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Wriggling, I tried to calculate what it would cost to embrace the Orient. It could be restrictive. One might even lose one’s former identity. Besides, would one be acceptable to them, as a half-Westerner? A quasi-Oriental face would only go so far to reassure them. Inner qualities would be needed to bridge the gap. Did these qualities already exist in me, or could they be developed as one went along?
Strangely, Korea was the last destination I thought of travelling to. It was a world I accepted as being permanently and impossibly remote. In my warped thinking, I vaguely imagined it to be full of Korean mothers who would give me a hard time. Perhaps I wasn’t strong enough to face the sad endings of the fairy-tale past related to me as a child. Yet the prospect held out an undeniable sense of promise. Maybe it was the key to some locked door which needed opening. Although one shrank from becoming a race-bore, for the first time it seemed that there might be a middle way between exaggerating its importance, and denying it altogether. Perhaps it would be possible to go to Korea.
Full of nascent intentions, I took the express train downtown, somewhat sedated by evensong and the good wine from lunch. But after a few minutes under the cauterizing lights of the jolting carriage and the barbed stare of a drunk vagrant, my nerves were soon fraying again. Korea was pulled from my thoughts like an expensive scarf caught in the subway turnstile.
I slightly dreaded arriving at the Twenty-third Street exit. Wesley, the one-legged black Vietnam veteran on crutches might be there at the top of the stairs, bellowing ‘Marry me!’ to all the young women walking past. Much as I had a soft spot for Wesley, I couldn’t face him tonight, and to my relief, he was not there. Back out on the street, the air had grown colder and the wind had picked up. I checked the train entrance reflexively to make sure that I was not being followed by the drunk from the subway car, nodded a greeting to Jésus at the Ti Amo Cigar Stand on the corner, and let myself into the dark apartment building, the sleet cutting into my cheek, like a spray of crushed glass.
The apartment was empty. Laura was out at an uptown gallery opening with her married lover. Not hungry, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. As I switched on the light the waterbugs startled me – and I them. Fat as dates, the bugs scrambled sluggishly out of the bathtub and filed into the large gaps in the tile-caulking that the landlord had promised to see to months ago.
I went to bed early, ascending the ladder to my carpeted shelf to read by the clip-on lamp. One could just about sit up without scraping one’s head. Without pleasure I drank the large glass of whisky I’d poured myself, feeling a sense of disgusted relief as the alcohol burned and seeped its way toxically around my bloodstream. In the semi-dark I drifted off – the marquee lights of the Coronet stayed on all night, bathing the curtainless apartment in ice-blue illumination. Since my small epiphany about Korea, I felt quite restless, unable to block out the usual nocturnal serenade. Traffic noise roared down Twenty-third Street. I was roused by the shout of a wino, the sound of a taxi honking. Around four am, someone’s newly discovered favourite song boomeranged around the building’s airshaft. The loud noise had a pointless, sad defiance to it, like a prisoner shaking the bars of his cell. It repeated three times more and abruptly stopped. Just before dawn, I slept.
CHAPTER THREE Five Martinis (#u1da4fc39-248e-5e87-b671-26f76088796b)
At six o’clock the next morning I was awakened, as usual, by the hydraulic twangs of the industrial elevators delivering shipments to the storage basement below the funeral parlour. Feeling jetlagged from sleep-interruption, I dozed on until nearly nine. Standing in the narrow, gloomy kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil I remembered that Oliver had given me a month’s notice. Familiar financial fear started to spread through my lungs like camphor.
Obviously, rents and utilities had to be paid; food, drink, and art supplies had to be bankrolled, and a surreally large college loan needed repaying. I had difficulty swallowing my toast. I took a scorching swig of coffee and glanced around the apartment; Laura had not come home last night. The apartment looked dusty and neglected in daylight. It was dusty and neglected.
That afternoon Laura rang me at Cadogan Books and asked me to meet her for a drink at the Algonquin. Harry also called, back from his business trip to Philadelphia. He would join us there later. Laura and I met at six-thirty, and sat on a sofa trying to look nonchalant. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of days. She looked tired.
‘It’s my birthday,’ she said brushing a lock of wavy blond hair out of her martini glass. I had forgotten her birthday. So had Philip, the married lover.
