[Cankor] Report #261

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CANADA-KOREA ELECTRONIC INFORMATION SERVICE

CanKor # 261

Friday, 22 September 2006
*************************************************
The new WFP Country Director announces plans to feed 1.9 million DPR 
Koreans in order to mitigate an estimated 800,000-ton grain shortage 
this year. An ROK cosmetics company has meanwhile delivered half a 
million dollars worth of make-up products as "humanitarian aid" to the DPRK.

The ROK announces development of a cruise missile capable of attacking 
the DPRK's ballistic missile bases. The new missile's range of 500 
kilometers (300 miles) will be doubled within the next five years, and 
will be fitted on three new submarines that will join the Navy's fleet 
next year.

Speaking at the Non-aligned Summit in Cuba, the DPRK's No. 2 leader Kim 
Yong Nam says that because of Washington's failure to respect the 
sovereignty of other countries, "the international order is disturbed, 
and peace and security in the world are seriously threatened."

With Six-Party Talks in suspended animation, US Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice convenes an expanded forum of ten countries (including 
Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Indonesia) to discuss Northeast Asian 
security concerns, but DPRK, China and Russia decline the invitation.

In our BOOK REVIEW section, John Feffer examines the English translation 
of "The Guest," a recent novel by Hwang Sok-Yong that provoked fierce 
controversy among readers in South Korea. A fictional minister of a 
Korean-American community in Brooklyn visits North Korea to meet the 
family he left behind as a young child and discovers the horrors of a 
fratricidal Korean War.
*************************************************

Contents:

1.   DPRK FOOD SHORTAGE REACHES 800,000 TONS
     
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2006/09/16/200609160001.asp

2.   ROK COMPANY SENDS COSMETICS AID TO DPRK
     http://english.yna.co.kr/Engservices/43010000004.html

3.   SEOUL HAS LONGER-RANGE CRUISE MISSILE
     
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/200609/20/200609202210198979900090309031.html

4.   KIM YONG NAM CALLS FOR NAM'S INCREASED ROLE
     http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2006/200609/news09/19.htm#1

5.   WITH KOREA TALKS STALLED, USA TRIES NEW APPROACH
     
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/21/AR2006092101568.html

BOOK REVIEW

6.   "THE GUEST" BY HWANG SOK-YONG
     http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060918/feffer
*************************************************

1.   DPRK FOOD SHORTAGE REACHES 800,000 TONS
     by Annie I. Bang, The Korea Herald, 16 September 2006

The World Food Program yesterday said it estimates that North Korea's 
food shortage has reached 800,000 tons this year. Jean-Pierre de 
Margerie, head of WFP's Pyongyang office, told the Voice of America the 
impoverished country needs at least 5.3 million tons of rice each year. 
He said this year's shortage is mainly due to lower food production 
after floods this summer, fewer imports from China and South Korea's 
suspension of its food aid. Heavy rainstorms hit North Korea in 
mid-July, severely damaging farmland and leaving at least 4,000 missing 
or dead. South Korea halted its regular aid, including rice and 
fertilizer, to the communist state after the North's missile launches on 
July 5.

De Margerie, who started his first day of work in Pyongyang earlier this 
month, said he will hold his first official meeting with the North 
Korean government next week to discuss increasing the regions that the 
WFP provides for from 30 to 50. He said although the WFP has not kept 
track of the exact amount of food shortage in North Korea for the past 
two years, he expects better cooperation with the North after recent 
productive meetings with North Korean officials. The WFP suspended aid 
in December last year at North Korea's insistence, a move prompted by an 
apparent fear of exposure to foreign monitors. But it resumed the aid in 
May with a plan to feed 1.9 million of the "most needy" people in the 
North for two years. Referring to transparency in the WFP's use of the 
food, de Margerie said the organization remains committed to its policy 
of "no access, no food."

Last month, South Korea sent 100,000 tons of rice through its Red Cross 
to North Korea in a one-time aid package. The package also included 
building materials and equipment. Rice aid cost some 195 billion won 
($203 million), and the shipment included 26 billion won worth of 
construction supplies and equipment, including 100,000 tons of cement, 
5,000 tons of steel and 100 trucks. Seoul has already provided around 
$10 million to civic groups here to buy aid to be sent to the North.
*************************************************

2.   ROK COMPANY SENDS COSMETICS AID TO DPRK
     Yonhap News Agency, Seoul, 24 August 2006

A South Korean cosmetics company said Wednesday that it sent makeup 
products worth 430 million won (US$449,500) to North Korea last month as 
part of humanitarian assistance to the impoverished country. The 
cosmetics were provided to those residing around the North's scenic 
Mount Kumgang, who often encounter visitors from South Korea and other 
countries, said officials at Able C&C, which owns the popular budget 
cosmetics brand Missha.

