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Fun on the dark side

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http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article1279157.ece

AIDAN FOSTER-CARTER

Victor Cha
THE IMPOSSIBLE STATE
North Korea, past and future
530pp. Bodley Head. £25.
978 1 84792 235 9

John Everard
ONLY BEAUTIFUL, PLEASE
A British diplomat in North Korea
260pp. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Paperback, £12.99 (US $18.95).
978 1 931368 25 4

Blaine Harden
ESCAPE FROM CAMP 14
One man’s remarkable odyssey From North Korea to freedom in the West
242pp. Pan Macmillan. Paperback, £8.99.
978 0 330 51954 0 US: Penguin. $15.978 0 14 312291 3

Johannes Schonherr
NORTH KOREAN CINEMA
A history
215pp. McFarland. Paperback, £63.50 (US $75).
978 0 7864 6526 2

Andrei Lankov
THE REAL NORTH KOREA
Life and politics in the failed Stalinist utopia
283pp. Oxford University Press. £16.99 (US $27.95).
978 019 996429 1

A now familiar satellite image shows the Korean peninsula at night. The South is ablaze with light, as are nearby Japan and China. The North, by contrast, is plunged in darkness but for a single blob: the capital Pyongyang, its monuments more brightly lit than residents’ homes, (North Korea has other large cities, but they show up only as the faintest of pinpricks.) You can feel the metaphor coming. The government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, its official name) keeps its citizens in the dark, not just literally – electricity is in chronically short supply – but by blocking all influences from outside, including the internet. In the other direction it is a different picture. We know far more about North Korea than formerly, yet pools of dark ness remain. Politics is one such, not least the thirty something young man who now rules the DPRK, and who earlier this year was cheerfully threatening all and sundry with pre-emptive nuclear strikes.

Until a decade ago, Kim Jong Un was not even known to exist, despite years of schooling in Switzerland; were our spies asleep? Kim Jong 11, son and successor to the DPRK’s founding leader Kim II Sung, was thought to have two sons of his own. In 2003 a Japanese who calls himself Kenji Fujimoto published a memoir, claiming to have been Kim Jong Il’s sushi chef and con¬fidant for over a decade. His tales of court life in Pyongyang – nude dancing girls (no touching), dog soup on Sundays and more – included the first mention of a hitherto unknown third son, said to be hot-headed and his father’s favourite. Right on both counts, it appears.

Fujimoto feared for his life after these revelations. Yet last July he was invited back by Kim Jong Un, who seems to share his father’s view that there is no such thing as bad publicity. In 2001 Kim Jong II had told Konstantin Pulikovsky, sent by Vladimir Putin to escort him on a leisurely and luxurious journey to Moscow aboard Kim’s personal train: “I am the object of crit¬icism around the world. But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track”. Like Fujimoto, Pulikovsky spilled the beans. Live lobster was flown in daily as the caravan crossed Siberia. There were silver chopsticks, fine French wines, lusty choruses of old Soviet songs, and maidens “of the utmost beauty and intelligence” (clothed, indeed uniformed).

Pulikovsky’s account, Orient Express, remains untranslated. The same goes for Fujimoto, now with three books out, and the important memoirs of Song Hye Rang, aunt of Kim Jong IPs disinherited and off-message eldest son Kim Jong Nam: formerly of Macau, now in hiding. Even the gripping tale by South Korea’s Burton and Taylor, the film director Shin Sang Ok and his on- off spouse the actress Choi Eun Hee, of their 1978 kidnapping – or was it? – on Kim Jong Il’s orders, life in the North (from jail to pal¬ace) and escape in 1986, has never appeared in English.

This is surprising. Nowadays books on North Korea pour from the presses: written mostly by outsiders who have never lived there, and occasionally never even been there. In this inspect the light map of the peninsula is reversed. Oddly, there are far fewer non-specialist works on the South: a fascinating and dynamic land, much easier to visit and study. Daniel Tudor, the Economist’s Seoul correspondent, recently published the first general introduction to South Korea to appear for some time; calling it, somewhat unexpectedly, The Impossible Country.

In a coincidence both authors may regret, Victor Cha chose the same adjective for the other Korea, where it fits much better. An academic who served in George W. Bush’s White House, Cha has written what his publisher brashly bills as “the definitive account of North Korea”. There can be no such thing; but this is a serviceable intro¬duction, from a conventional US viewpoint, to the tangles of what an earlier age would have called “the Korean question”. It will disappoint those hoping for an inside view of the battles between hawks and doves that rent the Bush administration, undermining any coherent policy. Cha’s defensive account is less informative than works with no axe to grind, such as Mike Chinoy’s Meltdown (2008).