‘About Philip,’ she said, ‘I think I’m in trouble.’
‘Not pregnant.’
‘No. In love,’ she said.
‘It’s not an affliction, you know.’
‘But it wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to just like his company. Appreciate the square meals. Now I really mind; I mind that he’s married; I mind that I mind. And of course …’ she trailed off, ‘It’s tacky, I know …’
‘Maybe you could bail out now, before you get hurt any more.’
‘Easier said than done, old thing.’
‘Yeah, I know. But you’ve got to think about the big picture. Meals come and go.’
Laura looked upset.
‘Well, I’ve lost my job; Oliver’s going out of business.’
Laura raised an eyebrow. A balding waiter politely brought us our second round of martinis and another dish of greasy mixed nuts.
I had known Laura since university. Since before she had become an unknown actress. She hadn’t met anyone nice since her junior year, when she’d gone out with Charlie Downs. It was widely assumed that they would get married. Charlie surprised everyone by getting engaged to the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Senator for whom he’d worked in Washington.
Across the room I noticed a couple of preppy-looking boys, probably around our age. One of them was long and droopy, and the other had curly hair and wore a cream-coloured Irish fisherman’s sweater draped around his neck. Unexpectedly, the droopy one made his way over to our sofa.
‘Would you ladies condescend to have a drink with us?’
‘Suave,’ Laura said, smirking, ‘I guess I wouldn’t mind another.’
I shot her a questioning look. One worried almost equally about Laura’s man-judgement as about her drinking-judgement. She tended neither to eat enough to avoid instant drunkenness, nor to get enough decent male attention to repulse dodgy advances. However a diversion from the adultery question was welcome. Noting his friend’s success, the boy in the fisherman’s sweater rose from his corner, and sauntered over to our table.
‘Hi there. Wen Stanley. Tommy introduced himself? Tom Morgan. Morgan-Stanley, I know, I know … Mind if we sit down?’ he asked.
‘What kind of a name is “Wen”?’ said Laura.
‘Short for Wendell,’ said Wen, visibly warming to his subject. He and Tommy smiled conspiratorially. ‘Waiter! Another round please. Put these on my tab, will you?’ said Wen, untying his sweater sleeves.
I don’t remember a great deal of the ensuing conversation, nor was any of it surprising. Condensed version: them; Groton, Middlebury, Manufacturer’s Hanover training program, Fisher’s Island. Laura knew Tommy Morgan’s sister from St Pauls. Wen knew a few people from Brown, including my old boyfriend, Fred, and a slew of friends of my friends’ cousins. Wen lived on the upper East Side in his maiden aunt’s apartment. Would we like to go up there for a nightcap?
Laura said she’d like to, and excused herself to go to the Ladies’ Room. I sat there between the boys, smashed. We had eaten some nuts and pretzels. I counted having drunk five martinis. (A first.)
Just then Harry entered the hotel and looked around inquisitively. He spotted me sandwiched between two strange men, and his face hardened a fraction. I had forgotten that Harry was coming.
‘How was Philadelphia?’
‘Fine,’ he said, scrutinizing me. ‘Harry Palmer. Pleased to meet you,’ he said, shaking hands insincerely with Morgan-Stanley. He fired me another look and settled heavily into Laura’s seat. The boys exchanged men-of-the-world glances.
‘Not Palmer, of Palmer’s Peanut Butter, I trust?’ said Tommy, in an inspired gambit.
‘’Fraid so,’ said Harry, looking about distractedly.
‘Weh-hey! Palmer’s Peanut Butter! The King of Peanut Butters. That makes you … what, King Peanut?’ said Wen.
Harry flinched. ‘My father’s the boss.’
‘So what do you do, crack the shells?’ Tommy drained his martini glass languidly.
Harry ignored him.
‘So you must be an incredibly rich guy. Plus all the peanut butter you could ever desire.’
‘I’m flattered at your interest in the family business. Why, what does your father do?’
‘Here are the drinks. Cheers, Mr Peanut!’ Wen raised his glass. Harry’s jaw tightened again, and he looked at me with distaste.
