A novel used as an English text in U.S. middle schools is drawing fire from Koreans and Korean-Americans for describing scenes of abuse and rape of Japanese by Koreans during the closing stage of Japanese imperialism.
The book, So Far from the Bamboo Grove, was written by Japanese-American Yoko Kawashawa Watkins and is supposedly based on her own experiences as a little girl. From Amazon.com:
A true account that is filled with violence and death, yet one that is ultimately a story of family love and life. Eleven-year-old Yoko Kawashima had led a peaceful and secure life as the daughter of a Japanese government official stationed in North Korea near the end of World War II. Abruptly, all is changed as she, her older sister Ko, and their mother flee the vengeance-seeking North Korean Communists and eventually make their way to an unwelcoming and war-ravaged Japan. Yoko’s story is spellbinding. She often escapes death by mere chance; her brother, Hideyo, separated from the family, has an equally harrowing escape. The longed-for arrival in Japan proves to be an almost greater trial, as their mother, defeated by the discovery that all their Japanese relatives are dead, dies. Together, Yoko and Ko create a home in which to await the return of Hideyo. Watkins writes clearly and movingly, with a straightforward style through which the story unfolds quickly. She skillfully alternates her account of the girls’ journey with that of their brother, maintaining readers’ interest in both. Watkins is able to describe scenes of death, rape, and other atrocities with a simple directness which has no trace of sensationalism yet in no way diminishes their horror. Readers will be riveted by the events of the escape and struggle for survival, and enriched and inspired by the personalities of the family. Especially well drawn is Yoko’s gradual emergence from a frightened, whining child to a strong and courageous young girl. Parallels can be drawn to Holocaust survival stories such as Aranka Siegal’s Upon the Head of the Goat (Farrar, 1981) and Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe (Crowell, 1968). So Far from the Bamboo Grove should have a place among the finest of them.
Parallels can be drawn to Holocaust survival stories? OK… Anyway, Yonhap reports:
This book, written by the daughter of a Japanese war criminal who was imprisoned for six years in Siberia, describes Koreans as if they went about abusing and sexually assaulting virtuous Japanese, and is having a seriously bad influence on American teenagers’ views of Korea.
Taking issue with the history presented in the book, Yonhap says:
The book says that Yoko, who was 11 at the time, took the train from Nanam [in Hamgyongbuk-do] with her mother and her older sister and made it south of Wonsan before the train was destroyed in an air strike. From there they had to walk to Seoul. From Seoul they went to Japan via Busan, but they had to dramatically escape from the merciless pursuit of the Koreans, and they witnessed [Korean] people wantonly killing and raping.
Some are pointing out, however, that according to the historical facts of the time, the Americans never bombed anywhere in North Korea during July and August of 1945 and Japanese troops still occupied all of the Korean Peninsula, so it couldn’t have been true that communist troops openly pursued Japanese or raped Japanese women.
In the book, Yoko also says her father, who worked in Manchuria, opposed the war, but in fact, he was a war criminal (or so Yonhap says) who spent six years as a prisoner in Siberia. In the book, it says he supported the “Yokaren” program of training kamikaze pilots.
An 11-year-old Korean-American, Alex Hur, told Yonhap that he almost cried when he read that Koreans harassed the Japanese, and that he couldn’t just stand there while his American friends learned such mistaken history. To express his opposition to the book, he refused to attend school, and the school discontinued using the text.
Another Korean-American mother expressed her pain when her two children who read the book came home and asked why Koreans had tormented the kind-hearted Japanese.
According to Yonhap, Korean-American parents in places like New York, Boston and Los Angeles have started an organized movement to get schools to discontinue using the book. Korean consulates in the United States are also working hard to get American schools to stop using the book. Ji Yeong-seon, the Korean consul general in Boston, said the book, which according to Yonhap distorts history, “plants in the minds of American children the mistaken understanding of ‘good Japanese and bad Koreans.’ Because of the book, Korean-American students are being isolated in their classes and experiencing difficulties.” The consul general said the Korean government would take active steps to correct the situation.
Marmot’s Note: Koreans described as brutal murderers and rapists? Jesus, the Korean embassy better get on the move on there, lest American young people begin to picture Koreans as Korean young people picture the U.S. troops who fought in the Korean War. And for the record, I have no idea how many American schools are using the book, but it does seem like a rather odd choice—even if the history presented in the book were true, I doubt very strongly that middle school kids—especially American ones—could appreciate the complexity of the period, especially if it’s being presented in a biased way.
UPDATE: In the Boston Globe, Harvard Korean history professor Carter Eckert writes a very thoughtful review of the book and the decision of one school committee to use it. The money shot:
Teaching should encourage students to think “outside the box” of American ethnocentricity and highlight human commonalities across cultural and historical divides. Watkins’s book goes a long way toward accomplishing these goals. Through the magic of her prose and identification with her heroine, students are transported to a distant and different time and place and can experience Yoko’s ordeal and triumph as their own.
But context and balance are important. While Yoko’s story is compelling as a narrative of survival, it achieves its powerful effect in part by eliding the historical context in which Yoko and her family had been living Korea. That context, simply put, was a 40-year record of harsh colonial rule in Korea, which reached its apogee during the war years of 1937-45, when Yoko was growing up. While some Koreans fared better than others, many were conscripted for forced labor and sexual slavery to serve the Japanese imperial war machine, while the colonial authorities simultaneously promoted a program of intensive, coercive cultural assimilation that sought to erase a separate Korean identity on the peninsula.
Well put. Be absolutely sure to read the rest on your own.
UPDATE 2: Two English-language pieces from Korean papers—the Chosun Ilbo and the Hankyoreh Shinmun. From the Chosun piece:
The Korean Consul General in Boston Ji Young-sun said the issue was first raised last September, when Korean American parents near Boston and in New York publicly complained about the book being used as a set text. This prompted an organized campaign against the book. Ji said many Korean students were shocked by the book and experienced discrimination because of it.
