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.
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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.) Furthermore, it would seem that the novel is being used for teaching English lit, not history. No responsible teacher would use it as a vehicle for portraying Koreans in a negative light anyway.
Maybe it isn’t surprising that some people who grew up in a system where there is one accepted version of history (well, depending on who is in power at the moment, that is), where the correct answer is supposedly one of A, B, C or D, might not be comfortable with the notion of students being exposed to a variety of opinions and being able to draw some conclusions for themselves.
Robert:
I think the title of this piece should be changed to reflect the fact that the book in issue on not in fact a TEXTbook, but a novel that’s been assigned for reading in literature classes.
I think people are getting carried away making comparisons to things and issues that have little to do with the main point of whether controversial books or challenged books, or banned books should be used to teach literature in American public schools. Those tax-paying property owners in that particular school district in Boston, regardless of their race or color, have the right to participate in the decisions made in that school district.
This is not a Korean issue — which many of you are trying to make it. Where were the Koreans when parents and many others opposed the usage of “Huck Finn” in many middle school English classes across the nation? Or “Catcher in the Rye”, or “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”? The people that complained about these books were not driven by nationalist sentiment; they were objecting to such literature for a variety of reason, including racist language, profanity, etc. Look at these other banned books by the ALA (American Library Association):
http://www.ala.org/Template.cf.....tID=119074
The sensibilities of practically every creed and color is represented in this and other similar lists of banned literature. IMO, it is not the local school board’s responsibility to educate the taxpayers and their constituency about what is or isn’t objectionable when it comes to curriculum and books. Rather it’s the other way around, i.e., it’s the responsibility and the duty of the district’s taxpayers to educate their local school board about what is acceptable or not. Nowadays, that mosaic happens to includes Korean Americans who bring to the table a sensiblity of their own. Anyone gonna object to that?
I will with a caveat.
I would classify this as senseless if they do not know the context in which it is being taught. I doubt that the “concerned” are fully aware of the curriculum.
Oh..and I think the banning of any book is senseless.
H. Kim, I very much agree with your notion of the citizenry enlightening the bureaucrats and not vice versa. That seems very democratic. Unfortunately, my snob side gets angry when they ban quality books. I’m pretty sure, however, that the text under discussion here is no Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye.
I missed another point as well. I will have to disagree with both H. Kim and peninsular aborigine regarding the ‘education’ of the educators.
I, under no circumstances, want the so called morality and judgments of the community enforced on my children. That would be my job as a parent. The vocal minority (in many cases) can pretty much go fuck themselves.
Let’s see:
(1) a bunch of ethnic Koreans object to the US schools attended by their children using a book in their curriculum that the parents feel feel conveys a false impression of Korea;
(2) they get called on it, and
suddenly ….
(3) it’s not a Korean issue, because other groups do the same thing.
OK, Koreans can be as narrow-minded as other groups sometimes are.
Happy now?
Sperwer is 100% correct about that.
Uh, no Judge Judy. I already defined what a 교포 is above in No. 21, so I’m not going to do it again. Anyways, what you described is not a 교포 but rather a confused Korean citizen. And despite someone’s attempt to give a dictionary definition of the term, don’t forget that many words in Korean have a connotation or underlying meaning that is not necessarily stated in a Korean-English dictionary. This is the sociolinguistic aspect of Korean that requires “high-context” understanding, which is why it’s so strange and aggrevating to me to see non-Koreans use the term 교포, mostly b/c it’s a relative term that is oftentimes used improperly. (Example: People will think you are strange if you call a KA this term in the U.S.) Like I said, there is a “preferred nomenclature” and I simply suggested an alternative, which would behoove you to follow. Whether or not you do, of course, is your prerogative. But don’t expect KAs to be receptive if you do.
H. Kim
Don’t be so myopic. You could have easily substituted ‘language’ for ‘Korean’ as it is not unique to the Korean language. Or is this the same as ‘four seasons’?
This, however, is an entirely different thread topic.
If you’re gonna put it that way, actually yes I am thank you very much.
You took the words right out of my mouth!
Haha, very funny. I was actually referring to the difference between “high context” and “low context” languages. English and other Indo-European languages are considered “low context” while Korean, along with Japanese are considered “high context”. So “high contextualization”, is in fact, unique to Korean, in the same way that “low contextualization” is to English and other Germanic languages.
Perhaps you need to look up the word unique. There are other high context cultures out there besides Asian.
Once again, this is neither here nor there.
OK. Please do educate us, if you can.
H. Kim, the Korean media itself is often confused about what a kyopo is. I have noticed that 교포 is used for both Koreans with another country’s citizenship, as well as those that merely have permanent residency.
Perhaps part of the reason why you feel the word Kyopo is used with contempt by non-Koreans is that many Kyopo of all nationalities come on sites like this and show horrible double standards and contempt for their hyphenated nationality. From my third person perspective (I am not American), many Korean Americans (and other kyopo, for that matter) seem to be rather low key Americans and rather hard core Korean racial nationalists. I have met sensible kyopo in real life, but there do not seem to be many online.
As for correcting everyones Korean and being the Korean language expert, how do we even know you know what you are talking about? If you are a second generation Korean American, there is no guarantee that you are fluent in Korean (unless you grew up in a Korea town, attended Korean racial churches, and basically had a Korean existence in America – which would make you a low key American). Do you read hanja?
Anyway, if you do not want me to refer to you as a kyopo, I will not. But I will continue to use it as needed because it is not a racial slur, no matter what you say.
Do your own research. I don’t feel like wasting my time as it does nothing for the topic of this thread.
To me, this thread is about vocal interest groups being able to dictate what should and should not be used in class.
Grave of the fireflies uses the firebombing of Kobe as the starting point for a story about two orphaned siblings, not the atomic bombings. True, it doesn’t talk much about what led to those bombings, but then The Thin Red Line didn’t talk about Pearl Harbor and what led to the confrontation on Guadalcanal either. The link to the wiki above has this interesting fact: “The release of the film in South Korea was delayed indefinitely because authorities feared it would be thought of as justification for Japan’s role in World War II.” It was supposed to be shown somewhere in Korea in early 2005 but was cancelled due to the Takeshima Day brouhaha, something I thought was pretty disgusting.
As for the ‘40 years of colonization’ bit, the protectorate treaty was in 1905, after which Japan was in de facto control of Korea (especially after replacing the King with his mentally handicapped son and dissolving the army (such as it was) in 1907). Considering the degree of control Japan had over Korea during those five years prior to annexation, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be considered part of the colonial period.
Copout. Btw, that was a challenge to see if you knew what you were talking about. It’s obvious that you don’t.
Since when does recommending a preferred nomenclature and providing simple definitions make me a “Korean language expert”? Get that chip off your shoulder — you’re embarrassing yourself! I’m done with this thread btw. Hast la vista!
Nice logic there, Sherlock. I will help you a bit: a) I don’t care about you b) I have nothing to prove to you c) it is not related to the topic d) see (a)
and would
not be the ultimate copout?
Hi Matt. Might I recommend “Hadashi No Gen” (맨발의 겐)? That Japanese manga is extremely contextual. However, it deals with a large number of of characters, which makes it different to the grave of the fireflies.
This is a great point. And I too was freaked by the use of ‘textbook’.
Yet, “Welcome to Dongmakgol” was a fiction, and that pissed me off. Even the stunningly retarded beginning to “The Host” just made me want to kill the director. Even though something is a “fiction” there is an essential point to me made in the pages. I agree, however, that the “historical inaccuracies” argument is a weak one in light of the fact that it is a novel.
Throwing down the hypersensitive-PC-bullshit flag on that one. H. Kim, you’re a 교포 if you like the word or not. It’s no more offensive than 한인.
The publishing company here seems to be quite thoughtful and mature in their decisions. I mean, they thought the book could challenge people. But alas, it inevitably comes down to this:
Whelp, so much for challenging concepts
H. Kim:
I am sorry to inform you that I will continue using the term “Gyopo”, as that is the term my wife recommended to me as the appropriate expression for a person of Korean origin who lives permanently in a country outside the two Koreas and the adjacent areas of China.
She herself insists on being called a “Gyopo”, although the German authorities classify her as a “ausländische Studierende” – thus a Yuhaksaeng, as she has not yet acquired German citizenship.
I’ve seen the movie (long time ago, though). I’d heard the manga was good – I’ll have to give it a try sometime.
I suspect this rather to be a striking example of Yonhap editorial researcher ignorance, regarding late WWII military history.
It didn’t have to be “American” planes; between 9 Aug (USSR) declaration of war and the Japanese surrender on 15 Aug, the Russian far eastern armies were advancing along a broad front, into Manchuria as well as Korea. Undoubtedly they were using tactical aircraft strikes ahead of their rapidly advancing forces (they routinely did this against the Germans, though to the very end of the war German tactical aircraft were able to retain local air superiority on the eastern front, when they were able to muster sufficient strength to locally oppose the Russian aircraft).
An 11 year old girl wouldn’t have been able to distinguish between aircraft nationalities, but I am inclined to think that for a child, the memory of being attacked by aircraft would not be a story so easily (and glibly) made up.
They could even have been aircraft of American manufacture! (Though I think undoubtedly piloted by USSR nationality aviators).
At least one obscure type of US-made ground support fighter-bomber was routinely “ferried” into Siberian airfields from Alaska during the war (part of “Lend-Lease”). It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the Russians retained many/most of these in Siberia and the Russian far eastern province, for potential use against Japan.
Unable to provide supporting links, haven’t looked yet.
