’s a pity, because Park had skills that Seoul still sorely needs. I could go on, and secret diplomacy did; especially in the sunshine decade (1998-2007), which is a whole other story.

For present purposes, suffice it to have shown that Lee Myung Bak is by no means the first right-wing South Korean president to have had trouble with North Korea. Yet in their different ways, Park Chung Hee, Chun Doo Hwan, and Roh Tae Woo were all ready to take more risks and to be more flexible in pursuing North-South dialogue. Compared to any of them, Lee’s rigid approach to the North appears both fatally flawed in theory—with its totally unrealistic insistence on denuclearization as a first step—and amateurishly bungling in practice.

Even so, shame on North Korea for stooping so low as to spill the beans on secret talks. That was a stupid as well as nasty move. Eighteen months from now, Lee’s successor—whoever that may be—will surely put out fresh feelers to the North. That will involve secret talks; it always does. But after this, how can any leader in Seoul trust a perpetually perfidious Pyongyang?

The answer is: You have to keep trying. And if existing policy fails, try something different. Deplorable though the North’s latest conduct is, it might just jolt the Lee administration into a belated realization that its approach hitherto simply hasn’t worked. Lame duck or not, Lee still has a year and a half left in office. Influential voices in the ruling Grand National Party (GNP), which fears a hammering at parliamentary elections (just 10 months away) if things don’t look up, are already calling for a new approach to North Korea. Lee is not exactly known for listening, but with so much at stake and time running out, he just might give it a try.

Pak Kyung-ni’s epic novel of Korean history

Posted on 22 June 2011 by admin

June 22, 2011
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7176556.ece
Land is a remarkable and important work in which Eastern and Western traditions fruitfully meet
Margaret Drabble

Pak Kyung-ni’s novel, Land, opens colourfully in 1897 at the traditional feast of the harvest moon, still one of the most important dates in the Korean calendar, where we are introduced to some of the hundreds of characters who people the vast canvas of this five-part national epic. Pak (1926–2008), one of the most celebrated twentieth-century Korean authors, centres her best-known work in a rural community which, through the generations, suffers the natural disasters of famine and cholera – both described in painful detail. The characters also feel the reverberations of distant armed conflicts in a rapidly changing world order, as centuries of rule by the Chosun dynasty stagger to a violent end. Agrarian uprisings, aggressive nationalism, modernization, modern weaponry and the invading Japanese threaten a stoic way of life that had endured, if not always prosperously, for hundreds of years. This is a work of immense ambition, covering nearly fifty years of history, and closing with the Japanese surrender in 1945. It appeared in serial instalments between 1969 and 1993, and the total text consists of more than 7,000 pages.

Land’s translation into English by Agnita Tennant is a landmark, and her undertaking is heroic. Hers is the first publication in English, although I am told that sections have appeared in authorized and unauthorized versions in French, German, and Japanese, and that a translation by a team of Chinese scholars is in progress. Tennant’s three-volume edition represents only Part One of the entire oeuvre, but, although seeded with intriguing premonitions of future events, it reads as a self-contained narrative. Over these volumes, we come to know the tenant farmers, the embattled landowners, their servants, and the children of the rising generation, all poised at a watershed in history. We enter their world, we follow its seasons, we learn its topography, and we see through them the tragic history of twentieth-century Korea unfold. The realities of the political backdrop are obscured from the villagers by ignorance and isolation, and news of revolution, assassination and capitulation filters towards them slowly, indirectly and not always in sequence, from Seoul and beyond; there are some strange loops of chronology that remind one of Joseph Conrad’s narrative techniques. But change is slowly if uncertainly approaching and an immemorial way of country life, rooted in Confucianism and Buddhism and ancestor-worship, is about to disappear forever.

Pak was brought up under Japanese rule, but she studied Western literature in Japanese translation (she never learned English) and was familiar with the works of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Balzac, Maupassant, Dickens, Hardy, and William Faulkner. For an English reader, Hardy is the most obvious point of reference, and his poem “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” comes frequently to mind – a poem that defiantly celebrates the continuity and timeless rhythms of rural life even as they violently disintegrate. We find in Pak a similar deep-grained dark cosmic pessimism and stoicism, a sense of a natural world more often hostile than benign, and an awareness of casual human brutality (the beating of servants, the caning of children, mob hangings) embodied in many a grim country proverb. The harshness is alleviated by moments of tenderness (even towards insects) and by the beauty of the landscape; by passages of lyric delicacy evoking the fields of grain, the flowing river, the flowering trees, the sunlight in the forest, the vines of wild grapes, the lily pond. But Pak’s realism exceeds Hardy’s: her characters blow their noses a lot; they suffer from diarrhoea and other physical ailments that he might have shrunk from describing; and their many visits to the privy are not veiled in literary decency. I am not sure that Hardy ever mentions a privy.