His virtues include a crisp chapter, “Five Bad Decisions”, on how the North’s economy lost its initial lead over the South (impossible to imagine now) and became today’s malnourished basket case. On policy, Cha rightly urges the need for the US and South Korea to coordinate their contingency planning with China. Beijing has not been keen, but this may change as it loses patience with Kim Jong Un’s antics. The final chapter, “The End Is Near”, predicts that the DPRK will collapse under the weight of its contradictions, and soon. Such forecasts have been heard for two decades, but North Korea has defied them thus far. If it survives till 2020, it will surpass the USSR as the longest-lived Communist (if that is the word) state. Its second hereditary succession looks smooth, yet in May a defence minister was replaced for the third time in a year. The armed forces thrived under Kim Jong II; his son and the Party are now reining them in. Ructions are possible, but Cha’s hopes for something akin to the Arab Spring in the DPRK seem optimistic.

Thousands of Westerners visit North Korea each year; a dozen firms compete to take them. (None pulled out during the recent tensions, though they had some cancellations.) Far fewer Westerners live there. Those who have written about the experi¬ence include two Englishmen, Andrew Hol¬loway and Michael Harrold, whose job was to correct the English in translations of works by the Leaders. Recently the Swiss Felix Abt self-published a book, available online, A Capitalist in North Korea, about his years in the country between 2002 and 2009. It would be good too to have the obser¬vations of aid workers, whom since 1995 North Korea has grudgingly let in, as it needs their help; but none so far seems to have gone into print.

John Everard wishes they would, so as “to correct the assertions of some who have writ¬ten at length and stridently … on the basis of very limited knowledge”. He himself spent two years (2006-08) in North Korea as Her Majesty’s Ambassador; previous postings had included inaugurating the Brit¬ish embassy in Belarus. UK-DPRK diplo¬matic relations date only from 2000, but already Britain has had six chefs de mission in Pyongyang. James Hoare opened the embassy, writing about this and more in North Korea in the 21st Century (2005, with Susan Pares). Now at SOAS, last year the tireless Dr Hoare produced both a historical dictionary of the DPRK and an edited three volume article collection on both Koreas.

As his evocative title suggests, Everard brings a keen ear and a fresh perspective to an often stale field. An eager cyclist, he could venture off the beaten track. Pedalling a scenic byway to the port of Nampo, “on my way back men appeared on bridges along my route telling me to take the main road”. (The plural suggests he ignored them.) He recounts some surprisingly frank conversations with North Koreans whose identity he rightly disguises, calling them all “she”, which adds a frisson; most were surely he. These were not the woman or man in the street but what he precisely pinpoints as “the outer elite”: those with “stable but not top-level jobs”.

In writers such as Abt, a laudable urge lo correct one-dimensional caricatures teeters into the trap of apologetics. This Everard avoids. With rare balance, he combines full awareness of the nuances and depth of the society with robust censure of the regime. Of course North Koreans are human beings, not robots; whoever denied it? But the DPRK is still a ghastly place nonpareil. He dedicates Only Beautiful, Please “to the people of North Korea, who deserve better”.

The heart of darkness is a vast gulag, where up to 200,000 innocents suffer unspeakably and often indefinitely. This used to be dark in another sense almost no details leaked out. Now the camps can be seen on Google Earth, and many reports have detailed their awful abuses. Some victims have written memoirs, the best-known being Kang Choi Hwan’s Aquariums of Pyongyang (2000). Kang was nine when his whole family was sent to Yodok camp after his grandfather, a Kyoto businessman who answered the fatherland’s call to build socialism – he even brought his Volvo – complained once too often. About 90,000 Koreans left Japan for North Korea, never to return; many were never heard of again. This thread in the DPRK tapestry of misery was the subject of Tessa Morris- Suzuki’s poignant Exodus to North Korea (2007).

Shin Dong Hyuk can trump Kang: he was born in the gulag. Near in age to Kim Jong Un, he recounts a Hobbesian life of constant, vicious, numbing cruelty. Shin even betrayed his own mother and brother for plotting to escape, and watched their executions. Almost as appalling is that few cared in South Korea, to which he miraculously escaped; his first book flopped. It look an American journalist, Blaine Harden, lo make Shin’s shocking story a global hit m twenty-four languages. All credit to him, though it seems strange not to credit Shin as co-author of Escape from Camp II: not even a “with”. The UN Human Rights Council recently set up a commission of inquiry into DPRK human rights abuses; it will report next March. No doubt the regime will continue brazenly to deny everything. For its interlocutors, the dilemma is what to prioritize. If the main task is to curb North Korea’s nuclear and missile activities, human rights tend to be passed over.

Most North Koreans avoid the gulag, but all go to the movies: a softer form of social control. Kim Jong 11 was a film fanatic; his works include On the Art of the Cinema (1973). Aware that quality was poor, Kim drafted in the Southern director Shin Sang Ok to improve things. Johannes Schönherr, whose North Korean Cinema is the first book in English on its subject, doubts if Shin was kidnapped. Schönherr’s own journey has been picaresque. He is a former East German grave-digger, expelled from the GDR in 1983. His Trashfilm Roadshows (2002) was a romp through the transgressive or bizarre; its index has “Woman Warrior of Koryo” between “Whoregasm” and “Zombie Hunger”. Blagging his way to a film festival in Pyongyang, he found his true metier. Still freelance, he now lives in Japan. Full of stills (all in black and while). North Korean Cinema is eye opening and a word rarely used of the DPRK — fun. Unencumbered by theory, this is a rich narrative history from the 1940s in the present. North Korea’s latest films revert to pre-Shin leadenness: no match for the slickness of South Korean soaps and other foreign fare, which circulate widely on DVD or memory stick the latter easier to hide if the police call.

