Turning East

On one of my trips to Japan I interviewed an American teaching English in a private university. He showed me the little Buddhist shrine in his apartment, but he talked mostly about the meditation as he had practiced it in and around San Francisco. In Japan he has gone  to the headquarters of the Sotoshu Zen sect, to connect with like-minded people and does some meditation with people in his area.

Links:

Tassajara Zen Mountain Center <http://www.stevenkharper.com/tassajara.html>

San Francisco Zen Center <http://www.sfzc.org>

Staying at Tassajara <http://www.sfzc.org/tassajara/display.asp?catid=4,19&pageid=2643>

Independent Meditation Center Guide <http://www.gosit.org/CenterDetails.asp?vCitySt=Los+Angeles~CA&CenterID=207>

Tracy’s story

My reason for coming to Japan was that I couldn’t grow professionally in the Bay Area.  You can’t get work in one institution full-time, which means you’re commuting between different schools, and that was a recipe for burnout.  I was very grateful to be able to come here. At that time my wife Umiko and I had started seeing each other, and she was going back to Japan, and there seemed to be a convergence happening in our lives, both of us moving in the same direction.

In the Bay Area there are so many traditions, so alive. In fact, Suzuki Rochi, who wrote Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, said, “I want to go to America because I like the attitude, I like the energy.” He was invited as the head of the Sotoshu Mission in San Francisco serving the Japanese-American community. After a couple of years, he was basically serving the role of your standard Buddhist priest, filling ceremonial functions. But more and more people were coming to the temple to sit zazen [Zen Buddhist meditation], and eventually the Japanese community said, “It looks as if they need you more than we do.” He said, “You’re right. This is where this practice is coming to life. It’s with these people because of their motivation and enthusiasm and willingness to try new things, and I like being around people like that, stumbling their way toward finding out what’s happening in the world.”

For me Buddhism is fresh. As it’s presented to us, it doesn’t have a rigid dogma that you have to accept before you can grow or be a part of the religion or the practice. It’s like religion without God. Westerners weren’t born into it, so it doesn’t carry all the baggage. The Buddha said, “Don’t believe anything I say. Just check it out for yourself.” It’s your own experience that verifies it. In the sutras there’s a lot about transcendence and cosmic psychedelia that’s very appealing, but what draws people is the suffering.

A lot of young people come to the Zen center because something in their hearts is calling them or because they find it philosophically appealing. There’s so much convergence with our understanding now of how the universe is constructed. There’s no separation between the observed and the observer and all. But certainly the people I’ve met in their thirties through their seventies all come to Buddhism because nothing else is working. I’ve been through it all, and I want to get to the root cause of suffering, which as I am finding out is also the cause of everyone else’s suffering.

Often there are elements of religion people liked as child: being in church, the smells, the bells, the chanting, the community. Then for whatever reason—getting fed up with the idea of original sin or the hypocrisy they saw around them—they grew out of it. But they still have a lot of affection for people coming together and as a group and expressing gratitude for things as they are.

I practiced meditation full-time for about six years, pretty intensely, and for eight years a little less so. I was actually at the monastery for two years and then working part-time and living in communities or in the city center and working in the communities, in the garden or the farm or in the kitchen.

The city center, the country center, the mountain center were all different. You could even say they were increasing in levels of intensity from the city to the country to the mountains. Some people would say that the mountains are the toughest because that’s where the practice is the most demanding and rigorous, getting up at 3:45 in the morning and having a couple of periods of zazen before breakfast. At the same time you’re doing stuff in the zendo [meditation hall]. It’s freezing cold outside although they’ve got heat in the center now, not like the good old days. Then more zazen all morning long, and then there’s a class and a few hours of work in the afternoon, and then you get to take a bath, and you have an hour and a half of free time. Then you’re back in the zendo and then there’s more of that and then you’re in bed by nine o’clock. You get up six and a half hours later. You’re physically exhausted, your body’s a wreak, you’re out of your element and you don’t have any of your comfort foods.

It’s often pretty grueling. Practice is great. Lunch is great. Whatever’s left over from lunch is all thrown together for the evening meal. Sometimes even the cold salad is thrown in with the sticky rice. It’s baked a couple of hours, and it comes out so that you have to scrape it off the spoon to your bowl. But then technically, there’s no meal at night. What you eat is like a warm stone in the stomach because it’s freezing cold in your cabin. The food keeps your energy up. Sometimes people would find the life very demanding, and certainly at the beginning it is.

There are seven periods of zazen. The meals and classes are in the zendo, and you sit in the same posture except that instead of facing the wall you’re facing outward. The meals are all ritualized, right up until the moment when you bow and get to start shoveling the food into your mouth. It’s all over quick. You agreed to be under their control, but very soon you’re going to be on the controlling side. That’s the beauty of the training: everybody slides through every position, even the abbots are cycled in and out. It’s a kindness machine.  You have to give up. If you fight it you’ll be really miserable. People’s hearts just open up.  They give up because they’re so exhausted. It’s classic brainwashing.

Why do it? Basically, the idea is that, if clinging to the ego is the essential cause of our suffering, if you remove all of your ordinary distractions you’re forced to face the operation of your own ego. You’ve made a commitment that for these next few months you’re really going to try. As Dogen said, “To study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be realized by all things.” Then compassion and wisdom are born. So if you’re forced to sit there, and you’ve made this commitment to yourself to sit there, you can’t see anything else but your mind basically screaming to get the hell out. Why the hell am I doing this? You start to see how your mind works when it’s faced with what’s unpleasant.  At the beginning nobody likes to get up at four o’clock in the morning.

Actually, after a while many people really start to dig it. When you start sitting long enough there’s a shift of consciousness going on, and you’re experiencing various bliss states. That in itself is very appealing and very addictive.  But for most of us it passes after a few days and you’re back in your suffering again.

So why would somebody do that?  As I was saying before, people are very often at a point where they’ve tried everything, and they know deep-down they are hurting, and the only way they’re going to get to the root of that is by facing that suffering. Then they see it’s not the pain that’s so horrible, it’s trying to avoid the pain that’s so horrible. That’s what’s causing the suffering. How you put the blame on everyone else, not taking responsibility for your own actions, not seeing the consequences of your own actions, not being aware of the karma that’s being produced. Also, how you’re living out your habits and you’re living out your parents’ history.

In my case, I had a history of depression—still do, but it’s largely diminished now. Certainly for me there’s a biological component, but there’s also a part that came out of shutting down at an early age to avoid the pain of the disconnect I felt from my parents. When I was doing zazen I could go into foggy-grey zones for days. I’d break out of it now and then.

For a lot of people, the only outlet they have is food, and even that’s regulated. You can go crazy over food because there’s nothing else to get worked up about. You could gripe about the schedule, but you agreed to that. So you complain that you’re not getting enough food or it’s not the right balance. Every fifth day you get sort of a day off.  You can have home-baked cookies if you want. People go berserk, and there’s a gorge fest to compensate for all the deprivation of the previous four days. I saw huge amounts of anger arising within me. We would get this great breakfast of fresh-roasted cashews and buttermilk and bananas. We could actually put the cashews and buttermilk and bananas in the bowl and mix them, which is verboten unless the cook invites you to do that. Sometimes the head cook would forget to invite people to mix. For me it was essential to have it all together. The only thing in your universe that you can control is adding the cashews in order to have a good taste for ten minutes. All the rest of the day you’re doing what somebody else is telling you to do. So I’d be raging inside that I couldn’t mix the food together, and I’d have a resentment, and I’d be forced to deceive everyone by putting  the cashews in my mouth and then putting the bananas and buttermilk in my mouth so I could chew them together.

Also, when the buttermilk and bananas was being served and the pot was coming around the zendo, I could tell from the sound of the metal ladle scraping the bottom that it was running out. So I’d be thinking, “Those idiots in the kitchen, can’t they plan anything correctly? Don’t they know that we’re all in here suffering and this is our only relief?” I’d have massive amounts of rage. Because of my history of repressing strong emotion, which gives rise to the depression, my energy would go into holding those emotions in.  But then I’d practice breathing in every bit of pain that’s in my knees during the rest of the day, breathing in and out that anger. It produced these breakthroughs, these flowerings. Sometimes I’d go into bliss states for days at a time, what they call “the reward body.” It’s kind of innocent, but it’s what happens when you get with the way things are.

You’re angry—don’t—it’s not your parents. Okay, it is your parents, but breathe that.  It’s not the cook. Okay, well, it is the cook.  Breathe that.  The bottom line is your reaction: okay, this is mine. People open up in ways that are incredible.

The abbot used to say, “You know, you guys are only here for a short time or maybe only a few years. When you leave, of course you’re sad. You know you won’t be able to sustain this sensitivity, this openness. It’s a physical impossibility. The heart opens, the heart closes. This is the way it is. In the city it’s going to be really loud, and your heart’s going to close down. I’ve been doing this for thirty years. You have been changed by this experience. You don’t know it necessarily, but deep down, at the cellular level maybe, you’ll remember. Whether you know it or not, our nature is Buddha-nature. You’re planting seeds in others even though you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t even begin to fathom what you’re doing. It’s incomprehensible.”

That was just one center. The vast majority of people who consider themselves a part of the sangha [community] don’t live there. They have busy lives. They’ve got families and careers.  Or they’re really messed up, with addictions and other problems, but they know this is speaking truth to them, and they want it.

When I was in Tassajara in the mountains, guests would come, people who’d volunteered in the work period, and referring to all fifty of us students who lived there year-round, they’d say, “I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you’re here doing this practice.” Now that I’m out I understand. When people do this practice, it’s a touchstone. It’s a reminder. It’s hope. It’s also that people are healing. I’ve forgotten all the words that used to come easily when talking about these kinds of things. The monks are doing healing work for the planet and for everyone else. They’re the shamans, the medicine men and women whose cultivation of selflessness is having an effect on everything else, helping everything else be a little less attached and stressed out about what’s mine and what’s yours. So even for the people who have no idea what’s going on, who haven’t thought about things other than mowing the lawn or trying to pay bills, I think they’re being helped too. The people who are aware that this is what’s going on and who aren’t actively taking part, like me now, would volunteer during the work periods or come as guests during the guest season. They’d say, “Yes, you’re actually helping me because I know this to be true, what you’re doing. It reminds me of how I want to be in my life—but I’m in the city.”

Dogen, the founder of the Sotoshu Mission, used to say, “In the beginning, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. You go to the mountains, and you practice, and then mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers. You come down from the mountains after your years of practice and return to the city, and then mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers again.”

What he meant was every day in conventional reality we say that this is a table and that’s a plant. Then we practice in the mountains or in our rooms, and we get a sense or maybe even a taste of the rise and fall of everything, all the time and at the same time. That everything is interdependent and nothing is happening without everything else taking part in bringing that event to life. So in that ultimate sense there is no ego, there is no self, there isn’t even clinging. Everything’s flowing. That mountain’s a part of that cloud, and this feeling of anger toward whatever is a part of an event in my life twenty years ago, and then a part of a series of events in my parents’ lives thirty years before that. You can’t point to any one thing as saying this is that without getting an incomplete picture.

Most of us can’t live in ultimate reality all the time with it’s constant sense of awareness. In a conventional world, children have to learn when they put a finger on a hot stove it’s going to burn. There are immediate consequences from their actions and behavior.

The universe doesn’t give rise to my sticking my finger in the flame. I have to take responsibility and ownership for my own feelings. Some people would say that “mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers” is an illusion, it’s separating reality into constituents that ultimately don’t exist as separate constituents. There’s an interdependence of everything and a selflessness of everything. But you have to be able to connect that with the fact that we all live in an everyday world where there are very direct consequences for our behavior.

Hopefully, when we come down from the mountains we bring that sense of interdependence with us to our relationships, to everything. They say that city practice is the toughest practice. That’s where the world is. You see people being thoughtless and cruel and everybody’s wrecking the world and hurting each other. It’s tough. But if you’re privileged enough or lucky enough to be able to do get away to practice, they say you’ve taken on a responsibility. Not in the missionary sense or evangelical sense, but just by living in a way that’s consistent with and comes from the experience of interdependence.  So that others can benefit.  That’s the bodhisattva. That’s the Lotus Sutra.

In the spring of 1980, South Korea was in the hands of the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, who had staged a coup a couple of months after the assassination of the previous military dictator, Park Chung-hee. It was a time of great social and labor upheaval, with disturbances caused by workers in various areas, demonstrations among the coal miners, industrial strikes and student demonstrations against Chun’s illegal seizure of power. Riot police were sent to squash all unrest. Chun disposed of his political rivals, dismissed the National Assembly, closed the universities and declared martial law. Then in May a peaceful demonstration on the campus of Chonnam University was attacked, not by the usual riot police with tear gas and night sticks, but by the Special Forces, paratroopers who had been deprived of sleep and food for three days then fed alcohol. In their mad frenzy they attacked people on and off campus with bayonets and created a bloodbath. The citizens came out in support of the students. Eventually the military was forced to withdraw. The townspeople elected a council which appealed to the U.S. as head of the United Command, but their request to intervene went unanswered. In the meantime, the military had sealed off the town, and they returned with overwhelming force. In the end an estimated two thousand people were massacred, many hauled away and buried rather than returned to their families.