Ji said the fact that the book is taught in U.S. schools was “in a way racial discrimination and violation of human rights,” adding Korean parents will file formal complaints with U.S. education authorities and state government. The consulate has already written to federal and state education authorities.
UPDATE 3: Yes, there is a Korean edition of the book, translated and printed by publishing company Munhak Dongne two years ago. The company actually had some interesting things to say about it today. They said, “We decided to publish the book when we judged that in the Korea-Japan relationship, Koreans have continued to be in the position of victims, but if you look at the content of the book, we could show young people diverse views about war through Yoko’s life, which shows that there could also be Japanese who were victims.” It also noted that unlike American readers, Korean readers already knew the history between Korea and Japan, so they could decide for themselves what to think of the book.
That didn’t stop Korean netizens from flooding the company’s website with off-color comments today, however. The company’s site is now down, but it did post an explanation to their decision to publish the book, however. They said that they believed that the book could be an opportunity to get beyond the concept of Korean=victim/Japanese=victimizer and look back at the past, which was painful for Koreans and Japanese alike. Novels exist to put aside fixed ideas, if only for a moment, they said. The company did note, however, that it felt it problematic for U.S. schools to adopt the book as a textbook since American youth had an insufficient knowledge of Japan’s colonial past in Korea.
The company also found it odd that people are making a big deal of the book now. The company released a translation of the novel in March 2005, and while it hasn’t sold particularly well, the reader responses up till now had been fairly positive.
Interestingly enough, the foreign school in Yeonhui-dong apparently uses the novel in their English class. Also interesting is that Japanese publishing companies have so far refused to print it, and the novel is banned in China.
UPDATE 4: The Kyunghyang Shinmun reports that not only are netizens pissed off at the book and the decision by some U.S. schools to use it, but they’re pissed off at the Korean media for waiting two years since the printing of a Korean edition to criticize the book’s historical distortions. In fact, the media wasn’t actually silent—the reviews in at least a couple of instances were positive.
UPDATE 5: The Foreign Ministry jumps into the fray. The ministry said it is taking the “necessary measures” at the government level, including demanding that the Massachusetts state government take corrective measures. It said it learned in September that the book contained content that could distort Korea’s image and give U.S. students the wrong impression about Korean history. It explained that the matter was discussed during a general meeting of Korean consul generals in Washington in November, and that a letter in the name of the Korean consul general in Boston was sent to the U.S. Department of Education, the Massachusetts Department of Education and the governor of Massachusetts expressing Korean concerns.
In particular, when the vice foreign minister met with the Massachusetts governor in December, he explained the need to take corrective measures concerning the novel. The ministry said that along with government action, Korean-American society—centering on Korean-American school parent organizations in Massachusetts and New York—was also working to block the use of the book in American schools. The ministry added that the government would continue to raise the issue.
As far as I know, VANK—fresh off its victory against the CIA—has yet to issue a statement. Of course, then again, I haven’t checked.
226 Comments
Harvard’s own Carter Eckert recently reviewed this for the Boston Globe. (Will this link work?)
http://www.boston.com/news/glo.....211;+Today’s+paper+A+to+Z
Really. This is a very odd story which I have a hard time believing.
This thread may break your standing comment record, Marmot.
Next, kyopos will be protesting U.S. textbooks that describe how the U.S. (with Allied forces), and not the “Korean Liberation Army”, defeated Japan in 1945.
I would love to see a competition of American and Korean textbooks being compared side by side. In fact, George Washington never actually cut … Our 5000 year history? Well, you see … umm, there was this bear … ah, and the Son of Heaven …
I won’t be using the book in my middle school class or future high school classes.
That thought did occur to me though — have a 73 year old woman write a DEFINITIVE account of a traumatic, massively confusing time from when she was 11…..hmmmm…
Flip-flop the words “Japanese” and “Korean” in the account, and insert the word “American soldier” for “Korean” - and she might get a Pulitzer…..
There are always two sides to history.
If Koreans keep on believing that all Japanese were the aggressors and all Koreans innocent victims and refuse to acknowledge otherwise, then how are
they different from the Japanese whom they regularly accuse of distorting
history?
That’s just it. They are not. In fact, I don’t think anybody is not ‘guilty’ of doing the same to some extent or another.
I guess some will undoubtedly comment on how “the shoe is on the other foot” in that this book could be lumped into the same category as the efforts by some alleged Korean scholars and political agitators to revise
createKorean history in Korean schools so as to make General MacArthur out to be the villain, the war to be a “civil” war, Kim Il Sung to be an honest Korean patriot (instead of a Soviet proxy), North Korea is somehow more “Korean” or pure than South Korea, etcetera, etcetera.I would really hope that Korean historians would try to impartially view their more recent history in an attempt to better understand their unique position in history and not to indulge in political subterfuge, half-truths and histrionics.
In his review of the book, Professor Eckert, professor of Korean history at Harvard, describes Kim Il-sung as being in Manchuria with his communist guerrillas in August 1945. I believe that the good professor is mistaken and, if he checks his notes, he will find that KIS was in a Soviet military camp in Siberia in August 1945, and had been there since 1941, serving as a battalion commander in the Soviet Army’s 88th Independent Infantry Brigade. And yes, KIS did not arrive in Korea until late September 1945. A minor point, but it detracts from Prof. Eckert’s argument. The Soviet Union did enter north Korea in August, some of their troops were Asian, and they experienced some disciplinary problems similar to the ones we occasionally suffer.
Violence and unrest against former colonial masters were common in all liberated territories at the end of WWII. That some Koreans might have taken advantage of the vacuum in civil authority by committing such acts places them on a plane with the rest of the human race, and more specifically the Indonesians, Burmese, Vietnamese, and numerous recently liberated European countries.