Richardson, who are you to tell me who I am? How arrogant and offensive. How about this? You are an racist bigot whether you like those words or not. (And how about ‘illiterate’ as well? “If you like the word…” sounds like you’re trying to make a 1st conditional statement. “If” should be replaced with ‘whether’ — it just reads better.)
And Fantasy, what you choose to call your wife, et al. is entirely up to you. She is obviously not KA, and therefore has different sensibilities, so there is no need to inform me of her or your preference. To each their own.
I am an American and Korean to boot, therefore, I have different sensibilities and a different nationality than your wife’s. I simply stated my preference so I would appreciate your recognition of the differences between KAs like myself and someone like your wife. However, my recommendation is to call a Korean American a Korean American. That’s all. Now, I’m really done with this read. Tschau!
Well thank you for enlightening me as to the detailed and highly contextualized nature of the Korean language. However I’m not quoting some ‘English-Korean’ dictionary; you’ll note that entry is from what is called the 국어사전, or in a more detailed and contextualized sense a Korean-Korean dictionary, though the English doesn’t encompass the full and extraordinary depth of its meaning.
H. Kim:
No, my wife is not a Korean-American, she is a Korean to whom I got married in 1999 and who left the country together with me in 2004. Now she is a medical student in Germany and wants to be described as a Gyopo.
And so will I continue to describe you.
Lot of people have missed the point of H.Kim. The word “Kyopo” is not an insult. But it is quickly becoming one in Korea related blogs. The context matters. For instance, when I see dogbertt posts kyopos this, kyopos that, and kyopos are scum in virtually 80% of his posts, I know his hatred and resentment of kyopos are pretty deep – no different from pawi really. The fact of the matter is, Asian Americans are not very liked nor trusted by the European/African background Americans. The polls have said so. Whether you be Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, or Korean, it’s same. The biggest complaints are that Asians in America don’t integrate. The only thing is, even if Asian Americans do integrate, they aren’t looked upon as Americans anyway. A perfect example by that poster who says he doesn’t like Kyopos because Kyopos in Kang Nam act and talk too much alike Americans. Integrate, you’re just a wannabe -not real Americans. Don’t integrate, you’re a traitor. It’s damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
As for the book, who cares. If you don’t like the novel, don’t make a fuss over it and nobody would have the urge to peek and solve their curiosity.Making a too much deal over it make you look like retarded dorks with too much time on your hands.
You know, for me as a European the term “Caucasian” sounds very odd. It is hardly ever used over here, and if so, it evokes connotations of the mountain chain between Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbeijan, between the Black and the Caspian Sea.
But it would be ludricous for me to object to the use of the term on this blog with regard to me, as it is a commonly accepted term in the States and elsewhere.
Neither I nor you are free to choose what we want to be described as. The idea that the term “Gyopo” can only be used by people of Korean extraction, and not by us humble non-Koreans, is in itself a racist concept.
Fanta, it’s all very simple: 1) I am not your wife. 2) Your wife’s preferences do not apply to me. 3) Your wife and I have different nationalities. 4) Your wife and I have different preferences. 5) I am a KA; your wife is a 교포 — vive la difference!
OK, then “Real Americans”. How’s that? Not sure how to differentiate the fake Asian Americans, so that’s why I used “European”. My bad mistake.
Agreed. But that doesn’t mean H.Kim or anyone else has to like the negative connotations behind if by some people.
The term by itself is not racist at all.
Using the logic that “kyopo” may often be derogatory when used on some blogs/forums and therefore some other PC term should be used would equate to doing the same thing for the word “Korean,” since it is also used in a similar manner; it’s just plain silly.
I have never used the word “Gyopo” in a derogatory sense. It should not be used in this way. This is, however, not to say that it can never be used in a negative context.
Insert ‘black’ etc. instead of kyopo and I think you will find that just because he does not like kyopos does not mean the term kyopo is a derogatory way of describing that group or person. In other words, if someone says he does not like ethnic Koreans does not mean the term ‘ethnic Korean’ is a derogatory way to denote ethnic Koreans.
And I do agree with another that H.Kims ‘I am out of here’ is a cop-out in light of his accusation of cop-out. Although I am glad he added to the discussion, as his dissenting view has added a little spice.
CM:
I was not referring to your comment but to H. Kim’s above.
You entirely missed MY point, which was to say that, in a multiracial context, terms like “Caucasian” are very useful and necessary indeed, although it still sounds odd in Europe. And the term “Gyopo” is equally useful and necessary as a general description of people of Korean extraction living in a good number of different countries, such as the US, Canada, Australia, India, Tanzania…It is simply ludricous to demand that we should enumerate all the different alternatives when referring to Koreans who live permanently overseas.
BTW the atmosphere in Europe becomes more multi-ethnic by the day, so that us people over here have to get used to the term “Caucasian” pretty soon, whether we like it or not. Or we could invent an alternative description. But a description we need. And a mere “white” simply will not do…
i understand that you are a korean-american, h.m. obviously, you have citizenship in the US and have given up your korean citizenship.
what then do you recommend calling those with american citizenship who have not given up their korean citizenship? this surely matters as legal and loyalty issues come into play.
Fantasy wrote im reply to H. Kim:
CM wrote in reply to this:
Good that we agree on this.
But that is not what I meant here. Please read me quoting myself above.
Even though H.Kim is Korean-American, that fact does not qualify him to speak for all Korean-Americans. It is, however, courteous to respect others’ personal nomenclature preferences. One commenter said that he would not use the term “gyopo” when talking about H.Kim but would continue to use it when referring in general to people of Korean ancestry permanently residing outside Korea. This seems reasonable.
Back on topic, some commenters have made the distinction that the book in question is fiction and is being taught in literature class, not history class. That’s true, but the book is historical fiction, and historical fiction is used to make cross-curricular connections between literature and social studies.
Some commenters questioned whether the book would really leave students with an anti-Korean ‘aftertaste.’ I think it is possible. I can still recall reading a newspaper story from the early 1980s about four Korean girls who committed suicide together so that their brother, the youngest sibling, could attend school. Apparently, the family was struggling to pay tuition for all of their children. I was in high school at the time and thought, “What kind of horrible country is Korea that girls feel so undervalued as to sacrifice themselves for their brother?” I have not read the book, but if the main Korean characters or most Korean characters in the book are doing evil, then yes, I think the book will leave some students with a negative impression of Korea and Koreans, an ironic consequence considering the greater historical context of the story.
Believe it or not, this book is not the first book to show Japanese colonists being raped, murdered, robbed after the war. In fact, you can find these references in novels (yes not just historical texts) written by Korean people. (gasp!)
So why focus on this one book? that’s what the Korean publishers are probably thinking. But that’s just the national chauvinist mob driven stupid kids posting on internet do. Think of the Marmot’s Hole times a factor of ten. With one Shakuhachi, we have one semi-interesting website. With 10,000 shakuhachis, we get another version of VANK. We might even begin to talk about the marmots in a hole effect rather than frogs in a well effect.
Lirelou points out the obvious that this sh17 normally happens when there is no police and lots of cooped up anger is released. But the kids in Korea (or korean kids eleswhere, aka Gyopo) can’t think logically when they are pissed off. They just put a one liner on a “reepul” somewhere to vent. Then someone takes it and make it into a relay marathon. See? I’m doing it write now. But instead of playing the part of relayer, i’m playing the part of “troll”.
I watched “The Host”. You know what I think a lot of people on this blog have in common with the vankers who watched the 007 movie Colonel Zhao and “outbreak”? They have very thin skin and always interpret it by their own prejudiced lens. When I first saw The Host, I gagged at the first 5 minutes. But by the end of the film, I took the movie to be a delightful political satire packaged as a sci-fi thriller. But it’s sort of hard to get past that first 5 minutes and not watch the rest of the film with hyped up emotional element. That first 5 minutes already makes you assume what the rest of the film is politically about.
In the case of Korean kids protesting this book, they made the assumption even without reading the first few pages. They “heard” that a Japanese apologist wrote a book about how Japan was a victim and Korea was the oppressor. So they start putting up a sh17storm.
But I’m very optimistic, because the Korean publishers didn’t seem to have caved in yet. Sooner or later, Americans will be able to “come out of the closet” like the bbo-bbo-bbo guy. You can’t predict the direction of a stampede. One generations fad is another’s fashion horror.
Okay, despite my previous protestations, I promise to abide by this rule. No big deal, though, as there is no need to use the term “Gyopo” when referring to H. Kim alone. In situations like this I will simply refer to H. Kim as H. Kim. I would have done so, anyway…
It seems to me being born with Korean blood is akin to joining the Marine Corps. Remember the famous line from drill sergeant Hartman in the movie, “Full Metal Jacket?”
- God was here before the Marine Corps! So you can give your heart to Jesus, but your ass will always belong to the Corps!
Pretty much saying that you can be a 6th generation ethnic Korean born and raised outside of Korea with no loyalties or traditions to the motherland. However, to Koreans….your ass will still never lose its mark of “Han” until the day you die.
Really…considering this, do the actions of Robert Kim really seem that surprising?? Or that of any other kyopo poster on the entire internet? Once a kyopo…always a jealous hater of everything non-Korean (or at least those countries which are richer, more developed and more respected by the international community than Korea).
If Dram_man is going to continue his Asshat award practice, I’d say he should ignore very obscure examples of inconsistency in Korean media reports from 3 years ago and recognize real talent at being as ass: H.Kim and his thread-hijacking, arrogantly taunting, faux intellectual routine. I’d bet all the supernotes in Namdaemun Market that this comment will not be topped in 2007 despite the best efforts of pawi, baduk, origami, wjk, michelle malkin and remort:
“This is not a Korean issue — which many of you are trying to make it.”