The news about the Kwangju Incident was suppressed or distorted by the press by government order. This was in the most repressive period of Chun Doo-hwan’s rule. Given the reputation that the people of the Cholla Provinces had for being untrustworthy leftists and artists, much of the Korean population accepted the official rumor that Kwangju had made it up. But about five years later a video was put together from pictures the German and Japanese media had taken right after the massacre, and copies of it began circulating. Eventually, the news did come out. (For a fuller account, see “A Priest’s View of Human Rights in Korea” http://caroldussere.com/2010/05/09/a-priests-view-of-human-rights-in-korea. Also, Henry Scott-Stokes and Lee Jae Eui’s Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Account of Korea’s Tiananmen. (New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2000.)

Young-soo was in middle school when he heard about the event from his classmate. “When I heard about Kwangju, even though I didn’t know much about it, it was a very big thing for me. At first I couldn’t believe it.  Then another classmate said his brother was crippled. Then I knew. I rejected everything from school—every poem, every novel, every bit of history. I started over, and I saw the world with new eyes.”

Fast forward to 1996 when Young-soo was a university student deeply committed to social change. He was arrested after the riot police sealed off buildings on the Yonsei University campus where student organizations had assembled to discuss the reunification of the Korean peninsula and other issues. (For a description of the confrontation, see “5,715 Students Arrested After 9 Day Protest and Police Brutality” <http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/55a/204.html>

Young-soo’s story

Some people thought students protested against the government because they didn’t want to study. That wasn’t true in my case. I really wanted to study, but I was desperately trying to find a way to develop a social movement. There were lots of uncertainties and lots of confusion. I wanted to work for democracy and social welfare and human rights. But every day things were changing.

In 1996, the president of the country was Kim Young-sam. He was a civilian president following several years of military rule, which was symbolic, but he wasn’t exactly democratic. Many of his policies reflected those of the previous regimes, especially Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo. Kim had been an opposition leader, but he wanted to be president, so he joined Roh’s camp in a three-party merger. While many people regarded the government as a democracy, others were concerned about Kim’s so-called reform policies, especially regarding Korean reunification and education. There was also a scandal involving Roh Tae-woo’s huge, illegally obtained slush fund—hundreds of millions collected from Korean businesses—and whether a large amount of that money funded Kim’s election campaign.

In 1996 the students were criticizing the government on three main points: the corruption issue I mentioned, the education issue and the reunification issues. The education concerned a big increase in university tuition and a proposed change in university structure. The university was not open. A student couldn’t enroll in the university and then decide on a major. Acceptance came for a particular major within that department. Both academics and the student hierarchical structure were based on the departmental system. All of a sudden, without any preparation, the Ministry of Education wanted to change it. There were no advantages to be gained, and the professors weren’t prepared for the changes. The students saw it as an attempt to dismantle the student movement by destroying its structure and the close relationships among students of the same department. Then there was the reunification issue. At the beginning of his presidency, Kim Young-sam had allowed a prisoner to return to North Korea, and he took other progressive actions. But then after the death of Kim Il-sung he canceled the North-South summit talks. In 1994 he returned to the old, repressive policies.

In early 1996, the students were demanding an investigation into the corruption issue. Whenever they demonstrated for reunification, they were severely suppressed on the streets by the riot police, which hadn’t happened in 1995. There was a very confrontational atmosphere. In March, when the students at Yonsei University demonstrated, there was a suspicious death which the students attributed to the riot police clubbing someone to death. A series of events in April, May and June caused the confrontations to escalate.

August 15 was National Liberation Day, the anniversary of freedom from Japanese colonial rule. Traditionally, students, dissidents, anti-government groups and democratization movement groups celebrated and held rallies for reunification and other democratization issues. The Korean Federation of University Student Councils [Hanchongnyon, which the authorities considered an “enemy-benefitting organization”] announced the event for August 13 to 15, but the government declared it illegal. There was conflict. Finally, the government shut off all access to Yonsei University. Nevertheless, a total of about 4,000 students got in. The riot police attacked. [With massive use of combat-grade pepper gas and liquefied pepper gas, fire and beatings even after the students surrendered.] Over the following days, the severity of the crackdown did not lessen although many prominent people outside the campus asked the government to let the students go home. The electricity and water were shut off and the radio and the news channels. No food was allowed inside. We almost starved. Some women’s organization tried to donate menstrual pads to the female students, but the police wouldn’t let the pads in. Students had been injured in the struggle with the police, but medical supplies were also not allowed in. We resisted until maybe the twenty-first or the twenty-second, then decided to escape. I was arrested on the way out. About 3,000 or 4,000 students were arrested by the police. A hundred—I don’t know—students spent one or two years in prison. I only got information after I was released. There was a very small human rights investigation. [See above link.] Some of my friends who had already done their military service said they had heard military guns shooting, like inside the building at a barricade. They said it was like another Kwangju. I don’t know exactly how many students were injured.

Before I was moved to the prison I stayed in a jail cell at the police office. Every day for about three weeks I was taken to the Hongjae office of the organization that was once the notorious Korean Central Intelligence Agency. I couldn’t see outside when I brought there. At that time the facilities were similar to when Park Chong-chol was tortured to death there in 1987. [Park Chong-chol, the head of the linguistics department student council at Seoul National University, was detained during an investigation into student activities. Park refused to confess the whereabouts of one of his fellow activists. During the interrogation, authorities used waterboarding techniques which eventually led to his death. Later in 1987 Chun Doo-hwan was overthrown, largely because of student protests.]

A lot of my problem came from being a leader. [In Confucian cultures, those at the top of the hierarchy always bear far more responsibility than those in the middle or at the bottom.] The two interrogating officers tried to terrify me. They forced me to stand and look at the wall for hours. They said, “You know this room and what happened here?” It was a room with a small bed, a urinal, a desk and a chair. They told me all of the student leaders were put in this room and not let out until they told exactly what they did. I was interrogated until midnight or one o’clock in the morning. They wanted names. I’d worked with someone high in the national alliance of student organizations. They kept asking me where he was. Every day they pressured me to write down everything I was thinking, especially anything about North Korea. “What do you think about Kim Jong-il? What do you think about the north Korean system?” They were looking for evidence that I had violated the National Security Law. In that law, especially under article 7, any criticism of the South Korean government was praise for North Korea. For two weeks I was told to write about North Korea. They were never very much concerned about the demonstration at Yonsei or what we were doing there. They wanted to know, “Who picked you for your position in the student organization?” “Oh, I was elected.” “But who picked you to become a candidate?” “What kind of books do you read?” I told them. “Didn’t you read Marxist things?” [Under the National Security Law, this was anti-state material.] They didn’t know much about Marxism or North Korea, but they had been instructed to ask or make me write about it. Funny—one day after the interrogation at Hongjae, a lower ranking official, drove me to the Seodaemun police office for more questioning. He was really eager to be promoted to interrogator, so he thought by getting information out of me he could further his career.

I spent a total of 18 months in prison. For the first six months I was at Yongdungpo, in a very small room, smaller than a twin bed. It was like a coffin. I’m short, but even so when I was lying down I couldn’t stretch out my arms because of the walls on both sides. There was no heat, and there was only a wooden floor with big holes in it. Inmates slept on the floor. Inmates were given two blankets and were allowed to buy a sleeping bag for the winter, which most of the prisoners did—except for the very poor—because otherwise it was hard to bear the cold temperature and wind. I’ve heard that the floors of the new jail are heated some. Wearing a lot of clothes didn’t help, although I didn’t have enough warm clothes. While I was lying there I could feel the rats. I stayed there the whole first winter, with ice on my body, my toes and fingers and ears. There was swelling and lots of blood. The skin got red and cracked and bled. My circulation was bad. I had regrets with regard to my colleagues and the younger students and my family, and that made the physical conditions harder to bear.

The food was bad. It was cooked by the other prisoners with ingredients that weren’t too good, and there wasn’t enough of it. We had three meals a day—a bowl of rice mixed with barley, a soup and two side dishes. Meat was available only three times a week. My family could buy kimchi and sausages and gochujang [hot pepper sauce] for me at the prison, and that made it bearable. Actually, the political prisoners were treated relatively well. My cell was a little bit modernized because I had a squat toilet instead of just a hole. I had a water tap so I could wash my face. In the other rooms water was carried in early in the morning so prisoners could wash themselves and their cutlery in their rooms.

I had thirty minutes exercise from Monday through Friday. For the whole eighteen months I was in a single cell eating alone, sleeping alone, then exercising alone—walking or running. There was no exercise equipment and no grounds outside the building. There was just a very small yard, a kind of garden.

Of the six months in Yongdungpo, the first three were really hectic, since I was called to the prosecutor’s office for investigation and the trial. I was there all day. I was so tired I couldn’t think. When I adjusted, I did yoga with some meditation as a way of overcoming my claustrophobia in that very small space. I needed escape from the darkness. There was a dim light, but it was still dark with no sunshine. I needed to overcome my fear. I felt if I could meditate and do yoga to increase blood circulation, it would also help me mentally. Through the window in the door, the prison guard saw me. He was a very experienced in Tanhak, a kind of Korean style meditation, so from time to time he came to my room and taught me. He told me, “Please lessen your rage.” His point was that if you didn’t deal with your rage, it would damage you.

I was convicted of violating the NSL, the prohibition against assembly and demonstrations, and then violence, which was a kind of collective charge. There were a lot of clashes between the students and the riot police. They had no evidence that I threw rocks or reacted in a violent way. They just lumped all the students together. After my conviction I was moved a remote area. It was the policy of the Justice Department to imprison convicted students as far away as possible from their hometowns or their families.

My second cell was two and a half times the size of the previous one. It was a little bit larger because the prison authorities were careful of all political prisoners, who were known to object to the conditions of their imprisonment. It was a kind of a tradition. They knew the political prisoners wouldn’t hesitate to go on a hunger strike or something like that. I think during the first six months I was allowed to see my family once a week for ten minutes. Later it was once a month.

In prison I was felt really disappointed and I had a sense of loss. At first I was always thinking about how to escape. But after the final conviction I needed to do something. I couldn’t think of anything, so I read books and other things. Six months before my release I read an article in the  monthly magazine Mal, which was very progressive and very critical of the government and U.S. interference. While staying in the U.S., the reporter wrote about why the U.S. empire had not collapsed and why it continued to prosper. At the end he asked what our young generation should do to prepare for the future. One of the things was to improve their English in order to work with other progressive groups and other countries on other continents. At that time my language skills were poor. Sometimes the prison guard had asked me to translate something about prison procedure for an inmate, like the English teacher who wrecked a car when he was driving drunk. I couldn’t do it very well, even something like “tomorrow we have to get up and get on the bus at 9:00.” The guard’s English was actually better than mine. I’d also been undecided about whether to finish my degree in engineering. At that time an increasing number of people were associated with human rights groups, but they were humanitarian rather than part of a social movement. After reading the article, I decided I wanted to be a bridge across borders. I felt if I could resolve the language problem maybe I could make a contribution. So I had a very clear objective.

That period is still a part of my daily life. From time to time I have dreams of being caught and thrown into prison. I don’t know whether or not it was a necessary channel to become the person I am now.

http://www.hrsolidarity.net/mainfile.php/1997vol07no06/2088

The speaker is a lawyer, a twenty-year resident of Japan and a good friend of mine.  The interview took place in 2011.

Cathy’s story

I first came to Japan in 1982 to live with the family of my first husband, a Japanese photographer. We’d met in France when I was twenty-two years old. I’d wanted to get married because I couldn’t figure out what else to do with my life. So at twenty-three I came to Japan, as the foreign fiancée of the eldest son in a conventional Japanese family, and lived with his extended family for six months, got married and continued living with his entire extended family. At that time the family consisted of his “grandmother,” his grandmother’s sister, his two younger sisters and his father and stepmother Kayoko, who came on weekends. After several years, one of his sisters got married, and her husband moved in, and they had two kids, so it really was quite an extended family.

My life was divided into two completely separate and distinct worlds. My first job in Japan was teaching English in a chain of English-language schools. Like a lot of foreigners, I taught English at multiple locations throughout the Kansai area in Western Japan, usually in the afternoon and evenings, and studied Japanese at a YMCA in the mornings. I quite liked this school since the teachers came from all over the world. The school I worked for was somewhat unusual in that it didn’t hire only blond, blue-eyed Americans. There were a lot of Asian teachers as well, which is unusual. We’d go out drinking in and to discos all the time (this was in the 80s). I felt like a tourist.

After this, I’d go home, where I’d try to be a typical Japanese daughter-in-law, wearing a kimono at home, doing Japanese cooking, even doing family ancestor worship ceremonies. This particular ceremony involved putting some rice in what looks like a small china teacup on the family Buddhist altar. You also put out sake an there are certain flowers that you change every two or three days. There are certain things that you dust, and there are certain things that you don’t move.

For me this part of my life in Japan was like acting. I wanted to experience the culture, and frankly I thought the only way to be accepted by a Japanese family was to be exactly like them. In my first few months in Japan, I learned from personal experience the maxim that the “nail that sticks out will be pounded down.” Conformity is highly prized. Individuality and self-expression is suspect and can be punishable by ridicule and isolation. At twenty-three I had no idea who I was, so I imitated what I saw and allowed the culture to define me.