I would berate Koreans for getting overly worked up about this, but my own blood boils every time I read some political polemic masquerading as history that describes how the United States “massacred” the aborigines of that continent. So, they are entitled to their buttons, and I’m entitled to mine. Serves the school board right. They should have stuck with Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth.”
Oh, yes. And Kudo’s to Yonhap for so quickly accessing the historical records and determining that no American planes were bombing anywhere in North Korea during July and August 1945. Now if they could only pull up those records on No Gun Ri.
Don’t be absurd. (And btw, the preferred nomenclature is ‘Korean American’ or ‘KA’. The overuse of the term 교포 by the expat community has become extremely offensive. When used among Koreans, it doesn’t have a negative connotation, but it has become extremely pejorative when used by expats b/c it mostly used to either denigrate, stereotype or marginalize Korean Americans. Therefore, I would encourage you to drop the term and use the proper term.)
And the issue here isn’t textbooks or the way history is taught. It’s a literature class for petesake! Banned books and secondary school reading lists have always been controversial with local PTAs and public school boards across the U.S. since the early 80s, when being pc became the fad.
Remember “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or other classics like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”? Has the controversy surrounding those classics ever died down? (I believe Huck Finn was just dropped from the American Library Association’s list of banned/challenged books just this year.)
School boards and local PTAs — or whoever approves reading lists for public schools — should be sensitive to the diversity of their constituents and the student body. Schools should select works of literature that have the ability to teach w/o offending minority groups. This is the reality of living in a multicultural society, and Korean Americans have just as much as right as any other minority group — Blacks, Hispanics, gays, etc., — to complain about literature or any other teaching materials selected for instruction in U.S. public schools that they find offensive. Now as to whether “Korean-American students are being isolated in their classes and experiencing difficulties” b/c of this particular book, nobody in their right mind is going to believe such nonsense, b/c it is of course typical Korean media hyperbole.
Nevertheless, I’m glad to hear that KAs are becoming active in their local PTAs/school boards by voicing their opinion and being interested in the curriculum that is being taught to their children.
According to the Boston Globe article, the book in question only affects the Dover-Sherborn Regional School Commitee school system, so I don’t know what this has to do with public schools elsewhere. Therefore, the Korean Consulate General or any other non-local organization would be seriously remiss if they tried to make this into a bigger issue than it really is.
For the Consultate General to say that “the Korean government would take active steps to correct the situation”, is really overreacting and reflects their ignorance regarding how American public schools are run. (The idea of a locally governed school system vis-a-vis a PTA or local school board is completely incomprehensible to a Korean mindset that is more familiar with a centralized and nationalized primary and secondary public educational system.)
Nevertheless, after having read the Boston Globe op-ed piece by Harvard’s Carter Eckert entitled “A matter of context”, linked above, where he says the following:
I’ll have to say that I couldn’t agree more. And I’m sure there are better choices for this particular middle school besides one obscure book that seems to be offending a lot of people.
Sidenote: My mother, who was born and lived in South Hamkyeong Province during the Japanese occupation is considering writing her own autobiographical novel in English about her life during those times, which of course, I’m helping her edit. Ironically, my mother’s best friend until she was seven — when the family came south after the 1945 liberation — was a Japanese girl of the same age whose father was a Japanese magistrate assigned to that district. My mother always said she really felt sorry for her Japanese playmate, b/c even though they had a good time together, the poor Japanese girl had no other friends, as her mother wouldn’t let her associate with any other Koreans, except my mother.
What, you trying to say that Kyopo is the new “nigger”? First off, Kyopo does not mean “Korean American”. It means “overseas Korean”. There are many Kyopos that come online and write offensive things, it is not just limited to Kyopos living in America. I do not see why these people that do not live in America should be referred to as “Korean Americans”.
Even amongst the Korean communities in countries other than America? (Like Australia or Canada?) I propose the term Korean-American/Canadian/Australian/Armenian/French/French-Canadian/Russian/Ukranian… as an alternative.
Funny, you don’t strike me as the PC type.
“Kyopo” is no more offensive than “expat”. It is not a pejorative term and I would wager that very few non-Koreans are even aware of the existence of the word — its use would be limited to those of us who have studied Korean.
I will not use “Korean-American” in place of “kyopo” becuase, point of fact, there are many “kyopo” in the United States who are not U.S. citizens. In addition, of course, “kyopo” is not limited to describing Koreans resident in the U.S.
Not to mention the fact that when I refer to overseas Koreans while speaking in Korean, I properly use the terms “재일 교포”, “재미 교포”, etc.
Kyopos, including Korean-Americans, are not an aggrieved minority in the U.S.
I’m a Korean American — don’t ever call me a 교포. It is just plain offensive — to me at t least. And civilized and educated people in the U.S. do not use the “N” word — ever. (I’m shocked that you did — a simple “N” or “the N-word” will suffice for most discourse.) If you don’t want to use “Korean American” or “KOrean Canadian”, a simple “Overseas Korean” will suffice.
And so what if “There are many Kyopo that come online and write offensive things…”? I can also say the same for non-Koreans, but I’m not that foolish or simple-minded to think that all foreigners are the same and cut from the same cloth.
It’s good if the Kyopos take part in PTAs if they remember that they are Americans. But if they just want to bring Korean factionalism and victimology to American shores …..
In order for this to be true, you must believe the following:
1. The middle school students assigned to read the book actually read it.
2. They were able to differentiate between the Koreans and Japanese in the book.
3. They gave a fuck about anything in the book enough to make “difficulties” to their classmates.
4. They were able to differentiate between the Koreans and Japanese in their classes.
The odds of 1 of those 4 things happening is about 250-1. The odds of all 4 of those things happening is about 250,000-1.