Pak has a powerful gift for strong but subtle characterization. Her people are not the types of earlier Korean fiction, nor are they the simple heroes and villains of folklore (although there are some villains), but vividly imagined individuals, each playing a linking part in what could easily be imagined as a television series. (There have been several adaptations.) Korean readers have their favourites: the doomed love affair of the handsome, unhappily married young farmer Yongi with the shaman’s daughter Wólsón is a popular storyline. She is a social outcast (there is a strong class system at work in village society), but she is an independent, intelligent, resourceful woman, and we watch her passionate relationship with Yongi wax and wane over the years until the affair settles into a sort of marriage by default. The descriptions of Yongi’s barren and angry wife Kangch’óng-taek, whom he has never loved, are also moving: for years consumed by violent jealousy, she has been forced to live in a cold and sterile home at the mercy of her husband’s public rejection and alienated affections. He has never felt anything for her but “pity and guilt”, yet after her death (more shades of Hardy) he remembers her when she was a child bride, standing before him in the fields “with a handful of pasque flowers, her skirt billowing”.

The gossip and malice and mutual support of the village women, at work among the crops, at home, round the well, stealing one another’s vegetables over the garden fence, sharing often sparse but sometimes festive meals, are beautifully portrayed, and their relationships, like those of Yongi and Wólsón and Kangch’óng-taek, shift over time as new alliances are forged, old friendships betrayed, new spites engendered. The workings of a whole neighbourhood and its many households are brought to life.

Pak, living in what was still a patriarchal society, writes well and easily of the male world, of the tediously opinionated schoolteacher with his strongly anti-Japanese but naive political views, of the kindly sweet-dispensing old doctor, of the scholarly, vengeful, sexually ambiguous and impotent heir to the estate. Pak is good (as were the Brontës) on the boredom and repetitions of a small community where so few have even a basic education. But she is also good with the artisans and eccentrics – the skilled and enterprising pock-marked carpenter, the dissident freethinking fisherman, the solitary hunter. The hunter is a fine portrait of a loner who prides himself on his skill in the mountains, tracking deer and bear and the elusive legendary tiger, earning his living by selling animal skins. He is tamed and brought down by sexual frustration and an obsessive passion for a self-serving and ambitious servant in the landlord’s household, who seduces him and leads him into murder and treachery. He, despising her, cannot free himself from her thrall.

Sex and violence and political unrest are here in plenty, as the landlord of the estate struggles to ward off impoverished but pretentious “modernizing” relatives from Seoul, with their Western clothes and their hair cut short – fine comic villains – who have a greedy eye on his land. Servants plot against their master and against one another. The beautiful young daughter of the waning house, Sohui, a child abandoned by her runaway mother, is growing into a proud, rebellious spirit who will one day have her revenge, just as her attendant, the seamstress’s daughter, may one day become a singer. This is a man’s world, but the younger women are beginning to see beyond the walls of their confinement.

Pak’s own life was hard; she was widowed young at the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 and had to write to support herself and her family. Her early work is full of war widows and grieving women. But in Land, which in time brought her international recognition and wealth (and enabled her to endow the T’oji Cultural Centre), she reached beyond this personal material to a larger historical vision. She believed in the land, lived simply, wore homespun clothes, smoked heavily, and encouraged the growth of organic vegetables. Culture and vegetables, it is said, vied for her attention at the T’oji Centre. Throughout her magnum opus the theme of land and seed, of womb and semen, or sowing and growing, is deployed with a challenging intelligence and a questioning of genetic and national destiny – the imagery is used very differently from the way it is used in the Western tradition; it manifests a different cosmic view, but is not incomprehensibly alien. Agnita Tennant, like Constance Garnett before her with the great Russians, has done English readers a service by opening up new territory.

It was not easy. The confusing publishing and editorial history of the many volumes, the transliteration of names (even Pak’s name has accepted variant spellings, as Pak or Park Kyongni), the length of the text, and the difficulty of translating colloquial Korean conversation presented her with obstacles. The proverbs must have proved particularly challenging. Some have an instant resonance: we know what is meant by “sometimes the sun shines in a rat hole”, or “if it’s your fate to die you’ll drown in a saucer of water”. But others retain a suitable mystery. The recurring phrase “it’s less than the blood in a bird’s leg” is strangely suggestive. In spoken Korean it has an epigrammatic concision impossible to convey in written English. And yet it is a phrase that figuratively conjures up a whole physical and mental landscape, another culture. Tennant has made this culture accessible to us, in a remarkable and important work in which Eastern and Western traditions fruitfully meet.

Pak Kyung-ni
LAND
Translated by Agnita Tennant Three volumes 1,171pp. Brill. 145euros.
978 1 906876 04 3

Through a Filmmaker’s Lens, a View of Korea

Posted on 13 June 2011 by admin

By JANINE ARMIN
Published: June 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/arts/14iht-rartpark14.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

This spring, the art establishment in South Korea made headlines worldwide by selecting the Chinese artist, activist and now political prisoner Ai Weiwei to co-direct the coming 2011 Gwangju Design Biennial.