With this kind of schizophrenic lifestyle, I’m glad I had a sense of humor because I really needed it. I was pretty independent, and I remember such things as going to the supermarket and buying what looked like organic peanut butter, taking it home, spreading it on bread, putting it in my mouth and discovering that—oh my God—it was miso. I got into so much trouble with my family. I’d decide to clean the house when they were gone during the day as a kind gesture, and I’d go out and buy cleaning products based on the size of the bottle and the color, assuming they would be the same as in the U.S. So I ended up using toilet cleaner to wash the dishes.

Yoshi and I were married for five years. After a couple of years of this Japanese-type existence with his whole extended family, I decided that we should move out. I thought married couples should live by themselves instead of with a whole boatload of relatives. I wanted out of this small town in which we were then living where I was the only foreigner. I thought that living in the either Kyoto or Kobe would work, since both of us would be within commuting distance of our jobs. He said no, he couldn’t do that. At the time we were living in a fourteen-room house, which is huge in Japan, left to Yoshi by his grandmother. He said he couldn’t leave his sister living there on her own. Six weeks after she met me, his grandmother had died from a heart attack which I’m sure it was brought on by her grandson’s marrying a big-breasted foreigner. She’d told everyone he’d only marry me over her dead body, and that was what happened. Yoshi’s grandmother left him this fourteen-room house, which is huge in Japan, and he couldn’t leave his sister living there on her own. At the time his sister was twenty-four, and I thought why the hell not? Then she got married, and her husband moved in, and they had two kids. So for a while there were two couples living there with two kids. Our marriage turned platonic, and in a way it felt like being married to my brother.

Looking back, there are a lot of things I really liked about his family. When I first got there, his parents were still really young and fun. They lived in Osaka and came home to this house on weekends. We spent a lot of time visiting temples all over the country. My mother-in-law was a Japanese kimono teacher who also taught Japanese tea ceremony and that sort of thing. I learned a lot from her about Japanese culture.

A family tree

My first husband’s family was quite unusual from an American perspective, but perhaps not terribly unusual for Japan at that time. When I learned about the complicated relationship of Yoshi’s family, it seemed like something from a Japanese novel. Yoshi’s father came from a poor but honest, hard-working farming family. Yoshi’s adoptive grandfather had only one child, a daughter, and they needed a son to marry into the family in order to carry on the family name. (In fact, Yoshi’s mother herself was not the birth daughter of Yoshi’s “grandfather” and “grandmother,” but was herself adopted. She was the result of a liaison between Yoshi’s “grandfather’s brother and his geisha mistress). So they went out scouring the villages for an eligible man to marry their daughter. They found Yoshi’s birth father—we always called him “Frank”—who at the time was seventeen or eighteen. He moved from his natural birth parents’ home to Yoshi’s grandparents’ home and was legally adopted as their son. He lived with them for two years before marrying their daughter. So for a couple of years, on paper, Frank and Yoshi’s birth mother were brother and sister. They got married, and he then legally became the son by adoption and was registered as such on the family register. This type of adoption of a son is a very common practice in Japan in families without sons. Yoshi’s grandfather, who was a wealthy banker, put Frank through college. Frank and Sumi had three kids, Yoshi and his two sisters. So the people Yoshi called his grandmother and grandfather were actually by blood his great-uncle and great-aunt.

Sumi had had a troubled childhood as the offspring of a long-term liaison between the brother of the man Yoshi called grandfather and a geisha mistress from Kyoto. This long-term liaison produced five children. To me what was interesting was that every time the mistress got pregnant, she would always go to her lover’s wife’s house to give birth, which was quite common in the Japan of the 1920s or 1930s. According to Japanese law, the lawful wife had the right to keep the children or have them adopted out. Of the five children, one was kept as a male heir and the other four were given to relatives for adoption. Yoshi’s mother was one of a set of identical twins who were split at birth and adopted by different relatives. Some of the relatives called Sumi flighty, and others called her slutty. After she married Frank and had three kids, she started running around and disappearing for long periods of time. Finally, when Yoshi was fourteen she disappeared altogether.

Yoshi’s father married a wonderful woman named Kayoko, my first mother-in-law. It turned out that Frank and Kayoko had also been having a long-term affair as well. What was amazing to me was that, by the time I got there, there was a grandmother who wasn’t really the grandmother and a father who was still legally the son of the grandmother whose adopted daughter he had divorced. Frank and Kayoko came on weekends. When the grandmother was ill and dying, it was Kayoko who came to take care of the grandmother, do the laundry, the shopping, the cooking, and all kinds of things like that, even though she was no blood relation.

This told me a lot about how Japanese families were constructed. It’s a kind of social fiction in a sense. Once you’re in a role it doesn’t matter what the reality is. Your role gives you your function, and there’s no way out of it. That’s really Japanese. I would ask Yoshi, “Have you ever met your natural grandmother, the geisha?” “Yeah, once.” “Weren’t you curious? Didn’t want to know more about her?” “No, why?” He thought it would be disloyal to the grandmother who had raised him.

I think the unusual family history made Yoshi’s parents really open because they themselves had been screwed by Japanese society. For example, some of the relatives said that when the grandfather was out scouring local villages for an heir, he already knew that his daughter had problems, but he didn’t divulge this to Frank.

In November, 1983, when I arrived in Japan, Yoshi met me at the airport and drove home to his house. It was Saturday, eight o’clock at night. His grandmother was already asleep. She just didn’t want to meet me. But Kayoko was there and Yoshi’s sisters and the great-aunt, who was wonderful, a real character. Frank worked for an architectural firm, and he was still at the office, but he called, and said to me in English, “Cathy, welcome to Japan and our family. Everybody crazy!” He came the next day bearing all kinds of gifts, including Japanese language tapes. His children weren’t fond of him because he had been absent so much during their childhood, but I think he saw me as a way to fill a hole in his soul.

We all lived in that big house. Through my English teaching we collected a whole menagerie of foreigners who used to come over for parties. Frank really loved that. One wing of the house had a huge room the size of a ballroom, but it was Japanese-style with tatami mats on the floor. That’s where we had all the parties. We had a stereo there, and Frank was really into disco dancing with the foreigners. Everybody was young, and it was a fun time.

Since the town was so small, I got to know the neighbors pretty well. I was the only foreigner for miles around. People often asked me to help their kids with English homework or to practice English conversation. I was never paid for any of it, but it gave me the chance to visit a lot of Japanese homes and see different types of lifestyles. One thing that was really fascinating about the town was that it was still divided into communities of ten homes, which was a system set up by the Japanese secret police in the 1930s as a way of group control—group spying, that sort of thing. In the 1980s, if somebody in one of the ten families died, all of the women would go to the house and manage the funeral, which would be held at home and last five days, from the wake to the Buddhist interment. So I got to be a part of that bunch of women. It was really amazing. They taught me how to make tofu and grow rice. That sort of thing was what made living in Japan an adventure.

I liked many things about Japan but I didn’t like my living situation enough to stay. I was getting tired of what I saw as a purposeless existence. I wasn’t using my mind enough teaching English [which can involve a lot of rote repetition and mind-numbingly simple sentences]. I got tired of playing a role. I didn’t know where Japan started and I stopped. I didn’t know how to tell my husband that the marriage wasn’t working out for me. .

I told Yoshi, “I want to go to Boston for a year, and then I’ll come back to Japan.” I thought of it as a permanent separation, but I didn’t say that. He decided he was going to come too. I taught in an ESL program t a U.S. University for a year, and I really liked that. Yoshi was in an English program at Harvard. We went through his inheritance from his grandmother. We bought a car and did a lot of traveling.

By that time I wanted out of the marriage, but I didn’t know how to do it. I wanted to go to law school, but I knew that enhanced language skills would be a plus, so I returned to Japan and went into a full-time Japanese language program from 9a.m. to 2 p.m. every day. I also needed to save money for law school so—this was in Osaka—I would rush out of the Japanese language school at one-thirty and start teaching English at two. I taught from two to nine at night, Monday thru Friday and all day on Saturday. I studied until midnight. I would study on the trains. I’ve always been like that. Even starting from age fourteen, I always combined working multiple jobs with studying.

I applied to U.S. laws school from Japan. Basically I chose the University of Denver because my undergraduate roommate was from there, and I’d visited, and it seemed familiar. In my early thirties I noticed that, although many people thought I was adventurous because I’d lived overseas and I’d moved a lot, every time I moved or changed jobs I went where I already knew someone. So I went to Denver, and Yoshi came with me. He found a job working for a real estate agency that put out magazines with pictures of the housing. He didn’t like that kind of photography, but he did it, and he also worked as a chef in a Japanese restaurant. I worked in the library, and I was a hostess at a Japanese restaurant on weekends.

Halfway through my first year of law school, I had a crisis of confidence and indecisions and wasn’t sure whether I wanted to continue either in the marriage or at law school. So I took a year off from law school. I found a job doing ESL in Chinatown that first summer, and then I found a job working for a really cool American lawyer who had worked in Hawaii and who had a Japanese speculator-billionaire as a client interested in investing in wine country properties and wineries. The lawyer needed somebody with Japanese language skills.

After about nine months, Yoshi and I decided to get divorced in Japan for various reasons, and we did. Then I went back to the States as a transfer student to a different law school—the Denver school had felt like a commuter school. I thought, “Okay, now I’m really done with Japan this time. I’m divorced, and I’ve said my goodbyes to friends and family. I’m going to a new school, and this is a new life.” Then the first week at school I met the man who became my second Japanese husband, which changed the whole course of my life, although I didn’t know it at the time.

Donna Miscolta

I first met Donna Miscolta in July 2009, when we were both in Chris Abani’s workshop at the Centrum Writers Conference at Port Townsend, Washington. I was impressed with her submission, a short story called “The Last Canasta,” which was later revised and then appeared in the Spring, 2010 issue of The Connecticut Review. Through the Squaw Valley Community of Writers alumni group, I learned of the publication of her first novel, When the de la Cruz Family Danced, which deals with the immigration from the Philippines. I read the novel and immediately loved the style and the interaction of the characters.

Dance is the dominant metaphor, and great attention is paid to nonverbal and verbal communication as a part of that dance. The narrative shifts with ease from the Philippines to Southern California and from 1971 to 1990 and to flashbacks of World War II. The point-of-view is always third-person limited, that is, restricted to the perspective of one person, but it shifts from one person to another. All shifts in location, time and perspective are clearly marked. At the beginning of the novel, the reader sees the world through the eyes of the two main characters, Johnny and Winston. After the other family members have been properly introduced to the reader, we see Johnny and Winston through their eyes as well. This gives the characters and their actions a rounded, three-dimensional quality because they are observed from several different angles.

When the de la Cruz Family Danced was released on June 28, 2011 by Signal8Press. Donna and I talked in December, 2011.

Link: Donna Miscolta’s blog http://donnamiscolta.com/notes/includes a link to the video trailer, a synopsis and reviewers’ praise. The trailer is also available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sEOr2WaBbR0#!>

Hopefully, Filipino book dealers can be persuaded to carry this lovely novel, In the meantime a look inside the cover can be found at Amazon, which offers both the paperback and the Kindle versions. http://www.amazon.com/When-Family-Danced-Donna-Miscolta/dp/9881989590/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325239806&sr=8-1#reader_B0055X0CEQ.

Donna’s story

The genesis of When the de la Cruz Family Danced was a class assignment: write the first chapter of your novel. I hadn’t anticipated writing a novel. After all, we were beginning students.I think the assignment was meant to make us consider the differences between short stories and novels and think about which story ideas were big enough to become novels. I started the assignment while waiting for a flight from Seattle to San Diego for my father’s funeral. I thought about my father’s life, about how little I really knew about him. I wondered what kinds of dreams he’d had and whether he felt he had achieved them. I thought about what it was like for someone to leave his home country to start a new life. What things got lost along the way? What things were sacrificed? Though the book isn’t about my father, I got the idea for it by thinking about him and the circumstances that led him to leave the Philippines. From there, I created the character Johnny de la Cruz and imagined his life.

Johnny’s aloofness and his reticence to touch–a simple hand on the shoulder, a playful slap on the back, an impromptu hug–comes, I think, from his sense of loss, of leaving something behind or perhaps never having it in the first place. For instance, the relationship he has with his daughters suffers because he was absent, away at sea in the U.S. Navy, during the early years of their childhood. He doesn’t know how to relate to his daughters because he feels removed from their experiences and emotions. Then there’s also the cultural preference for sons. Johnny think she might have had more of a connection to a son, but the appearance of young Winston Piña in his life challenges that belief. Leaving the Philippines as a young man and coming to a new country, making the transition from one culture to another, causes a gap in Johnny’s psyche, his soul. That gap can be hard to close, particularly for someone as introverted as Johnny.

In the novel, dancing is how people connect to one another. Dancing is important in many cultures, including Filipino culture. But Johnny doesn’t dance–something I can relate to in my own life. I’ve taken some dance lessons, and I’m a passable partner, but I don’t really have the confidence to go beyond basic steps. I love to watch people dance, which is why I had so much fun making a book trailer. Dancing is such a beautiful way to connect with music and with one another, and when you’re not good at it, I think you do have a sense of missing out.