The last thing on the planet middle school kids give a fuck about is how some Asians treated some other Asians 70 years ago.
Typical overreacting douchebaggery.
btw, the preferred nomenclature is ‘foreign national’ or ‘FA’. The overuse of the term expat by the kyopo community has become extremely offensive.
Notice that H. Kim #16 refers to anyone who is not Korean as a “foreigner.” He claims the English speaker’s persepective and then calls us “foreigners” while we shouldn’t call him a “Kyopo.” Weird.
Then can I call you “cracker”?
omigod. You don’t even know the meaning of Gyopo. Yes, there are many kinds of Koreans in the U.S. When Koreans are talking amongst themselves, it’s likes this:
교포: Literally “Korean residing abroad”, means Korean American, Korean Canadian, etc. That is, a naturalized or native born citizen of a country other than Korea. 교포들 are not Korean citizens — they are U.S. citizens, Canadian citizens, etc.
유학생: Literally, “Korean student studying abroad”, which indicates Korean citizens who attend schools in the U.S. These people are not Korean Americans and are not 교포들.
What evidence do you have that KAs have ever “brough Korean factionalism and victimology to American shores”? Sounds like your own prejudice. Btw, do you even know what percentage of the U.S. population is KA? It’s something like 0.36%, according to the 2000 U.S. census. If you are really interested in helping KAs assimilate, you wouldn’t be so discriminatory.
Actually, in Korea, I am a foreigner, so when I say “foreigner”, I’m talking about myself too. And what makes you think that I’m not an English speaker? As a second-generation KA, I am a native English speaker.
I, non-hyphenated American, will call kyopos kyopos.
Anyhoo, 유학생 and 미국시민권 딴 한국사람 and 한국계 미국인, whatever, there is quite a gamut there that is easily described as “kyopo”. I won’t call non-U.S. citizens “Korean Americans”.
You can call me “cracker” if you wish. It seems a bit odd, first because you are a relative newcomer with no history of racial enmity with white Americans and second, because as I am not an angry minority, I don’t give a crap what you call me.
However, out of not wanting to be rude, I won’t refer to you as a kyopo. But I do not agree that that is some special word only Koreans are allowed to use (sounds like you are the ones who don’t want to assimilate).
I will say that’s the first I’ve heard (well, you posted the same screed elsewhere) that “kyopo” is a derogatory term. I’d be interested to hear the opinions of other kyo…oops “overseas Koreans”.
It is not just our responsibility to help overseas Koreans assimilate, the impetus and desire must come from your community. So far, I have seen precious little of that. I wonder why.
BTW several sources estimate there are more than 2 million Koreans living in the United States. Not quite 1% perhaps, but more than 0.36%.
A lot of thin skins being exposed. Looks like the comments have gotten off the original subject. Someone once said “you can call me anything - just don’t call me late for lunch.”
‘i’m not an angry minority…’ dogbert
right; you’re an angry loser white guy. lol!
my, how tolerant your brothers are of your racism, doggy.
anyway, dog, i just want you to know that i’m so proud to be american where at least i know i’m free. and doggy, ain’t shit you can about it. lol!
Fair enough dogbertt. We’ll just have to agree to disagree about this 교포 stuff, which was not may main point anyway. Btw, sometimes, I like to be called “LaShonda” if that’s OK with you.
H. Kim, while it’s true that many commenters on this and other Korea related blog forums use the term ‘kyopo’ in a disrespectful way, it is not fundamentally disparaging. As far as its definition:
교포 [僑胞]단어장에 추가
A Korean resident[national] abroad; a Korean residing abroad; [총칭] overseas Koreans.
僑胞] 외국에 살고 있는 동포. ¶ 재일 ～/재미 ～.
동포
同胞] ① 한 부모에게서 태어난 형제자매.
② 한 나라 또는 한겨레에 딸려 있는 사람. ¶ 재외
Notice the Korean definition makes no allowance for nationality. If you’ve spent much time in Korea I’m sure you’re aware that while your passport may be blue, many Koreans consider you a Korean first and an America second. If being called by this blanket term, which can imply that your loyalties lie somewhere other than the US I can understand why it might offend you. However, from the Korean perspective - it is after all a Korean word - you and any other Korean living in America, either as a citizen of the US or on a Green Card, Student visa etc are Kyopo.
BTW “overreacting douchebaggery”
Classic
Fair enough, LaShonda
I’m afraid, nulji, by emigrating to the U.S. from Korea, you’ve single-handedly lowered the collective IQ of each nation.
H.Kim,
Do not argue with some people here because you are wasting your time. They hate Koreans, plain and simple. And, they come to this board to diss Koreans.
KAs are big threat to them since we can speak English. And, they feel very uncomfortable because they cannot freely diss Koreans and Korean culture.
Before me and some other Koreaphiles join this board, most of posts were highly critical of Koreans. Name-calling and racial slurs about Koreans filled this place.
I welcome your posts because they need to be informed. We provide an alternate explaination and balancing view.
However, Kim, don’t be too nationalistic either. After all, we are Americans. Yes, we are. Someday, unfortunately, we may have to bear arms against Koreans. Especially, when they become pawns for the Chinese. Or, Russians.
Think and present a balanced view. The Japanese were not great but they did bring sweeping changes to Korea and pulled Korea into 20th century. Not all of them were bad.
About the story in the book, I believe some rapes and killings did take place when the Japanese were leaving the country. Pent-up hatred toward the Japanese surfaced. And, some ugly things were done to them. Even Koreans, if their honest moments, will acknowledge this, as some accounts have been written down in history books and literature.
Just curious, baduk. Do you consider your fellow Korean-American “nulji” to be a good American?
Who cares. If we could, let’s try to keep this thread on topic. I have a feeling it might get long enough even without discussions of the word gyopo or Nulji’s allegiances.
do I get a hat tip?
