PREFACE

from the French edition by editor Cécile Wajsbrot

The Shadow of Arms is set during the Vietnam War, and describes an aspect thereof about which little is known—Korea’s participation, somewhat coerced, as an allied country alongside the American and South Vietnamese armies.

France had been out of the region for some time, following the defeat at Dien Bien Phu and in accordance with the Geneva Agreements of July 1954, which consecrated the division of the country into North and South Vietnam on either side of the Seventeenth Parallel. To the north, the Democratic Republic of Ho Chi Minh; to the south, the dictatorship of Diem and then the regime of general Thieu. The United States, which ever since the start of the Korean War in 1950 had underhandedly financed the Indochina War—the “free world’s” fight against Communism, that era’s Axis of Evil—progressively intensified its presence until undeniable engagement; August 1964, when North Vietnamese gunships attacked two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. We know the rest, the growing opposition to the war, the draft, the profound losses, the Paris Accords in 1973, and The United States’ withdrawal in 1975.

This novel takes place around the time of the Tet Offensive, launched by the Communists in January to February of 1968 at the height of US presence. Ahn Yong Kyu, a Korean corporal (later promoted to sergeant) is transferred from the front to the Department of Investigation, where he is to look into black market activities in Da Nang, South Vietnam’s principal military port. And yet, The Shadow of Arms is not a war novel. There are no combat scenes, save for the rare images that emerge from Yong Kyu’s memory. Rather, there are the strands of dense black market intrigue that weave together every actor in the conflict—the Americans, Vietnamese Saigon partisans, the Viet Cong, Koreans—through characters who, though perhaps emblematic of ideologies, are not without emotional depth, the complexity of life. Such as the two brothers who align themselves with opposing sides, Pham Quyen and Pham Minh, one of whom experiences the thrill of strategy, and the other, the loneliness of souls enamored of an ideal. And Toi, Yong Kyu’s Vietnamese friend; a mysterious man with a tragic fate. Also Hae Jong, the Korean seductress of questionable character. As for the character of Ahn Yong Kyu (in which we see Hwang Sok-yong’s own experience), his position as a foreigner—sure that he’ll forget everything upon his return—makes him at once both a part of the action and a distanced onlooker. Vietnam is a sinking ship, a shore you wash up on, wreck on, but not a harbor. Accounts of atrocities by the American army break up the narrative. There reigns a strange calm, the eye of the hurricane, perhaps. But this is also a world where people refuse to abandon their aspirations, to renounce dreams, deny emotion—a world brimming with humanity.

Back in Korea, Hwang Sok-yong was far from forgetting. He wrote several pieces (among them the story “Doe-Eyed,” which appeared in his collection The Road to Sampo) that show him grappling with the Vietnam War—a subject not usually written about in Korean literature; a war that generally escaped scrutiny. Then came the great work, this novel, The Shadow of Arms, in which he shrugs off the shadows of time—the alchemy of transforming the realness of reality into the realness of literature.

First appearing as a series in a monthly journal in 1983, and later as a single volume in 1985, Hwang Sok-yong’s novel was an act of courage in a Korea whose situation as a country divided is reminiscent of Vietnam’s. What’s more, the author’s implicit sympathy for the Viet Cong offended the dictatorial regime of Chun Doo-hwan, so much so that the second volume (from Chapter 22 on) had to await publication until Chun stepped down in 1988 and the ensuing period of relative freedom. The following year it received the Manhae Award, one of the most prestigious in Korean literature.

The author revised the text in 1992—and this is the text that has been translated into English, following the French edition, which was the first available in Europe.

C. W.