You noted, Carol, in our email exchange that Filipinos tend to be warm and demonstrative. That’s absolutely true. But it’s not universal. It wasn’t my experience growing up in my particular Filipino (and Mexican on my mother’s side) household. I don’t know whether my father’s personality just didn’t fit this cultural pattern or whether something in his experience affected how he behaved in his interpersonal relationships. The story I gleaned was that my father’s rebellious adolescence coincided with World War II and the Japanese occupation of the islands, during which my father engaged in some guerrilla activities. Post-war, my father’s rebellion hadn’t subsided and my grandfather dealt with that situation by helping to engineer my father’s exit from the islands. My understanding is that there was some manipulation of my father’s birth year on the enlistment papers for the U.S. Navy. So my father left his home in Las Piñas because my grandfather wanted his son to have some direction in his life, not to mention opportunities that could accrue from eventual U.S. citizenship. It seems that my father left the Philippines not necessarily of his own accord. And I don’t think he ever liked the Navy. I think he just made the best of the situation and put everything behind him—the Philippines, his language, his customs—and made a concerted effort to become an American and to adopt American behaviors.

In our Southern California neighborhood there were quite a few Filipino families. My father rarely spoke Tagalog, preferring to speak English with the neighbors. I think it was also important to him to sound like an American. You could barely detect his Tagalog accent. He wanted us to be an American family. We ate American food, though on occasion he did cook pancit for us. The friends I hung out within high school were from households where both parents were Filipino. They knew the language, the food and the culture. So I did experience this sense of not quite fitting in—of being more of an observer of Filipino-American culture. Quiet and shy, I spent a lot of time observing inside and outside my family, comparing how we interacted with how other families communicated, both verbally and non-verbally. I became practiced at the “unsaid,” which I think plays a big part in my writing.

My father never shared much information about himself. When I was growing up, it never occurred to me to ask my father about his past. He never volunteered information, so it was easy to believe there was nothing to tell. Of course, anyone who lived in the Philippines during the war had some experience it. In the novel, there’s a flashback to the war when the teenage Johnny encounters a Japanese soldier in the rice field. That scene was based on an event my father shared when asked by my husband about his role in the war. It was really a revelation to me–my father as a teenager in real peril. You don’t imagine your parents being in such situations. That bit of information my father shared made me realize that there was so much about him that I didn’t know—and that I’ll never know.

Writing this book might have been an attempt to connect in some way with the Philippines and with my father. My knowledge of the Philippines has come through books, movies, photographs, articles, and talking to people about their experiences there. I felt very relieved that the two Filipino-American writers who read my book and wrote blurbs for it seemed to think that my scenes set in the Philippines felt authentic.

I think you can say that my fiction is a way of connecting with my roots. I have a short story collection that I’m hoping to have published. Three of the stories have been published in literary journals– “Rosa in America” in New Millennium Writings, “Strong Girls” in Calyx, and “The Last Canasta” in Connecticut Review.  The collection has three sections. The first is about four women—one named Lupita—who emigrate from Mexico. The next two sections are about Lupita’s children and grandchildren.  For these stories, I mined my family for a lot of material—things I observed or heard. I sort of appropriated them and made them my own. Again, the themes center on how one goes about making a life in a new country, how things are lost, how belonging can be an elusive thing and how the hopes of immigrants are often invested in subsequent generations.

My grandparents and parents did not go to college, but my circumstances were different. I have an undergraduate degree in zoology, and I have master’s degrees in education and public administration. I didn’t have much of a background in literature or writing, but I’ve been a lifelong reader, which served me when I decided at the age of thirty-nine that I wanted to be a writer. I think I’d always wanted to be a writer. I just never allowed myself to believe I could be. Maybe it was from reading so many books by long-dead authors. When I was in junior high school, I read a lot of William Faulkner and in high school it was Thomas Hardy and Henry James. After college I had my D.H. Lawrence phase. But I also had my Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen phases. Eventually I came around to writers like Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Gish Jen, writers of color who made it easier for me to believe that I could become a writer.

I do think those writers I read early on influenced me in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways. In 1998, when I was at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers conference, I had a one-on-one consultation with DeWitt Henry. He remarked on the stream-of-consciousness quality in my story and asked me if I’d read much Virginia Woolf. I wondered if he was suggesting that I was imitating her. I wasn’t aware of consciously having a style. I think at some level, we’re influenced by everyone we read. Like Henry James with his long, long sentences and pages of description. I’m sure I was influenced by him to some extent.

When I first started writing, all I did was exposition. Writing exposition is easy for me. It took me a while to really figure out story. I’ve attended a lot of writer’s conferences, I’ve taken classes, I’ve read how-to books, but still it took a lot of practice to figure out how to write the story. I wrote a complete draft of this first novel and was fortunate enough to have had an editor look at it and give me feedback. She was encouraging, but in the end, I saw that the novel wasn’t really working, so I tossed out all but thirty pages and started over.

The first chapter was published in an online journal called Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. That led to the book being published by Signal 8 Press, a new press based in Hong Kong. The press released four books last year, most recently a short story collection by Xu Xi called Access. Also released was a story collection by Bay Area writer Philip Huang and a non-fiction book by Chris Tharp on his experiences living and traveling in South Korea.

With my story collection completed, I’m working on a new novel. I came relatively late to writing, not starting until I was nearly forty. I’m fifty-eight now, and I have a sense of urgency about getting work done and out into the world. That’s what we want to do when we write something. We want to share it.

Reader feedback:

Excellent!  I liked it very much; felt like I was right there, listening to her talk.

Dr. Sandra Fahy

Dr. Sandra Fahy has been a close friend of mine since we first met, shortly after she arrived in Seoul. I couldn’t be more proud of her for reasons that are quite evident in this interview, which we did in September of this year. We plan to do two posts, one on the story behind her book and a second on the book itself, entitled The Biography of Loss: Collective Suffering and Social Fracture in North Korea.

Here’s a link to an interview Sandra did with Dr. Kang, the director of the Korean Studies Institute at USC for National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/2011/12/19/143958745/what-will-the-dear-leaders-legacy-be.

Sandra’s story

It began with my fascination with the holocaust as reflected in the arts, philosophy, psychology and the writings of genocide survivors. When I was majoring in literature in Canada, I read the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Viktor Frankl and Alexander Kimel, which were really insightful into the dynamics of suffering. I studied famine and social suffering for my master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies, and I discovered that famine survivors had produced nothing like the work done by survivors of other crimes against humanity. There are two autobiographies, Grass Soup and My Bodhi Tree by Zhang Xianliang, a Chinese writer who survived the Great Leap Forward. A group in Canada collected oral testimonies from survivors of the Ukrainian genocide famine. Other than that, the writers are historians or journalists, so maybe 99.9% of the material was written by people who were never there. John Steinbeck wrote Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, excellent books that describe the experience beautifully, but he was not a survivor of it. The absence of work is astounding considering that famine is a human experience of Biblical proportions which is known to all people and all places.

I wondered why the silence. I knew what was going on in North Korea, and I saw the lack of research as a glaring omission. I’m a scholar at heart, inherently curious. So in 2000, when I finished my master’s degree, I got a job teaching English in Seoul. I learned Korean in the evenings. With this topic in mind, I went to the UK to work on a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of London. I learned how to do field research and how to approach, examine and digest my material and be respectful of it. In 2005 I returned to South Korea and started working with non-governmental organizations, and in 2006 I began my field research.

I wanted to get involved with the North Korean community in Seoul, so I volunteered as a translator for an NGO. This group was pretty radical. A lot of the members had survived North Korean political prison camps. When we went to dinner, there would be talk like “We’ve got to assassinate that mother-fucker, Kim Jong-il.” This was the group sending helium balloons into North Korea. Inside the balloons are plastic envelopes which contain flyers about who really started the Korean War and historical information about North Korea and its leadership. The flyers are obviously not safe reading material, so as an incentive to pick up the envelope they add a US dollar bill which you can be seen clearly through the plastic. Foreign currency is used a lot in North Korea on the black market.

I got to know people and started interviews. I told people exactly what I was doing and why I was working with the material. I had written consent forms, but often people just gave their consent directly into the tape recorder. I was a little hesitant at first to ask people about their experience. My focus was on the famine in the 1990s: what it was like, whether their political views changed and whether it led to a desire for rebellion. Given the lack of literature by famine survivors, I expected people to be a little embarrassed, a bit shy or reluctant to sit down and talk to me about it. But everyone who had direct experience of the famine said yes. I interviewed thirty people in total. Two seemed to be acting from a sense of duty, but everyone else said they really wanted to talk about it. They were extremely gracious.

I told them I was born in Ireland, which was also divided and colonized and where there had been famine as well. They knew about the history of Ireland. They were immediately sympathetic to my interest. When they asked why I learned Korean, I said, “So I could speak with North Koreans.” That always won them over. I never told South Koreans, but it embarrassed them if they found out.

It was weird to be in Seoul, a brilliant metropolitan hub, with people who were foreigners like myself, who were outsiders and social outcasts in a way. We knew that as we were talking the other reality north of the border was continuing. South Korea has given a lot to the world in terms of technology development and all kinds of things. I looked at the rich, well-dressed South Koreans and thought of the potential that was lost in North Korea. If the peninsula were one nation, capitalist or semi-socialist like Canada, it would be a powerhouse in a totally different way. I think reunification is impossible. The amount of work that would be required—economic, social, psychological, intellectual, infrastructural—is unprecedented on a global scale.

Of course I also worried about whether I could get the information I needed, but there was another kind of stress which made me reluctant to do the interviews. I became depressed. I had dreams of being in a landscape of deprivation. Eventually I became a bit numb, but even that was weird. I got very sick, but the doctors in Korea and the UK when I went back could never find out what was wrong with me. Maybe it was some kind of sympathetic, psychosomatic sympathy. I was eating just as usual and doing everything I normally do, but I became very thin, my hair started falling out and my skin got very bad. It was really bizarre.

Strangely, often the interviews would involve eating. If we were at someone’s house, for instance, they might arrange food, which was a bit awkward. A scholar working with holocaust survivors said that, while they were talking about hunger in the ghettos, they would have big buffets of food. Maybe it was a form of reassurance for the survivors, a tangible proof that the deprivation was over for them. I always took people out to eat after the interview as a way of thanking them.

I’d expected to hear anger toward the North Korean government. I thought there would be more disillusionment and criticism of the nation state as a failure, more camaraderie between individuals and more solidarity in overcoming their difficulties. I wondered whether this material would provide insights like the works of Frankl and Solzhenitsyn, but I didn’t expect that level of self-reflection or intellectualizing. What surprised me was how long and how much my interviewees trusted that the North Korean government would eventually provide for them. All thirty people had been happy, contented with life and the status quo. Since the division, the whole population in the North had adjusted to or become acclimated to rationing and under-nutrition. So when things started to go bad at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s—and of course in the middle of the 90s with the flooding—the people were already used to a situation which was far from ideal. So their reaction was “okay we’re going to hustle, but we’ll do it.” Often they didn’t see that things had gone bad because the government was inconsistent: it would promise to deliver the food and do it, and it would promise and not do it.

They might first notice something was unusual when returning after an absence—for instance, a soldier who’d come back from military duty and seen that things had changed. One person said, “I noticed that my brother and sister were selling on the black market, and I wondered what the hell they were doing. We’d been educated not to do that.” Later he realized there was nothing for them to eat. His siblings had become more acclimated to the changes, possibly because in the military he’d been fed a little better.

People would notice that the children were falling asleep in school. Former school children would say, “I’d go to school, and the teachers would tell us we needed to bring certain items for the teachers to eat, and if we didn’t bring them we’d get punished.” People started locking their doors more. They saw more orphaned children wandering around, and they wanted to feed them, but they didn’t have enough. Someone in charge of the apartments in a building would notice that people didn’t have enough to eat, or they had only one set of clothes, and they would wash them, but then they had nothing to wear while the clothes were drying outside. It was really bizarre because they couldn’t even help each other out too much. We’re talking now about the most northern regions. Gradually the famine spread to Pyongyang.

At the time I was surprised at the willingness people demonstrated to stay and wait and trust as long as they did. In hindsight I’m not, because the North Koreans would talk about being much tougher than South Koreans and being able to put up with a lot more. They also have a lot of ingenuity, they’re creative and they know how to solve problems, and of course that’s something to be proud of. The context of South Korea shaped how people spoke about their lives in the North.

Anyway, we would meet in my apartment, their apartments or a third location. I had my cassette recorder, a map, consent forms, note paper and my electronic dictionary to use for translation. I would begin with, “Tell me about your home town. What was it like?” Individual personalities impacted a lot on the interviews, but no one was angry about the North Korean leadership or said they hated everything about North Korea. If they were angry it would be with the South Koreans—living very well, wasting food, worrying about their diet, wanting to be thin, dressing extravagantly, acting silly on television—while their so-called brothers are dying up in the North. I guess it was misdirected frustration.

The interviews got very emotional. The men my age—I was thirty at the time—didn’t want to tell me how hurt they were, but everyone else was really open and started getting very upset about it and crying. I’d be crying too. How can you not? The South Korean woman who transcribed the tapes said she cried when she was typing. Every South Korean I met who knew I did this work got emotional about it, although it was hard for them to approach North Koreans and show their feelings directly. But when they read the interview material or heard about it from me, they would allow themselves to feel their emotions.

