a memoir that I am planning to write. Ok-Kyung

Post: Edit

 2021.08.16

Summer of 2021

Hello family and friends,

I would like to share with you all about what I am doing this summer

I am a member of a Korean discussion group, called Korea Peace School. (한평학당) The group has 60 invited members, most of whom are professors in South-North Korean universities or professionals in different areas (philosophy, education, sociol-ogy, political science, religions, North Korean Studies....).  The group founder is a professor at Wongang University, a Buddhist University in Iksan where my grandparents and my father are buried. The purpose of the group is to exchange, discuss and educate ourselves about  topics of Peace, Unification of  the Ko-rean Peninsula and a better understanding of North Korea.  So far they have had 20 Zoom conferences, one meeting a week on Monday for 2 hours.

All conferences I participated so far are excellent, completely new subjects I never heard or read about. I joined the group re-cently. I was asked to give a talk. I chose the date October 25, to give me enough time to prepare it properly. I never gave a conference in Koreanlanguage  before!  Imagine!   In 2015,  I was not able to type in Korean on computer!  Of course, I was able to do  Korean  hand writing.

I am hoping to make my conference material, as the basis for a memoir that I am planning to write.

Ok-Kyung 

__________________

Title of my conference ( to be presented on 2021.10.25)

"Modern History of Korea (1885-2020): A 135 year History of my family and Immigration, resulting from division of the Korean Peninsula and its colonial experience".  

The date 1885 is the year when my maternal grandfather was born.

Table of content  of the conference ( tentative)

1.  Self Introduction (10- 12 slides):

Desire for domination at an individual level -   create an outcast, bullying - based on my childhood observation at school

What marked my early years (since 15 years old) was « exclu-sion of others », « discrimination ».  Noam Chomsky (an emi-nent American linguist) talks about the same experience in his childhood and how it determined his life.

2. The same human relationship is found at the national le-vel  between nations  (slides 13-25) all over the planet

 * Desire for domination at a national level: Colonialism; setting the world order (as we see it now)  based on commercial inter-est and exploitation of slave labour (e.g.the case of France)- This economic order has been continuing for almost 200 years (1642-1848) and still affects the world order ( e.g. of  Haiti, which is still struggling with its huge debts.   Piketty proposes to French government  to pay compensation of 30 billion euros to Haiti.

* In 1833 when the British Parliament voted for abolition of the slavery,  it accorded 4000  owners of  slaves a compensation  of 30 million (current value) euro to each owner .- the total amount  represents approx. 5% of GDP of that period. 2010 university research shows that this amount was the origin of family fortunes - e.g. the family of David Cameron

* Thomas Piketty (Economist at CNRS, Paris) - his book, ‘Capi-tal et Idéologie » (2019) proposes to study the history of une-qual societies, colonialism and slavery. He was born in 1976 in France and never learned and heard at school about slavery - France’s ‘crime against humanity’. Slavery participated in the development of the capitalism. It allowed not only accumulation of the capital, but also elaborated indispensable tool for func-tion of the capitalism: stock company, bank, insurance, stock exchange,  international commerce or monoculture  (interview with Piketty, L’OBS, summer special issue, 2021)

* In case of Korea - a similar pattern found

American colonization of Korea and Korean War (1950-53), and division of Korea, followed by current occupation of Korea, fol-lowing the Japanese colonization of Korea 

* The majority of Korean people in South deny their country’s colonial relationship with USA (Korean Cultural Centre in Paris asked me to take out the sentence which says Korea is the co-lony of USA, 2018)

* What marks the colonial relationship is « lack of « self-determination », « human dignity »

* The case of Korea-US colonial relationship under the name of « allies » and its devastating impact on South Korean society  has been well demonstrated by 20 some lectures presented so far at the Korea Peace Study School . So my conference will not touch on this subject.

* Listen to Frantz Fanon’s cry (1961, born in Martinique, a preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolo-nization and psychopathology of colonization):  « It needed more than one native to say,’We’ve had enough; more than one peasant rising crushed, more than one demonstration put down before we could today hold our own , certain in our victo-ry. As for we who have decided to break the back of colonia-lism, our historic mission is to sanction all revolts, all desperate actions, all those abortive attempts drowned in rivers of blood »

3. Family history- immigration history, starting from the life of maternal grandfather, who dreamed of a « just society »   (slides 26-45)

* Grand father’s choice of having gone to North Korea (in search of a more just society) affected our family’s destiny

*  No place for a « communist » family in South Korea at that time (1960’s)

* As an immigrant, from the first moment I landed in Brazil at the age of 19 and then in Canada 4 years later, my pressing de-sire and obsession was how to communicate with ‘others’ - people  I met in Canada (from all over the planet, Canada being an immigrant country)  using different languages and culturural frames.

