Speech given at the Fiftieth International PEN Conference at Lugano, Switzerland, May 12, 1987
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
To begin with, let me tell you that this is one of the best-organized conferences that I have had the pleasure of participating in (and I have been to many). For that I would like to thank the organizers and the staff. I would like to thank the British Council of Hong Kong and the Department of English of Hong Kong University for creating the idea of this conference in the first place. I remember writing to Jill Martin and commending her and all those involved in organizing this conference for the very idea of hosting a conference of this nature. And I would also like to thank this conference—from a very personal point of view—for inviting me to participate in it because the invitation helped me—in a rather unexpected way, I confess—to clarify and define to some extent what I think of myself by understanding what others seem to think of me.
I am an American and have been one for more than a quarter of a century—but, as you all know, appearances can be deceiving. . . .
I live, and I have lived for more than twenty years, in a very liberal, small academic town in what must be the most liberal state in America—Massachusetts.
Now—my barber in that very liberal academic town in that most liberal state in the Union still greets me at each of my tonsorial visits to his shop by saying, “Well, you’re still here, eh?”
“Well, yes, I am still here as you can see.”
“So, what are you studying these days?”
That—after all those years of my academic life as professor of English at the university in his town.
I merely mumble something to the effect that I am, well, studying life, sort of.
Then there is this blue-eyed, blonde, lady bank teller who asks me where I am from—the sort of question no one ever asks my blue-eyed, brunette wife of Danish-German ancestry.
Again, I mumble, “Oh, from here and there.”
The lady and I are trying to untangle a bureaucratic mishap involving a quarter of a million dollars of our business account, and, speaking on the phone to someone at the main office of the bank, she says—oh, so sweetly—“Look, Jane, I have here with me a very nice foreign student who . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”
Well, it has been also like that for me in the States in my relation with the so-called American literary establishment.
I remember that when my first novel, The Martyred, was published in New York I was simply presumed to be and was presented as a Korean writer, and, no one, including myself, minded that—except the Koreans in Korea, especially Korean writers and critics who felt that since I wrote in English I lacked proper credentials and legitimate claims to be a Korean writer.
In fact, a professor-critic there who made his living mainly by putting out anthologies told me in all seriousness that when I finally wrote something—by God, said he, anything—in Korean, he would certainly include me in one of his literary anthologies.
To this day, I am not considered, so I am told by Korean writers and critics, to be qualified as a proper Korean writer.
So it went till my third book was published in the States, when Professor Edward Sidensticker, an eminent authority on Japanese literature reviewing the book most favorably, referred to me as Richard Kim of Korea, whereupon the progressive, liberal staff of the New York Times Book Review listed the book in the Review’s list “Editor’s Choice” and defined me categorically as a Korean-American writer. The dawn of hyphenated Americans (not all of them, mind you) has arrived.
But, that, of course, made the Korean writers and critics more adamant than ever about my literary status (or nonstatus).
Now, really, all this is quite silly, but what it all seemed to signify was that, from a literary point of view of categorizing writers, I was a very inconvenient writer indeed—both to the Koreans and to the Americans.
Well, I really was too busy doing this and that nonliterary thing to care much about all that, but I did want to look into this business of my Koreanness, so to speak, just to see, if for nothing else, if I could also write in Korean.
To make a long story short, it did turn out that I could indeed write in Korean, and thank God for that, and that was that. That is, as Dr. Han Suyin has remarked the other day, I could just think of myself as a writer at peace with the world, the whole world, in diverse cultures and languages, and let the literary intelligentsia and academicians worry about the rest.
And yet the very theme of this conference, not so much about “in English,” I confess, as about “Asian Voices,” has made me realize that, at last, I have now found one unequivocal, unchallengeable claim that I can make about myself, about my literary status and identity—I am an Asian writer. How nice!
Now, to this matter of “in English.” I do write in English, more so than in Korean, and I think I can say that I am one writer who is madly in love with the first-person “I” of the English language—from the point of view of the metaphysics of Being.
The joy, excitement, and wonder that came to me when I first discovered the impact of the “I” in English—and I am sorry it is all so personal, not intellectual, that I really can’t go into it all at this point—well, it was like when, on my maiden voyage to the United States, in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, I came, alone, face to face with the sun emerging from the waves on the morning horizon . . . and it was then as if I saw the sun for the first time in my life, it speaking to me and I speaking to it.
I think it all went with my own private exploration, discovery, of my Self, now utterly alone, physically and psychologically, away from Korea toward the unknown . . .