So it was really sad. My interviewees would be upset because of a child or a neighbor who died of hunger, but also because everything they knew of their country had changed. They no longer had a part in the dream of what the country could be, even though they wanted to. They knew the decision to leave was final, even though it might not have been in their hearts. The state had decided. They might have gone into China to get medication or food or to sell lumber or whatever, they might even have been so sick they didn’t know they were being taken out, but then they were at a point of no return. There had been cases where people were successful at returning and talking their way out of punishment, but you couldn’t count on that. Some people were reluctant to move from China to South Korea.

Now, Koreans in Los Angeles may have a distilled understanding of Korean-ness going back as far as the 1960s when they emigrated, but that’s not how people in Seoul would define what it is to be Korean. The North Koreans lived in a time capsule, a sovereign nation with another version of Korea. In human history I don’t know that there’s another case that approximates this, not even the north and the south of Ireland. North and South Korea are so economically much farther apart from each other than East and West Germany were. The literacy rate in both North and South is very high except for the huge number of orphaned North Korean children. But the differences are vast, and they’re growing more each year. So the refugee is basically stepping from one world into another—having had the expectation that there would be more similarities. It’s heartbreaking for them. For example, they may think they speak the same language, they have the same blood line, they look the same and talk the same. And then they get to South Korea and they find they don’t have standard Seoul pronunciation. Even people from Cheju-do or Kwangju [in the southern part of South Korea] are discriminated against in Seoul.

The language of North Korea includes no borrowings from English. A huge percentage of the Korean vocabulary comes from borrowings from Chinese, but the North Koreans won’t know the Sino-Korean characters. [This limits what they can read]. Most North Koreans are shorter from being undernourished; their skin is darker and more worn. The South Korean standard of beauty is different. Then there’s the fact that both nations have been waging propaganda campaigns against the other. [In the recent past, South Korean school children had textbooks of North Koreans with as wolves or red devil faces and guns under their arms]. So the end result is that these underdogs are coming into a majority pool where they’re seen as people who failed. In some ways the society in North Korea may be superior to South Korea. There must be something because 23 million people live there—solidarity, community, who knows.

During the interviews, I really just went into their world, listening as carefully as possible and asking for clarification when I didn’t understand. One guy said, “I’m only going to talk for ten minutes.” Then he talked to me for about an hour. People found it strange that I was just interested in doing this without expecting anything from them. They didn’t see what we were doing as an exchange. Sometimes they wondered why we were talking about this, although they might have needed to talk about it for emotional reasons. Some people wanted payment or expected something in return.

Well, I went back to London and recovered from whatever illness I contracted. I finished my PhD in anthropology. For the dissertation I went over to the British library and selected sections of the interviews which seemed really pertinent, interesting, relevant, and I translated them. The dissertation had a different structure than the book I’m working on. There was a review of the literature. There was a chapter about what led up to the choice to defect. There was a chapter about control over the language North Koreans were allowed to use. That was the big thing that people talked about, how they were censored in North Korea. [People were not allowed to say they were hungry. They had to say they were in pain.] I looked for patterns in the testimonies, patterns of metaphor or how they referred to Kim Il-sung versus Kim Jong-il, how men coped with the famine, how women coped with it. How women talked about it, how men talked about it. The signs of trouble that told them they had to find another way to live. Going off into the mountains to look for food or planting their own private plots. Then there was a section about trauma and PTSD in a non-western context.

So I finished the PhD in 2009 and then I did a post-doc in Paris for one year, and got I did a post-doc fellowship here at USC for two years. I’m on my second year. My current employer at USC is incredibly supportive, but I think there’s a lack of understanding about how taxing research like this can be for the academic.

The book I’m now working on is a rewrite which follows the chronology of the famine. That’s the backdrop, but the greater topic and the theme that runs throughout the book is loss: loss of country, loss of loyalty, loss of trust, loss of family and friends. It continues into South Korea where survivors have a loss of identification. Their hopes are dashed in many ways. That’s the direction I’m moving in with the book now as I revise it. I’m still in touch with the North Korean community.

Reader comment:

Reader comment:

In the mid-80s and earlier, most international tourists in China traveled with organized tours to places the authorities wanted them to see, while university students and faculty were more likely to be independent travelers who might well find themselves in areas that were “closed,” or off-limits to foreigners.

In 1986, I spoke with Valerie,  a fair-complected Australian studying Chinese at Xiamen University, or actually attached to the school but learning Chinese by traveling.  Her modest, unassuming manner gave her the ability to blend in almost anywhere without being noticed, except China.

Valerie’s story

I love the minority areas. The Chinese don’t always understand that. When you’re on these long train trips, and they say, “Where’ve you been?  Have you been to Beijing, have you been to Shanghai?”  Then they say, “Where do you like best?” and you say someplace like Kashgar or Mongolia or Yunnan, you can see they’re thinking, “God, the minorities—how do these people—they think that’s China—they go and see the minorities.”  They say to you, “But that’s not China!  China is in Beijing and Shanghai. These people out there are so luohou, so backward. You’re not allowed to go out there and think that’s China!”

It’s funny. I’ve met quite a few Han Chinese who really look down on the minorities. When I was in Xinjiang there were several incidents. Once when we were coming back from Kashgar on the bus—it’s about a three and a half day trip—there was a Uyghur lady sitting near me, and we got to be quite good friends. She was a very intelligent lady. When she spoke it wasn’t perfect Mandarin, she still had an accent, but you could understand her very easily. She was an interpreter for the Uyghur people. She had been to Beijing and had studied in the university, but you never would have guessed it. She was still a typical Uyghur lady in the scarf and thick stockings and purple dress.

When we stopped for the night, she and I were in the same room. She went in first and put her things on a bed, then I came in, and a Han man came in. Apparently we had registration numbers, but they’d gotten them all mixed up. Well, who cares. There was an empty bed, and she put her things on it. But this man’s wife had the bed, and this Uyghur lady should have taken another bed. He was talking to her as though she were a child. He turned to me, and when he found out I could speak Chinese he spoke to me at normal speed. But he spoke to her as though she were an imbecile, and he said, “These minority people don’t understand a thing.”

She was speaking to him in beautiful Mandarin, and it was just as though he wasn’t even hearing her. He had this idea that she couldn’t understand—even that the numeral four was different from the numeral five.

Quite a few times I’ve seen things like that. The Uyghurs, because they’re looked down on like this, hate the Hans. They’re friendly to us, and they say to us, “Well, we’re foreigners too. You’re like us.”

I have a very good friend who was sent to this place in [Inner] Mongolia to do experiments. She said it was a beautiful place, and I should go up there if I could. We knew it wasn’t open and there was no way they would give us permits.

We tried a few places, and they said, “Nah, you can’t go up there.”

We went as far up as we were allowed to go, and then I went to the railway station and said, “I want two tickets.”

“Why are you going there?”

“To see some relatives.”

The ticket seller turned around and said something to the people behind her. I could just make out “Russian.”

I thought, “Oh, good. They think I’m Russian.”

When we got there, as soon as we got off the train we made a dash for the bus station because we figured, “If we book in any hotel here, they’re going to tell the gonganju [police or public security] and they’ll be sending us back.”  So we just went to the bus station. We had no idea where we were going, and there were just crowds of people around us.  We thought, “God, any minute there’s going to be some officious-looking person coming.”

Then a large woman appeared over us who reminded me of an actress on an Australian television show, this huge woman who was half-Russian and thought I was a real Russian. She’d been sent out to talk to us and to ask us where the hell we thought we were going. When they found out we were students—because of course we couldn’t fool her, so we told her the truth—they thought that was fine.

“Well, great. Good to see you coming out here.”

We just said we’d take a ticket for “anywhere you think is nice” and hopped on a bus.

When we arrived it was nearing dusk. We had to book a hotel, and immediately we heard them go into the office and ring up the gonganju and tell them, “There’re two foreigners here. What should we do?”

So we thought, “We may as well go for a walk because they’ll be coming to find us soon. We’ll go and see what there is to see.”

It was a lovely place out in the grasslands. It was summer, but the roads were still in very bad shape because of all the rain they’d had in the spring. There was mud everywhere. We came up to a tractor pulling out a little truck. This huge Mongolian leapt off the back of the tractor and came over to us and said, “Hi. I’m from the foreign affairs department. I’m the newly assigned member to this area.”

“Hi. That’s nice.”

“Welcome, welcome here. How did you know that we’re about to open up this area?”

“Oh…oh…a friend told us. Yeah, we knew about it.”

“Oh, that’s great. And you’re students?  Good, good. I like to have students coming out to have a look at things. That’s what you should be doing.”

He was a lovely man. He took us to dinner, put out this big spread. He was hitting the baijiu [white grain alcohol] and getting very merry and had a few friends in, and we were getting on very well.

Then he said to us, “Where do you want to look?  I can arrange to take you anywhere. There’s a photographer from Hong Kong coming out here tomorrow. He specially asked permission to come out here because he wants to photograph the grasslands. Why don’t you go along with him?  Good opportunity–you’ve got a car and so on…”

“Great!”

“We’ll pick you up tomorrow morning.”

Then this woman came in. She was quite young, and I decided immediately that this might be her first job because she was pretty unsure of herself. She was from the gonganju , and he was from the waiban [foreign affairs], which was separate.

As I was easing out the door she said, “I’ve been told you were out here. Where’s your permit?”

“But we’re students!  Ask this man. Here he’s looking after us. He says we don’t need permits.”

He was backing us up. He was so jolly by this stage he said, “Yes, they’re fine. I’ll look after them. I’m in the foreign affairs department.”  He hadn’t even met this woman.

So she went on her way. We got back to the hotel, and about one or two in the morning there was a knock on the door. She had come back with reinforcements.

“OK, where’s your permit?”

We kept saying, “Oh, you’ve heard the man. We don’t need one. This place is open. Or it’s nearly open.”  We just talked on and on, and she gave up in the end.

“We’re leaving tomorrow morning. We’re not going to bother you, don’t worry. We’ll leave.”

So she went off.

We had a good time with this man. He sent out a car, and we went way out into the grasslands. The photographer had permission to go to an area so close to the Soviet border that even the Chinese who live there need a special permit to get in. They were a bit apprehensive that we wouldn’t be allowed in, but the photographer had his papers all written up properly, so we just sat quietly in the back of the car. When the officials had a look in and said, “What about these two?”

We just said, “We’re with him…we’re with him.”  They let us through.

It was beautiful. It was a bit put on. The photographer only had a certain amount of time, and he’d arranged for the local minority people to come in traditional costumes. It was hot. I was dressed in a skirt and a shirt with short sleeves. Some of the minority people came dressed as the Chinese usually do—in a shirt and slacks—and then changed into the traditional clothes, but most of the women and men wear these warm costumes year round. They had brought a big herd eight hundred or a thousand horses and they were galloping them back and forth in front of the photographer so he could take pictures. Instead of catching them like our cowboys do with a lasso or a rope, they have this big long stick with a loop on it. They’ ride up right beside the horse and then just put the loop around his neck. It was fun to watch.

The photographer was treated like royalty up there, and we were included in everything. It was wonderful.

After three or four days we said, “Well, we think we’ll have to get going now. How do we get back to the road so we can try to catch a bus?”

“Oh no, we’ve got a car here, and we’ll take you back in.”

“No, no. That’s too much trouble.”

“You don’t think I’ve been sitting around here waiting all this time because I think it’s hao war [great fun] or anything, do you?  They all know you’re out here.”

He drove us back to town. We said, “OK, just let us off at the station, we’ll be getting on our way now.”

“No, no, no. I’ve been told to take you to see the Big Chief.”

So we had to go and see him. He gave us a little talking to about what we thought we were doing there. It was strange. He was very interested in why we picked that particular place. I don’t know if he really had ideas I had some Russian contacts, but he wanted to know why we had chosen that area specifically. When we just came out and said that it was pure chance. We told him the whole story and said, “This happened like this and this, nothing behind it…”

“Ah, ah!”  He was very relieved.

We were all forgiven and had to promise that if we came again we would tell him first. We were sent, sort of escorted, to the station. The man waited until we got on the train and waved to us and saw to it we didn’t come back again.

Actually, I’ve had very few run-ins with public security even though I’ve just gone where I wanted to. Now there are so many more places that are open. You don’t have to go running around behind someone’s back.

There was another incident the second time I went to Hailandao. I went there to see a friend I’d met the first time I was there. She had a new job teaching Vietnamese children in a school quite a ways out of the city. I never did find out much about it because her parents were ill or something and she’d had to leave suddenly. I just missed her. I’d written and told her I was coming and just assumed she’d be there, and normally she would have. Luckily a friend of hers overheard me saying where I was going and who I was going to meet, and she knew my friend had left that morning, so she said, “Well, come and stay with me.”

Word spreads so quickly, and we’re very obvious, of course. That night we were visited by public security, who came and wanted to know what I thought I was doing there.

“Oh, I’m going in the morning.”

I had come on the last bus that evening. That was okay. I didn’t know whether they were putting me on or not, but they were so concerned about my safety. “We want your things, we want them put here, and we don’t want anybody coming in because there’d be a big mess if any of your things get taken, so we want you to stay here and we want your things to stay here.”