‘I’d better go see what’s happened to Laura,’ I excused myself. As I walked to the Ladies’ Room the force of the martinis asserted itself in a blaze of dizziness and acidic hunger. Legs, which felt like they belonged to someone else, carried me to the little wood-panelled bar with the grouchy bartender. Ignoring his eyeballing intimidation tactics, I crammed a handful of mini-pretzels from the napkinned bowl into my mouth and walked away, crunching, pleased to be able to negotiate the crowded reception area without mishap. I found Laura behind a locked cubicle in the Ladies’ Room.
‘Are you all right, Laur?’ I got down on all fours onto the spotless black-and-white checkerboard floor and looked under the door.
‘Absolutely not,’ came a weak voice above her familiar feet, ‘I’ve been sick.’
Worried that I might get sick as well, I started to do some light jumping-jacks and toe-touching calisthenics, hoping that violent blood circulation might speed the alcohol-processing and chatted with some difficulty to Laura as I performed them.
The sound of Laura retching ripped through the echoey sanctum. It was so hushed in the Algonquin that one could imagine being ejected for making audible bodily function noises. A middle-aged woman in a fur coat entered and looked horrified, catching me mid-jumping-jack, and experiencing Laura’s vomiting noises as they peaked acoustically. She left in an outraged huff, trailing the scent of ancient Blue Grass.
‘I don’t want to rush you, but are you OK yet?’ I asked under the door.
‘Getting there.’
‘You can’t really want to go uptown with these clowns. I mean, it’s not as if we know them or anything. And Harry certainly won’t want to go.’
‘What is there to know, for Christ’s sake. Where’s your spirit of adventure? It’s my birthday after all … Won’t you at least go along with me on my birthday?’ she wheedled from under the door.
‘Excuse me for pointing this out, but look where “spirit of adventure” has gotten you so far, Laur – the tiles.’
‘Oh come on. Forget Harry. You don’t like him anyway.’
‘Thanks Laur. I’ll see you back out there. And hurry up will you? Do you need anything?’
‘Nah. Be out in a minute.’
Twenty minutes later, the five of us were in a taxi headed uptown. Tommy tried to charge the bill to his father’s reciprocal Harvard Club account, but the waiter refused. Harry, looking blacker and blacker, ended up paying the tab. The air was somewhat tense.
Although Morgan-Stanley were a bit of a joke, Harry’s martyred patience and plodding reliability were not especially endearing that evening. There in the taxi I was chilled by the thought that I didn’t actually care much what he thought or felt. Though we had only been seeing each other for a month, he was becoming quite proprietorial. Our watery liaison boiled down to a flirty evening shouting over the Palladium’s sound system, a couple of unrelaxed beers at Fanelli’s, a harrowing weekend at his parents’, and an intensely interrogatory dinner at Mortimer’s.
There had been a curious lack of urgency about our attraction. Harry’s advances, like his opinions, were politic, and had remained delayed on the ground for a disarmingly long time, like the take-off of a well-maintenanced jumbo aircraft. Although he was kind and well-meaning, I had been attracted to a friend’s racy description of what he had been like during college. As time went on, I wondered if perhaps the friend had been thinking of someone else.
Squashed up against Harry as the taxi gunned up Park Avenue, mildly sickened, I wondered about romantic Love. The rare, invisible currency running through people’s lives, whose presence tripled your blood count in the night. People pretended it didn’t matter if you had it or not, but it did. Maverick and precious, it was a wild thread stitching together unlikely people, strengthening them, suturing their wounds, weaving surprising designs in the chaos. Whatever it was, Harry and I had not been selected for its grace.
I recalled that weekend, being brought home speculatively, and prematurely, to his family’s grey-shingled mansion in Sands Point, to see how I went with the decor, and the weft and weave of other family members. Harry’s other blond brothers Mark, Randy, and Junior were all lined up at the enormous mirror-polished dining-table with their blonde-highlighted, nautilized wives. It was like being cast in an East Coast setting of a Tennessee Williams play. Mr Walter Palmer, rheumy-eyed, ruddy-faced manufacturing magnate and patriarch, sat at the head of the table sallying and interrogating his slightly cowed sons with brittle humour. Mrs Betty Palmer, with spun-sugar hairdo and kind, suffering expression, made conversation with Junior’s new wife Donna about the upcoming Cancer Benefit at The Pierre.