"Cosmetics are not luxuries but daily necessity items, and we thought 
people in North Korea would also need them," Yang Soon-ho, the company's 
president, said in a press release. The company hopes to help the North 
Koreans enhance their image with outside visitors to Mount Kumgang, the 
North's representative tourist attraction and the common venue for 
inter-Korean meetings, Yang said.

The assistance consisted of 500 kinds of cosmetic products ranging from 
moisturizers, face cleansers, shampoo and soap to lipstick and eye 
shadow, numbering 230,000 items in total, the company said. The 
company's officials said it refrained announcing its aid shipment for 
weeks amid rising tension over North Korea's missile tests on July 5. 
The company's shipment was made before the North fired seven missiles 
that fell into the East Sea, they said. Company officials said they hope 
to continue giving cosmetics aid to the North in the future. Able C&C 
initiated the budget cosmetics market in South Korea in 2003 and has 
established two wholly owned subsidiaries in both China and the United 
States. The company also operates about 50 stores overseas.
*************************************************

3.   SEOUL HAS LONGER-RANGE CRUISE MISSILE
     by Kim Min-seok, Joongang Ilbo, 21 September 2006

Seoul's military has developed a cruise missile with the range to attack 
North Korea's ballistic missile bases, a senior military official said 
yesterday. Speaking to reporters on background, the official said the 
new missile has a range of 500 kilometers (300 miles), and predicted 
that the range would be doubled within the next five years. The missiles 
are also part of the armament that will be fitted on three new 
submarines that will join the Navy's fleet next year.

The new missile, developed in Korea, is reportedly similar in structure 
and guidance technology to the US Tomahawk, but with a shorter range. 
Nonetheless, the new "Cheon Ryong," as it has been dubbed, will be South 
Korea's longest-range missile. The weapon uses an inertial navigation 
system and technology that matches map images in its computer memory to 
the features on the ground below it. Those systems, the defense official 
said, give the missile the ability to hit within three meters of its 
target at worst.

Another Ministry of Defense official said the missile would solve South 
Korea's problem of hitting North Korean missile bases, which tend to be 
deeply entrenched in mountainous areas. Cruise missiles fly much as an 
airplane does, rather than on a ballistic trajectory. The Korean missile 
will fly at an altitude of only 50 to 100 meters, making it a difficult 
target for air defenses.

Still another official said the new weapons will be a boost for Korea's 
deterrence. He said the missiles could be used in the early stages of 
combat not only to hit North Korean missile bases but also to attack 
military headquarters sites to disrupt Pyongyang's control of its forces.

The Agency for Defense Development started to develop the new missile in 
the early 1990s, but suspended it after an agreement with Washington put 
limits on the range of South Korean missiles and the size of the 
warheads they could employ. An amendment to that agreement in 2001 
removed cruise missiles from the scope of that agreement, and the 
research was resumed.
*************************************************

4.   KIM YONG NAM CALLS FOR NAM'S INCREASED ROLE
     Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Havana, 16 September 2006

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) should put up collective actions against 
the arbitrary and high-handed practices of a specified country and take 
more practical measures to establish a new and fair international order. 
Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the DPRK Supreme People's 
Assembly, said this on Sept. 16 at the 14th NAM summit now under way in 
Havana. He went on:

Over the past 45 years since the declaration of its birth, the NAM has 
served as a banner for the developing countries in their struggle to 
build an independent and peaceful world based on justice, and made a 
great contribution to the process of transforming the world. The desire 
and aspiration of humankind after the just and peaceful 21st century are 
still facing serious challenges.

The international order is disturbed and peace and security in the world 
are seriously threatened by the high-handed acts and unilateralism of 
the superpower standing in the way of independent choice and development 
of countries and nations and the non-aligned countries have become their 
biggest victims. The USA has escalated all sorts of despicable moves 
against the DPRK since Washington singled it out as part of "an axis of 
evil", a target of preemptive nuclear attack, invariably pursuant to its 
hostile policy towards Pyongyang.