And later, when I began to write in English, the “I” in Korean gave way willingly and joyously to the “I” in English—and it was like discovering and assuming a wholly new identity of Being and, with it, a wholly new way of seeing, thinking, cogitating, and understanding, having shed the Korean “I” that is not really “I” but that is subservient, always, to the Korean “we.”
And with all that came also my fascination with the relative pronouns of the English language. I don’t know about other writers whose native tongue is not English, but, for me, the relative pronouns of the English language forced me to think, to reason, to qualify, logically and rationally—in short, to make myself clearer to myself and to others. Thank you, whoever you are, for inventing the relative pronouns of the English language.
Now, what I am going to say and do in the remaining hour could not have been possible, I assure you, if I had not begun my writing life in the English language. I mean not only that I couldn’t have thought, written, and said it in the Korean language exactly the way I wanted but also that I couldn’t have, perhaps, arrived at certain points intellectually and psychologically had I not been writing in the first-person “I” of the English language with its metaphysical implications.
Here, then, is a piece titled “Remembrance of Things Lost,” not of things merely past but of things lost . . .
One of the most important elements in Korean literature of the past and even the present—from the point of view of understanding Korean literature psychologically and philosophically—is the concept of Han.
Han is difficult to translate into other languages. It is a composite of ideas and emotions and everything that goes with a certain perception and understanding of humanity’s misfortunes and tragedies—all compressed into one single Chinese character. Because the character is shared by the Chinese and the Japanese as well, perhaps the Chinese and the Japanese may be able to understand the Korean version of Han—but only to a limited extent and even then with, I suppose, quite different shades of meanings and connotations and, therefore, emotional impact.
Han, in the Korean context, is—and this is purely my own personal understanding of it—a composite, as I have mentioned, of human responses and reactions to what we may call man’s inhumanity to man. Or—as Albert Camus might have put it—victims’ responses to their executioners.
Han can be expressed individually as well as collectively. Han contains a range of human emotions derived from one’s awareness of one’s doom—and that awareness is expressed with (and I list the following in no particular order or sequential significance): lamentation; a sense of loss, doom, and destruction; a certain amount of anger and resentment at one’s perception of unfairness inflicted upon oneself, that is, one’s sense of being an unfair victim; a fatalistic perception of a fundamentally, inexorably unfair, cruel universe, and an equally fatalistic resignation and final acceptance of one’s fate.
At this point, a literary example that comes to mind, one that may be more familiar to Western readers, is Franz Kafka’s K in The Trial and his last three words uttered at the moment of his execution: “like a dog.” But Korean Han is much more than that, I think, perhaps mainly because, with Korean Han, there always seems to be a collective sense of it even when only an individual Han is apparently involved. Perhaps, who knows, there is a collective racial sense and perception in it all—of sharing in Man’s Fate, the Human Condition, by one and all.
Having said all that and also having said that Han is the most important element in Korean literature, I should now like to say that I have long ago declared myself free from the Korean version of Han and said goodbye to all that.
Now, what I would like to do is to share with you one Korean writer’s will and effort to liberate himself and his characters from the iron grip, from the centuries-old clutch of Han. For what I have been trying to find in and through my writing is nothing less than the ways and means—psychological and philosophical—to destroy the Korean version of Han. But—why, one may ask.
I am of that generation of Koreans who have experienced the Japanese domination of Korea, the Soviet occupation of North Korea, and the American occupation of South Korea with the resultant division of the country, and I am one of that generation who fought in the bloody Korean War, of the generation that experienced in a very short period of time a heartbreaking, bone-crunching tyranny of inexorable History, a generation that was asked to sacrifice most and that willingly sacrificed most.
And—having experienced all that, having suffered through all that, and having survived to testify to the sacrifices, destruction, and unfulfilled aspirations of those of my generation both dead and alive—I found Han not to my liking, not worthy of my own and my generation’s battle hymn, and not acceptable as my final dirge. More than that, I found that Han had inhibited our will and spirit to wrestle our political freedom from the foreign powers and to explore and develop our own destiny.
Han—I realized—had made Koreans pliant before foreign powers and domination, subservient to foreign interests, and obsessed, masochistically and degradingly, with a petty, private, and baser instinct for only one’s survival.