Harry smiled a little too encouragingly at me over his cut-crystal wine goblet. That I was an apprentice artist had been bad enough, but when Mr Palmer asked what my father did for a living, he took the news that my father was an artist too as if it were a personal insult. He couldn’t quite place me socially, which irritated him; artist-father – could be some Communism there – the slightly Oriental eyes, the prep-school and ivy-league background, it didn’t tally squarely on the balance sheet. Mrs Palmer was just asking where my mother was from, when Mr Palmer launched into a well-rehearsed anecdote about how Mr Palmer senior had worked his way up and across from air-conditioning units to the dizzying heights of the peanut butter world. We laughed tactfully, and filed into the equestrian-print-lined, chintzy study for coffee and Mrs Palmer’s special-recipe peanut brownies à la mode, as prepared by Dolores, the Filipina cook. I smiled inanely, and sat down on a needlepoint cushion that read, Nouveau Riche is Better Than No Riche At All.
Why had I gone? What was I now doing in a taxi with him and these other strangers? I didn’t really know. Muddling along, trying anything once. Lost. That most people I knew appeared to be equally lost blurred this fact, and removed the stigma.
During the cab ride Wen accidentally dropped his fisherman’s sweater out of the open window. The taxi driver refused to stop for it. Back out on the pavement Laura, now sober, paid for the cab as the rest of us were having considerable trouble finding correct change. Harry’s pale blue eyes looked more puzzled and washed out than usual, and he said that he was going to walk home. I told him I would be keeping an eye on Laura. As I said this, it occurred to me that I might not be seeing Harry again. I felt a needling regret as I remembered that Harry was quite nice really. I wished him well, and selfishly, disliked losing an admirer. Harry walked away, head down and hands jammed in his coat pockets, and disappeared into a gap of dark pavement between the streetlights.
Wen, Tommy, Laura and I crushed into the carved wooden elevator under the disapproving stare of the doorman, and entered Wen’s aunt’s apartment with a respectful silence as we took in the regulation upper East Side brocades, severe Chippendale and grandiose blackamoor figures flanking the doorway to the dining room.
Tommy, the polite one, decanted generous glasses of Aunt Stanley’s vintage Armagnac. A lock of Laura’s hair caught fire as he lit her cigarette. It wasn’t serious, but she was a bit shaken. We ate some Baskin Robbins Rocky Road ice-cream and leftover microwaved macaroni, in that order. After a couple of Armagnacs and some frugal lines of cocaine from a little waxed envelope in his wallet, Wen emerged from a bedroom without any trousers on, and sat down wittily on the ottoman at Laura’s feet in his socks and protruding boxer shorts.
This seemed like a good moment to leave. Wen, still trouserless, and Tommy escorted us downstairs in the elevator, and Laura – nursing her singed lock of hair – and I got into a cab and went home. We never saw them again.
As I lay on my mattress trying to get to sleep that night, my head throbbed. I was terribly thirsty, but refused to get a glass of water, having just drunk an unbelievable amount of water only moments before. I was too lazy to get up again, and could not guarantee a successful reprise of going up and down the ladder. It seemed unfair to have contracted a hangover while still technically drunk.
The garbled mess of the day circulated through my head like hard lumps of batter through an eggbeater, gradually growing smaller. Each diminishing thought was accompanied by increasing feelings of disgust, and surprising sadness. Oliver’s impending departure and Harry’s retreat formed one lump of ambivalent, unmelting loss. Laura’s troubled, sleeping presence nearby did not lessen the loneliness which seemed to have welled up from beneath the darkened furniture and flooded the room.
Was anybody else’s life so disjointed? If so, didn’t they worry about it? Perhaps this was just the normal texture of postgraduate life in New York at the end of a fractured, narcissistic decade. Even couched in the sedative language of Newsweek, the condition hurt. The disjointed bits had spikes, and the missing piece, whatever it was, had left behind a canyon of emptiness around which I had organized my life quite well.
At first I thought the missing thing might be Love, but wasn’t sure. Was Love so big?
Perhaps the force itself was still mighty, but its public image had been diminished by the same hype as less important things; it had been used to sell economy cars, diet soft drinks, untrue songs, banal movies, and anti-wrinkle creams. Although cheapened, private Love still exacted the same high price.