If Dram_man is going to continue his Asshat award practice, I’d say he should ignore very obscure examples of inconsistency in Korean media reports from 3 years ago and recognize real talent at being an ass: H.Kim and his thread-hijacking, arrogantly taunting, faux intellectual routine. I’d bet all the supernotes in Namdaemun Market that this comment will not be topped in 2007 despite the best efforts of pawi, baduk, origami, wjk, michelle malkin and remort:
“This is not a Korean issue — which many of you are trying to make it.”
H. Kim wrote:
“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.)”
Richardson responded:
“Throwing down the hypersensitive-PC-bullshit flag on that one. H. Kim, you’re a 교포 if you like the word or not. It’s no more offensive than 한인.”
I would make two points:
1. Richardson and others are of course right that insisting a parallel between the Korean term “교포” and the English term “nigger” is preposterous. “교포” is a standard term to describe Koreans living abroad in Korean.
2. I would add, however, that H. Kim is partially right in that “교포” seems to be used as a pejorative in certain circles–though not among the circles that H. Kim identifies or in the manner he thinks.
That is, in my experience in Korea (and in my experience among Korean students studying abroad), the term “교포” is used in a derisive manner by Korean natives and some long-time ex-pats (esp. by those who think they are experts because they run online Blogs) in Korea who fancy themselves special expertise in Korean matters. For instance, whenever a Korean-American (or, in my case, those who is erroneously perceived as a “Korean-American”) takes a strong stance on Korean issues, he is often dismissed as a “교포” who knows nothing about Korea.
Yes, this is rabsolutely correct.
Sorry about the spelling mistake.
How long did it take for this subject to predictably degenerate into another round of kyopo bashing? 4 posts to be exact. Kim’s point is not that there is a problem merely with the term itself, but the contempt behind it, which he and others are tired of. That contempt translates to standard replies to anything that the evil kyopo writes up.
Like this.
H.Kim’s points (valid or not, agree or not), are dismissed as just another rant of a racist kyopo.
Then what’s the point for H.Kim and others for posting here? They merely are going to be dismissed as kyopo fifth columnists anyways, so what’s the point? There is no point for any of the Kyopos to post here. So Kyopos you’re not welcomed, just go away. boo hoo too bad.
And Won Joon Choe, sh*t the f*ck up, you’re just a Korean kyopo anyway, you’re just defending your motherland to the death because you’re a Korean racist that’s jealous of all the countries that are better then your shitty soju barf covered Korea.
I can think of only one commenter in the blogs I read who uses kyopo derogatively (Dogbertt) and I have always just ignored it as not germaine to the topics at hand — while thinking it was gratuitously insulting and assuming there must be bad blood between Dogbertt and some overseas Koreans flowing from the Fighting 44s or racialist sites of that ilk.
CM:
I did not dismiss H. Kim as a gyopo fifth columnist , on the contrary I believe (and sometimes have said so) that he is a highly intelligent and knowledgeable men who sometimes writes brilliant comments, especially over at The Asia Pages.
But, while I believe I understand what he wants to tell us by calling the word “Gyopo” a “relative term” I do object to his consequence of excluding all those who are not ethnic Koreans from using this term. And I stand by my assertion that this latter idea of his is owed to an underlying racist concept of which H. Kim himself may not even be aware. Korean terms are for the use of those of Korean blood only. Yes, and we Germans want our “Zeitgeist” and our “Fahrvergnügen” back from the Americans…
I repeat once more that I have never used the term “Gyopo” in a derogatory sense. Actually, I tend to say things like “The Gyopos in Europe are doing better than most other ethnic groups.”
What do you want me to say instead ?
“The Korean-Europeans are doing better…”
Or should I instead enumerate the 30 or so different nationalities, each with the prefix “Korean-” ?
Fantasy: “BTW the atmosphere in Europe becomes more multi-ethnic by the day, so that us people over here have to get used to the term “Caucasian” pretty soon, whether we like it or not. Or we could invent an alternative description. But a description we need. And a mere “white” simply will not do…”
What about “Native-European”? You know, like the “indians” in the US are called “Native-Americans”?
Hmm…now that i think of it, most “PC minded” people will probably think it’s racist.
Fantasy, I wasn’t referring to you.
Anyway, let’s agree to just drop this, since this is getting stoopid.
Absolutely. If I heard a teacher in the schools where I’m student teaching here in the US told me they were teaching that book without reference to information about the Civil War outside of the text, I’d be pretty dumbfounded.
I know what you are saying about a fair percentage of Koreans picking any kind of reference to Korea or Koreans in a movie that can possibly be seen as negative and calling it a conspiracy and thinking it has an impact.
But, what I am saying is that from what little I know about this book, it isn’t good history even though it is historical fiction, and I would not want to distract the kids from learning a more commonly accepted understanding of that history.
There is no easy to see compelling reason why the text should be in the schools. Add to that the perception it might give some students about the nature of Japanese colonialism and/or Korean society’s reactions in 1945 — and I just wouldn’t feel like it should be in my class. I’d pick something else that fit into whatever theme or period I was teaching — in my language arts class.
Since the kids are hard to get interested and keep interested, and since you have so much class time taken up with other things, there is a premium on quality instruction time. I would want a book that offered more than what this seems to offer.
Stop reading at #121.
On Virtual Wander’s #111.
I know this doesn’t fit neatly, but what if an English dubbed version of “The Host” was used in American high schools or middle schools?
Or, what if it were used in Korean lit. courses in Korea?
Or, one of those historical based movies about the Korean War and what they show of GIs – even if the GIs are only a small part of the film?
Taking it into the classroom of teenagers, where the teachers are not going to have the time, and the students are not going to have the mental development or attention span, to give it serious academic thought complete with competing versions and a wider variety of material…..it becomes highly questionable as teaching material.
But, whatever resistence the kids have in the classroom as teens, they know they are in a learning environment and at least subconsciously expect that what the teacher is putting in front of them is academically worthy.
I emphasize I know very little about this book, but from what I’ve heard and what I know about that time period in Korean history, it seems to me the worthiness of it being brought into a classroom is probably low and is taking up valuable time that could be used with better historical fiction sources.
Let me try an example:
I remember as an undergrad listening to a guest speaker on campus who had written some books about Poland and WWII and the Holocaust. The interesting part was an exchange in the Q&A with one of our schools professors.
He took the guy to task for focusing only on Jews who had helped the Germans and local Polish officials who worked for the Germans round up Jews.
The gist of the exchange was that our prof said the guy was making apologies for Poland’s society’s antisemitism and role in the persecution of the Jews by trying to make the Jews look like the bad guys by focusing on the actions of a small minority of them.
I have absolutely no clue whatsoever about who was more right or wrong in that exchange.
But, let’s say my professor’s description of the books were correct.
What if a high school teacher — with the time and students he is working with — decided to make that book the only asigned reading they did on that time period – generally WWII and the occupation of nations by the German’s and the Holocaust – before moving on to the Vietnam War or some poetry unit or something similar and unrelated?
That’s just bad teaching. The teacher in the history class or literature class should know more about the book they are thinking about using and its context.
In the high schools and middle schools, you don’t have the time like in a college class to dig into topics and give a wide range of information to feed the students’ development.
So you have to pick your material more carefully. And what little I know about this book by the Japanese woman seems to merit passing on it as secondary school reading material.
While the lot of you are barking about the relative offensiveness of the term “gyopo,” (gayest argument ever, by the way) there are serious human rights violations occurring right under your noses. And I don’t mean in Darfur, I’m talking about Boston.
Countless Korean-American 13-year olds are being run off their farmland, mercilessly slaughtered by Janjaweed militia…oh wait, got confused…countless Korean-American 13-year olds are being forced to read a book they don’t like. A fate far worse than genocide, as any douchebag Korean Consul General will tell you.
By the way if you’re interested in the Korean/gyopo (my bad HKim) definition of human rights, it goes something like this:
Anyone or anything contradicting what I think is right, is violating my human rights.
Just a heads up for those of you that are trying to keep your permanent record clean of a human rights violation from the Hague and may disagree with a Korean on any particular issue.
Why? How?
wjk from United States your flag
Posted December 27, 2006 at 11:20 am | Permalink
http://www.boston.com/news/glo.....cles/2006/ 12/16/a_matter_of_context/
US Koreans want to ban this Japanese American’s book from being required reading for school children.
This Japanese female child grew up in Northern Korea during World War II. Then, I suppose she became a US citizen, taking the name Watkins.
So far, it has a perfect 5 star rating on Amazon.com.
I think this is suitable material to reach at least 50 comments or so. More, I expect.
Somebody, any of the authors, should take it up, if interested.
….
MyProof that I brought this up at least 2 weeks before this even made the headlines.
Nice… you hijacked a separate thread with this a month ago, and were surprised to be completely ignored? Here’s a cookie – now go back to your gimp cage.
Let’s play nice down here.
Anyway, for all of you ignored Comment 33 to continue the debate on the term gyopo, I’ve created a discussion space just for you.
Now please, stop hijacking this thread. The editorial staff (me, myself and I) thanks you.
hijack what? I contributed information. Something you wouldn’t have gotten till pretty much yesterday.
Sperwer #126
It is simply not how we are trained to teach texts, and it isn’t how we are trained to read them in the English departments of a university.
There was a 20th century school of literary criticism called The New Criticism (if I remember correctly) who argued that the text should be evaluated solely on the internal dynamics of it without reference to the author’s life, other books, historical setting of the story or of the author’s life, and so on, but that style has passed out of vogue.
