Book Review: The Guest, by Hwang Sok-Yong By Martha Kramer
The Guest Hwang Sok-Yong Translated by Kyung-Ja Chun and Maya West New York, Seven Stories Press, 2005
In October 1950, US military forces, during their northward invasion, occupied and controlled a small region of North Korea called Sinchon in the Hwanghae Province. For a month and a half, thousands of people were systematically arrested, beaten, tortured and murdered. Witnesses described hundreds of victims burned to death in a warehouse. Hundreds of others were drowned alive in a nearby river and local wells. Untold thousands were shot to death in their homes, in prisons, and other public places. More than 35,000 people were killed in just 52 days by the US military and its local allies.
Atrocities ordered and carried out by US forces and its allies in 1950 were not isolated to Sinchon. Secret US Air Force documents dated July 1950, which were declassified recently, indicate that US Army commanders requested the mass killings of North Korean refugees by machine gun fire from Air Force jets. Colonel Turner C. Rogers of the Fifth Air Force, while recognizing the likely international outcry that would result, noted, "To date we have complied with the army request in this respect."
In that same month, in the South Korean town of Rogun-ri (No Gun-Ri), US soldiers rounded up local villagers and herded them into a bridge tunnel and gunned them down. The incident, like most of the atrocities of the war, prompted no apologies from the US government, though President Clinton in 2000 did "express regret." Even with this slight gesture, Clinton's right-wing enemies ignored the evidence for the crime and accused him of buying into the lies of the Communist propaganda mills.
In addition to these particular horrors, indiscriminate bombings of civilian targets, often with napalm, and the use of chemical and biological weapons added to the atrocities committed by the US government in the name of its self-declared "war on communism." US General Curtis LeMay, a top US commander who had developed the US war strategy, was quoted later as saying, "We burned down every town in North Korea, and South Korea, too."
One year into the war, Major General Emmett O'Donnell described the success of the US military's mass destruction policy to a US Senate committee in 1951: "I would say that the entire, almost entire, Korean peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name." In the end, North Korean sources, estimated that as many as one million, or one-tenth of the North Korean population, were killed during the war.
A recently published novel by Korean author Hwang Sok-Yong, entitled The Guest, vividly addresses the Sinchon atrocities specifically as well as the nature of the conflict between pro-Communist and anti-Communist forces. Publicized as a balanced condemnation of "the twin evils" of Christianity and Communism, Hwang's book is unusual in that it provides a rare and moving look, from the perspective of the families and communities in one North Korean province, at a war that has been all but completely forgotten by people in the US.
In this powerful tale, gone are the one-sided narratives that picture pro-North Korean people as pure villains oppressing those supposed innocents who were said to have sided with democracy and freedom. Instead, the true story of the Sinchon atrocities reveals both barbarism of violence unleashed by fanatical proponents of an ideology as well as the material basis for why some adopted that ideology.
The story is told mainly from the perspective of a Korean American minister, Ryu Yosop (Joseph) living in New York, who returns to his hometown of Chansaemgol in Sinchon as part of a reconciliation effort designed by the North Korean government to reunite emigres with their families. In the process, the goal is to heal the wounds of a war that hadn't yet ended.
In Hwang's story, the Ryu family, prior to the Korean War, was a well-to-do landowning family. In the 1880s, a great grandfather had befriended Christian missionaries from the US and converted, even "Americanizing" the names of his children. Over the decades they benefited from their friendship with the Americans, gradually increasing their land holdings, employing many tenant farmers.
Tenant farmers leased a portion of the owners' property to work on. In exchange for the use of the land, seed and fertilizer, the tenant would turn over 70 percent of the produce to the owner. As with all tenant farming systems, tenants almost always remained deeply in debt to the land owners no matter how hard they worked. It was essentially a designed system of debt peonage.
During World War II, the Ryu family collaborated with the Japanese invaders and ran a land development company that stole tens of thousands of acres of land from families, even Christian ones, who opposed the Japanese invasion as well as from non-political small farmers. In the end, the Ryus prospered under Japanese rule, increasing their property by tens of thousands of acres, and helping to exploit many local families. And despite the family's strong identification with Christianity, they seemed to be motivated more by the desire for wealth and power than the Christian virtues of love, mercy and peace.
