[KS] Re: 'Memoir' defames Korean culture

Charles Rd K Armstrong cra10 at columbia.edu
Fri Sep 8 16:42:42 EDT 2000


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Myers wrote a book on the North Korean author Han Sorya that was published
by Cornell a few years ago. Last I heard he was in Germany. David McCann
might know of his more recent whereabouts.
						CKA

 On 6 Sep 2000, HOLLEE MCGINNIS wrote:

> REPLY sends your message to the whole list
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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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