* I thought studying anthropology might help my quest.

* The ship which carried us along with 300 other  Korean fami-lies from Busan to Santos (Brazil) stopped at many ports du-ring a 2 month voyage, including Cape Town in Africa, where I saw  all bench seats marked at one end ‘black only’, at he other end ‘white only’.

* When we arrived in Sao Paolo, Brazil and 4 years later in To-ronto, Canada (1968), almost immediately I started working in a Jewish clothing factory which collects cheap immigrant la-bourers. I came across many European immigrants of all ori-gins, including Jewish holocaust survivors with mental pro-blems. My heart ached in seeing them, although I was not in a better position than them. I was witnessing the result of « hu-man errors » or  I should say « human disasters ».

* my family became a member of a church, as most Korean immigrants do. Church was a way of creating a community to belong to. But I was disappointed by the Korean church life. Korean immigrants  created a wall to protect themselves from the outside world - « strangers »  and also to create an artifi-cial world of status society within the wall as they were used to, to give a meaning to their lives which seem insignificant in the vast world of foreigners-the Canadian society. I left soon this world.

4. My desire to see a  different  world  order (I) : the case of West Sumatra, Indonesia (slides 46-64)

* I undertook a fieldwork in West Sumatra for my anthropological doctoral thesis in 1980-81.

* The social strata and slave class found

* Domination of the slave class (called ‘nephews below knee’) by the aristocracy

* Women’s central position in an agrarian society with their pos-session of rice-field in a matrilineal society, where men are  not minorized , but given respect, unlike Korean Neo-Confucian society

*  Nevertheless, women’s world is also under the grips of social strata

5 . My desire to see another world (II): the case of Jeju,

 Korea (slides 65-86) 

* tIn 2016, I undertook a brief fieldwork in Jeju, Korea - a ho-mecoming visit and desire to understand my own society

* Before my fieldwork in Jeju, In 1986-1989, after finishing my doctoral degree, I undertook a fieldwork among Montreal Ko-rean immigrant community, for a post doctoral research. I dis-covered a « miniature » Korean society in this community - ob-sessed with « self-identity as Koreans », based on exclusion of other people (race, nationality) and non-Christians, creating a status system to advance oneself over others within the com-munity. I left this community. 

* In Jeju, the same pattern of domination,  minorization found between the centre and periphery (Jeju)

* The history of Jeju is marked  by ‘agony’ and ‘desolation’

* « contradiction » of Jeju:    Being at the periphery of periphery (from the point of view of distance from the Chinese continent and civilization from where originated Neo-Confucian ideology), overwhelmed by the sense of ailenation,   at the same time wanting to be like the centre

* Women divers of Jeju considered as the bottom of the social ladder, saved the island economy, with their diving income  du-ring the Japanese colonial period

* Women divers have their own world view with shamanism con-fronting the Neo-Confucianism which does not allow a space for women, but at the same time under the grips of Neo-Confucian ideology which shapes the social ethos

6. My desire to understand another world  (III): North Korea (slides 87-100)

* During my second visit  (2018) to N. Korea,  I found a society I was looking for almost at the end of my life, where everybody is provided at least with  basic needs: education, health service, food. The government looks after all Koreans from north, south, overseas equally. Its central philosophy is « self-determination » (Juche). It refuses to trade its self-determination with external domination. It prefers dignity with hunger, rather than bread in the slavery.    A society that respects « human dignity ». But I have not done a fieldwork in North Korea. So my understanding is based on other people’s work.My understanding of North Ko-rea is based on my 2 brief visits (one month in 1979; 1 week in 2018) and writings of other people.

* Prof. Park, Han-Shik (a retired prof at Georgia University, USA) proposes to establish a Tong-Il (unification) University  by North and South Korea together in Gaesung (a city near the border line of North and South, to teach the philosophy of an equal society with dignity of an individual, where all citizens are looked after equally and given equal opportunity.   His vision of « unification education » is based on ‘human rights’: 1) Right to exist ; 2) Right to live together (family, country); 3) Right to choose (if not, slave); 4)Human dignity (free from poverty); 5)Free from violence (economic, social); 6) Freedom of religion (free from space and time). We have to understand the con-cept « people » used in North Korea. He gives examples of « ideal society »: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Sweden where socialism and capitalism are mixed. (Park Han Shik lectures in 2021, available on YouTube)

*    Perhaps, when we achieve someday a « unified Korea » with values,as described by Prof. Park, Han-Shik,  it will be a socie-ty I have been looking for.   

*     When I tried to publish my travel essay (to North Korea in 2018), The Korea-Canada Newspaper in Montreal did not want to publish it in fear of being accused as a communist newspa-per.