Surrounded by foreign interests, which were urging on and forcing on us an outmoded concept and practice of dialectical materialism on the one hand and, on the other, a quaint, outmoded political, economic liberalism rooted in alien soils of materialistic pursuit of an illusory happiness on earth, and equally alien, imported religions with conflicting promises of salvation, Koreans, with their ingrained sense of Han as a way of viewing the world and understanding their place in that world, have become in the past powerless and susceptible to accepting either consciously or unconsciously their roles as victims. It goes without saying, then, that Han in Korea has helped produce many a Korean flunkey and servant of foreign interests.
I found Han, therefore, degrading and repugnant. It has—you see—a smell of defeat and a stench of death—in the not yet completed confrontation and conflict between my own and others’ small histories with a small h, and History with a capital H.
Of course, as Rubashov found in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, as Kyo found in Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate, and as Denisovich found in Alexandre Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—just to name a few at random—History will no doubt crush and destroy small histories.
But—and this is to me the most important—it is not the fact that History will and shall destroy small histories that gives History its victory and small histories their defeats. Rather, it is how small histories confront History and battle with the tension of that confrontation and, though they may be ultimately crushed, fight the battle honorably without despair and surrender and, thereby, liberate themselves from the tyranny of History and win their final victory.
How, then, one may ask, has my remembrance of things lost led me, through my writing, to the final denunciation of Han, which I would dearly love to consign to the dustbin of Korean history?
Certainly, what I am in search of in and through my writing are things lost to me personally and to Koreans in general by extension. To engage in remembrance of things lost is not only to remember and recall things lost but also to retrieve that which has been lost from the innermost niche of our souls.
And I and Koreans have a lot to retrieve from the past, from our misbegotten recent history. Our history—of thirty-six long years of colonization by the now defunct Japanese Empire—and of the savage Korean War that claimed millions of our lives—and of forty-five long, heartbreaking years of the division of our land, with millions of refugees and displaced persons and families torn asunder.
We had in the past lost a lot. We had lost our land to the Japanese; we had lost, because of that foreign domination, our country, which is to say a home to us, something much more than a mere nation-state. And, above all, we had lost even our names to the Japanese, who had forced us to adopt Japanese names. I would ask you to consider that extraordinary, historically unprecedented chapter in all histories of colonial experiences: a symbolic and quite ritualistic effort on the part of the colonizers, the oppressors, to alter the identity and destroy the self-respect of the colonized, the oppressed.
It was a brazen attempt by the imperial colonizers to erase and obliterate our history and, in the last analysis, our memories, our individual and collective memories. But, of course, it did not work out quite like that, and we have retrieved our names and all that goes with them—but still, we have a lot more that is lost to us, and we have a lot more to retrieve.
But here I ask myself—why is this all so important? What is it really that I am trying to retrieve?
“Nothing really happens to a person,” someone has said once, “except as it is registered in the subconscious. This is where event and feeling become memory and where the proof of life is stored. The poet—and we use the term to include all those who have respect for and speak to the human spirit—can help to supply the subconscious with material to enhance its sensitivity, thus safeguarding it.” I couldn’t have said it any better.
The proof of life—that is precisely what I am after, what I am in search of, in my remembrance of things lost. That—the proof of life—not of death—is what I am trying to retrieve from among the ruins and shambles of the twisted, distorted, stunted histories of our people in our recent past—to see a light, a glimmer, however faint, of the proof of life in the ashen twilight years of our past lives—so that that proof of life, of the living, will triumph over the withering negation of life, the dead . . .
And—a reward for my remembrance of things lost may be not merely to cry out “Never again,” though I suppose one must begin somewhere, but to come to terms with one’s past, with one’s things lost, and to come to peace with oneself and, ultimately, I suppose, with the enigmas of the world—an affirmation of life—yes, as Joseph Conrad would exclaim—a moral victory.
Otherwise, defeats suffered by small histories at the hands of tyrannical History would be too nihilistic to bear and to endure with honor and dignity. Shakespeare’s King Lear lamented, “As flies are to wanton boys are we to gods. They kill us for their sport.”
Like dogs, like flies . . . But no, we can’t accept that sort of Han.
I realize it is not fair to refer all that I have said so far to a work, and my own work at that, which is not known to you. But please indulge me if I read a few passages from my work titled Lost Names.
On February 11, 1940, the Japanese forced all Koreans to abandon their names and adopt Japanese names. The hero of the story, a young boy of twelve or so, goes out to the village cemetery with his father and grandfather—after their new names have been officially registered by the Japanese at the police station—to report, as it were, the event to their ancestors.
I was interested in how the event was registered in the subconscious of my character—if “nothing really happens to a person except as it is registered in the subconscious.” Obviously, how something is registered is very important indeed, and I, the author, wanted to explore and excavate that subconscious—to give life to that which had been registered . . .