In the English departments we are trained to right papers and read a text with part of the filter being a search for information outside the text that connects to it any pretty much any way, shape, or form.
And in teacher training for secondary schools, we are taught to connect the text to the lives of the students some how and to connected it across the curriculum.
Teaching the Red Badge of Courage would be like teaching The Diary of Anne Frank without reference to WWII, Nazism, the Holocaust, and so on. Or, it would be like teaching Uncle Tom’s Cabin without reference to slavery or the Civil War.
It simply isn’t how they taught us or told us how to teach.
And again, there is a difference here between someone reading a book and using a book in a classroom.
After I did some graduate student work in English literature, just before I went to Korea, I got so burnt out on having the field of play for literary studies so damn wide open, after I went to Korea, I didn’t read a novel or fiction for some years. Majoring in English lit. almost killed forever my ability to read fiction for pleasure.
That’s almost funny….
So in the comment section in a piece on contradictions in the opinions of various commentators, you ‘contributed information’ on a group trying to ban a book. Nicely played.
To tell the truth, I didn’t get it until pretty much yesterday. After all, I’ve pretty much learned to tune out your posts.
Yes, you did. And I wish I had read the comment back then.
Good, now that we’ve established that Koreans are not some unique species entitled to some special treatment for their delicate sensibilities, perhaps you’d also like to agree that the complaints raised by the Korean parents in the US against this book and the online blitzkrieg unleashed against it in Korea by both the established media, the
WVankers and the Netthugs are completely unfounded and misguided.I just ordered a used copy of the book from Amazon.com (used, so no additional money in the author’s coffers). Besides the noted major historical and geographical inaccuracies – no native bamboo in NK, no Korean commies before 1948, no US bombings in 1945, it will be interesting to see how Korea and Koreans are depicted in this controversial story. This thread will probably be dead long before the book arrives, but if I discover anything worth sharing, I’ll dig up the thread and post as long as the Marmot doesn’t mind.
1. What difference does it make whether the bamboo was “native” or not. Is this an “historical” inaccuracy, especially one of any significance?
2. No Korean commies before ‘48? Go back and read Cummings and Scalapino.
3. re Bombings, see Paul H’s comment.
This level of simian nitpicking, like H. Kim’s troll bait on kyopos is pure obscurantism that works to shift the focus from the original, real issue raised by the protest against the book, a classic rhetorical tactic of those with no persuasive arguments on the merits, one to which Koreans all too readily revert when their sentimental emperors are shown to have no clothes, and which I think H. Kim cleverly and deliberately deployed for its distracting potential in this debate.
For those of you put off by Prof. Eckert’s review. Don’t let this put you off from reading his “The Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism”. While his book concerns itself with Korea’s economic development during the colonial period, as seen through the participation of a single family in the textile business, his research and presentation are first rate. Eckert’s review, for example, mentions the assimilation policies of the Japanese after 1937, but his own book offers statements by a wealthy Korean tightly integrated into the Japanese/Korean textile industries who makes it a point to note that he never adopted a Japanese name. Indeed, Eckert’s book on Korean capitalist development presents a far more nuanced view of the Korean colonial experience than can be garnered from many other histories of the period. Eckert is a Korean history scholar of the first order, even if pundits like myself occasionally find fault.
Hear, hear! It is a very good book.
If the author screwed up on the big historical details, what other distortions or inaccuracies about Korea and Koreans appear in the book? The book is historical fiction. This means the characters and story are fictional but set around real historical events. Most Americans don’t know Korea from a hole in the wall, so yes, I would be concerned about middle schoolers’ first impressions of Korea from this book. Then again, since an Amazon review written by a student referred to the country’s setting as “Vietnam,” perhaps Koreans have little to worry about.
As someone with an MA in literature, you feel the book is just a story about a girl facing adversity. USinKorea and I, both public school teachers, disagree. The American school curriculum emphasizes “cross-curricular connections.” I am sure that virtually every secondary school teacher using this book is addressing the historical context while the class is reading the novel. The question of one of balance – two days spent talking about East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere versus four weeks of Koreans raping and killing.
I did buy the book and will read it to judge for myself. Parents and the community at large are stakeholders in education and have a right to voice their views about what is being taught in the curriculum.
Apes don’t talk, nevermind “nitpick.” Why are you ranting to me about Koreans’ argumentative style? I’m not Korean. I expressed concerns about the book’s content because historical fiction is used to teach history as a cross-curricular connection.
So what is the “real issue”? The involvement of the Korean government? Protests from Korean-Americans? The Korean government is not a stakeholder in American schools, and local school districts aren’t going to pay much attention to letters from the Ministry of Whatever. They will, and should, listen to parents and members of the community, and that includes Korean-Americans.
Sonagi #136 — concur no US air operations over Korea prior to Japanese surrender in 1945, but I suspect the air attack on her train near Wonsan was probably made by Russian aircraft. Ref my speculation on this, post #95.
scroll down to page 10: http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/pd-c-01.htm
The wikipedia article on WWII
(1945, end of the Pacific war portion, Soviet offensive against Japan beginning August 8, “Operation August Storm”)
says Russian troops didn’t enter Korea until August 18 (after the Japanese surrender 14-15 Aug), but I think that’s an error.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W....._Theater_7
Regardless of the actual date of entry into northern Korea by Soviet ground forces, I think it extremely likely there were wide-ranging and extensive Soviet aircraft attacks over Northern Korea, between 8 and 15 August 1945. There didn’t have to be American aircraft overhead, for her account to be factual.
The Foreign Ministry that has time to send diplomats to meddle in the affairs of a Boston school district over a book few of them have read but can’t find the time to help an escaped North Korean kidnap victim get home from Shenyang is the same outfit that gave us the new UN Secretary General. Scary shit.
No, but the problem is that US 9th graders spend all year learning about the slave trade, the Trail of Tears, the colonization of the Philippines, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the internment of Japanese-Americans, Jim Crow, and the Vietnam War. Should they “learn” that this poor little Japanese girl in North Korea was nearly killed by US bombs at the end of WWII? As I’ve said before, in the US curriculum, historical fiction is not just literature. It is a cross-curricular connection to social studies, and that is why accuracy matters. I do appreciate your civilized debate on this topic.
which ones are those; the ones you mentioned before that are either trivial or not screw-ups at all?
It is only historical fiction in the sense that it recounts essentially private experiences against an historical backdrop in which the protagonist’s experiences occur. In fact, the “history” is less of a backdrop than something in the wings or even backstage.
“Kidnapped”, for example, is set during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland, but it’s not about the rebellion. Similarly, The Red Badge of Courage takes place during the Civil War, but the book is not about the civil war and doesn’t purport to say anything interesting about that conflict in particular one way or the other. Ditto “A Tale of Two Cities” and the French Revolution.
Other forms of historical fiction are about history. The Waverly novels, Rob Roy and Ivanhoe by Scott, the conventionally designated progenitor of historical fiction fit this mold. They do purport to accurately portray Scottish and medieval history – in fact such histories are the real subjects of the books, the individual characters being more or less well-realized vehicles for the presentation of the historical thesis.
Another example of the latter is the work of the Nobel-prize winning Polish author, Henryk Sienkiewicz who wrote both “Quo Vadis” and a trilogy about the Poles standing up to save Western Civilization against the Teutonic Knights, the Swedes and the Cossacks (the books for which he won the prize). These books are all about history, often presenting elaborate and often tendentious interpretations – Sienkiewicz’s hobby horses were romantic polish nationalism and sentimental Christianity –that are made to seem more plausible by shrouding them with a human interest element in the guise of (often cardboard) characters.
Subjecting the work like Scott’s or Sienkiewicz’s to critical historical analysis is, accordingly, meaningful in a way that is simply senseless in the case of “The Red Badge of Courage” and, I think, Far From the Bamboo Grove, despite the fact that they are staged in the “real” rather than a wholly imaginary past.
I don’t have a degree in literature; my graduate degrees are in history and law; but unlike you and USinKorea, I have read the book. And I don’t think is “just” a story about a girl facing adversity (as you try to denigrate it), because I don’t believe that the story needs to have an historical dimension to weigh in as significant.
If “virtually every secondary school teacher using this book is addressing the historical context while the class is reading the book”, then what are those who object to the book raving about? You astonishingly surmise that it’s because they are spending weeks promoting the view that Koreans raped and killed Japanese while downplaying the brutalities of the East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere. This is sheer, unfounded, irresponsible, unjustifiably inflammatory and profoundly shameful rhetorical speculation on your part.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Not everything is about politics or should be subjugated to politics. If the emphasis of American secondary school education on cross-curricular education is the latest subterfuge for that sort of totalitarian mindset that is something to be deplored.
My comments above are in response to Paul’s post #141.
Sperwer wrote:
I haven’t read the book YET, but I have ordered it and will read to judge the content for myself. I was not “denigrating” the story. Overcoming adversity is a common and meaningful theme of literature from elementary school through college. I used the word “just” to communicate your apparent view of the story as a personal narrative not a historical epic.
Once again, you misunderstand. I did not surmise that teachers were teaching about Koreans raping and killing. I surmised, based on a description of the plot, that the content of the book includes many acts of violence committed by Koreans. I did NOT surmise that American teachers “downplay” the brutalities of Japanese colonialism. My comment reflects the fact that required world history courses get a couple of years in the secondary school curriculum, and 35 years of Japanese colonialism in Korea isn’t going to get more than a couple of days worth of attention with so much material to cover.