The Chinese authorities want us to see all the concrete and the modernization. “There are no facilities there for you, and you wouldn’t be happy there. It’s best you leave.”  They just don’t like us to see areas that they we think are lovely because they’re so simple and left alone.

I think the railways are quite marvelous. I mean, there are so many people they’re moving from one place to another, and they still manage to stay pretty much on time. The trains are kept clean. They’re crowded to the roof, and yet they manage to keep order, and there’s little theft. The people are very friendly to each other, not just with me. Watching the Chinese, you see they’re very happy to strike up a conversation with the people beside them. Even though they know they’re going to be together just for a few hours, they’re concerned about each other and look after each other. It seems well organized in a way, though it can be chaotic. But just think what they’re so many people. I’ve heard many travelers complaining about the inefficiency, but I think the trains are just great.

There are so many little things people do. That’s why you want to be in China. It’s the people. When I was in Hailandao the first time, I was walking along the beach and met this guy, a fisherman or a worker who would have been sixteen or seventeen or so. We were just walking along and talking and picking up shells. We didn’t have long because I had to catch a bus in about ten minutes. He knew I was studying here, and I think he knew my name was Valerie. A few weeks later I got a beautiful letter from him. He had wanted to send me some shells, but he couldn’t find any he thought were nice enough, so he sent me some coconuts instead. There was this big bag with three or four, I think. It was a lovely thought. I couldn’t thank him because I didn’t even know his name.

The first year I was here, a couple of days before Chinese New Year, I was going down to Nanning to see some friends. On the train a little girl came and sat down beside me. She had a comic book or something, and we were talking about it when her mom and dad came over and asked, “Is she bothering you?  She’s always like this with people.”

I said, “No, no.”

We started chatting. They asked me to come and stay with them at her mother’s place. They were halfway to Nanning. They insisted I get off with them, and many, many times I said I couldn’t do that. I refused endless times. They would not listen to me. I put up any number of arguments why I couldn’t and so on. But they said, “It’s two days before New Year, so you’ve still got time to get to your friend’s place. Stay with us for a day.”  So I did.

Again it was a place I wasn’t supposed to be. We just got off at the railway station. Because they lived just down the line, we didn’t go through the main gate, we just walked along the tracks and over a fence or something. We came in the house, and here was this poor mother. She hadn’t seen her daughter for a couple of years, and then her daughter and son-in-law walked in dragging this foreigner. You can imagine how she felt. But immediately everything was under control and I was to stay with them. I ended up staying a couple of days, and I didn’t get to my friend’s for New Year, but that didn’t matter. It was so lovely. There are so many, many little experiences that don’t seem like much when you talk about them, but you know you’ll never forget.

The original buildings at Xiamen University

I tell my students, “Whatever characteristic you have, unless it’s something you share with a dog or a cat—like fear of loud noises or fear of falling—you learned it, and if you learned it then it’s tied up with culture in some way.

This is also true on the basketball court, as I learned in 1985 when I interviewed two tall Westerner students at Xiamen University.

Steve’s story

During the next two weeks I’ll be playing in the Fujian Provincial College basketball tournament on the university team. I think all my teammates are really looking forward to this because they have a real center. They always used to complain, “Our team’s too short, we don’t have anybody who can play center.” But almost all Chinese teams are that way. You may not have a center, but nobody else does either, so don’t worry about that. Now they have a giant center, and they think they’ll do pretty well.

A few weeks ago they had a round-robin tournament with the student’s team, the graduate students’ team, and the teachers and workers’ team. I was practicing with the students’ team. I was going to play with them. I went down the night of the first game, and we were going to play the teachers’ team. The teachers said no problem, I could play, but there were several graduate students sitting there, and they said, “We don’t want Steve to play on Saturday against us.”

Before the tournament they were supposed to have decided. They talked about it, but they hadn’t really made a final decision about whether foreign students could take part in this competition. Last semester for the volleyball tournament they came up with this rule that in order to participate in intramural sports, the competitions within the school, a foreign student had have to been here for two years or have plans to stay for two years. So if you only stayed for one year, you were not enough of a university student to take part. I don’t know how much my height was a factor in the decision that I shouldn’t play, but in this case it seemed like it really was the major reason. “He’s too tall. We don’t want him to play. So what can we say to make it look legit?”

That evening I decided that if I couldn’t play in the game against the graduate students I wouldn’t play in this one either because I might as well let it be the same all the way through the tournament. After the game started one of the guys in the graduate students’ team came over and said, “I’m sorry you can’t play. We have these rules.”  He went on and on.

It was the first time I’d been treated that way as an athlete. I’ve played on basketball teams in both Chengdu and Xinyang. In Xinyang there was some question before the tournament whether I could participate. The other team didn’t like the idea, but it was decided that I could play, and it was no problem. But this was the first time I’d been excluded from playing. You used to hear the Chinese phrase, “Friendship first, competition second” all the time. I wrote to a few friends about this incident, that I was really disillusioned now. I really believed the maxim, “Friendship first, competition second,” but it’s not that way anymore. I’m not sure how much it ever was that way.

Supposedly, they’ve decided I can play in this tournament next month, which will take place in Fuzhou. I guess there was a big discussion about that. The coach from here asked if foreign students could play. At first the other schools didn’t like the idea, but he convinced them that I am a student here at this university, and I should be able to play on their team. So I’m interested to see what kind of reactions I get in Fuzhou from the other coaches when the tournament starts. He probably didn’t tell them that this foreign student was 6’8” either. Let’s see if they can come up with anything to keep me off the court this time.

Mark’s story

The only sport I’ve played here has been basketball, and that’s because—being a Briton—I decided I wanted to do something to keep myself fit. I’ve always played something. First it was rugby, recently it was squash. I used to play basketball at school, and I really enjoyed it. In China there’s no particular cult of keeping fit.  You see people running, but they are runners, not people who are doing it for fun or to keep healthy. I don’t think tai chi makes you very fit, though it might make you supple.

The Chinese who do some sport are all incredibly thin. If you pushed them they’d probably fall over. Most of the guys I play basketball are pretty small, but they’re actually quite strong, they have a kind of wiry strength and a lot of stamina, though none of them is strong in terms of having big muscles.  They’re by no means weak and puny, which seems quite surprising to me, given how little meat they eat. They always seem to eat rice. They can’t throw as much weight as I can, but it doesn’t really matter in basketball.

I started playing basketball here by just going to one of the outdoor courts and using sign language to get myself on. I started playing and after that you don’t really need very much communication. I went out there and messed around with whoever was there. The university team noticed me because I was a foreigner, and they came round and asked me to come play with them. That was just before the 36th anniversary celebration [October 1, 1985], and they were having a tournament of basketball matches in the open stadium. I was really out of form at that time. I hadn’t played basketball seriously for ten years. It was difficult trying to explain that because the captain’s English and my Chinese weren’t up to it.

I’ll remember that for a little while, the first time that I played for the university team. It was this kind of round-robin competition. There were about three hundred people in the light ground watching this match, and when we warmed up I could feel everybody watching me miss all those baskets. I was benched for the first fifteen minutes, first quarter or something like that. Then they brought me on. Ann was sitting in the crowd, and she told me the people behind her had been saying for the first quarter, “There’s a foreigner over there. Wonder when he’s going to come on?”

“Oh, he’s coming on. He’s coming on.”

Somebody in the other team threw a long ball down the court, and I virtually threw myself at the ball to put it out of bounds, and it sort of glanced off my arm. It was nothing dramatic, just the sort of thing you might do automatically that might get a hao chou [good move] from someone. But since it was the first thing I did, I got a tumultuous round of applause.

From then on, I’m afraid it was laughter. It was a bit of an embarrassing experience, but when you go out and play basketball, you’ve got to be prepared to face that. It seemed unfortunate, when we were in defense, that I didn’t understand who the captain wanted me to mark [guard]. This guy shot four baskets in a row from a long way out, and I think the captain thought I should have been out there. That was a bit embarrassing. Then the first time I got the ball in my hands I think I made a complete mess of it. Over the whole place there was laughter. If it had been someone else, probably the audience would have laughed, but maybe not so heartily. I didn’t take any offense at that, but they took me off after ten minutes.

Then the next night there was a game inside that gym where we had dances. Of course this time it was even worse because it was simply a court with three hundred people crammed in around the side of the court. From the edge of the court to the wall it’s maybe six or seven feet on one side—there’s enough room for maybe a foot outside the court and then there’s people’s feet and a bench and then people standing behind the bench and then a wall. More space at the ends of the court. If you were running and you couldn’t stop yourself, you would just run right into the crowd. That made it even more immediate.  There were also people outside. The windows and the doors were packed very close.

They put me on straightaway, but again I was off after ten or fifteen minutes. I’m not quite sure what the whole idea was of me playing because there were plenty of other players around. I was by no means really worth putting on. I’m not sure, but I think maybe the captain thought added interest to have a foreigner playing, and as long as I didn’t make too many cop-ups or really give a lot away, having me on for ten or fifteen minutes was a nice gesture.

In the team talks, the captain was giving a pep talk for a long time, and I was just standing there, and didn’t understand any of what was going on, and then at the very end he said, “MacGregor, cover this man.”  That’s me—done in a short sentence.

That was very early on. I played quite a bit after that, and just before I sprained my ankle I was certainly getting a little bit better. I was actually scoring a few baskets and I was more than pleased.

By British standards, which are very high, the basketball they play here is really not good at all for a university team. It’s nice in a way not to have any of the pressure I know American and British universities have. Every Wednesday and every Saturday you have a match, and probably at least one, and maybe both, are important matches you have to win. There’s a lot of competition about it. Here it seems to be much more laid back, and people really do just play for fun, because they enjoy playing. It doesn’t do their basketball very much good. Because what you find is that—and this is something that Bob also noticed when he played—Chinese students who play here are very, very selfish. When they have the ball and they’re running up, they’ll go for the big shot–the dazzle stuff—and try and get it in the basket instead of passing to the next man. Part of that has got to do with the fact that it’s more “fun,” so it doesn’t matter that they miss it. Whereas perhaps with the American teams and British teams, it’s much more important that you play a tight game. You make sure when you shoot at the basket you have a pretty good chance of getting the shot in, so you don’t have quite so much fancy stuff. These students love to run up, put the ball around their waist under their leg and up into the basket. Not just simple straightforward straight-in. You see a lot of them doing that, but it means that they don’t play so well in terms of teamwork. They’re much more a set of individuals. In a way I found that quite surprising for China. In the political rhetoric, there’s so much emphasis on the masses, if you like, and less emphasis on the individual. [The same thing was true in my classes, individual students asking questions rather than listening to the answer to the same question I just gave someone else.]

It’s not always true that the team doesn’t work well together, but it was the very first thing that I noticed. The first time I just went to look at this team playing, I found myself thinking, “Now here you have five men defending and your five men outside. In an American basketball team you’d see the ball get passed to the other players, like boom—boom—boom—boom—boom—boom—boom—boom—SHOT. Here the ball goes boom-boom-SHOT, and it’s just one or two little passes. Our way is to stretch people out, to create something, and then you’ve got a basket. I wonder, if they had the pressure of competition on them, if they were playing matches twice a week, whether their style would change and they would come to that. Look at something like China’s top volleyball team. They play together.

It seems quite contradictory. The theory of everybody pulling together in this kind of a society, the whole theory of socialism, which is what my students tell me this is, is more to do with helping each other than cutting each other’s throats. One doesn’t get in front of the other and say “tough luck,” but it doesn’t seem to work like that in practice, at least on the basketball court.

In 1988, I interviewed a petite, pretty, blond and blue-eyed Englishwoman in her early twenties about her experiences in a Korean bathhouse. Later, from my own experience, I discovered that little had changed since then except for the prices. Around 2005, in a basement-level neighborhood bathhouse, I was still able to get all the services Jane describes here—except for the massage—for about 10,000 won or about ten dollars. At a window I bought a ticket, went below ground to rooms with concrete walls. I put my clothes in a wooden locker, took the little hand towel I was given and went into the larger room with the showers, shallow concrete tubs and massage tables.

With a group of friends, I also tried out a fancier place, a jjimjilbang, where people were allowed to sleep overnight after the massage. Some people use them as surrogate hotels. I found the windowless space too claustrophobic to sleep in, though, and took a late night taxi home. Other luxury bathhouses also have rooms with healing stones of various kinds, computer rooms and snack bars.

Although the bathhouse is a Korean and Japanese tradition, several Korean women have told me they don’t feel comfortable going.

For a very multicultural view, here’s a link to a luxury bathhouse [jjimjilbang] in Fairfax, Virginia, as reported on Al-Arabiya TV. This one even has a traditional restaurant. < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cBOsXd04M0>

Jane’s story

The women who work in the bathhouse know me now, but the other customers I meet there are always different people. They stare. For the first five minutes I have to force myself to stay. The staring is bad when you’ve got clothes on, but when you’ve got no clothes on you feel really vulnerable. Then of course the Korean women my age are all really thin. They just stand there and look at you. You want to hide. But after a few minutes they’ve found out that you have exactly the same bits and parts that they do, and they stop staring. Then most of them are friendly.