Dull thoughts followed, so boring that they slipped from beneath me, half-formed. I found myself thinking again of Korea.
The roar of traffic held me in web of continuous noise. The light of the cinema marquee across the street flooded beneath my closed lids and strained my eyes, despite their being closed. Thoughts racing, I longed for rest, for peace.
Often, when my mind tired of its ineffectual wonderings, I would think of cool, green leaves and imagine fresh, verdant smells. Fanned, rustling leaves enfolded me. The woods were so deep I couldn’t tell if it was night or day. I lay my head on some moss, and to the sound of rushing leaves, eventually I fell asleep.
CHAPTER FOUR History (#u1da4fc39-248e-5e87-b671-26f76088796b)
Cardboard boxes and canvases slid across the back of the rented station wagon as the car’s wide hips swung around the corners of Route 9. Driving up the Interstate earlier, my spirits felt progressively lighter the farther from New York I sped; Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, Holyoke, Northampton, Greenfield, and finally Exit 3 to Starksboro. The names of the towns on these green-and-white signs were tattooed in my memory; their familiar sing-song syllables, like nursery rhymes, prompting the mixed emotions of childhood, with its maddening dreads and comforts. The landscape growing steeper and wilder, I floored the accelerator up the final hill, impatient to arrive.
The next morning, sitting at the dining-room window, I gazed out at the high clouds and pine branches tossing in the March wind, drinking coffee from my preferred blue-willow cup and saucer. I smiled at the sight of my mother, weeding as usual, at the edge of the window frame. She would never run out of weeds in Vermont. For years, she had tried to grow tiger lilies, her favourites, by the front steps, but they always died. Resigned to the cantankerousness of the Vermont soil, my mother discovered an unusual answer. She made a garden out of the weeds themselves: cultivating the prettiest, and uprooting the nastier-looking ones. Growing up, I had found this practice – as well as making monster bonsai out of scots pines – rather embarrassing, but now thought it quite inventive. Looking at the scots pine-bonsai next to her, now much taller, I thought of Hong-do.
After quite a lot of thinking and worrying, I had moved out of New York and bought a one-way ticket to Seoul. It sounds a bit melodramatic, but the open-ended ticket had more to do with ignorance of how long the trip would take than with a desire to stay forever. It almost felt as if I were going to Korea against my will. Although no one was forcing me to go, thoughts of going to Seoul kept returning insistently during quiet moments, creating a pressure impossible to ignore.
Despite being unhappy about giving up my studio, it felt likely that if I didn’t go now, I might easily resist it later. The paintings I’d been working on were terrible anyway – a series of self-conscious fauve fire-escapes. They were leading nowhere at all, and a break could only help. The exact purpose of this trip was fuzzy, but its vagueness seemed appropriate. While it had seemed so small at the time, my uncle’s visit had opened up something unaccountably big. Clearly, going to Korea would be the most direct way of finding out what the nature of this something might be. Hong-do sent a brief note welcoming my visit.
My mother had been very surprised when told of my plan over the phone, but also seemed pleased. Being reserved, it was sometimes quite difficult to tell when she approved of things. I’d decided to try and learn some Korean, but unfortunately, my mother would be away on a recital tour for most of that short interval, so I was unable to learn from, and practise on, her. Instead, I brought with me a Linguaphone Korean language course purchased in the city: one of those instruct-yourself kits, complete with cassettes and a couple of bewildering booklets designed to simplify and decode the cryptic Hangul characters.
Nearly blue with frustration, I sat in my old bedroom with the headphones on, and tried again and again to halt the tape in the spot where the frail thread of comprehensible sound became a locomotive of complete gibberish. I studied the Korean alphabet chart and tried to think in ideograms rather than in individual letters. The concentration required was strenuous in the extreme; like trying to cut something by first melting down a knife, recasting it into a pair of scissors and waiting for the metal to cool each time you needed to cut with it; the scissors turning back into a knife as soon as the immediate task was complete.