Oh, and BTW, you also misread an earlier post:
In my original post, I used the phrase “historical and geographical.”
If the book in question is an outstanding example of prose, then inaccurate depictions could be overlooked for the sake of appreciating and learning from the use of language and literary style. I’ll have a chance to see for myself why this book has been included in some middle school literature classes.
In re #145, oh my, my feelings are hurt.
Re #146:
A distinction without a difference. My question stands is this what you think a “major” historical and geographical” error, especially one of any sigificance or one that would justify the sort of criticism levelled at the book? Not having read the book – apparently a defect you share with many of the Korean critics, especially those here in Uri Nara, how do you even know that the bamboo in question is meant to refer to bamboo in Korea.
And what about those other major errors – pre-48 Commies and air strikes in the north of Korea. You’re suddenty awful quite about those.
As for the rest, if I misunderstood anything, I think you’d better have a look at your writing. If you didn’t intend to be deliberately offensive, you might consider remedial composition classes, particularly if you purport to be a teacher.
Yoko’s book is getting very recent 1 star ratings from presumably Koreans. Checkout amazon.com. Presumably many Koreans are finding those 1 star ratings helpful.
How long will it take this former 5 star rated book to drop to 3 stars in, a period of, 2 weeks?
2 stars?
I think it’s kind of childish and unfair.
“I think it’s kind of childish and unfair.”
Don’t expect maturity from Korean (or any country’s) nutizens.
I am late reading this, but just in case people are interested, I found an article in the Boston Globe about the controversy:
‘Bamboo’ lesson plan to be revised
Officials seek wider discussion
By Lisa Kocian, Globe Staff January 7, 2007
Here are a few snippets:
The Dover-Sherborn Regional School Committee voted Tuesday night to revamp the lesson on the book, which is part of a unit in the English Language Arts curriculum that focuses on stories of survival.
…
One School Committee member said she had vacillated on whether the book should remain in the curriculum.
Shelley Poulsen said she asked herself if the school would teach a book that described a Nazi family fleeing its enemies after the war. “I said, ‘Well, no, we wouldn’t,’ ” she told about 50 people who came to hear the debate. “It’s just a slap in the face.”
But then she reconsidered, she told them, wondering, “Where is the healing?” if the book is not taught and discussed.
…
That panel recommended on Oct. 30 that the book be removed from the curriculum because there wasn’t enough time to provide all the historical context that would be needed to render a balanced lesson. Superintendent Perry Davis supported the recommendation, and the School Committee took it under advisement.
In the meantime, middle-school English teachers expressed a “strong interest and willingness,” Davis told the committee, to expand the unit with other survival stories that show the period from the Korean perspective. That led to a reversal of the original recommendation.
…
The restructured unit will be taught this spring and the School Committee will review it in October.
After the vote, parents who had asked for the book’s removal from the curriculum were stunned and frustrated.
Agnes Ahn, a Korean-American parent of a fifth-grader, said she wants discussion of war crimes committed by the Japanese to be included as part of the survival stories lesson.
“I’m hopeful that this will allow the public to learn more about Asian history and the war atrocities committed by the Japanese against the Koreans and the Chinese during their occupation.”
The whole article is here, but you have to register (free) to read the second page:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/yveooz
——————-
I also found a lesson plan (more like a unit) put out by Glencoe Literature Library and McGraw-Hill (publishers of textbooks etc.) that seems like a pretty one-sided approach to using the book. If you are interested, its a pdf document:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2pay73
This document is linked from the Indiana University: National Clearinghouse for U.S.-Japan Studies.
*They have included Kimchi, Japanese internment camps, a UNICEF program, and refugee/immigrants to America activities in the unit.
**Writing about the novel: What did you learn about history from this novel? Write a proposal to persuade a history teacher that this book would be a good addition to a WWII history lesson.
Another teaching guide (one you have to buy)I found actually pairs this book with “Year of Impossible Goodbyes” by Sook Nyul Choi.
The above book is told from the Korean point of view. Here is the synopsis off amazon:
From School Library Journal
Grade 5-9– Ten-year-old Sookan tells of her Korean family’s experiences during the Japanese occupation as World War II ends. The Japanese commit cruel, fear-provoking acts against this proud, hopeful family and against the young girls who worked in a sweatshop making socks for the Japanese army. Relief, hope, and anticipation of the return of male family members after the Japanese defeat is short lived as the Russians occupy the country, bringing their language, their customs, and communism to the village. Equally as insensitive to the pride and possessions of the Koreans, they are as bad as the Japanese. Plans are made for Sookan, her mother, and younger brother to escape to South Korea. However, their guide betrays them, causing the children to be separated from their mother, and the two begin a daring and frightening journey to cross the 38th parallel to safety. Through Sookan, the author shares an incredible story of the love and determination of her family, the threatening circumstances that they endured during occupations by two totalitarian governments, and the risks they took to escape to freedom. Readers will get a double bonus from this book–a good story, well told, and the reaffirmation of our faith in the human spirit against incredible adversities . — Lydia Champlin, Beachwood City Schools, OH
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
I think the only good way to use the Bamboo Grove book would be to compare/contrast it with the above book, or one similar.
Cynthia
Thanks, Cynthia, for the interesting and useful links.
Would you mind explaining why you think the study guide to the book “seems like a pretty one-sided approach to using the book?”
Having read through it, I see that it provides a lot of background, especially highlighting that the Japanese presence in Korea was the result of aggression, but otherwise it doesn’t seem to me to take any side at all regarding the politico-historical issues.
Sperwer,
It seems one-sided to me because although it mentions (several times) that the Koreans resented being controlled by the Japanese, the wording of it almost sounds like the Koreans were being unreasonable for not opening up trade etc. and that they were forced to sign a trade and friendship treaty. I know very little about the history, but to me, the wording seems to white-wash what was going on. My concern with this lesson is that many teachers don’t know anything about this history either and that they wouldn’t present a balanced unit based on this plan.
When I read through it, I thought it read like it was written from the Japanese perspective, not American. At the risk of sounding nationalistic, I think it makes the Japanese look like victims (many were), Koreans not so nice (if what has been written about the book is true), and Americans as bullies because we interned the Japanese-Americans and dropped the bomb on Japan.
Maybe one-sided wasn’t the word I should have used, unbalanced might be better.
For the record, I am not anti-Japanese in the least, but I don’t think we do our students justice by giving them a very narrow glimpse of history.
Cynthia
I think it would be easier in the long run if they just pulled the book. For some reason I don’t think the parents would be satisfied with a fair representation of the period from a non-Korean point of view.
What seems to have been forgotten here is the kids’ education. If you want an Asian History class…have one. The parents politicized the book (rightly or wrongly – I don’t care) – thus shifting the focus from an LA class to a history/poli sci class. That is wrong.
As was mentioned, they could be used in order to develop compare/contrast writing styles, but I personally think the topic is far to contentious for that level.
I doubt you will find a balanced account of what happened during or just after the occupation. Ever.
Re: 136
By the way, I just ordered a copy of the book from Amazon.com (hard cover, with no discount, to maximize the money going into the author’s coffers).
Your last observation is absolutely right.
Your first suggestion is absolutely wrong. I mean, it would be easier, but that renders making that wrong choice even more reprehensible.
Yeah. I never said it was the right choice…just the easiest.
How long until the
cyber-thugsnetizens get a hold of the various school websites?The otherwise perspicacious Sperwer, with a graduate degree in history, argues that reading “literature” can be an ahistorical act (144). How … sublime?
Great thread, more please! *flippers slapping in appreciation* How about a marxian or psychoanalytic reading of So Far from one of the lit degree holders?
Cynthia:
Thanks for your response.
As a relation of a couple of guys who were POWs in Japanese camps during the war, I’m not exactly inclined to take the Japanese side in anything. But fair is fair. I don’t see anything in the study guide that does either. That’s because although the heroine is Japanese and is victimized by Koreans, the book is not about the victimization of Japanese by Koreans,and neither makes or does anything to invite such categorical generalizations, but instead deals with the experiences of one individual and her family as victims. What I think this episode illustrates more than anything is what a mistake it is to provide even the modest sort of historical background material that the study guide offers in the case of such an essentially a-historical and a-political book, because – as balanced as it seems to me to be – it shifts the whole approach to the book away from the author’s subject and intention into a realm of politico-historical discourse that the book does not purport to address. And in that arena, as the Goat says, it’s never going to be enough for people like the Korean woman whose father was executed by the Japanese and who is hysterical about the fantastic concern that this story is going to so inflame her son’s 6th grade classmates that they bully him because they identify him with the victimizers of the heroine. Meanwhile the book is lost.
Trachsys:
Thanks?
Indeed, I’m not much of a fan of Marxist, psychoanalytical or deconstructionist readings – although I’ve done them all at one time or another – because they often are trivial even when they are not hopelessly obscurantist. One can imagine and I suppose if I thought it would be sufficiently amusing I could cobble together quick versions of each regarding So Far from the Bamboo Grove, but that sort of academic onanism bores me. The stickiest one undoubtedly would be that which concludes with dismissing the book as a piece of self-indulgent post-bourgeois individualism. I guess that works if you have no belief in the possibility of individual transcendence, but I do. So apparently does the author, because that’s the holy grail in her story. And you don’t need Erickson, Althusser or Derrida, let alone people obsessing about whether the book provides a balanced picture of Korean-Japanese relations in the East Asian context, troweling on their preoccupations to get that – in fact it just makes it disappear.
Sperwer wrote:
From an editorial (not reader) review at Amazon.com:
But then since you’ve already read the book, you knew that, right?
RE: the bombings, see comment #143.
