Public notice to young researchers, artists, and journalists

I can’t believe I need to say this, but I guess I do because the situation of disrespect has been getting progressively worse over the past few years, and this weekend I just about lost my shit.

Public notice: If you are someone who is coming to Korea to interview, study, or make an art project out of people here, treat us with the same respect as you would anyone else. Think about your white neighbor, for instance. You understand and treat your white neighbor as a human being with thoughts, feelings, and dignity — as opposed to the zoo animals that some people seem to think we are. We are human beings too.

Basic courtesy: 1. Write a letter of introduction. Write it in a language that the people can understand. If their language is Korean, it is your responsibility to get it translated. If you cannot translate it yourself, hire someone to do it for you. You would not expect your white neighbor to read a letter in Korean.

2. Arrange mutually convenient dates to work together, if people agree to work with you. Do not just show up whenever is convenient for you, with your deadline, and expect your white neighbor or anyone in Korea to suddenly drop all what they’re doing so they can help you with your project. People actually have things that they are already doing. Like going to work. Don’t come here and say, “Well I only have two weeks and so I need to meet you before next Thursday.” Maybe we are busy until Friday. Contact people before you buy your plane ticket.

3. When you get here, do not just show up at someone’s house, meeting, or workplace. Contact them first and ask permission to come. If a stranger just showed up randomly on your white neighbor’s porch, he would slam the door in their face and say, “Sorry, not interested.”

4. Be prepared to convince people about why they should participate in your project. Convince us that we should work with you. Tell us what you are doing and why. Show us work samples so we can make an informed decision.

5. We are more likely to want to work with you if you are working in solidarity with us. Are you going to stick around for awhile and make a friendship and build trust with us? Are you going to support our work through yours in some way? If so, we are more likely to want to cooperate with you. If you have learned something about what we are doing before you even contact us by reading on the internet or reading books, etc., we can tell how much you have learned by your attitude. If you have done your homework, we are more likely to want to work with you because you have shown that you are already caring enough to take the time to learn. Do not expect us to use our precious time to explain everything to you from square one. If you are here for a quick trip to just take what you need for your personal gain and then leave, why would we (or your white neighbor) want to give you the time of day?

In addition, people who work on a volunteer basis in Korea are working ON A VOLUNTEER BASIS. Volunteers get to do only what they want to because they are not paid to do anything. We are doing activist work out of our convictions. We are usually happy to help out when we feel that your work aligns nicely with our convictions and our activism. If you have a great track record and you come well-prepared, people will probably fall all over themselves to help you.

However, if you have come to Korea in a completely ignorant state or with an attitude that Koreans do not deserve the same respectful treatment as your white neighbor, then don’t expect volunteers to use their precious and limited time to help you do anything, and don’t expect us to open any doors that will enable you to exploit our friends.

Lesson: Do your homework. Use common courtesy. Then everything will work out fine.

제인 정 트렌카, 「덧없는 환영들」 중에서

From the Korean edition of “Fugitive Visions.” Thank you, Mun Jang!

Police web site for missing people

Missing girl, 4 years old at the time. Now 42 years old.

Date of birth: July 25, 1970

Date of disappearance: May 9, 1975 

She said she was going to her grandmother’s house, and then she disappeared.

Somebody asked me if there is a web site in Korea for missing people. I still haven’t found an efficient way to post all of the listings of children who I think may have been adopted overseas, but you can use these links to look through the web site yourself.

Here are the listings for people that disappeared. Families are searching for them.

Here are the listings for individuals who have been found somewhere in Korea, and the authorities are trying to find their families.

 Here is the homepage, including an English menu. You can find applications for overseas adoptees and DNA there. I am not sure how well they respond to English requests on this site; I have no experience with this web site.

May all your wishes come true in the New Year.

Translations by Chae-Pyong Song

Chae-Pyong Song, who brought The Language of Blood to Korea as both the translator and the connection to the publishing house, is now translating Korean poetry into English along with Anne Rashid and Melanie Steyn. They have done a whole series on the Gwangju Uprising, which you can read on the Korean Poetry in Translation blog.