The grave situation where DPRK's security and interests are exposed to 
the US threat to mount a nuclear attack on it compelled it to take an 
option to have access to nuclear weapons as deterrent for self-defence. 
The government of the DPRK declared more than once that it will feel no 
need to keep even a single nuke when it is not exposed to the US threat 
any longer after it has rolled back its hostile policy towards Pyongyang 
and confidence has been built between the two countries. The nuclear 
issue between the DPRK and USA can be finally resolved only if the USA 
respects the sovereignty and option of the former and makes a switchover 
from its hostile policy to a policy of peaceful coexistence and 
basically remove all the nukes and nuclear war threat from the Korean 
Peninsula and its vicinity.

The present international situation requires the NAM to increase its 
position and role as an independent political force representing the 
South. It is our view that the summit should pay a special attention to 
the following points in setting out the orientation of the NAM's 
activities to cope with the prevailing situation:

Firstly, the NAM should invariably remain true to its noble idea and 
principle.
Secondly, the NAM should meet all challenges by the force of the unity 
and solidarity.
Thirdly, the NAM should put main emphasis on categorically rejecting the 
double standards in the international relations and ensuring the strict 
adherence to the principle of equality and impartiality.

The government of the DPRK will as ever perform its responsibility and 
role in the efforts to achieve the human cause of independence and the 
growth of the NAM.
*************************************************

5.   WITH KOREA TALKS STALLED, USA TRIES NEW APPROACH
     by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, 22 September 2006

With North Korea refusing to return to the six-nation disarmament talks, 
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday convened a meeting of a 
new group of nations that will focus on Northeast Asian security 
concerns. Diplomats have dubbed the group "Five Plus Five" to refer to 
the 10 countries involved, but North Korea declined an invitation and 
China and Russia did not send representatives.

"It turned out to be the Six Minus One Plus Two Plus Three Minus Two," 
quipped Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, the 
administration's point man on North Korea.

Few issues have proven as vexing as the impasse over North Korea's 
nuclear ambitions. In some ways, the gathering is the diplomatic 
equivalent of throwing spaghetti against the wall -- an effort to try 
something just to see what sticks.

"We had the three-party talks, the four-party and the six-party, and now 
the 10-party," said Kongdan Oh, an expert on the North Korean nuclear 
program at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria. "As the 
number of parties has gone up, the speed of the failure has gone faster."

A year ago this week, in what was hailed as a breakthrough, Hill and 
diplomats from North Korea, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan agreed 
to guidelines for negotiating the dismantling of North Korea's weapons 
programs in exchange for economic and political incentives. But the 
negotiations never got started in earnest. Four days before the 
agreement was reached, the Treasury Department had designated Macao's 
Banco Delta Asia as acting as a front for North Korean counterfeiting 
operations. The Treasury action had wide repercussions, leading many 
banks around the world to curtail dealings with North Korea. North Korea 
declared that the action amounted to "financial sanctions," and refused 
to return to the six-party talks.

North Korea further rattled nerves with a ballistic missile test in July.

Now, with little prospect of restarting the six-party talks, the United 
States has decided to try to broaden the circle, bringing in nations 
such as New Zealand, Canada and Indonesia. The first meeting of the 
larger group was held on the sidelines of a July gathering of the 
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), after the missile test. 
Thursday's meeting, at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel, was the second, 
and Hill said a third is planned for Hanoi in November, when heads of 
state gather for an annual Asia-Pacific summit.

"In Northeast Asia, we need a stronger dialogue on security issues," 
Hill said. "It's not to change the six-party talks. It's not to have an 
immediate sort of actionable outcome or something. It's simply to have 
information exchange."

But there is a broader subtext to the gathering. The Bush administration 
wants China to do more to bring North Korea back to the table, and Hill 
pointedly noted that several ministers present said China should do 
more. Moreover, as a result of the UN Security Council resolution passed 
after the North Korea missile test, the United States has prepared a new 
package of sanctions. But the administration wants a number of other 
countries to sanction North Korea first, before it announces its own 
sanctions, so it will not look like the heavy.

At Thursday's meeting, representatives of Japan and Australia described 
the sanctions their governments recently imposed on Pyongyang, and Rice 
urged other countries to follow suit.