I wasn’t your teacher, so don’t blame me if your reading comprehension skills are lacking.
Yep, but you didn’t when you made your remarks, which so far have been for the most part unfounded idle speculation when not simply wrong.
The bigger problem is the general trend in the teaching of English/American literature away from works of the imagination towards easier-to-read memoirs and fact-based novels (usually litanies of suffering). The books’ formal deficiencies are always excused with a view to the importance of the historical content, and the historical inaccuracies are excused by reminding readers that it’s “just” a work of fiction, or “reality as one person experienced it,” etc. As a result the children get neither good literature nor good history.
The literary value of Watkins’ book is clearly minimal, as its ghastly first sentence makes clear. (A page or two later, she writes that the handle of a shovel was taller than she was. I imagined a very odd looking shovel, until I realized she means the shaft.) The book is being marketed as a true account. Koreans thus have every right to protest, whether the thing is taught in English class or not.
The irony is that Watkins lends support to the myth that Kim Il Sung had an army that helped to liberate Korea. It’s a shame she doesn’t describe just what its uniforms looked like, because one sure can’t tell from the “photographs” later put out in North Korea! (Or the paintings, for that matter – I’ve counted five different uniform styles so far.)
Watkins also supports the myth, much cherished by the South Korean left, that the North Korean communists came down harder on the Japanese than the South did. In fact Kim kept Japanese technocrats on at high salaries long after the South had kicked them out. Japanese also helped edit some of the North’s early propaganda films.
Finally – educated Koreans, unlike the netizens, do indeed acknowledge that bad things happened to the Japanese stranded here. As I remember, Hwang Sunwon’s Descendants of Cain talks empathetically of a Japanese carrying a dead child, a harrowing image. (Now there’s a novel they should be teaching in class.) It’s odd that Koreans who lived through the colonial period tend to hate the Japanese much less than their grandchildren do.
On a personal note: I can’t help being struck by the difference between the Korean-American community’s furious reaction to this book and its utter indifference to 10,000 Sorrows (2000), a purported memoir of a Korean childhood that spoke not only of rice farming in December, heated mud floors, mothers bowing to their children and other inanities, but also of Korea’s savage tradition of honor killings. While I was protesting to Doubleday, Korean-American newspapers and TV stations, and getting yawned at by everyone (except the author’s lawyers), some Korean center in San Francisco was giving the good lady an award! Korean-American makes good, etc. If memory serves, the academic community in the US was awfully quiet. (I remember someone on a Korean Studies listserve asking me what I was so worked up about.) I guess it makes a difference whether the person defaming Korea is called Watkins or Kim.
BRMyers wrote:
I think it makes a difference whether the person defaming Korea is called Yoko Kawashawa Watkins or Kim.
Sperwer wrote:
If by the phrase “you didn’t,” you mean that I didn’t know the bamboo groves referred to the family’s land, you are wrong. I had read the editorial and reader reviews before I ordered the book at Amazon. Please see post #136.
HKim wrote
Any more offensive than ‘waygook’ which is used in the most exclusive of manners with regard to Korean Blood and nationalism? It so often denotes the ‘other’ in the most exclusive of ways that it makes what you are alluding too seem like schoolyard taunts.
Second point, the issue here is the insertion of a government of a foreign nation into the business of another. If Korea wishes to optimize it’s soft power it will have to learn that bee-covered, finger-chopping protesting gains little credence and that the proper way to pursue positive outcomes is to accentuate the positive
In one of those ironic moments in bloggin’, i find myself in agreement with Sperwer’s view on this.
On another note of irony, this book is probably getting a lot of free marketing.
If someone refers to me as a caucasian I will think they are talking about a shoe style. I’m american and we hear that only in jest or on censuses.
However, because american is so often used derrogatorily, forthwith I don’t want anyone to refer to me in that manner. In fact my students use my first name in a sort of skeevy fashion so you can stop calling me that too. In the future you can call me fellow earthling. I salute you H. Kim. Can I call you earthling?
Sonagi #143:
Ok, now I see your point, but the probable prevalence of a “blame America first” attitude among English and history secondary school teachers in Mass is a given as far as I’m concerned. After all, these things you allude to in your quote ref American history actually happened.
My only concern here is an extremely limited one — that any “highly-intelligent-and-educated, but-possibly-ignorant-of-some-arcane-details-of-military-history” readers of this blog be made aware of an objective fact — that it was indeed very possible for a non-American (let’s call it an “Allied”) airstrike to have happened to this Japanese family’s train, as they attempted to leave their home in N. Korea in the last few days of the Pacific war.
The columnist Mark Steyn often notes with amusement what he calls the “internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition”. If what happened here is that earnest young teachers in Mass thought they were coming up with another way to be innovative and multi-disciplinary, in showing the “Asian” perspective (and in the process, get another chance to shake their heads over the brutal use of American airpower on innocent Japanese) — I think it’s rather amusing that they found themselves “blindsided” by a sudden crossfield “block”, coming out of nowhere from another aggrieved-but-wholly-unanticipated “Asian victim” group.
I wouldn’t even necessarily say that these Mass teachers would be “wrong” in their perspective. (Uh-oh, did I just perpetrate a double negative?)
If this particular airstrike had somehow been captured on newsreel footage of the time — say, filmed from another accompanying aircraft — and then shown, a few months later in 1945, to movie audiences all across the USSR and the USA –I’m sure it would have elicited thunderous cheers from most (though not all) of the various viewing audiences.
Maddlew #169:
I note your ironic tone but nevertheless am compelled to recommend that you stare back sternly and stoically at anyone who refers to you as “American” in “a derogatory manner”. (Derogatorily? Perhaps grammatically correct but awkward IMO).
Let your reply to them be simply “Cives Americanus Sum”.
http://myeurope.eun.org/ww/en/.....enship.htm
If you insist on doing something “derogatorily”, let it be the delivery of a swift kick in the ass to any American travelers you come across in the ROK — ones who choose to “skulk” behind, say, another country’s national flag displayed on their backpack.
Tell them they need to “turn in” their US citizenship papers; they can, if they like, draw “earthling” ones instead, from UN HQ.
Stopped reading and skimming at about #150.
Sperwer,
It seems you and I and Sonagi are criss-crossing in and out in the multi-way discussion. Sonagi and I overlap at points, and I think you and I overlap some, but my ultimate position on the use of the book is close to Sonagi’s.
I am nnot terribly worried the book will skew the minds of the readers in the classroom to much of an extent. I certainly don’t think the potential influence it could have warrants the level of action the Korean government and netziens are starting to throw at it. (Similarly, I don’t think the US Embassy should get involved with something like “The Host.” If they put out a press statement about some of the Korean War movies lately, I wouldn’t object. If they cried foul more officially over the Nogunri movie that will inevitably come out, I would be on board.)
My objection to the book – the reason I wouldn’t use it in my classroom and wouldn’t really respect another teacher too much who did, is that I can see no value in it worth accepting what distortions in thinking about history it could lead to in the minds of some readers.
Weighing the value of what I’ve heard about the book – the good and bad – I can’t see why someone would justify bringing it in.
And I agree completely with Sonagi – virtually any text you bring into a classroom is supposed to be tied to somehow, someway to the contemporary lives of your students and some broader background (usually historical related to the period in the book or the author’s world).
It is how they teach us literature in college, and it is how they train us to teach kids in secondary school.
If individuals want to buy the book and read it on their own for pure joy or whatever, more power to them.
But, in the teaching profession, you have to pick your material carefully, because it is so hard to get quality reading and writing and thinking done in secondary schools in the amount of time you have and what you are working with – picking books that do not scream some clear relevance to the class and that have some questionable relationship with the history in which it is set – just doesn’t make sense.
USinKorea,
Hope you didn’t skim past BRMyers’ excellent posts #163 and 164. Paul H’s post #170 has an interesting explanation as to why the book was chosen.
I concur with Myers this not great literature, but it’s better than a lot of the dreck that gets foisted on kids, and because it tries to teach a lesson about the importance of things outside of politics and history it’s a shame that so many are intent on dragging back into the colisseum.
Yeah, you strike me as a Cliff’s Notes sort of guy.
VW:
That’s because I think we agree on the substance of things more often than not. Our respective varieties of snarkiness just get crossed once in awhile.
You noticed my ironic tone and yet you still responded as if I were serious? Yes I was being ironic, and water is wet. There’s a homeless guy walking around saying he’s the Emperor of Venus but I still call him crazy.
Spewrer wrote:
And how do you know what kids are learning in school these days? Literature anthologies from 1st grade to 12th are organized into thematic units centered around universal human themes of family, friendship, community, growth and change, adversity, love and loss, and interaction with the environment.
That comment demonstrates a high level of self-awareness.
I guess that’s your way of admitting you were mistaken.
BTW, did you read the book as a part of a course or on your own?
My daughter is in primary school; my nieces teach in middle schools; a cousin teaches in high school.
Not exactly or, should I say, not hardly.
)
I read the book on my own. I’ve lived in 그들의 나라 for nearly fifteen years, and I read nearly everything I can get my hands on concerning Korean history, USROK relations and whatever makes the natives restless, because I think it’s important to “know one’s ‘enemy’”.
As I said far up, I would probably vote for the book being replaces.
This, however, is a pissoff: “The (Korean Foreign) ministry said it is taking the “necessary measures” at the government level, including demanding that the Massachusetts state government take corrective measures”
Where do Koreans get the nerve to demand changes in other countries school curriculums? Would they EVER tolerate America or any other country “demanding” changes to theirs? The arrogance and pushiness of the above is terrible.
