Nodutdol . e*News
August 2009
DEEP Report Back: Learning a new language
by B. Yoon
My visit to the DPRK is directly tied to my work on Nodutdol’s Peace Treaty Campaign. Too often, the language about the DPRK that occurs here in the States is dehumanizing—and if there is reference to the people at all, it is to their status as victims. But not as victims of the Cold War, or of imperialism, but of their leaders. There is little to no real debate about the character or the people of North Korea—only the understanding that the leadership is crazy and unpredictable, and that the people are brainwashed. This is a significant barrier to any attempts to unify the peninsula. This pattern is not unfamiliar—we see it happening when talking about Iran or Palestine—actually, in most dialogue that takes place on the Middle East, Africa, and other postcolonial nations. There is rarely any attempt by the mainstream press to understand the historical context behind present day situations—often motivations are deemed evil, and thus unknowable. Scholar Mahmood Mamdani has written about the difference between survivor’s justice and victor’s justice, with survivor’s justice cloaked in this language of unknowability, creating zero-sum conditions that preclude coexistence and reconciliation. Survivor’s justice, on the other hand, is what took place in South Africa after apartheid, where it was decided that coexistence was not only possible, but was the only real option. This involves recognizing both parties as human and deciding to plot a common future together. The official line of the United States is of course in favor of peaceful coexistence—and yet the portrayal of the DPRK as varying degrees of crazy is critical in preventing the sort of personal understandings that must occur for reconciliation and unification. The DPRK Education and Exposure program has the goal of demystifying the DPRK and establishing people-to-people relationships. Returning home to the US, it is easy to see how remote the matter of unification can seem at times, but experiences here in New York, such as the recent issues that have surfaced in the local Korean community due to the current race for city council, show how these unresolved wounds lay not so deeply beneath the surface.
The issue of depiction and understanding is not only a media and governmental-level problem—it takes place within families and homes as well. As a second-generation Korean American, the multiple forms of home that existed when I was growing up included the various parts of the US my family had lived in, and because my entire father’s side of the family still lives there, it also included Korea. But what was meant by the term “Korea” was South Korea. The northern half had been dismissed into silence. In my household at least, it was never talked about even disparagingly—it simply did not exist. This sort of silence surrounding personal experiences before immigration and the relegation of Korea’s Cold War experiences as not cold but hot to the definitive past was not uncommon. Our story, as handed down by our parents, was a story of fresh starts, of success in America, of immigration away from all that troubled the past, whether this immigration was fueled by the war or by the military rule that existed in the south after the war. My journey to North Korea was an effort to put personal experience to the history I had grown up with. This search for history through the present is particularly salient, given that the Cold War, having been declared finished, lives on through national division in Korea, with repercussions that play out socially both in north and south Korea, as well as in overseas Korean communities. So the trip, for me, was part of a process of exploring the conditions that ended up with me, a person of Korean descent, being born and raised in the US, and to see what home really means. What was it that made the southern half home and the northern half a non-entity? These were questions I was trying to answer.
Given this, arriving in Incheon airport for a layover on the way to Beijing (itself a stopping point on the way to Pyongyang) this summer felt very strange, considering that for three years, arrival at Incheon signaled the end of my journey. Incheon airport is still more familiar to me than LaGuardia, JFK, Seatac, or Logan airports, all places I have lived. Until I moved to South Korea in 2004, my only homes had been in the United States. Now at 28, I have many more homes than I would have thought, and after DEEP, I can consider one of these to be the Korean peninsula, and not just the lower half of it.
Going to North Korea was like learning a language by immersion—as a group, we quickly adjusted to the different ways of speech, the different cultural norms, and the somewhat formal attire of daily life, until after 11 days, it became part of us. As our trip was winding down, I had a small pang to realize that no longer would I say or hear “일 없습니다” and no longer would I be in such a place where the longing for reunification and pride in being Korean were so strongly felt and expressed. My fear then and now is that I will lose all that I experienced as easily as languages are lost when they are not exercised.