Finally, some of Rice's aides, such as counselor Philip D. Zelikow, have 
long been interested in reshaping the security framework of Northeast 
Asia. The region has no organization similar to NATO or ASEAN, in part 
because relations between China, Japan and South Korea are so tense. So 
when crises occur, diplomatic initiatives must be cobbled together from 
scratch. Some experts believe the new effort is an attempt to provide 
the building blocks for such an entity.

"I'm not going to make predictions at this point whether this is the 
protoplasm of a new OSCE," Hill said, referring to the Organization for 
Security and Cooperation in Europe, a regional group that some see as a 
model for Northeast Asia. "I just at this point can't speculate that far 
ahead."
*************************************************

BOOK REVIEW

*************************************************

6.   "THE GUEST" BY HWANG SOK-YONG
     Reviewed by John Feffer, The Nation, 18 September 2006

[The following is excerpted from an article entitled "Writers From the 
Other Asia" and reprinted with permission from the 18 September 2006 
issue of "The Nation." Visit www.thenation.com for subscription 
information or to read other articles. John Feffer (www.johnfeffer.com) 
is the author of "North Korea, South Korea: US Policy at a Time of 
Crisis (Seven Stories)." --CanKor.]

According to the official North Korean version, the Americans were the 
culprits. In October 1950, the first year of the Korean War, American 
soldiers massacred tens of thousands of innocent people in the North 
Korean city of Sinchon. In perhaps the most horrifying incident, US 
soldiers led 900 residents, including 300 women and children, into an 
air-raid shelter. After the victims passed three days in thirst and 
fear, the GIs poured gasoline into the dark, confined space and threw in 
a match.

Today in Sinchon, the North Korean authorities have memorialized this 
slaughter with burial mounds for the victims. The nearby American 
Imperial Massacre Remembrance Museum holds tours for school groups and 
the occasional foreign visitor. In September 1998 I visited the Sinchon 
museum and listened to the guide itemize the many wartime cruelties 
committed by American troops. She took our delegation to the burned-out 
shell of the air-raid shelter and, on the basis of survivor accounts, 
reconstructed the atrocities.

It would be another year before the Associated Press published the first 
revelations of the US killings of civilians in July 1950 under a railway 
bridge near the South Korean hamlet of Nogun-ri. But based on what 
historian Bruce Cumings and others had described of US conduct during 
the Korean War -- the saturation bombings, the threatened use of nuclear 
weapons -- the museum guide's well-rehearsed stories seemed plausible, 
even accounting for the embellishments of North Korean propaganda.

In the 1980s South Korean novelist Hwang Sok-Yong visited the same 
museum. He subsequently interviewed several survivors of the Sinchon 
massacre who had immigrated to the United States. Their description of 
what transpired in the fall of 1950 diverged so radically from the North 
Korean account that Hwang was driven to write about the incident. His 
novel "The Guest" provoked fierce controversy among readers in South 
Korea, where it was published in 2001.

Finally available in English, in a translation by Kyung-Ja Chun and Maya 
West, "The Guest" joins the handful of Korean novels published in the 
United States. While Japanese and Chinese literatures have established 
footholds in intellectual circles here -- from the classics of Sun Tzu 
and Junichiro Tanizaki to Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian's "Soul Mountain" 
and the postmodern fictions of Haruki Murakami -- Korean literature 
remains terra incognita.

Japan and China, of course, built empires. Korea suffered the 
indignities of colonialism at the hands of its neighbors and now endures 
the frustrations of relative cultural invisibility in the eyes of the 
West. American novelists such as Chang-Rae Lee and Nora Okja Keller have 
drawn inspiration from Korean material, but no Korean author has become 
a household name in the United States -- despite the brilliance of Yi 
Munyol's meditation on authoritarian psychology in "Our Twisted Hero" or 
Ahn Junghyo's blistering portrait of South Korea's involvement in the 
Vietnam War in "White Badge."

But Korean literature is finally attracting more of its rightful share 
of the limelight. In October 2005 South Korea was the guest of honor at 
the Frankfurt Book Fair. As part of the festivities, sixty-two South 
Korean writers gave readings to enthralled German audiences. One of 
those present in Frankfurt, poet Ko Un, has appeared on the Nobel 
shortlist for several years. A clutch of Korean translations have 
recently appeared, from classics like Yom Sang-seop's "Three 
Generations" and Lee Mu-young's "Farmers" to avant-garde short stories 
and the work of too-often-overlooked women writers. Even North Korean 
fiction, perhaps the least accessible of any Communist literature, is 
attracting renewed attention.