I think I mentioned this coming at least 2 weeks ago, although no link.
I just sort of noticed it on local tv gyopo news
Is this book used in English literature classes, or in history classes?
Although history classes would be worse, I can see why kyopo’s and Koreans would think this was a bad choice, since although it details the suffering of the Japanese leaving Korea in 1945 the big unspoken thing is, uh, what the freak were you Japanese doing there in the first place? (The same thought crosses my mind when muslims whine about the terrible injustice of them being kicked out of Spain and Sicily.) As expats in Korea we would immediately see that question as the elephant in the room, but few would back in America and therein lies the dangerous potential for this book to mis-educate, not educate.
Analogies, all equally ludicrious: A book detailing the suffering of ethnic Germans kicked out of Czechslovakia in 1945 while not mentioning that this minority had fatally stabbed the nation in the back in 1938, a book moving us to tears about a French family being kicked out of Algeria without mentioning the half-million dead Algerians caused by France’s stubborn attempts to hold on to it’s colony, and so on.
Well… considering that for just about any book, there’s a minority group waiting to be offended by it, I’m going to go ahead and say that sentiments like this really shouldn’t be controlling in considering reading lists for school curricula. Are we really so sensitive a society that we should extend an automatic ban on certain works just to avoid offending anyone? What would we be left with? The Adventures of Dick and Jane? (On second thought, maybe not that… too many ‘Dick’ jokes inherent in that one for it to pass muster.)
Really, it also does seem like adopting a policy that bans books based on their capacity to offend would offer a sort of perverse incentive to people to claim offense by certain books. Are we really proposing that we should dumb down our entire culture just to cater to the over-sensitive and those with hidden agendas?
I’m assuming this book was either recommended reading or on a required reading list for a literature class and not a history class. Even in that case, I’m all for providing a balanced cultural view of the historical record but that assumes the average English and/or literature teacher in the US Public School system would know in advance that imbalance of viewpoint was an issue here. Furthermore, I’m certain many of us with knowledge of Korean historiography efforts would find the “balance” sought by the Korean American community every bit as historically fallacious as they claim “Bamboo Grove” to be.
There will not be a nice middle ground on this issue. Prof. Eckert’s editorial was politely put, but I think he is still asking too much of a middle school system. The standard for cultural acceptability being sought would require the kids to either read everything or read nothing. hmmm.
40-Year? When did that happen? I thought it was 35 (or 36 if you are already 1 year old when you’re born). Why is there a need to exaggerate things to prove a point? I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I’m saying it wasn’t 40 years. Just like I’m not saying the Nanjin Massacre didn’t happen, I’m just saying that there are faked photo’s, and estimates of 300,000 victims are troubled by the population being closer to half of that, I’m not saying all comfort women were ran to the brothers with their hands in the air, I’m just saying that with the findings of adverts for prostitutes, it’s impossible to say every last one was abducted and made into a slave.
Should the book be used in class? Well if children are coming home crying asking why the Evil-Koreans hurt the Innocent-Japanese, then hell no. Facts needed to be presented, but not in a way that says one race is bad and another is good. Just like that education in Korea that says Koreans are an inherently good race, and the rest are inherently evil needs to be corrected to present facts without teaching hate.
This story is so full of Sh*t! This thread is about to stink up the place!
“but it has become extremely pejorative when used by expats b/c it mostly used to either denigrate, stereotype or marginalize Korean Americans”
Crap. No negative connotation is intended by most people who use the term. I for one am not going to stop using it. I use it because it is the Korean term for a an ethnic Korean from a foreign country. Simple as that. No hostility intended, especially as I like most kyopos I’ve ever met (excepting idiots like Pawi, who I thankfully have never met).
My sentiments exactly, Hugh. I mean, ironically enough, in a Korean classroom, the book might have its uses since at least everyone has an idea about the context. But in the United States, it’s problematic. The Germans getting kicked out of Czechoslovakia is a good analogy. The one I was thinking about was the mass rape of German women by the advancing Red Army as World War II was drawing to a close. Yes, it was an atrocity, and probably should be learned about, but to teach about it without mentioning the context in which those rapes took place, i.e., following the repulse of a very brutal invasion of the Soviet Union by one of the most evil regimes mankind has ever known would be extremely questionable.
I quit reading at about #20 and stopped even skimming at Marmot’s 33.
I know I have been much less communicative on the K-blogs before Christmas break
(sorry for those non-Christians I’ve offended by use of that term)but while I wasn’t looking, did someone change the comment rules on the K-blogs? Is it now mandatory to take every thread in an absolutely left-field direction after the first 5 comments?It wasn’t always like this, was it?
Anyway, I’ll use kyopo, because the idea that it is the same as the N-word or cracker makes me laugh to hard and would probably make most of the Koreans I knew in Korea either laugh as well or scratch their heads in bewilderment.
But, back on topic –
What blueballs said was right on. I have daily firsthand experience with middle schoolers in the US. The idea that this book is going to turn a lot of fresh teenagers into people who dislike Korea or Koreans is far fetched.
In fact, the idea this book was being taught at all left me scratching my head in bewilderment……you don’t have a hell of a lot of time to teach enough reading and writing in the schools - what could the rationale possibly have been for bumping some work of literature off the reading list in favor of a book about how the Japanese were treated by Koreans at the end of WWII??????
I wouldn’t teach the book, because it is bad history. And, it is also obviously not an American or world classic.
I guess somebody somewhere had a reason for teaching it, though…
Do you think that the people who assigned this book had so little knowledge of history that they thought that they had it figured out who the “good guys” and who the “bad guys” were?
(I use the scare quotes because I think that the eternal lesson is that there are no permanent good guys/bad guys and, thus, I would want to teach the students that man is a wolf to man.)
Therefore?