Such key social changes are well documented in The Real North Korea. Andrei Lankov is a phenomenon. Born in Leningrad, he studied in Pyongyang and is now a professor in Seoul. A historian who has used Soviet archives to write two books (so far) on the DPRK’s early political history, he is also a prolific commentator. Besides writing many an op-ed, he has two long-running columns in the Korea Times, on the dawn of modern Korea and on the North, each already anthologized in book form. Some of the thirteen boxes studding the text of this new book are from such columns, though that is not mentioned. This is the best all-round account of North Korea yet. Its many virtues include apt detail, dry wit, a sure analytical touch, and refusal to preach. Lankov is insightful too on the South, such as the contortions of its leftists. Still fixated on their own long gone dictators (pussycats compared to the Kims), some find virtue in the North: at least it hosts no foreign troops. Dividing a nation also twists minds.

What can be done? Hawks and doves both err. As Lankov puts it, the sticks are not big enough and the carrots not sweet enough. Engagement is better than sanctions for weakening the regime, but North Korea can last a while yet before the inevitable crisis. That could arise in several ways, but whatever happens a soft landing is “not very probable”. Not quite Hilaire Belloc’s “They answered as they look their fees, There is no cure for this disease”; but small comfort for ideologues, certain that being either tougher or kinder to Kim Jong Un will do the trick.

Pak Kyung-ni’s epic novel of Korean history

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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

Park Kyung Ni: South Korean novelist

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Park Kyung-Ni (photo: Oh Jong-chan / Chosun Ilbo)Author whose epic novel, Toji, is regarded as one of the greatest contributions to Korean literature

Park Kyung Ni was one of the leading South Korean novelists of her generation. In her own country and abroad, she was best known for the epic Toji (The Land), widely regarded as the greatest achievement of modern Korean literature.

Born in the city of Tongyeong in South Gyeongsang province at the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula, Park graduated from Jinju Girls High School in 1946. During the Korean War, which broke out in 1950, she suffered a personal tragedy; her husband Kim Haeng Do, whom she had married shortly after leaving school, went missing in action. This sorrow, and the larger traumas of the war became the subject of much of Park’s early fiction, the author herself observing that she would not have written novels if she had been happy.

Her first published stories appeared in the magazine Contemporary Literature in 1956, and during the late Fifties she wrote a sequence of novels concentrating on the melancholy experiences of female protagonists who, like their creator, had been widowed by war. Among these were The Age of Distrust (1957), The Road Without a Guidepost (1958) and Drifting Island (1959). A later treatment of the Korean War was The Marketplace and the Battlefield (1964), concentrating on the relationship between a politically uncommitted student and his ideologically engaged teacher.

Among other important works from the early years of Park’s career were Saint and Witch (1960), a romantic melodrama, and The Daughters of Pharmacist Kim (1962), a tragic account of the lives of a pharmacist’s four daughters, said to have marked a change in subject matter and style for its author. Both these books were later adapted into notable films.

Park’s acknowledged masterpiece, The Land, was serialised in Contemporary Literature for a quarter of a century between 1969 and 1994. Chronicling the lives of five generations of a rural landowning family in Park’s native province, this epic used their personalities and experiences as a microcosm of the history of the nation from the end of the 19th century, through decades of Japanese colonial rule, to the division of the Korean peninsula in 1945. The finished work stretched to 16 volumes comprising a total of five episodes; to date, only the first two episodes have been translated into English. The book quickly achieved fame in South Korea, and a film adaptation of the early chapters was released in 1974; three television serials, a cartoon and an opera have also been based on the story.

In 1996 Park established the Toji Culture Foundation in order to encourage creativity and literary achievement among a younger generation of South Koreans. She served as chairman of its board of trustees, and later opened the Toji Cultural Centre on the site of her own home in the city of Wonju, east of Seoul.

Parkwon various prizes and honours, including the Inchon Award and, in 1992, the Bogwan Order of Cultural Merit, the third-highest cultural honour in South Korea; the highest honour, the Geumgwan Order, was conferred posthumously. In her later years, Park also became known for her concern with environmental issues.

When cancer was diagnosed in 2007 she refused treatment. A late poem, The Old House, expressed her equanimity in the face of death: “I am content with my old days; I have no desire / The burden I carry will be left when I say goodbye.”

Park’s marriage produced two children. Her son died in infancy, but she is survived by her daughter Kim Young Ju, head of the Toji Cultural Centre, and her son-in-law, the distinguished poet Kim Ji Ha.

Park Kyung Ni, author, was born on October 28, 1926. She died on May 5, 2008, aged 81

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4091217.ece