The country’s homegrown contemporary art scene may be less likely to make international news. But artists like Chan-kyong Park — known for his haunting films and photography — are making an impact both at home and abroad. His short and feature-length films as well as his photography address the storied relationship of North and South Korea without losing the levity required to captivate an audience — a careful balance in a country ready to break away from rule-book behavior.

“Korean contemporary art has the most vital scene in Asia,” said Mr. Park, who says his belief is based on the growing prominence of Korean artists and, increasingly, women filmmakers like Jae-en Jung, Chan-ok Park and Sun-rae Im. But overturning the rigid infrastructure of South Korean museums and galleries is an uphill battle, he said. “Institutions are too conservative, too vulnerable to government change, and there is no good journalism and critique.”

Mr. Park’s own work reflects the various structures born of Korea’s politically fraught history. The resulting religious mix of Buddhism, Christianity and shamanism offer Mr. Park a rich palette of imagery.

His film “Sindoan” (2008), for example, portrays individuals practicing the many anomalous religions generated in the country during the mid-20th century. His photo series “Three Cemeteries” (2009) consists of images of the final resting places for displaced peoples in South Korea.

Late last year, Mr. Park completed the film “Anyang, Paradise City” for a local festival in the city of the same name. The film, which was shown earlier this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and at the Jeonju International Festival in South Korea, is a blend of documentary and fiction that centers on the search for survivors of a 1988 sweatshop fire that killed 20 women. “From my college years, I remember Anyang as a city full of female factory workers,” Mr. Park said. “Koreans all know that the Korean ‘economic miracle’ is based on their toil, but they never want to remember.”

In the opening scene a group of women dance on a verdant plateau and appear to sing a traditional song about their troubles with men. The dance was declared a cultural asset by Unesco, and by using it Mr. Park is commenting on how he feels institutions exploit tradition to increase tourism. “It was a traditional folk dance,” he said. But now it has “gained a certain marketability.”

His criticism of bureaucracy, as well as of South Korea’s neglect of heritage sites, is evident in other documentary aspects of the film. “Anyang” includes footage of an archeological dig for an ancient temple from the Silla dynasty that was covered with another temple during the Goryeo dynasty. “Tradition is dead in Korea, but no one knows how many antiques are buried under the soil,” Mr. Park said. “There are too many big apartments on top of them.”

Recently, the artist collaborated with his brother, the filmmaker Chan-wook Park, who is best known for his psychological thrillers that make up “The Vengeance Trilogy.” The brothers wrote, produced and directed the short film “Night Fishing,” which was shot exclusively with video from four iPhones in a partnership with Korean Telecom.

Chan-kyong Park said he enjoyed the odd angles he could capture with the phones. The first shots demonstrate the benefits of this technique: an initial pan across a dirt road where a band performs is punctuated with powerful close-ups. Their song is carried over to an elderly man in a nearby wood, who, after a fishing accident, is able to speak with his family one last time through a female shaman.

Paradise, and the struggle to get there, pervades both “Anyang” and “Night Fishing.” Mr. Park’s ambivalent search is an apt filter through which to consider present-day Korea. “Paradise became either a bad dream or a big joke,” Mr. Park said. “There is a Stalinists’ paradise in the North, and aggressive capitalists’ paradise in the South. While Koreans are bound to the ideological utopian images, Koreans lost great richness of their traditional imagination of the good world, because Korean modern history is really built upon blind futuristic will.”

Mr. Park’s sensitivity to the vices and virtues of a divided Korea is what separates him from his peers, said Yun Cheagab, the commissioner for the Korea Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year. “His work is very conceptual,” said Mr. Cheagab, who has known the artist for many years. “He’s willing to figure out what is between North and South Korea. Not South Korea, not North Korea, middle Korea.”

For Mr. Park, the “blind will” that colors Korea’s political history is inextricable from the current state of contemporary art. “1987 and 1988 was the high time of the labor movement,” he said. “Like the artist group introduced in ‘Anyang,’ there were strong small groups who created propaganda works and were involved in grass-roots community arts. They have left a heritage. It’s called ‘Min-jung art’ meaning ‘people art.”’ Mr. Park says a generation of “post Min-jung art” has arisen that is influenced by Western conceptualism and sensitive to media politics and art institutions. He positions himself between the present and past iterations.

Operating in this temporal limbo is clearly fruitful for the artist, who has several shows this autumn, including “Second Worlds” in Austria at the integrated contemporary art gathering Steirischer Herbst Festival 2011 (Sept. 23 to Oct. 16) and “Image Clash: Contemporary Korean Video Art” at the CU Art Museum in Colorado (Sept. 9 to Oct. 22).

He’s also enthusiastically pursuing a new project, despite the fact that he does not yet have funding. It’s “a horror film scenario, a narrative with a lot of female ghosts,” he said. “Other than that, I practice every day in art, drawings, paintings and installation. The artworks focus on what I call ‘Asian Gothic.”’

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