Crimes against innocents and vigilant justice are what: justifiable? understandable?
Besides getting a PhD in Korean studies, did Eckert minor in moral obtuseness.
Eckert’s piece is not thoughtful, it’s simple a manifestation of PC White Man step’n fetching it on Korea Street - fodder for a send-up a la Tom Wolfe in his “radical Chic” days. As even he admits, the book is “simply .. a heroic personal narrative of survival”, in this case one that he apparently at least partly approves because it also has a hero(ine) who is neither male or white. It should be left at that. The bankruptcy of Eckert’s thought on the matter is summed up in his own piece’s finally succumbing to Godwin’s Law.
Sperwer—Did Eckert actually say that crimes against innocents and vigilante justice are justifiable? He didn’t. All he said was that context was important. I mean, yeah, it was neither justifiable or understandable for, let’s say, U.S. troops to shoot civilians, rape women or abuse POWs during the Korean War, but if Korean schools were to focus only on such incidents without explaining the context in which such incidents took place, it would be problematic, no?
If I could presume to vote, I’d vote against making this blog politically correct. If you’re so insecure as to care what others call you, then you might want to surf elsewhere. Kyopo is a perfectly acceptable term; deal with it.
Now, as to having jr. high schoolers read this book: It’s one thing for parents to get involved in their kids’ education, but quite another for Korean consuls to stick their noses where they don’t belong. I don’t think they’d like Americans telling them to correct falsehoods on Taft-Katsura, the liberation of Korea and the Korean War, would they?
I’ve got some evidence. The whole “Corea” fad, which was getting out of hand there for awhile by second- and third-generation KAs.
H.Kim, interesting comments about “kyopo”. I didn’t realize some thought it was disparaging. I’m guilty in that I do use it snidely to describe the type of person who walks around Apkujeong while loudly showing off his English, filling the air with “dude”, “sweet”, and far more grammatical errors than a good beginner who stayed at home in a 학원. But now I’ll use 유학생.
If this book is taught in class without putting the book in context, then that is ridiculous. Even if in context, I am sure there are plenty of other books out there that are better. You really can’t get better than “The Diary of Anne Frank.” However, Yonhap has a hypocritical and distorted view of this story.
I am sorry to wade in about Kyopo, but I personally would not use that word because of how that word is used in China. They use ‘overseas Chinese’ a lot. The reason I don’t like it is that it has the implication that that ethnic Chinese person is abroad for just a few years and ‘will be coming back any day now’–even if they are 3rd generation American. It’s one reason why a Chinese-American journalist is more likely to land in a Chinese jail than a European American. I think ‘ethnic Chinese’ would be better. With that said, I don’t know if Koreans use kyopo in the same way.
However, if the Koreans use Kyopo, you can’t be pissed at foreigners using it, unless the foreigners are across the board using it derogatorily. Although it seems some do, most do not.
The U.S. embassy has, in fact, expressed concern about what is taught in Korean classrooms:
I think that is a too harsh.
I doubt seriously Eckert was saying what happened was “justifiable.” I might picture him saying it is “understandable” but he would be using the word in the academic sense. In Offspring of Empire, Eckert showed himself to be one of the most level headed Korea area experts writing out there.
It’s late, and my brain isn’t funcioning close to maximum capacity, so off the top of my head, I don’t know if this next part will end up working or not - but - I would say Eckert and then Spewer’s points of view kind of touch on the phenomenon many of us complain about in Korean society - like with this latest rape case.
If you only focus on the act itself, and then use that to paint an overall picture of USFK members as bad people, and then extend that to complain bitterly about the whole history of the US-SK relationship, you will have been taking a tragic, bad event and throwing it out of context to the point of being absurd.
I can “understand” why Korean society blows GI crimes out of proportion, but that doesn’t make it right.
And apparently, from what little I’ve been reading on this book just now via Marmot’s linkage, this book is being used in schools, and whether it is in a literature class or history, it is going to be placed in a historical context (the book itself does that), and if that historical context is skewed too much from reality, it is a bad text to teach to teens.
It’s not about being PC or bowing to the multi-cultural gods. It is about whether the book instructs well or not. And you can be instructive in a constructive way by misleading students.
Incidentally, the book was–and probably still is–available at Kyobo Bookstore. I leafed through it a couple of months ago at the Gangnam branch.
By the way, regardless of what one thinks of the term gyopo, could we all agree to follow the example set by the good Marmot and hyphenate the term “Korean-American”? I don’t know what a “Korean American” is.
Robert:
No, he didn’t, and I didn’t say he did.
What I did mean to say is that context isn’t important for appreciating the book in question on its own terms - which do not include making any statements at all about History. And what I questioned is why Eckert thinks context is important - admittedly in a provocative way.
Eckert, like the indignant Koreans, want to make this all about Korea; it’s just not.
It’s a simple story about a girl’s life that, in the context of the work itself, only very incidentally happened to take place in a place called Korea. That fact in itself is wholly irrelevant to the story, except in the (for the purposes of the story) trivial sense that because of the circumstances of its composition Korea is the stage where it happens.
(Maybe the various books written by Koreans about the hard times of early Korean immigrants to Hawaii should be taken to task by or on behalf of native Hawaiians for not being sensitive enough about the displacement of Hawaiian labor from the plantation fields by slant-eyed interlopers.)
Sometimes squeeky wheels and their oilcan Harry’s need derailing and redundancy.
And I think one thing that was correctly heard after 9/11 was that, hey, perhaps the US government should get involved a little more in such things.
You can be “world’s sole superpower”
yada yada yadabut it still helps to have allies - and by that I mean real allies - so it does hurt us when we sit back and watch as nations like France or Germany or whoever go about widely distorting what it means to be “America” and to have been “America.”I can’t speak for the level of such teaching in France or Germany, but we clearly have a problem here in our South Korean ally, and it does hurt us.
