[KS] Re: 'Memoir' defames Korean culture

[Charles Rd K Armstrong]

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Dear all,

Much as I enjoy reading about the list members' cute mixed-raced kids
(having been such a child myself), it seems that we haven't discussed the
main point of Brian Myers' comments, which is his critique of Elizabeth
Kim's best-selling "Ten Thousand Sorrows". Having read the book myself
recently, I can attest to the numerous distortions and inaccuracies that
appear in the book. Admittedly this is not a book "about" Korea, as
two-thirds of it takes place in the US, but one might expect a little
research and sensitivity to go into the book's representation of Korea.
Korea for Kim is a primitive, backward, misogynistic place where little
girls' genitals are burned before the child is given up for adoption and
"honyol" is the worst form of pejorative. The book plays into some of the
most unreconstructed stereotypes of "the East" and at a certain level
works to make Americans feel good about not living there - despite the
author's difficulties in the US, it is only here that multicultural
redemption becomes possible. A similar point has been leveled by some
Irish critics of "Angela's Ashes", although 10K Sorrows cannot begin to
compare to that rich, wonderful, poignant, sad and humorous book. For a
truly informed and eloquent representation of the mixed-race experience in
Korea, read Heinz Insu Fenkl's "Memories of my Ghost Brother".

								Charles  

 On 6 Sep 2000, HOLLEE MCGINNIS wrote:

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> 
> Korea Hearald 
> http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/news/2000/09/__03/20000907_0310.htm
> 
> [Letters to the Editor] 'Memoir' defames Korean culture 
> 
>      A few years after the Korean War, a waitress at a Seoul noodle shop falls
> in love with an American soldier she meets. After a while, the GI disappears
> and the waitress returns to her village, where she horrifies the locals by
> giving birth to a mixed-blood daughter.
> 
>      Through years of harassment, which ranges from catcalls to stone
> throwing, the woman toils in the rice field, trying to support herself and her
> child. Finally the woman's father and brother decide to expunge the family's
> shame and hang her from the ceiling of her tiny thatched hut while the little
> girl looks on. The next day the child is dropped off at a filthy orphanage
> where she is kept in a cage until an American couple adopts her.
> 
>      This, in a nutshell, is the first third of Elizabeth Kim's memoir "Ten
> Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan"
> (Doubleday). Since its publication in May, the book's author has repeated her
> sensational story to interviewers and audiences in the United States, Canada
> and Britain.
> 
>      Reviewers have generally praised the book, comparing it to "Angela's
> Ashes" while making clear that Kim packs twice as much hardship for your buck.
> "I was in tears by the second page," raved the San Francisco Chronicle's
> Andrea Behr. Alas, "Ten Thousand Sorrows" appears upon closer examination to
> have a lot in common with Binjamin Wilkomirski's "Fragments" (1995), a
> tearjerker about a pre-adoption childhood that was exposed as a hoax last
> year.
> 
>      There is one important difference between Wilkomirski and Kim: The former
> was shown to have been born in Switzerland, far from the Nazi concentration
> camp he claimed to remember, whereas the latter is almost certainly telling
> the truth about having come to America as a Korean adoptee.
> 
>      Having said that, Kim's description of Korean life, language and custom
> is so wildly inaccurate, and her account of the Confucian "honor killing" so
> improbable, that the only question for me is whether she herself believes what
> she has written.
> 
>      For instance, she tells how Koreans harangued her every day with catcalls
> of "honhyol, a despicable term that meant nonperson, mixed race, animal."
> Honhyol is in fact a word used in polite conversation by educated Koreans,
> even by mixed-blood Koreans themselves. The derogatory word is "tuigi." Now,
> if a black woman claimed to remember an Alabaman childhood in which white
> racists hounded her day in, day out by "that despicable term,
> African-American," wouldn't that seem strange? But then, everything about
> Kim's Korea is strange. This is a country where women work in the fields with
> babies strapped to their chests, and wear hanboks with wide, kimono-like cuffs
> and bow humbly to their little children. This is a country where rice is
> farmed in December and people live on swept earth floors, Chinese-style. Even
> so, they still manage to enjoy an ondol heating system, which presupposes a
> covered stone floor.
> 
>      What makes all these inconsistencies especially fishy is Kim's refusal to
> offer any information - years, names, locations, etc - which would allow a
> researcher to check her story. When asked probing questions in interviews, she
> casually backpedals.
> 
>      In the book, she claims that Korea has a "long accepted tradition" of men
> murdering their disgraced female relatives. In interviews, however, she says
> only that such killings take place everywhere.
> 
>      If "Ten Thousand Sorrows" was set in Ireland, and the author claimed to
> remember daily espresso drinking, wheat farming in December and a widely
> accepted tradition of "honor killings," the book would have been withdrawn
> months ago.
> 
>      Why? Because Irish-Americans would not tolerate such outrageous
> misrepresentations. Koreans, however, have registered no public protest at all
> regarding "Ten Thousand Sorrows." Kim claims that some Korean-Americans have
> even congratulated her on the book! With the Olympics drawing near, Korea
> would do well to remember that its international image is not defined by gold
> medal winners, whose names foreigners will forget even before the closing
> ceremony, but by books that end up in public libraries and on university
> reading lists.
> 
>      Brian Myers U.S.A.
> 
>      
> 
> 
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