The first time I went, my friend Nancy took me. I was worried about it. I’m really modest. In England I don’t even like changing rooms [dressing rooms]. But then I thought, “Well, I’ll take my contact lenses out, then I won’t be able to see what’s happening.”

You go in, and you sit on these funny little plastic stools. They remind me of potties, actually. You sit on there with a hand shower and wash yourself off. The Korean women shower for about half an hour. They scrub between their toes and the soles of their feet and between their fingers. They must think I’m really dirty, but I can’t sit there that long. It takes me about ten minutes to wash all over, and then I can’t work out what to do.

Then you go and get in the sauna and sweat for a while. You have to wet your towel with cold water first and put it over your face because it’s so hot in there that you can’t breathe otherwise.

Then you’re supposed to go into the cold pool. The Korean women just leap out of the sauna and into the pool. But it’s so cold, at first I couldn’t do it. I just stood there pathetically splashing cold water over myself. Once this old woman took a big bucket of cold water and threw it on my back right after I came out of the sauna. I could have killed her, but of course I had to just turn around and smile. She thought it was really funny. I’m getting a little more used to it. Now I can throw a bucket of cold water on myself before someone else comes along and does it.

There’s a Jacuzzi, a bubbling pool that you can go and sit in. It’s so big the children swim around in it. They’ll swim up to you and have a look at this strange creature who’s sitting in their Jacuzzi.

If you want to be scrubbed and massaged, you have to go and tell the woman, and when it’s your turn she’ll come and drag you out of the pool. The women who do the scrubbing wear black underwear. I suppose it’s the most sensible thing to wear if you work in a bathhouse, but the first time I saw it I thought it looked really sleazy, like something women might wear if they gave sex massages in a man’s bathhouse.

She has you lie down on this table, and she gets a green cloth which looks like a Brillo pad. She starts at your feet, scrubbing really hard. The first time I had it done it was quite painful, but now I’m used to it. As she scrubs you, all the old, dirty skin starts to come off in big lumps. You’re lying in it, and as you move you can feel it underneath you. The first time I went, tons of my skin came off, and she must have thought I was really horrible. Many Korean women get exfoliated every week, and they have really nice skin. I feel if I were to go every week I would have no skin left. I usually go once a month.

She turns you over on your side, and she lifts your leg up so she can scrub everywhere. Inside your thighs is the worst bit. The first time I went it wasn’t relaxing at all because I was frightened about what she was were going to do with me, so of course I couldn’t relax, and she kept telling me I was too tense. She kept picking up my leg and dropping it and picking it up and dropping it, and of course I wasn’t relaxed. She thought it was really funny. She kept calling her friends over and trying to say in English, “Relax, relax.” But I was frightened because I didn’t know what they were going to do to me or what bit of me they were going to attack next. Now I’m better, but sometimes I still can’t relax, and they still pick up my leg and drop it and laugh.

She scrubs behind your ears and your neck and between your toes and the soles of your feet. It really tickles. Then she turns you over on your back. When she’s scrubbed you all over, she puts some kind of frothy oil all over you, and then she throws water over you.

If you want a massage as well, you have to dry yourself off and lie down on the bench again. She puts really hot towels on your face—I assume to open the pores. Then she puts something which smells like baby oil on your face, massages your face, wipes the oil off and puts hot towels on again. Then she grates a cucumber up and puts it on your face, just leaving your eyes and nose free. While the mask is on, she oils over your body and starts to massage you. It’s a different sort of massage than we expect in England. It’s thumping your body with a cupped hand. It’s very loud. You can hear it when you’re in the Jacuzzi waiting for your turn, and you feel like changing your mind because it sounds really painful. Some of it is painful. It feels as if you’re going to be covered in bruises afterwards, but you’re not. If you’re sore somewhere, like in your back, the masseuse always seems to know because she hits the sore place more. It hurts at the time, but afterwards the soreness is gone. The massage must be really good for you.

Then she covers you with warmed milk which is slightly perfumed. It must dissolve the oil. She washes it off and washes your hair. She swishes you around on the table, pulling your hair really far back so that your head and shoulders are off the end. Because you’re really greasy, you feel as if you’re going to fall off onto the floor. You can’t hold onto the sides because your hands are really oily. It’s quite frightening. She washes your hair in a bucket, and you stand up, and she throws water all over you from the troth at the end. Then as a kind of finish, she puts some soap on her hands and washes under your arms and between your legs. I don’t know why. Then she pushes you off and toward the showers where you wash all the gunge off.

It’s brilliant afterwards because your skin feels so smooth, especially on your face and neck and thighs. The smoothness lasts a couple of weeks.

When I went with my mum, we were both being done at the same time, and they were talking about us. I couldn’t work it out properly, but I think they were saying that we were exactly the same shape but my mum was bigger than I was. They always tell me I’m pretty, and that’s kind of an ego boost.

At the place I go, the whole thing comes to about 10,000 won [$13.50]. I went to a really deluxe bathhouse with Susan and Nancy. That was much more expensive, 25,000 won. There they did a different kind of massage, much more relaxing. Afterwards I fell asleep. It was morning, and I’d had a good night’s sleep, but after the massage I just went to sleep. When I woke up my friends were  standing around laughing at me.

The women told Susan that they could tell a lot about someone just by looking at her body. She didn’t have a wedding ring on, and she hasn’t had any children, but they said they could tell she was married, and that Nancy, who is about the same age, wasn’t married. Obviously they thought I was too young. They could guess our ages as well, which most Asian people aren’t good at guessing.

Korean women spend four or five hours at the bathhouse. They just sit around and talk. I suppose it’s one of the few places they can go where they don’t have to wait on men all the time. It’s nice also because they bring their children. Sometimes they set the child in a bowl and the mother will be scrubbing her daughter’s back, and the grandmother, the mum’s mother, will be scrubbing her daughter’s back, so there are three generations in a line. It’s really good to watch.

People usually talk to you. They come by to talk or throw water on you. And afterwards then you can buy little yogurt drinks to refresh yourself. Now it’s a pleasant experience.

[Above diagram: Layout of the first floor of the KCIA building, showing where the bodies were found: 1) Park Chung-hee, 2) his bodyguard Cha Ji Chui, and 3-7) other bodyguards.]

For many years the military dictator Park Chung-hee, self-proclaimed “president for life” feared assassination, particularly by communists or North Korean agents. His wife was killed in 1974 by an assassin gunning for her husband. Ironically, the deed was finally done by Park’s own head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, Kim Kae-won, who was angry at his declining influence over Park and fearful of losing his job. He invited Park to dinner at KCIA headquarters, killed Park and Cha Ji Chui and had his five KCIA henchmen finish off the remaining bodyguards. Almost immediately, all of the culprits were arrested and questioned. The “Friday night massacre” was reportedly plotted and led by Kim alone and was not part of a coup. The assassination was the subject of the controversial black comedy The President’s Last Bang (2005). Looking Back, Part 2 contains links to the Youtube version of the movie as well as several other links to texts and videos of the period. For an excellent Korean history, see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun. For a quick look at the period on this webside, try A Priest’s View of Human Rights in Korea <(http://caroldussere.com/2010/05/09/a-priests-view-of-human-rights-in-korea>

The following conversation with my friend Frank took place in 2007.

Frank’s story

When I came here in 1970, there was all kinds of martial law stuff going on and police stuff. Korean police were like stopping Korean boys with long hair and dragging them off and cutting out hunks of their hair [like just on one side so they’d have to go to a barber to get a haircut to even it out]. They were arresting people for long hair and so forth. Of course, I had come through the Boston sort of hippie era, and I was outraged by it. Now I had a job at The Korea Herald, proofreading and writing headlines. I worked with these two older foreigners. One of them was an ex-military guy, and the other had left the priesthood and gotten married. They were both nice enough guys, but I was having these big arguments with them at work. “They’d say, “Aw, Frank, these are Korean kids. They don’t need long hair.” I’m pretty sure that even in the ‘70s and even in the ‘80s there were street thugs and scummy sorts of people that were attached to the police.

I had a beard when I was a professor in Tokyo. I came here with a Japanese-American who had really long, straight, jet-black hair. We were traveling around the country, hitch-hiking out in the middle of nowhere. This black military jeep came along, slammed on the brakes, and these two thugs in leather jackets—they were obviously official sort of guys—jumped out of the jeep and started manhandling my friend, grabbing him and yelling at him. I couldn’t understand the Korean, but I was trying to get between them. I said, “He’s an American. He’s an American.” Finally I got through.

The main attacker stepped back and said “American?”

I said, “Show him your passport.”

So Rod pulled out an American passport, and these guys started laughing and apologized. They said, “Where are you going? We’re going this way.” With a little bit of trepidation I got into the jeep.

Those were crazy times. I think people were just really afraid to talk. South Korea was a real police state. For example, at the U.S. Osan Air Base [located near Songtan, Korea], there was a Korean guy who worked at the education center as an administrator. He’d go to the public bath over the weekend. Apparently—or the story was that he had said—while bathing—that Pres. Park should step down. He was locked up for a couple of months for making a comment like that. I used to watch out in restaurants and bars when people would start saying “Taehan Minguk” [Daehanminguk in the revised romanization, the ethnic-nationalistic slogan for Korean land and people]. It was always some drunk right-winger I wanted to steer clear of.

One of my in-laws worked in the legal system. Sometimes I would make critical comments about Park, but even within the family he would never say anything critical. But at a family gathering after Park was shot, I said, “After all Park’s done for the [economic development of the] country, it was a shame he was shot down like a dog.” This in-law said, “How many people did he kill?” It was a complete 180-degree turnaround.

Every office had a picture of Park on the wall. A priest I knew, a foreigner, used to get drunk and go into the police box when he was drunk and point to the picture of Pres. Park and call him an asshole and saying what a jerk he was and the police would just laugh and say, “Go home. Go to bed. You’re drunk.”

It’s amazing today. I don’t know if you ever noticed, but out near out near Songnam, before Bundang, there’s a Korean air base—Seoul Air Base. The U.S. Army has helicopters out there, too, but the bases are kind of separated. I’m out there sometimes. That’s where the Korean presidents and dignitaries fly in, as well as Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush. Whenever an important person is coming in, there is a Korean Secret Service guy and a policeman at every street or alleyway, any road that would have access to the road that the motorcade is going to be on. This is for miles and miles. They have police downtown, right through the tunnel, down across the bridge route, blocking traffic for two or three minutes before the dignitary arrives. They time all the lights so that the traffic never stops. The driver can just drive straight through, and it’s so well timed with the police in walkie-talkie communication along the way blocking off the traffic. So the traffic hardly changes from its usual routine.

At Osan Air Base, there’s a big overpass that goes to the base. I remember once in the Park Chung-hee era I was driving on the overpass, and suddenly these ajǒssis [middle-aged Korean men] and paramilitary guards stopped me. They were all blowing their whistles and waving their arms. So they pulled me over, “Get out of the car! Down the stairs! Down the stairs! Down the stairs!” Next to the sidewalk on one side of the overpass there was a concrete stairwell. I walked down about halfway down thirty to fifty stairs, and they blew the whistle at me and said, “Come on back up.” So I got up to the top of the stairs, and I said, “Number one?” and held up my index finger. They laughed, and they said, “Number one.” Park had just driven by.

I mean, it took the CIA chief to kill Park Chung-hee. There were only maybe two or three people that were close enough, and even then they had to have some luck. If I remember correctly, a pistol was put in the bathroom, and during a drinking party, the CIA chief went in there to take a whiz and came back with the pistol and shot him.

Korea is still a place for rumors. But back in 1974 when Pres. Park’s wife was shot, there was a rumor that he had her shot, that he was tired of her. [The rumor is not surprising because Park was in the National Theater giving a speech, and the gunman fired several shots from the back row, wounding Park’s wife, Yuk Young-soo, and another person. Park continued to speak while his dying wife was carried off the stage.] After the KCIA chief, Kim Jae-kyu, shot Park, there was a rumor that they’d executed somebody else and that Kim was running a grocery store in Minneapolis. In a police state anything was possible. There was no freedom of information, so any rumor was considered more plausible than a reported account.

Another interesting story was that the martial law commander before Chun Doo-hwan, a general several years older and senior to Chun, was arrested for complicity in the Park assassination. I think probably that was how the coup was staged. As martial law commander, he was up on the side of the Namsan, down in Hannam-dong. There’s a bunker up there in the woods [and buildings where dissidents were tortured]. Soldiers loyal to Chun or Rho Tae-woo went up there and surrounded it. One or two guards were killed. They arrested him, claiming that he had met with the Kim Jae-kyu before Park was shot. They framed him so that Chun could take over as martial law commander, which enabled him to seize power. Later it was shown to be all completely nonsense, and the general was exonerated, his name cleared and so forth.

When he was arrested, my wife was down on the bridge down in Hannam-dong, and she heard the gunshots up on the hillside. All the traffic was paralyzed. She was in a cab, and she got out and walked across the bridge. I guess that would have been directly before. The Kwangju demonstrations were in reaction to Chun’s illegal seizure of power. Chun responded by launching the suppression and massacre down there.