I would not like to see the US government inflicting punishing trade sanctions against South Korea for how it distorts the US involvement in Korea or some other measure like that - like perhaps encouraging a large group of internet vigilanties from scouring the world wide web for sites that make the US look bad - but I don’t mind the US Embassy pointing out in some public fashion that the US did no “give” Korea to Japan in exchange for The Philippines (and Hawaii) with the Taft-Katsura “Treaty.”
This reminds me a bit of the acclaim received by the Japanese animated film “Grave of the Fireflies”, which presents in a tragic manner the story of Japanese survivors of the nuclear bomb, without explaining all the things the Japanese had done up to that point, which caused them to have to be healed by the purifying fire.
I might read the book. I might even like it.
I won’t be teaching it in schools to teens. That is the point. It isn’t just about appreciating the book. It is about using it as an educational tool which almost assuredly means placing it in its historical context, and since few people in the US have a clue about the historical context, it is a good bet the book is being taught as if the historical context the book itself is presenting (a little Japanese girl in a place called Korea being terrorized by the natives around her) is the reality of that time period, which it was not. At least, from what little I can remember about the southern half of the peninsula in 1945, large scale retaliation against the Japanese was not going on. (A key phrase being “large scale”).
It sure hasn’t taken for Amazon.com to be bombarded by angry Korean reviewers.
Don’t know if I have mentioned this story before —
I was kicked out of my high school social studies course and given 3 days of detention and forced to write an essay for protesting a slide-show presentation a visiting Japanese teacher brought with her was being shown around the school. (side note - I didn’t protest in front of the Japanese teacher or ever saw her the short time she was there in fact).
The slide show had been making the rounds of the school, and the impact on the students was pretty amazing. I can’t remember ever seeing depression in the halls like that any other time. I mean, there was a real eerie quiet in the hall after this started being played, and in class, every class, students were saying things like, “How could we do that to people?”
Which is a perfectly acceptable question if you have a good idea of the history. These students didn’t.
With the teacher I had, we spent more time talking about the internment of Japanese in in the US than we did about anything else. Our teacher was teaching WWII in a way that was subtle but obvious (and on more than just the use of the atomic bomb), and I remember well when one student asked her what she thought about the bombing, which asking a teacher point blank to openly state her opinion was slightly odd, and she paused a minute then said she thought it was an unfortunate national tragedy that the only nation who has used nuclear weapons in war was the United States.
A couple of days later, when we got to class, the slide show had finally made its way to us, and she handed out a translation of the tape explaining the images -
-and the first line of the first slide was “On blah blah date in 1945, the young children of Nagasaki woke up hoping for a quick end to the war.”
That was more than I could stomach, and I told her so. It was not said in an “in your face” manner, but I let her know that some of us had actually read up about WWII outside of her class, and I didn’t appreciate the way she and then this slide show were giving a one-sided and distorted view of what took place in WWII.
She told me I could sit down and watch the slide show or leave.
I left.
As I got to the door, she added that I could leave to go to the vice principles office.
The next day, we had the obligatory “I looked over the slide show and Ms. blah blah’s lesson plans, and I can’t see any bias there.”
Yeah, sure. Yada yada yada. I just sat, because you can’t fight the man (even when they are two women).
For my extra assignment essay I wrote in detention, I took our book and wrote about things we didn’t cover, like the Batan Death March, Japanese actions in China like using WMDs, how all the key nations in the war were racing for the bomb, how Japan and Germany would have used if they beat us, and stuff from outside our book like how many KIA and WIA were expected if we had to invade the Japanese mainland.
I got no comment back on my essay.
It’s literature for Chrissakes; it’s not an educational “tool”. It certainly isn’t a text to choose for a history lesson about Korea or East Asia - except perhaps as a kind of sidelight “personal” point of view sort of supplement to an otherwise dispassionate account of the relevant facts and interpretations. Since it apparently was not being used even in this way, let alone to teach anything at all about East Asian history, it should be let alone. Not everything should be grist for the nights of the historical long knives.
P.S. I’ve read the book
PPS I have a graduate degree in history.
Dogbert:
I’m not familiar with the film, and perhaps there is something about it that makes your critique pertinent, but I can easily imagine a story about survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki that is authentically tragic without its having to genuflect at the altar of Japanese guilt - and make no mistake, as a relative of Allied POWs of the Japs (and their Korean trustys) I have no qualms about making them feel guilty when appropriate.
I should have added to this line
that I included how many Japanese were expected to be killed if the war were drug out to include such an invasion and referenced loosely the amount of Japanese who had died in conventional bombings of Tokyo and other cities before the atomic bomb was chosen to speed up the end of the war.
Do what you do best…cyberbomb!
I thought the book was being used in the schools and that was why it was upsetting the Koreans.
We aren’t talking about the book simply being banned from being in the school’s library, are we?
If I’ve misunderstood how the book was in the schools, then my point of view is distorted. My objection would be using the book as required reading in a secondary school classroom, because in such a sitution, it would be used not simply as a piece of fiction to be enjoyed.
My understanding is that it is being used in classes and that is what the Korean Babbitts are complaining about (not that it should be banned from school libraries - but don’t hold your breath when the Korean Savanarolas are on a roll).
The salient point, though, is that it is NOT being used in history classes or to teach anything about East Asian history. It’s being taught as literature, as a story about overcoming adversity, in particular about a child who is a girl and not-an-American doing so.
Although a careful teacher would point out to students not to think that because someone is either a “hero” or a “villain” that everyone from the same (ethnic) group of either necessarily is one or the other, there’s nothing that needs to be taught about the “context” — one wonders just how balanced a treatment the Korean inquisitors would tolerate — for this book to work as it was intended.