With the defeat and expulsion of the Japanese, competing forces rushed to fill the vacuum of power. Wealthy landowning families like the Ryus sought to reassert their power over political life in the country. They were aided in the southern provinces by the US military occupation forces who overlooked rampant collaboration with the Japanese in the name of propping up those who supported US interests in the country and region.
Pro-Communist forces, who had led the anti-Japanese guerilla movement during the war (a fact only indirectly acknowledged by Hwang), sought a program of national unity that rejected the influence of the US occupiers and reduced the power of the landowners. Soviet peacekeeping forces supported this group in the northern provinces for a brief period following the war. Even after the Soviets left, the US military remained in the South, and, in conjunction with their southern allies, sought to force unification of the whole country on their terms. Until war broke out in 1950, an international agreement provided for a temporary division of the country at the 38th parallel.
Some parts of the story are left out of Hwang's account. From 1946 to 1950, even without the opening of military hostilities (no war was officially declared), US military forces in the South violently and indiscriminately targeted those suspected of aiding the North. Pro-unification organizations that opposed US occupation were suppressed, their members imprisoned and executed. Anti-Communists in the North either moved to the South or joined terrorist organizations that openly broke laws, agitated for the overthrow of the Northern government, or violently attacked its supporters.
Hwang's tale, however, does capture the nature of political conflict in the North after the Japanese left. Though the Workers' Party (the Communists) quickly moved to control much of the government apparatus after the Japanese occupiers left, the new Constitution guaranteed certain basic rights, such as voting, public education, social equality and even the freedom of religion. For families like Ryu Yosop’s, however, laws curtailing the dominance of landowners inflamed their anger. Land reform laws ended the tenant system and confiscated much of the property the largest landholders had stolen under Japanese occupation. While thousands of acres were confiscated from Yosop's family, it was allowed to keep tens of thousands.
Yosop's older brother, Ryu Yohan (John), a devout Christian, viewed this new land law as theft and as aimed at oppressing his family because of their religion. Former tenants who were forced into servile roles for the Ryus before the liberation from Japan now were put into positions of leadership and viewed themselves as equals to their former "betters." Yohan considered this new equality as a profound insult and a violation of God's law. The perpetrators of this great sin were part of the army of Satan.
Vowing revenge, Yohan fled into the hills and joined an anti-Communist terrorist organization composed mainly of Christian sympathizers of the US occupation. Early on, this group was involved in minor acts of sabotage and harassment of the communists and those who accepted the new way of doing things. After hostilities between the North and the US and it southern allies began, however, harassment turned to full-scale revolt.
In October 1950, as US forces neared Sinchon and forced the North Korean army into retreat, the guerrillas attacked poorly armed local police and unarmed Workers' Party offices. They compiled lists of Party members, sympathizers, Christian "heretics" who sought to work within the new system legally, and others who had benefited from the new order. In a short time, hundreds were rounded up and the atrocities at Sinchon were under way. Yohan personally participated in and ordered the deaths of many of his neighbors and their families, including a former family servant who had become a local Workers’ Party leader and his wife and two small children. Just two days after the slaughter began, US forces occupied the area and armed and equipped the anti-Communists.
A righteous war against the army of Satan quickly turned into an orgy of murder, rape and destruction. Their victory was short-lived, however, as China came to the aid of North Korea and drove the US army back to the 38th parallel that December, bringing the war to a stalemate. During the retreat, those who remained in the anti-Communist prisons were finished off.
This tragic tale is told in the manner of a traditional Korean exorcism tale. Its parts are often narrated by the ghosts of men and women who had been either perpetrators or victims of the atrocities. One of the astonishing conclusions one ghostly character makes is that Koreans had been the architects of the killings, not the US or the Soviets. This truth, the ghost suggests, has to be faced up to in order for the dead to find peace and for the people of Korea to let go of their hate and embrace each other again.
While Hwang's account of the Sinchon massacre may be used to shift responsibility away from the US military for its role in the atrocities committed during that war, this novel has some important points to make. It is a poignant story, but in the end, it is optimistic about the healing power of the truth and forgiveness.
Maybe it is a lesson that the people of the US could also learn. Perhaps in confronting the truths of the Korean War, rather than chalking up the evidence of the great crimes committed there to Communist lies and propaganda, we could begin our own process of healing. Perhaps we could even earn forgiveness from the Korean people.
Hwang's book is indispensable in that it points us toward the truth in better ways than most readers in the US have at their disposal. It is a must read.
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3481/1/186/
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