Korean culture has a certain pungency that complicates its entry into 
the global mainstream. Korean movies, traditional songs and fermented 
dishes are acquired tastes. This pungency has been sharpened by Korea's 
recent historical experience. The twentieth century, after all, was not 
kind to the Korean peninsula. The first fifty years were marred by 
Japanese colonialism, the second fifty by division, fratricidal war and 
the dictatorial politics that dominated both North and South. Famine and 
its attendant diseases killed as much as 10 percent of the North Korean 
population in a few short years at the end of the 1990s. Added to these 
unspeakable horrors are the quotidian but no less heartbreaking 
tragedies that accompanied rapid industrialization, despoliation of the 
environment and the cold war separation of so many families.

The depiction and re-evaluation of these tragedies, both large and 
small, constitute a major driving force of Korean literature. Suffering 
does not necessarily produce great art. Like the Irish and the Polish 
before them, though, Koreans have created a language of suffering 
capable of attracting not only world sympathy but artistic appreciation 
as well.

Koreans once called smallpox, one of the most homicidal pathogens in 
human history, their "guest." Uninvited and virulent, this guest left 
behind many dead and generations of scarred survivors. In "The Guest" 
Hwang has in mind two very different uninvited scourges that infected 
Korea in the modern era: Christianity and Marxism.

Of the two culprits that Hwang fingers at the outset of the novel, 
Christianity is perhaps the more surprising. Though it is difficult to 
recognize after fifty years of anti-religious policy, the present 
capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, was once known as the "Jerusalem of 
the East" for its concentration of churches and the fervor of its 
converts. When former guerrilla fighter Kim Il Sung began introducing 
Marxism in earnest in 1946, he strategically incorporated aspects of 
Christianity into the official political ideology and, later, into his 
personality cult (much as Christianity absorbed woman-centered pagan 
rituals into a Marian cult to gain adherents in medieval Europe). 
Between 1948 and 1950, during the undeclared war between North and South 
that preceded the Korean War, Christianity and Marxism battled each 
other for the soul of the peninsula.

Here "The Guest" departs from the official script. In the fall of 1950, 
the American army did not reach Sinchon in time to participate in any 
massacres. Instead, Koreans inflicted the damage on themselves. For a 
country accustomed to blaming others -- the Chinese, the Japanese, the 
Americans -- this history is not easy to swallow. Hwang, though, is 
comfortable in this role of truth-teller. His earlier fiction catalogued 
the human losses associated with Korea's economic miracle and its 
participation in the Vietnam War. He spent five years in jail for his 
unauthorized visit to the North. Now he is taking full advantage of the 
more liberal climate of free speech in the South and the warming of 
relations between the two halves of the peninsula to tell a story that 
will haunt even those who have no connection to the events described.

"The Guest" follows Ryu Yosop, a minister in a Korean-American community 
in Brooklyn, as he prepares to visit North Korea and the family he left 
behind as a young child. "Hometown" is a cherished concept in Korea. It 
is bound up not only in friendships and family relations but also in the 
rites of ancestor worship that have survived more than a century of 
Christian evangelism.

For Yosop, though, his hometown conjures up decidedly mixed feelings: 
"The word started out with the scent of a mountain berry, lingering at 
the tip of one's tongue -- but then the fragrance suddenly turned into 
the stench of rotting fish."

He wants to visit his family -- one of the millions of families divided 
by the Korean War -- but he worries that his family background and 
religious affiliation will scotch his visa application. So he puts down 
the North Korean capital of Pyongyang as his birthplace on the visa form 
and trusts that somehow he will find his way back to Sinchon.

A few days before his flight, Yosop checks in with his older brother in 
New Jersey. A retired minister who has become practically a recluse in 
his suburban home, Yosop's brother doesn't want to talk about the old 
days. Yosop sees the visit to the North as an opportunity to confront 
the dimly remembered horrors of the past, to repent for sins and forgive 
those who sinned. Yosop's brother, whose memories are considerably more 
precise, disagrees.

"Why should I beg for forgiveness," he angrily retorts. "I was on the 
side of Michael the archangel and those bastards were the beasts of the 
Apocalypse!"