The experiences of DEEP show us that the North Korea that exists in the media and in the minds of the American people is not the same North Korea that we saw. The North Korea I saw was a place full of love and absence of guile, a place that suffers from division rather than prospers from it, and a place where all those who called themselves Korean were welcomed and loved. We saw how well expectant mothers were treated at a maternity hospital, we got to see children playing and doing math at the board in an orphanage classroom, we saw our driver chat comfortably with a professor and order our guide around on a few occasions, clearing away our preconceived notions of class and social status, and we saw love in many forms, the most visible being the effort that went into a surprise birthday party for one of our members.
Not everything was beautiful, however. We witnessed arguments and people not getting along. There was poverty and there was the still present trauma of war and division. We stood in the actual bunkers and barns where Koreans had been killed by the US army (the soot comes off on your hand when you touch the walls) and laid flowers at mass graves at Shinchon. There was the DMZ and the recognizable lope of US soldiers casually strolling on the south side of the demarcation line. The unconverted political prisoners we met were both tragic and beautiful—their stories of imprisonment and torture were told with faces that were peaceful and full of warmth and love. When I told Rhee Kyung-gu, 77 years old and imprisoned for 38 years, that my grandfather still lives in Gongju, Rhee’s hometown, his face lit up and he held my hand.
The purpose of DEEP is to make person-to-person connections, to move from looking at the DPRK from a governmental level to the level of the people. So it was valuable to both see the national-level traumas and poverty that exist and yet make personal connections and speak one-on-one with students, youth, and workers. The most meaningful connections we made were with our guides and translator, Mihyang sunsaengnim, Huh sunsaengnim, and Han sunsaengnim, with whom we spent the most time. Exchanging pictures, stories, and songs, our time with them felt to me like the actual process of building that bridge so that when we part, there will be something to return to. And when we separated at Pyongyang airport, there was the definite sense of leaving something behind—that we had, by coming here, somehow filled an unrealized need—and that by creating these paths and bridges, we then were required to use them. Everyone there, when we asked what we could do as overseas Koreans, said only to speak the truth about our experiences. So I will continue to do so, to both fulfill promises made and to exercise this new language so that I do not forget.
My visit to the DPRK is directly tied to my work on Nodutdol’s Peace Treaty Campaign. Too often, the language about the DPRK that occurs here in the States is dehumanizing—and if there is reference to the people at all, it is to their status as victims. But not as victims of the Cold War, or of imperialism, but of their leaders. There is little to no real debate about the character or the people of North Korea—only the understanding that the leadership is crazy and unpredictable, and that the people are brainwashed. This is a significant barrier to any attempts to unify the peninsula. This pattern is not unfamiliar—we see it happening when talking about Iran or Palestine—actually, in most dialogue that takes place on the Middle East, Africa, and other postcolonial nations. There is rarely any attempt by the mainstream press to understand the historical context behind present day situations—often motivations are deemed evil, and thus unknowable. Scholar Mahmood Mamdani has written about the difference between survivor’s justice and victor’s justice, with survivor’s justice cloaked in this language of unknowability, creating zero-sum conditions that preclude coexistence and reconciliation. Survivor’s justice, on the other hand, is what took place in South Africa after apartheid, where it was decided that coexistence was not only possible, but was the only real option. This involves recognizing both parties as human and deciding to plot a common future together. The official line of the United States is of course in favor of peaceful coexistence—and yet the portrayal of the DPRK as varying degrees of crazy is critical in preventing the sort of personal understandings that must occur for reconciliation and unification. The DPRK Education and Exposure program has the goal of demystifying the DPRK and establishing people-to-people relationships. Returning home to the US, it is easy to see how remote the matter of unification can seem at times, but experiences here in New York, such as the recent issues that have surfaced in the local Korean community due to the current race for city council, show how these unresolved wounds lay not so deeply beneath the surface.
The issue of depiction and understanding is not only a media and governmental-level problem—it takes place within families and homes as well. As a second-generation Korean American, the multiple forms of home that existed when I was growing up included the various parts of the US my family had lived in, and because my entire father’s side of the family still lives there, it also included Korea. But what was meant by the term “Korea” was South Korea. The northern half had been dismissed into silence. In my household at least, it was never talked about even disparagingly—it simply did not exist. This sort of silence surrounding personal experiences before immigration and the relegation of Korea’s Cold War experiences as not cold but hot to the definitive past was not uncommon. Our story, as handed down by our parents, was a story of fresh starts, of success in America, of immigration away from all that troubled the past, whether this immigration was fueled by the war or by the military rule that existed in the south after the war. My journey to North Korea was an effort to put personal experience to the history I had grown up with. This search for history through the present is particularly salient, given that the Cold War, having been declared finished, lives on through national division in Korea, with repercussions that play out socially both in north and south Korea, as well as in overseas Korean communities. So the trip, for me, was part of a process of exploring the conditions that ended up with me, a person of Korean descent, being born and raised in the US, and to see what home really means. What was it that made the southern half home and the northern half a non-entity? These were questions I was trying to answer.