When we are in front of the graves of our ancestors, my father wipes the snow off the gravestones. The names chiseled on the gravestones are filled with ice, so that I can barely distinguish the outlines of the letters.The three of us are on our knees, and, after a long moment of silence, my grandfather, his voice weak and choking with a sob, says, “We are a disgrace to our family. We bring disgrace and humiliation to your name. How can you forgive us!”He and my father bow, lowering their faces, their tears flowing now unchecked, their foreheads and snow-covered hair touching the snow on the ground. I, too, let my face fall and touch the snow, and I shiver for a moment with the needling iciness of the snow on my forehead. And I, too, am weeping, though I am vaguely aware that I am crying because the grown-ups are crying.My grandfather unwraps a small bundle he brought with him and takes out three wine cups and a bottle of rice wine. He fills the cups with the wine, for all of us.We hold the cups in our hands and pour the wine over the graves, one by one, with my grandfather filling our cups with more wine before each mound. The pale liquid forms a small puddle for a second on the hard snow before it trickles down into the snow, as if someone inside the mound beneath the snow-packed earth is sipping it down.Then, my grandfather fills our cups once more, and we hold them up high before our eyes for a moment and then drink.My grandfather would like to be alone for a while. My father and I make a final bow to the graves and leave him.More people are trudging in the snow, coming up to the burying ground. Here and there, I see people on their knees in front of graves, some crying aloud, some chanting, wailing mournful words. An old man in white—gasping in the freezing air and the blowing snow flurries, supported by a young woman, also in white and with her hair down and disheveled, stumbles in the knee-deep snow. He comes up to my father.The old man stretches out his wrinkled, gnarled hand to my father, touching him. His long white beard is caked with snow. His small, bleary eyes, opaque and watery, peer out of the hollows formed by his high cheekbones.His tremulous voice says to my father, “How can the world be so cruel to us? We are now ruined—all of us! Ruined!”My father does not speak.The young woman says, “Come on, Father, we must hurry home.”The old man says, “Now I lost my own name and I am as dead as . . .”“Please!” the young woman begs.And—suddenly—I am repelled by the pitiful sight of the driveling, groveling old man, whose whining muttering is lost in the bitter wind and swirling snow. Turning away from him, I stride down the path made by footsteps. I stop and turn around to see if my father is following me.He is still with the old man, who is now clutching at the arm of my father, openly wailing, and my father stands silently, with his head bowed. The young woman, too, standing behind the back of the old man, is weeping. Behind them, I see my grandfather on his knees before the graves.The snow keeps falling from a darkening sky, millions and millions of wild, savage pellets swirling and whishing about insolently before they assault us with malicious force. I watch the people everywhere, all those indistinct figures engulfed in the slashing snow, frozen still, like lifeless statuettes—and I am cold, hungry, and angry, suddenly seized with indescribable fury and frustration. I am dizzy with a sweet, tantalizing temptation to stamp my feet, scratch and tear at everything I can lay my hands on, and scream out to everyone in sight to stop—Stop! Please stop!—stop crying and weeping and sobbing and wailing and chanting. . . . Their pitifulness, their weakness, their self-lacerating lamentation for their ruin and their misfortune repulse me and infuriate me. What are we doing anyway—kneeling down and bowing our heads in front of all those graves? I am gripped by the same outrage and revolt I felt at the Japanese shrine, where, whipped by the biting snow and mocked by the howling wind, I stood, like an idiot, bowing my head to the gods and the spirit of the Japanese Emperor . . . and I remember my father’s words: “I am ashamed to look in your eyes. Someday, your generation will have to forgive us.” Stop! Stop! Stop! I want to shout out into the howling wind and the maddening snow. How long—for how many generations—are you going to say to each other, “I am ashamed to look in your eyes”? Is that going to be the only legacy we can hand down to the next generation and the next and the next?“Oh, we are ruined!” Ha! What is the matter with you all, you grown-ups! All this whining, wailing, chanting, bowing to the graves, sorrowful silence, meaningful looks, burning tears . . . that is not going to save you from having to cry out, “Oh, ruination!” Damn, damn, damn—like my good old grandmother would say—Damn!And—with the kind of cruelty only a child can inflict on adults—I scream out toward those frozen figures:“I don’t care about losing my name! I am just cold and hungry!”And only then do I give in to a delicious sensation of self-abandonment—and I begin to cry.My father is at my side. “We’ll go home now.”With tear-filled eyes, I look up at him. “I am sorry, but . . .”“Yes?”“But—what good can all this do? What good will all this do for us?” I say defiantly, flinging my arms wide open to encompass the burying ground, with all its graves and the people; “What good will all this do to change what happened!”To my surprise, he says quickly, “Nothing.”“Then, why do you? . . .”“That’s enough now,” he says. “Someday, you will understand.”I am not soothed by these words, which are vague and hollow to a child’s comprehension of the here and now. I do not respond to him.He bends down, bringing his face close to mine. There is a strange smile on his face. “Today,” he says, “you, too, have made a small beginning.” Ah—Father—always a riddle.“Come on,” he says, extending his hand to help my grandfather onto the path. “Let us all go home now.”It is dark, and, with the coming of darkness and the night, the wind is dying down, and the snow is falling straight and calmly. The blurry figures of the people move about the burying ground like ghosts haunting the graves in the snow.