This book has been removed from the Seoul Foreign School Middle School curriculum at the request of the Korean Ministry of Education. It will remain in the Secondary Media Center (library) however.
Hugh,
>Where do Koreans get the nerve to demand changes in other countries school curriculums?
Maybe when they attacked Japan over the new history textbook and nearly all of the western media supported them?
Hugh,
regarding your post in #180, I have come to believe that the Korean media has no idea what the word demand implies. In a nutshell, they do not have the cultural or language experience to recognize nor to properly use ‘loaded’ words.
Perhaps the more fluent Korean speakers in this thread can help me out a little here…but here goes.
It is my understanding that 요구하다 can translate loosely to: demand, insist, and even as far as request or require (as in a set price – got the last few from 야후사전 so take it with a grain of salt).
Let’s just look at the first two – demand vs. insist. I think that most of the English language papers make this mistake which has an enormous effect on the ‘feel’ of the article and/or statement. At first I thought it was just a ploy as it was most often used in regards to negotiations or talks (about whatever) with the US. The US ‘demanding’ implied a power position and that poor lowly Korea was not in a position to blah blah blah – or so I thought. After reading more and more and seeing various scenarios where ‘demand’ was being used, I really think that the translators have no clue what they are actually writing.
As for the use of insist, I interpret that as something they feel strongly about and would like it to be looked at further.
Another good example of this would be the sorry/regret crap that goes on. Again, more fluent can correct me if I am wrong please…
From webster online
regret – 1 a : to mourn the loss or death of b : to miss very much
2 : to be very sorry for – regrets his mistakes
intransitive verb : to experience regret
sorry – 1 : feeling sorrow , regret, or penitence
Yet when an official announcement is made and regret is used, the public goes nuts because of the different ‘feelings’ associated with the different words in Korean.
I could go on but I hope you understand what I am talking about. Hell I hope I understand what I am talking about.
Re “regret”:
There are two major and subtle differences in the connotation of this word.
When someone says they regret something, they may mean that
1. they regret it in the sense that they are taking responsibility for their own wrongful behavior, or – alternatively,
2. they may be expressing their concern or sympathy for a situation completely beyond their control and for which there is no question of their culpability , e.g., “I regret that your dog was killed by Mr. Smith’s careless driving.”
In English, there is no necessarily clear distinction between these two meanings, i.e., different words with clearly differentiated primary meanings.
Korean, on the other hand, seems to have two sets of words: 뉘우치다/후의아다 for the first meaning of accepting personal responsibility, and 생각아다/슬퍼아디 for expressing sympathy for someone’s misfortune.
I don’t know, though, whether this apparent distinction actually lives in the spoken or written language.
If it does, it would be very interesting to know which formulation is used by the usual suspects when they express “regret” when they’ve been caught with their hands in the till and their pants around their ankles.
Interesting. The first form that came to my mind was 유감(스럽다)
Well, yes; 유감(스럽다) is another alternate form of the second variant to the effect, e.g., “I regret that you have been caused some inconvenience” or even more obliquely “It is to be regretted…”
If that is the formulation used by all the politico-business miscreants in Korea in their “sincere apologies”, it’s really just crocodile tears at their most egregious.
That I don’t know – I have never bothered to look it up. It could, however, help explain the somewhat common ballistic response to US official statements using ‘regret’. The media could easily
purposefully distortmisinterpret the statement by choosing alternate forms.Since many of the things for which apologies are demanded of the US by Koreans don’t merit one, it doesn’t particularly bother me that the US doesn’t really apologize or isn’t made to seem to do so. However, it would be helpful if our representatives could get together a formula that works for these situations, together with their own Korean translation of it so they at least have a fighting chance of getting theri meaning across.
Anyone care to venture why people are getting worked up now about a book that was published more than 20 years ago? Is it because this is the first time it’s being taught in a school? I can’t find any info about that.
Because some ethnic Korean parents with kids in US schools where it’s taught suddenly have got their panties in a twist about it.
I guess this does say something about the growing presence of Koreans in the U.S., along with the pettiness of the Korean gov’t for getting involved. As the Marmot said, “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.” At least the U.S. doesn’t have kids breaking out the crayons to depict another country as “evil” and then hang the drawings in subway stations….
Yeah, but we’ve got politicians who only will eat Freedom Fries
Sperwer wrote:
If you read the Boston Globe story linked in a previous post, you will find that it is not only ethnic Koreans complaining, but parents of other ethnic groups are objecting to sixth graders reading a novel with graphic violent content. This concern about the appropriateness of the novel for middle schoolers also expressed in some of the reader reviews in Amazon.com.
Sonagi, the diary of Anne Frank is taught to fifth graders:
http://www.amazon.com/Teaching.....059067482X
Kids should learn about harsh historical events, with as much context as possible of course, so they can see what assholes adults can be and just maybe learn from their mistakes.
For those of you who mentioned Eckert’s book “Offspring” I recommend an article he had published a few years back (maybe 99 or 2000?) called “Korea’s Transition to Modernity.” While “Offspring” was helpful in its look at Korea’s capitalistic obstacles and/or tendencies I found it lacking in a historical basis. “Modernity” can kind of be viewed as his caveat to “Offspring” and really balances that research well. I believe it was published in a book called Historical Perspectives on East Asia.
Meanwhile, back at the hall of justice, it’s a novel folks. Don’t shoot the author. As for those objecting to the book for non-historical reasons, i.e. graphical sexual content, their’s is the same reason as for rejecting Graham Greene’s works, the Alice series, and Catcher in the Rye – a Victorian sense of snobbery. Has notta to do with the korean-japanese issue.
Michael wrote:
I did not say I objected. I said that some parents objected. The Diary of Anne Frank appears in almost every school district curriculum, but the age group varies. At a previous school, the book was read by 9th graders as part of a unit on the Holocaust. It’s been a long time since I read the story, but as I recall, the diary deals mostly with Anne’s feelings and interactions with others in the hiding place. The historical setting is horrific, but there are few descriptions of actual violence.
When and how to expose children to the ugliness of the world is a matter of wide disagreement and vigorous debate.
I’m sympathetic to those who argue the novel presents a biased, decontextualized view of that period…at the same time, I don’t like to see any school curriculum changed to suit a special interest group. So I’m kind of ambivalent about the whole thing. You’re right Sonagi, there’s bound to be wide disagreement over something like this.
Has the States run out of stories of its own aggrieved groups? The
LA RiotBlack RiotSouth Central Uprisinghappenings of 29 April 1992 ought to make for a good read and a lively discussion. A whole lot of adversity-overcome stories on that day; entirely plausible one involving a real 11-year-old girl dodging real Molotov cocktails.Given there are plenty of other books that hit the overcoming-adversity theme why was this book chosen? Perhaps it’s safer for the school administrators to focus outside the States when two peoples-of-color groups are at each others throats? And the added bonus of cowardly US bombers–agenda advanced.
If the school admin can’t find a suitable story about overcoming adversity I recommend James Brooke’s. Last time I checked Dayak headhunters weren’t too active in the PTA.
Apologies to the
DayakBidayuh readers out there–evidently some find the term offensive.I don’t have time any more now that school and grad school are back in, so I’ll probably not be commenting much for awhile or reading the comment sections or even checking the blogs each day.
I wanted to say I did go back and skim the couple of comments by the person who had the article from Boston and found the lesson plans, and it and a couple of other tid bits I managed to skim turned out to be basically what I expected.
Unless the people teaching the stuff in this or that isolated local area happen to be (like me) someone who has a background in Korea (East Asian) history/society, they are not going to have what they need to teach this book.
So, they are not going to be able to put it in a reasonably proper context – much less correct some of the problems with the picture of history it presents as historical fiction.
The book itself isn’t about a topic that is central to US society/history/culture — so it is not screaming to be included in the curriculum.
So the best answer seems to me to pull the book, because it really isn’t quality teaching material.
I think the quotes from the article from Boston the reader presented showed the book was just being used without much thought put into its contextual environment – beyond the “story of survival” thing – then the answer about the Nazi post-war question showed not much thought was being put into the use of the book.
If they included a work from the Korean point of view, it would make using both acceptable to me in a class – but I would still think that 90% of the teachers wouldn’t bother to gain some understanding of the Korean colonial period —– which would mean they would just be “winging it” and that is shoddy teaching.
And that is what they are telling us in the teacher-training program I am in.
The reason I won’t be blogging much from now on is — I’m having to do a bunch of refresher work on stuff I’ve read about before and pick up some new information on the broad background stuff for “The Diary of Anne Frank” I started yesterday.
I’m googling around for basic information on stuff like The Netherlands, Amsterdam, and such as well as WWII info and things more directly related to the history of Anne Frank (and the play and the movie version).
I just spent two days with the 8th graders in the computer lab with them gathering tid bits of information on these topics too – as a pre-reading exercise before we even start the play.
This is the kind of stuff just about every book they make me read in my grad school classes is telling me I “have to” do as a secondary school teacher.
And it fits with me fine – because I orignially wanted to teach at the college level, and I’ve done MA work in literature as well, and this is the kind of think we were trained to think about (and research about) when we read works of literature.
And that is why, based on what little we learned about this book and how it was being taught in this thread, I disagree with those schools using it.
For example, let’s say as part of the theme of “survival” – they were to read “The Diary of Anne Frank,” something written by some Japanese family interned in the US during WWII, say, some piece of literature about political prisoner camps in the Soviet Union, and so on, as well as this book about this Japanese family in Korea in 1945.
What kind of impression about Japan-Korea relations around that time period is the class going to be given?