Given this, arriving in Incheon airport for a layover on the way to Beijing (itself a stopping point on the way to Pyongyang) this summer felt very strange, considering that for three years, arrival at Incheon signaled the end of my journey. Incheon airport is still more familiar to me than LaGuardia, JFK, Seatac, or Logan airports, all places I have lived. Until I moved to South Korea in 2004, my only homes had been in the United States. Now at 28, I have many more homes than I would have thought, and after DEEP, I can consider one of these to be the Korean peninsula, and not just the lower half of it.
Going to North Korea was like learning a language by immersion—as a group, we quickly adjusted to the different ways of speech, the different cultural norms, and the somewhat formal attire of daily life, until after 11 days, it became part of us. As our trip was winding down, I had a small pang to realize that no longer would I say or hear “일 없습니다” and no longer would I be in such a place where the longing for reunification and pride in being Korean were so strongly felt and expressed. My fear then and now is that I will lose all that I experienced as easily as languages are lost when they are not exercised.
The experiences of DEEP show us that the North Korea that exists in the media and in the minds of the American people is not the same North Korea that we saw. The North Korea I saw was a place full of love and absence of guile, a place that suffers from division rather than prospers from it, and a place where all those who called themselves Korean were welcomed and loved. We saw how well expectant mothers were treated at a maternity hospital, we got to see children playing and doing math at the board in an orphanage classroom, we saw our driver chat comfortably with a professor and order our guide around on a few occasions, clearing away our preconceived notions of class and social status, and we saw love in many forms, the most visible being the effort that went into a surprise birthday party for one of our members.
Not everything was beautiful, however. We witnessed arguments and people not getting along. There was poverty and there was the still present trauma of war and division. We stood in the actual bunkers and barns where Koreans had been killed by the US army (the soot comes off on your hand when you touch the walls) and laid flowers at mass graves at Shinchon. There was the DMZ and the recognizable lope of US soldiers casually strolling on the south side of the demarcation line. The unconverted political prisoners we met were both tragic and beautiful—their stories of imprisonment and torture were told with faces that were peaceful and full of warmth and love. When I told Rhee Kyung-gu, 77 years old and imprisoned for 38 years, that my grandfather still lives in Gongju, Rhee’s hometown, his face lit up and he held my hand.
The purpose of DEEP is to make person-to-person connections, to move from looking at the DPRK from a governmental level to the level of the people. So it was valuable to both see the national-level traumas and poverty that exist and yet make personal connections and speak one-on-one with students, youth, and workers. The most meaningful connections we made were with our guides and translator, Mihyang sunsaengnim, Huh sunsaengnim, and Han sunsaengnim, with whom we spent the most time. Exchanging pictures, stories, and songs, our time with them felt to me like the actual process of building that bridge so that when we part, there will be something to return to. And when we separated at Pyongyang airport, there was the definite sense of leaving something behind—that we had, by coming here, somehow filled an unrealized need—and that by creating these paths and bridges, we then were required to use them. Everyone there, when we asked what we could do as overseas Koreans, said only to speak the truth about our experiences. So I will continue to do so, to both fulfill promises made and to exercise this new language so that I do not forget.
This article originally appeared in the August 2009 issue of Nodutdol eNews.
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About Nodutdol eNews
Nodutdol eNews is the monthly e-mail newsletter of Nodutdol.Through grassroots organization and community development, Nodutdol seeks to bridge divisions created by war, nation, gender, sexual orientation, language, classes and generation among Koreans and to empower our community to address the injustice we and other people of color face here and abroad. Nodutdol works in collaboration with other progressive organizations locally, nationally and internationally as part of a larger movement for peace and social change.
In this issue
DEEP Report Back: Learning a new language
DEEP Report Back: The road to unification
DEEP Report Back: My 38th parallel
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