The father’s riddle, his enigmatic smile, a small beginning—what were they, what did they did they all lead the boy to?
One day, several years later, the young boy and his classmates were ordered by the Japanese teachers to go around their town and collect all the rubber balls that had been given, as gifts, to Korean children by the Japanese to celebrate their conquest of Malaysia and Singapore. The Japanese were losing the war and had already surrendered in Malaysia and Singapore. No more rubber for the Japanese. So—the boy and his classmates collected rubber balls and, because so many rubber balls would not fit into a sack, they punctured and flattened the balls—on the advice of his grandmother—and brought them, proudly, to the Japanese teachers. The boy was beaten by a Japanese teacher who accused him of being dangerous and subversive—all because of the punctured and flattened balls.
And, suddenly—with a whish—the bamboo sword smashes my bottom, jolting me with a numbing blow that instantly shoots thousands of sharp needles of pain through my body, snapping it into an arch, flinging my head backward. My body is shaking and my knees trembling and I can’t control my body. I press my lips tight and close my eyes with all my strength, but I can’t shut the tears in. I taste the salty tears on my lips, but I make no sound. The bamboo sword is slashing into my flesh, onto my legs, my bottom, my back, each blow contorting my body and blinding me for a second. Then—suddenly—my tears stop and my body goes limp . . . yet I am calm, so calm that I am almost surprised, as if I slipped out of my body so that I won’t feel the pain. I can take it, I can take it, I think, feeling strangely serene and almost powerful; every fiber of my being is alive and pulsating with a sense of triumph, not hatred, of pride, not heroic bravery, and of being larger than life. Don’t cry. . . . They know not what they do. . . . Love and Compassion for sinners and evildoers. . . . Turn the other cheek, also. . . . Be noble in suffering. . . .But that self-induced, masochistic euphoria—an illusion—does not last long. There is no nobility in pain; there is only degradation. And, now, every sensation within me is turning, with each blow, into a boundless contempt, and my contempt is burning into hatred, a hatred fierce and immense—until, screaming, . . . still screaming, I faint. . . .There is a blank in my memory—but my mother is saying, “A boy being carried home, bleeding and swollen, and unconscious. No, you don’t forget that.”No, you don’t forget that. No, I won’t forget that. I exult in neither bitterness nor hatred nor an ephemeral snobbishness of suffering; yet, I glory in neither magnanimity nor understanding nor forgiveness. I merely reflect, with a quick, sharp ache within me, that that is only one of the many other things that I cannot and will not forget. “Vengeance is Mine,” says a god. “Vengeance is Yours,” I say, “Memories are Mine.”
Oh, yes! “Vengeance is Mine,” says a god. “Vengeance is Yours,” I say, “but Memories are Mine.”
Years and years after the event, the young boy, now a man, in his remembrance of things lost, has come to that point in his life where he can now consign his Vengeance to a god and say with all his heart and affirmation, “Memories are Mine.”
And that, to me, is the proof of life, without the paralyzing whiff of the withering breath of death.
He still has miles to go before he sleeps, but he has already traveled miles and miles in the confrontation of his small history with History. He has won a battle, I should like to think and believe—for he has at last freed himself from the spell cast by the accursed Han.
And, after many a small beginning, one day in the midst of carnage among the fallen comrades on a barren Korean hill, he would repeat after the immortal words of Holderlin: “And openly I pledged my heart to the grave and suffering land, and often in the consecrated night, I promised to love her faithfully until death, unafraid, with her heavy burden of fatality, and never to despise a single one of her enigmas. Thus did I join myself to her with a mortal cord.”
Thank you.