Adding to the required reading list a piece of literature by a Korean about that period showing how Koreans survived the colonial period will give the students a chance to get some real-life understanding of the history, but without some broadening of the view, they will be misled about the actual history if they just get to read that book along with these other pieces of historical fiction.
And, it seems, though I could be wrong, the unit theme of survival is about survival in historical settings, right?
I mean, they are not reading this book on Korea along with something like the book the movie “Alive” was based on, right?
Which is my last point. If you wanted to just teach about the human strength of survival – you could pick some very different material to read – there are plenty of books and short stories and movies and documentaries you can bring into the classroom from plane crashes, shipwrecks, natural disasters and such.
If you wanted to be a good teacher, you’d still have to do some background checking on geography and some other stuff both to be able to answer questions that might come up and also use such material to broaden the thinking of your students, but you wouldn’t have to do the kind of nationalist related history research you would “need” to do if you wanted to include pieces of historical fiction like this book on Korea.
I just thought of this too.
One reason why a teacher should have the background knowledge of what the students are reading and should bring it into class is to try to interest as many of the students as possible.
I taught Julius Caesar as a student-teacher last semester, and I remember some teachers making cracks about it like “Good luck” and that they were happy they weren’t going it.
It did’t worry me. I thought it had a lot of potential especially due to the fact I had a lot of guys in my class: the play has a coup, murder, power, ambition, greed, gang-type slaying including an incredible amount of stab wounds by different people, a civil war, battle, armies, empires, and so on….
There is a reason the PC game “Total War” is played a lot – at least by guys.
So, I brought in things like — print outs of the photo head shots of the the Republican leaders in Congress and the Bush administration. (This was before the last election)
and I placed those images up beside images of the people in the play – Caesar, Brutus, and others – to get them to think about what kind of history this play was actually talking about.
I had them write short things on something like, “Imagine if the general in command of US forces in Iraq became angry at the White House and decided to try to overthrow the government? Imagine if just off the coast of the US near Washington one day, the aircraft carrier fleet from the Gulf along with the air force and other transportation means were quickly bringing over the US military from Iraq and Afghanistan and were threatening to invade Washington if Bush didn’t step down as leader? Imagine if Donald Rumsfeld was leading the whole effort….”
We would have short class discussions on the US Civil War or people who had tried to assasinate US presidents and what their motivation was and how that differed from what was going on in the play.
As several people have noted, getting the majority of the teens in secondary school to pay attention is a major task in itself.
That is why if you want to teach a book – any book – you need to take a scatter gun-type approach throwing out a lot of broad background stuff – because the more different angles you attack the text with – the better chance you have of at least partially hooking more of the students into listening – at least that day.
Ref: your #201, USinKorea.
Interesting post, an innovative approach wherewith to catch the interest of the plebians.
Though I’m leary of any suggestion that our US military could ever be involved in domestic/international politics in an “old world” “man on horseback” way; if there’s one common world problem we’ve managed to transcend, it’s political stability. Thank God for that.
Nevertheless I must approve of your method. Thought I’d let you know that at least one person was interested, as this thread approaches the end of its natural lifespan.
800 years for Rome, 2 1/2 days for this Marmot thread, what do they have in common? Why, during their respective lifetimes, they both lit up the sky, like the flash of a brilliant meteor.
Not “leary”, but “leery”.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/leery
Every time I parade through here triumphantly in my “correct English” chariot, I need somebody to whisper in my ear: “Remember that you are only a man…”
The parents and the bureaucrats who pressure and decide these things tend to be reactionaries. They don’t do their homework and the children are saddled with the results. The Peter Principle is alive and well.
It’s funny how the parents who are protesting this book’s use claim that its contents are fabrications yet have no aversion in fabricating incidents to get the book pulled. To them, the end justifies the means. If they are such experts on education then why aren’t they educators?
amazon link
I thought the above review from amazon was interesting.
As I said, privately, I believe Koreans did rape and butcher the Japanese as they retreated towards East Korea and then to Japan.
But, I don’t think the Chinese or the Soviets were as kind as this reviewer claims. If I believe Kimsoft’s diary/autobiography, the Chinese were just as bad, and the Soviets even worse. Occidentalism’s Japanese citizens claim that Taiwan was much nicer. Maybe, but there’s a good reason for that. Interesting that none of the Japanese ever mention Chiang’s ties to both German and Japan. long time leader of Taiwan
Chiang’s German equipped and trained army.
In fact, the Russian Red Army is famous for committing atrocities wherever they have “liberated”.
I wonder why nobody is asking for compensation from them.
Maybe because Russia is not rich?
The Japanese will tell you that the Korean and Taiwanese conscribes were the ones who perpetrated the brutality during the war.
A lot of POWs will tell you that too.
Japanese who survived the immediate post-war aftermath and remained in China did not fair too well during the Cultural Revolution, when anyone with any kind of foreign ties was treated as an enemy of the state. In the book The Good Women of China, former Chinese radio talk show host Xin Ran tells a horrific story of one CR victim of mixed Japanese-Chinese ancestry who was gang-raped repeatedly by Red Guards.
No pictures of the Japanese chicks or Gerry Bevers unwillingly taking it hard?
–Remort
South Koreans seem to be frantic in their need to show the world a pristine human rights record. There is too much history and too many people for this to happen. In fact, there isn’t a nation in the world that doesn’t have a couple of closets full of horrors.
What seems symptomatic here is the desperation of their efforts, as if the plight of the victims pales in comparison to the embarrassment they would feel if the truth were to come out. I am mystified.
this is very interesting, especially since I read the book in middle school as part of my social studies/literature arts curriculum.
as a middle school korean-american student knowing very little about korean and japanese history but aware of the two countries past, it struck my curiosity and i’ve asked my parents about the book.
it is true, the book does portray the japanese as the victims and koreans as the villains, arguably the direct opposite as most of history tells us. even worse, the book is at a low reading level, and the reader (usually at a young impressionable age) is encouraged to sympathize with the protagonist of the story.
i did gain a bad insight of koreans especially because of my young age and lack of knowledge in asian history (u.s. public schools have very little to offer before the university level in asian history).
Amazingly, some Korean commentators actually are keeping their heads about this:
http://joongangdaily.joins.com.....id=2871646
although, if as the writer says, the book is anti-war not anti-Korean, it’s hard to digest the mealy-mouthed conclusion that American students, unlike Korean ones, still need to be given the “historical context”, i.e., the full cleveland of Korean victimization.
I read that as well. Some hitches in the article here and there but reasonably objective considering the topic. Quite interesting.
davelee,
Since I have not read the book, I have a question. Does it portray Japan (the country) as a victim? The editorial states that it was banned in Japan for being too critical of the government that started the war. These two points do not really jive…Or does it portray some Japanese people as victims – which is an entirely different situation.
Even worse?!? What is problematic about being sympathetic to a preteen trying to survive? Is that judgment based strictly on nationality of the protagonist independent of the situation?
People seem pretty quick to condemn an entire nation of people for the sins of a long past government.
It is funny that Koreans will not accept any sort of historical context for the Japanese taking over Korea either.
it is funny that shakuhachi is obsessed with bad mouthing Korea, 24/7/365.
Sperwer wrote:
“although, if as the writer says, the book is anti-war not anti-Korean”
Whaddaya mean “if”? You read the book, didn’t you?
Sigh.
“if AS THE WRITER SAYS”. That is, assuming the writer’s own perspective for the purpose of demonstrating the untenability of the writer’s position.
I’m glad my daughter doesn’t have an apparent ignoramus like you as a teacher. It makes your PC even less edifying.
If you have read the book and agree with the writer’s premise that the book is anti-war, not anti-Korean, then the word “if” doesn’t belong.
If you’re trying to learn about the “enemy” by reading juvenile fiction, then your reading comprehension must be at about the same level as your daughter’s.
I obviously agree that the book is not anti-Korean, but I don’t agree with the part of the author’s premise that the book is not anti-Korean because it’s anti-war.
I’m sorry that you have such a primitive capacity for argumentative discrimination.
Your other pathetic attempt at a riposte doesn’t warrant a response.
For those still interested Sonagi posted a review of the book at Occidentalism.
http://www.kimsoft.com/KOREA/eyewit.htm
for those interested, a kimsoft’s autobiography which includes some stuff about Japanese refugees fleeing from North Korea.
http://www.kimsoft.com/KOREA/eyewit12.htm
“The Soviets cart off everything they can lay their hands on. They take all Japanese properties – factories, house furniture’s, food stocks, supplies, vehicles – anything not tied to the earth is loaded on to trains headed to Siberia. They take the 6-month rice stock Gen. Abe gave to the Korean People’s Committee. Korean students demonstrate against the Russians in Hamhung and Sinyiju – to no avail. Every day, train loads of our properties and food stocks leave for Russia and there is not a single thing we can do to prevent it. The communists say that it is all legal – the Russians are collecting their war reparations. Everything we have belongs to the Japanese – according to the Russians; Koreans own nothing.
Stalin formed the 25th Division of the Red Army with prison inmates and other scum of the Soviet nation. The soldiers of the 25th were dumped onto Korea ill-trained and poorly equipped. Many of them did not have proper uniforms and lived off the land. The Red officers looked the other way when their soldiers raped Korean and Japanese women and stole properties. “
Well I am sure glad you brought forth such an unbiased and impartial source such as kimsoft….
usinkorea, i sure wish i had you as a teacher back in the day… seriously. kudos to you.
Hmm. Maybe if the book was used in conjunction with Richard Kim’s “Lost Names,” it might add some context?
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