In 1970 there were only one or two bridges over the Han River. There wasn’t one in Hannam-dong, for example. Where the highway now crosses the Hannam Bridge there was just a dirt road down by the river. I remember getting directions to somewhere in Seoul, which is now filled with highrises, and hearing. “You can’t miss it. It’s the only 5-story building around. They didn’t mean it was the smallest. They meant that it was the biggest.

Seoul's Banpo Briidge and apartment blocks south of the Han River in 2007

I think it was about ‘73 or ‘74, when the first high-rise apartments went up in Youi-do. A friend of mine moved there to a place along the Han River. We went to a party at his place on the seventh or eighth floor, and we were just amazed. The thousands and thousands of apartment blocks started springing up in the mid to late ‘70s. South of the river was just pear trees. Yangjye [at the southern end of Seoul], which is now one of the biggest real estate areas in Seoul. But back then my wife and I rode a bus out in the countryside, a country bus, all through the rice fields to Yangjye. It was called Malchiguri, that means “horse” something-or-other.” I wanted to live there and commute into Seoul, but she didn’t want to live out there because it smelled of manure and it was just so country. She said, “No way I’m going to live here.”

In ‘79-80 there were a lot of hakwons [usually for-profit cram schools]. In ‘71 or ‘72, I was lost staying in a temple in Incheon. I went down to the waterfront and got lost. A woman took me in for the night. There was a story that she’d been seduced by a priest, gotten pregnant and had a child. She was a little crazy. But she ran an institute for half-Korean kids who wanted to get to the States or be adopted. I taught there for a while, and then later when I was traveling through and I got a job teaching English around Osan.

For this post I’ve added video links and links to older posts in order to give readers a fuller picture of what Korea was like before and after Park Chung-hee’s assassination in 1979.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiesTVHu1eE –Scene of Yushin Era in South Korea (English, pro-American)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKyHWvbC4SM&feature=related–Park Chung hee’s coup in 1961 (Korean)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boBMFXdJo8U –Park Chung hee assassination (Korean)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i4I5SOZsAI&feature=related–The President’s Last Bang, part 1 of 11. (Korean with English subtitles)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gSjrTsHepc–State Funeral (no narration, video with music)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S03jongVTwA–State Funeral of South Korea (Korean narration, end the same as above, good video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7hQyd5bxFQ–Movie “A Single Spark,” about the labor martyr Chun Tae-il. English subtitles. 1 of 12.

From this website:  A Priest’s View of Human Rights in Korea(http://caroldussere.com/2010/05/09/a-priests-view-of-human-rights-in-korea/), Working with Women Workers (http://caroldussere.com/2010/05/), A Skeptic’s View of the Korean Student Movement (http://caroldussere.com/2010/04/.

Kimchi pots outside a traditional house

Michael is an Irish Catholic priest with many years serving in South Korea. This is from an interview in 2007.

Michael’s story

The night Park Chung-hee was shot [October 27, 1979], I was at a party at Konguk University, where an ex-Peace Corps guy was celebrating his birthday. I took some English students to meet the foreigners and speak a bit of English. A friend was visiting from England, looking into setting up a program for justice awareness, and after the party we stayed up talking about injustice in Korea and the Philippines. In the morning I was taking a shower when he rushed in and said that Park Chunhee had been shot just as we were coming home from the party. I thought he was joking. I got dressed and went out. Everything was quiet. In those days whenever an incident happened, people passed out free, quarter-page sheets bulletins from news agencies. The news was just that he was shot. Curfew was moved from midnight to an earlier time.

At that time I was running a center for Catholic students, a place for them to come together, where they could do debates and discuss literature or whatever. Across the street was a station for the police and the KCIA. One of these guardian angels, a Mr. Hong, was watching to see who came and went. About a week before he’d come over because of a flyer on the wall about an educational event on secular developments in Europe. One of the students had told him it had to do with communism. Just saying the word “communism” made you a red at that time, and informing on others was quite common. I’d had to go over to the police station and explain myself. On the morning after Park was shot I saw Mr. Hong a few other guys on the street, and they looked at the ground. They were ashamed that Park was shot by the KCIA chief. I shouldn’t have done it, but I said, “You guys were accusing me of communism, but we didn’t shoot the president, and there were no troops coming over the border. It was your guy that shot the president.” After the assassination everybody was very quiet, and the KCIA didn’t come around the center. Because of the curfew everybody was afraid. The news came out slowly how he was shot and all of that.

Before the funeral a friend and I went down to the south to Naedamsa to see the fall leaves. On the way back there were very few cars on the road, and those cars were all being pulled in by the police. It was kind of a free-for-all for the police to accuse drivers of speeding. I’m sure they were lining their own pockets because the king was dead and they could do whatever they wanted.

We watched the funeral on television. A motorcade and the coffin with a whole carriage all made up of yellow and white flowers. It was a beautiful sight, and the daughters and the sons and the officials were all in mourning clothes. It was very solemn. Whether people were for Park Chung-hee or against him, they had a lot of sadness about his being shot that way.

All along we’d been told that the North Korean communists were going to come down and shoot the president. And now there was a lot of fear. What was going on? Then in the election Pres. Chae was chosen, but he only lasted a short time. Then there was the coup of December 12 when Chung Doo-hwan took over. I remember being over at the center a few nights before, around curfew time. There was me and a New Zealander. We heard this rumble like a whole movement of army trucks moving. We ran to out a small little window that onto the main road, the one that went across the bridge. It looked like the whole army.

Seoul apartment blocks in 1975

Background

I first came here in September, 1969. I was amazed by the throngs of people on the road and everywhere. Seoul was still undeveloped. There was a lot of poverty, a lot of old Korean houses with tile roofs, which later on were preserved as a kind of national treasure. In the countryside at the time there were mainly thatched cottages with no indoor plumbing, and some of the rural areas didn’t even have electricity. There were some paved roads, but especially up in the mountains there were still very few. The roads were set up by the army, part clay and part gravel, so they could get around in their black jeeps. The few private cars were mostly in Seoul. You could see lots of punctured tires on jeeps and cars and buses.

The electric trams had just gone out before I came here, but there was good bus service, with a conductress at each of the front and back doors. They took the fare as you got in and hit the side of the bus to tell the driver it was time to leave, and then they’d announce the station. When the bus was really crowded they had to turn their back to the crowd, take hold of the barriers and push the people in with their behinds. In 1974-75 the girls who worked on the buses had demonstrations—they had no unions. They were protesting against being strip-searched at the end of the line by men. At his Christmas mass, the Bishop at Wonju [who went to jail for protesting against Park Chung-hee’s declaring himself President for Life] said if they are stealing money there was nothing sinful about that, they were just taking what they should be getting anyway.

Yushin Constitution in 1971 [Revitalizing Reform Movement] brought in the Saemaul, or New Village, with in much needed cleanliness, getting rid of the dirt and squalor in back alleys, having people take responsibility for cleaning up around their houses. There was a big push to get rid of a lot of old things, and a lot of good houses probably were destroyed. Yushin was also about saemaum, or New Heart, New Attitude. It was tied up with politics and control and the old Confucian respect for elders. In reality it did a lot of good.

In ’69 when I came, Seoul was mostly one and two-story buildings. In the back alleys there were open sewers, especially the outskirts where poor people lived. It was all squatters’ area. People who had failed in the city and were in debt, they moved out to those places. No running water, living in boxes in the summertime. Then people were moved out of the poor areas, probably just loaded on the back of trucks and taken further out of the city. By 1979 saemaul would have replaced the thatched houses within the official inner city with houses of concrete block, but probably not out in the outskirts where squatters lived. After the reforms they’d put a metal roof, but that can be really hot in the summer and cold in the winter. So they’d keep the thatch and put that on top of it.

In the early ‘70s, there was a big market in textile production. The sweatshops were keeping wages down in order to produce as much as they could and send their products to and Hong Kong. There was an organization for young Catholic workers which had branches in the factories, and we would celebrate mass at a table in the middle of the factory floor. There were at least three, if not four platforms stacked on top of each other, where the girls sat cross-legged in front of their machines. The idea was to get as many girls as possible and as many machines as possible into a small space. At first one of the big issues the girls were fighting for was one day a month, and then much later they got one day a week off. Of course, the factories and those sweatshops had all kinds of goons working for them. The girls were protesting about being beaten or raped—threatened at least. If you complained about anything, you were branded a communist. Nobody wanted that, but at the same time you had to fight for your rights. With the textiles there was a lot of dyeing. When I was mountain climbing, I’d see dye coming down all the streams—blue, and pink or purple with the overflow from the factories.

Working conditions were bad, in crowded rooms with bad air. There was a lot of tuberculosis. Girls had problems with their eyesight from being on the sewing machines for a long time. I know because we ran a night school which started in 1975, with girls from the factories or guys who worked in these fitting shops. In the late ‘70s they started demonstrating. If they’d sit down or go slow work or no work, the factory with the help of the government would send in the goons. In a few incidents these goons brought in buckets of shit and threw it on top of them. The demonstrators were sent to jail for a while. [See “A Single Spark,” link above.]

In the center for Catholic university students, we organized a night school for kids up from the countryside who had no middle school education. They came after work, at 6:30 p.m., for a year and a half to do middle school education, Korean and math and English and history. School finished at 10:30. There were very dedicated university students teaching the program. Some volunteered extra time to help those who were slow. It was a model school in some ways. As the school got very strong, we had up to 40 students. A lot of them had to drop out, but we had a graduation celebration in the countryside with own school song. Some of our students went on to the university after that and became teachers in the school. That went on beyond ’79 and into the ‘80s. Then after ’82 teachers were coming in who wanted to focus on the class struggle, democracy, change and labor laws. We had a big struggle among ourselves. One teacher said, “These students want to go on to high school or the university. That’s what we’re here for.” By 1986 enrollment was way down. There were maybe 15 teachers and 4 or 5 students. So the school was closed.

In the 70s there was a photocopy machine in every church. The political activists would copy their book of rallying songs with Catholic hymns. Farmers’ bands were banned. [For a look at a farmer’s band, see part 1 of “A Single Spark.] They used to have them at festivals. They took harvest stories and used them to make modern day plays with masks representing the factory owner and the workers and all that. They’d practice and put it on in front of Myoung-dong Cathedral, but then it got so widespread that the government stopped it.

After the Kwangju Incident in 1980 [see “A Priest Talks about Human Rights”], students found out that they alone could not take on the government. A lot of them started to go into the factories to create awareness. You could say that was part of the reason the Kwangju Incident started. So now the university students wanted to take over everywhere, including the churches. A Korean priest took over the center and closed the whole office. Movement decisions were made outside, like where there was going to be demonstrations and what the issues would be this month and next month. Of course phones were tapped, and there were KCIA informants everywhere.

I lived for nearly two years on an island off the south coast where there was no phone, no electricity, no roads. The boat took over seven hours, stopping at all the other islands. Especially in the summertime they’d be crowded, people getting seasick, carrying chickens and things like that. It was one of the beautiful spots in Korea, but I watched a lot of people perish out there. Sometimes the skin scabs would break out from malnutrition. We were doing relief. Yellow cornmeal came in from American agencies. People were hungry so they had no choice but to eat it, although some people exchanged the cornmeal for rice. We ran a kitchen as part of our middle school, and we gave the kids a hot lunch. Although we were living on an island, it was the hardest place in the world to find fish. Any fish that was caught was exported directly to Japan. Very few of the people could afford to buy it themselves.

Many of the mountains around were bare after the Korean War. After 1968, every May the big thing was to go out and plant trees, green belts around the cities. About 1968 or so the troops came from the North trying to assassinate Park Chung-hee. So places around Seoul were out of bounds, and army camps were brought in. That preserved the trees because people were stopped from cutting them. In the wintertime the women went down and collected the pine needles, and carried on their heads big loads of pine needles, which they made into bales and used as firewood. Collecting branches was allowed, but you were liable to be accused of cutting trees and fined if somebody needed a bit of money. In the countryside you’d see smoke coming up from the houses for the evening meal. The fuel was either straw or pine needles.

The army ruled the roost. I remember having an argument with them, hot-blooded Irish that I am. In the summertime I used to go out with the students to work in the countryside with the farmers. Afterwards we’d go to the seaside for a few days. Once we were staying in a hostel with a courtyard, and the students wanted to have a campfire. The army said they couldn’t. So the students argued back and cajoled, and finally they were told,

“OK, build a campfire, light it, take a photograph and then put it out immediately.”

“Why?”

“Well, the North Korean boats will see it.”

We were inside a square building with only a small door coming into it. This was completely illogical. It was all about control, really, and a lot of it was done by young soldiers out of envy and jealousy for university students who were enjoying themselves.

The beaches were barricaded off by wires and guarded by soldiers, but some of them were opened up in the summertime. The students used to go there with tents and music. One night I was there with a group of students, and a soldier came in and turned off the music with no explanation. One of the students said, “He’s on guard duty, so how dare we enjoy ourselves.”

Another time there was a school sports competition, and on the third day in there were army trucks set in position all around the playing field. They were going to be there for two weeks for army maneuvers. Nobody apologized. The soldiers were the same age as our students. They put a truck on the basketball court, and they were driving onto the soccer goal area. We asked if they could wait just five minutes, but of course the guy wouldn’t move the truck off the soccer field. It was a strange game trying to move around a truck to score a goal. The army wouldn’t give an inch.