Several days later, overwhelmed by guilt and anger, Yosop's older 
brother takes to his bed and quietly passes away. His stories, however, 
do not die with him. As Yosop makes his way to North Korea, he is 
visited by a succession of ghosts, including his brother's. These 
uninvited apparitions, yet another of the novel's guests, supply details 
about the blood-soaked days of 1950 and the events that Yosop had been 
too young to experience or fully understand.

With its supernatural events and chorus of spirits, "The Guest" would 
seem to belong to the tradition of magic realism. And like so much magic 
realism, it involves the remembrance of unspeakable atrocities. The 
novel that launched the genre, Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred 
Years of Solitude," revolves around a massacre of banana workers. Salman 
Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" draws its considerable power from the 
tragic partition that divided India from Pakistan. As a trauma can 
provoke a derangement of the senses, so can a terrible crime push a 
writer toward fabulism. It is as though conventional storytelling has 
become incapable of conveying the magnitude of atrocity.

Yet for all its affinities with García Márquez and Rushdie, "The 
Guest's" magical elements are faithful renditions of Korea's traditional 
shamanic culture. And when Yosop arrives in Pyongyang, what might appear 
to be magic realism turns out to be straight narration. Here, after all, 
is a country where the first leader, though dead, still occupies the 
highest office, where tens of thousands of young children perfectly 
synchronize their movements in mass games that celebrate the system, 
where a mammoth unfinished (and unfinishable) hotel dominates the 
cityscape and, like an embarrassing goiter, is pointedly ignored by 
guides and minders. North Korea is truly a land of "make-believe," as 
Hwang has remarked in interviews.

When Yosop eventually makes it to Sinchon and his surviving relatives, 
the tenor of the novel changes. The carefully constructed North Korean 
reality of Pyongyang, with its fixed itinerary of sights and sites, 
gives way to a very different world. Here, in the countryside, North 
Koreans let down their guard. They become real characters, rather than 
the brainwashed automatons of the "totalitarian" model. Yosop's family 
reunion is accompanied by tears, accusations, explanations. As we move 
deeper into the reconstructed events of 1950, Hwang resists shifting the 
narrative to the past in order to dramatize the action. Instead, he 
allows a chorus of the living and the dead to step up to the microphone 
and testify, as if at some celestial truth and reconciliation 
commission. No single narrative can capture the truth of the past, Hwang 
suggests. We are reduced to sifting through an array of often 
contradictory first-person accounts.

The witnesses tell Yosop of how, in the wake of MacArthur's pivotal 
landing at Inchon in mid-September 1950, a Christian paramilitary in 
Sinchon worked clandestinely with an anti-Communist youth corps from the 
South to seize the county administration from the Communists. These men 
of God show no mercy.

"In the beginning, there is no rape," one ghost relates. "Far from it. 
Many times, after a kill, the young men stand together in a circle to 
pray together." Later, as the body count mounts, there is time for 
neither prayer nor proscriptions against rape. When the Communist Party 
cadres regroup and regain control, their vengeance is equally unsparing. 
The wounded are shot on the spot. Prisoners are lined up against the 
wall and executed. Young men are dragged into military service against 
their will and then, when the fortunes of war shift and they fall into 
"enemy" hands, they are killed as surely as the true believers.

By the time "The Guest" reaches the atrocity in the air-raid shelter, 
the question of culpability is almost beside the point. The war has 
become a swirl of thrust and counterthrust, and the reader can be 
forgiven for losing track of who has done what to whom. So much blood 
has been spilled, and it has stained all hands. But in Sinchon, those 
hands are all Korean. The Americans, for their overall stage management, 
barely qualify as accomplices. After the dust has settled and permanent 
battle lines have been drawn, the exigencies of nationalism and group 
psychology have reduced this complex tale of revenge to simple 
anti-Americanism. The Americans, after all, were responsible for a great 
number of atrocities in the war, so why not add a few more in the 
interests of smoothing the path toward eventual Korean reunification?

A novel that so closely follows historical fact raises the question: How 
much literary license has Hwang taken? I asked Bruce Cumings, the 
foremost American historian of the Korean War and another visitor to the 
Sinchon site. Hwang's take is plausible and convincing, he told me.

"The Guest" is worthwhile not only for its heterodox version of Korean 
history and its intriguing portrait of North Korean society. It is a 
finely rendered work of fiction -- disturbing yet somehow beautiful. 
Hwang's achievement should resonate long after the controversies over 
its illumination of one dark corner of the Korean War subside. (...)
*************************************************

End CanKor # 261

*************************************************

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