Here is one poem in particular that grabbed me:

Park Geun-hye burns incense for victims of the Gwangju Massacre (for which Chun Doo-hwan was responsible) in July.

I Reject Your Eulogies and Condolences

by Im Dong-hwak

I reject your eulogies and condolences.
Though I did urinate, hiding in an attic closed on every side,
though I did hide myself, escaping from the city and martial law,
though I still feared random questionings and the sound of whistles late at night.

It was a time of animals or only those who roamed then understood.
Till the outrageous conditions of freedom are invalidated,
I reject the prayers of anyone secure with objective distance,
I reject an age that justifies your cunning and metamorphosis,
and the bunch of flowers you offer with white, blood-stained hands.
I reject eulogies written in a skillful, glib language.

Korea/Japan/China – three leaders through their fathers’ names

Is it a woman thing or an East Asian thing?

This article is pointing out that the leaders of Korea, Japan, and China all have a famous father who was a leader of his country. In addition to Park Geun-hye, we have Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who will take office December 26 this year, and Xi Jinping, who took office as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China on November 15 this year.

 왼쪽부터 고 박정희 전 대통령, 중국 시중쉰 전 부총리, 일본 아베 신타로 전 외무장관./사진=조선일보DB

Worse than George W Bush 2.0

PARK GEUN-HYE AND THE THOUGHT POLICE

After the election, younger Korean friends have been asking if this is what the Americans felt like when George W. Bush was elected the second time. Personally, I am way madder/sadder about Park than I was about Bush. Also, the first Bush was not in office for 17 years, so there’s that difference.

The situation being as it is, I hope that we get a Korean Obama the next time! What will be a key factor in whether or not that happens is how much the thought police continue their conservative crackdown. It goes without saying that freedom of speech and freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy. But major media in Korea have already been taken control of by the Lee Myung-bak government over the past five years.

(One amazing and dedicated young journalist who unfortunately works for a conservative paper wrote a great article about fraudulent adoption paperwork this fall, and it was cut by the editor before it went to press — it does make the government look bad because the government allowed it and was complicit in creating that paperwork. The story was submitted and cut a few days after the same journalist wrote a wonderful article about adoption with a more personal focus, which garnered literally hundreds of comments online. You would think that would be good for the newspaper.)

Under Park Geun-hye, I think the situation for free speech will become much worse. For instance, people who make the popular podcast Na Ggom Su were hauled in to the prosecutors for “defamation” the day after the election.

Smart and funny enough to be dangerous: youth and counter-culture oriented Na Ggom Su podcasters.

The “suspicious death” of independence and democracy activist Chang Chun-ha

Chang Chun-ha

There are many Korean heroes that are little known about in the English language. The independence and democracy activist, journalist, and politician Chang Chun-ha is one such person.

I became interested in Chang Chun-ha’s life after hearing my friend Dr. Steven Kim talk about him. Dr. Kim then introduced me to his friend, the human rights activist Ko Sang-man, who has written a book about Chang Chun-ha and also investigated his death. (Ko Sang-man is yet another person who is doing his part to help adoptees.)

Chang Chun-ha as a prisoner in 1974, under Park Chung-hee, for collecting signatures for Constitutional reform. The Yushin Constitution implemented by Park Chung-hee  in 1972 gave him dictatorial power.

Photo of Chang Chun-ha’s body from the Presidential Truth Commission on Suspicious Deaths, revealed in 2005

The recently excavated skull of Chang Chun-ha showing that he died from being hit by an object (as opposed to having accidentally fallen off a mountain). Go to this link for an article showing Park Geun-hye busting a sweat over it: http://news.donga.com/3/all/20120817/48684743/1

If you want to read more about Chang Chun-ha, you can google him or click on this link from the Korea Democracy Foundation. And below is an interesting interview with his son, who said:

We’re not enemies, me and Park Geun-hye … It was her fate to be born Park Chung-hee’s daughter. But she shouldn’t concern herself with political power … If she does want to be in politics, then she needs to be her own woman…

(Park Geun-hye rode in on the votes of her father’s supporters, while she simultaneously tried to distance herself from her father’s wrongdoings. In other words, she had her cake and ate it too.)