Marmot: You got me. However, it’s up to Korea what they teach their kids, and it’s up to us where we put our armed forces.
On Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I had a high school teacher who said something to the effect that we sure as hell were goddamned right to drop the bomb, or else he wouldn’t be there teaching the class (he was in the Marines training for Operation Olympic in August 1945).
But the divide in departments isn’t that stark - literature over here - history over there - even in high schools.
I am teaching “The Diary of Anne Frank” starting this week, and the first two days are not going to touch the text at all. We will be in the computer lab doing internet searches for a list of topics related to WWII, the Netherlands, anti-semitism, and so on. The lesson plans on the internet in connection to “The Diary” are heavily focused on teaching The Holocaust.
Now I readily point out that this play is a more unique creature given the Western emphasis on remembering the horrors of The holocaust.
But, I’d bet dollars to donuts in the places this book is being used, it is in fact tied in some significant (though perhaps not overly so) fashion to history. It is simply how we are trained to teach kids, especially in middle school where English teachers have somewhat less autonomy in favor of working as a “team” with teachers in other departments.
The emphasis is very much on “teaching across the curriculum.”
And I know American secondary school teachers do not have the background necessary to teach this text and fit it into the bigger picture “across the curriculum.” I doubt they are using the book to teach how rotten Korea and Koreans were to the Japanese, but I am confident they are most likely teaching the text in a way that makes it seem like the version of history the book seems to be presenting is more truthful than not. I mean, that by using this book in class, and not putting it in a greater historical context, they are by default teaching it as actual history. It’s a piece of fiction, but it is a historical novel.
For example, Herman Wouk’s Winds of War would be an excellent piece of historical fiction to introduce teens to elements of WWII they don’t really cover much because we tend to teach as if WWII started in Dec. 1941.
(Well, the book wouldn’t be that excellent, because it is so long and not so interesting to a teen’s mind, but it is a good novel that happens to follow actual history fairly well.)
This book, from what it sounds, doesn’t. But since I only know of the book from what I’ve picked up today from this thread, I admit you have a much more definative position on how much or loosely it tries to describe real history in Korea at that time.
iheartblueballs,
Your comment(#18) is a classic among classics. You, sir, should definitely start your own blog.
As Spewer notes:
Yet we get Korean films such as the “Welcome to Dongmakgul”, that one might argue is the same thing as this book, yet, in the context of contemporary Korean society and the political reality herein, it is a kind of propaganda tool, re-cast as “entertainment”. Though one might not choose the “Dongmakgul” film for a history lesson, the record of recent history has been subject to such revision and creative interpretation that it would be disingenuous to call such just a fictional film about Koreans and the Korean War.
While one might say of this book that it is only a literary effort, and will have little impact on American society, other alleged “entertainment” in Korea are more so intended to be “edu-tainment”; a sly Trojan Horse wrapped in entertainment that insinuates a legitimate truth and has more than a little devious political intent.
i had assumed there were only two usages of “korean-american”. the first is a person born in the united states whose ethnicity is korean. the second is a person born in korea, acquiring US citizenship, renouncing korean citizenship and removing his name from the korean family census register (as obligated).
from my understanding, “gyopo” often refers to that person who illegally attempts to retain both citizenships.
Look! Koreans would never rape any woman or women. Only Japanese and white and black barbarians do that! Whatever Koreans say about history (any history that is) is true. They never get anything wrong about history. Besides, most people outside of Korea don’t care about, and have no interest in, Korean history. Sorry, but that’s the way of things.
Elgin:
(1) “Welcome to
DonganunDongmakgul” isn’t being taught in Korean schools, as far as I know (although I’m sure some elements of the Teachers’ Union would like to)(2) If it were, I think the situation would be different than that of the book because the former, unlike the latter, expressly sets out to present a view of History (a view that happens to be quite distorted, although that is beside the point - which is that the film deliberately addresses Historical issues).
A former friend of mine is a friend of the knucklehead who is making the Korean film about No Gun Ri. I gave her a copy of Bateman’s truly excellent critical historiographical review of the whole business to give to the director, but was given the book back with the explanation that the director did not want to be distracted by too careful a study of what actually can be verifiably known about what transpired at No Gun Ri or, especially, the demolition that Bateman performed on the sources of the
mythopoeticsreportage that fueled the whole public controversy. When the film comes out, I expect that it will be fully deserving of being blasted for historical falsification; we’ll see.Anyway, the point is not that literature per se is or should be immune from being contextualized, but contextualization of “So Far from the Bamboo Grove”, especially “contextualization” of the PC sort that demanded by Eckert, in his sly academic way, and the Korean Babbitts in their inimitably whingeing way, is not necessarily in order; it depends on the intention and nature of the work in issue.
What’s the proper context for the Wizard of Oz?
Is it at all genuinely relevant to an understanding of The Red Badge of Courage that it takes place during the Civil War?
The Korean attitude about this reminds me of an exchange I had with some Koreans when the film “Outbreak” (I think that’s the title) came out. We were talking about then recent films, and they were outraged that the monkey that is the source of the epidemic in the film is portrayed as being conveyed to the US on a shabby Korean tramp steamer, whose crew are portrayed as — well — how sailors are usually portrayed. I think they were even more outraged when I told them that, despite the fact that at the time I had seen the film I was living among Koreans and had a Korean girlfriend with whom I saw the film I hadn’t even registered that the ship and the sailors were Korean, so that their assumption that this footage was included in the film as a deliberate insult to and belittlement of Korea to be enjoyed by Americans seemed refuted by its utter ineffectiveness in that regard.
The Poles call Warsaw the bellybutton of the world, but nobody beats the Koreans for navel lint-gathering.
As a former middle/high school teacher of English and History/Social Science in Canada, I am reasonably certain a book like this wouldn’t make that deep an impression on most students in the first place. (Sad, but true.) Furthe