‘Annyong haseyo. Annyong-i kyeseyo …’ I repeated over and over. Hangul required six syllables simply to say ‘goodbye’. King Sejong, inventor of the Korean language, promised that it would take only a day or two for his subjects to learn it, but he must have been flattering his countrymen. The difficulty of following Hangul on the earphones was hallucinatory. As the grammatical and conceptual differences between English and Hangul widened further, my metaphorical scissors shrank. It was like trying to penetrate a concrete wall with a safety pin. It filled me with indignation and disbelief. For the first time, I began to get a measure of the formidable barrier my mother had overcome.
Those few weeks were spent painting during the day, cooking for my father, and leafing through Western books about Korea in the evenings. Besides needing to know some facts, I craved a tangible definition of Koreanness. The books’ indexes yielded such dry characteristics as a) the sanctity of hierarchical Confucian family and social relationships; b) ancestor-worship; c) advanced scholarship and artistic achievement; d) self-reliance; e) self-sacrifice; f) pacifism; g) harmony with nature. Although not unhelpful, the words failed to construct a convincing picture. It was like trying to understand the soul of a missing person from police forensic reports and identikit features.
Reading the encyclopaedia, I grew embarrassed by my ignorance. Even the most pedestrian of facts had passed me by.
I learned that Korea – ‘The Hermit Kingdom’ – was one of the oldest, most insular nations on earth, autonomous, racially, linguistically and culturally distinct for 5,000 years. Legend held that Koreans were descended from a semi-divine bear king, Tan-gun, in 2333BC. Science dated Korea’s origins to the Palaeolithic Age, identifying Koreans, rather unpoetically, I thought, as Tungusic Mongoloids, a Mongolian sub-species taller and fairer than other Asiatic races, though not through Caucasian influence, and unrelated to the Ainu-descended Japanese.
I studied these bald, creaky facts as if for an exam, stopping frequently to make cups of tea. It was not that the exercise was exactly boring, but it was painful, like doing years of ignored accounts. I grilled my father for any intelligence he might be hiding, but his knowledge was fairly sketchy too. He had left art school to serve as a draughtsman in the navy in World War II, but hadn’t left Maryland. They heard little on the boats; minimalist wire reports, crude newsreel propaganda, leaflets – that was all. My mother had told him odd family stories over the years, but they were mostly the same ones I had heard. Teeth gritted, I persevered with the history books.
Korea had been the last Far Eastern country to open her gates to the West in the 19th century, and only then under severe foreign trading pressure. Its xenophobia developed over the centuries by devastating foreign invasions; multiple regicides; organized mass rape; mass torturings; massacres and cultural repression. These and other deeds of shocking opportunism had been performed enthusiastically by the Japanese, with occasional cameos by Mongols and Manchus. During periods of peace, Korea had been a vital cultural channel between Japan and China, bringing Buddhism, art forms, and technologies to developing Japan, some two thousand years younger than Korea.
When Christianity was brought to Korea in the 18th century by the French, it was a catastrophe. Unprecedented division and slaughter ensued, creating the chaos that neighbouring Russia, China, and above all Imperial Japan, were to exploit to their advantage in the 19th century.
Japan ordered the assassination of the Korean Queen Min in 1895, and had annexed the country by 1910, turning it, like Manchuria, into a puppet state, brutally suppressing its language and culture for nearly four decades. When the deposed and humiliated King Kojong refused to grant further concessions, Japan allegedly ordered his fatal poisoning in 1919, provoking the pacifist March 1st Independence Uprising in which the Japanese massacred thousands of unarmed Koreans.
During World War II, Japan forced two hundred thousand Korean women into sexual slavery for the Japanese Army along with thousands of Dutch, Malaysians, and Chinese women; they reduced millions of educated Koreans into menial labourers, confiscated wealth and property, and imprisoned or executed all dissidents. Only Japan’s defeat in World War II briefly restored Korea’s freedom.
Then came more familiar tragedies: 1945: Korea partitioned without its people’s consent on the 38th parallel – an arbitrary North-South division designated by Russia and the Allies at Yalta to facilitate the withdrawal of Japanese troops; North under Communist aegis; South Capitalist. Five years later came the Korean War: one of the most savage in recorded history. Seventy-four thousand UN fatalities, thirty-five thousand American fatalities, and a staggering three million Korean dead. It accorded no glorious victory, only a bitter forty-four-year ceasefire. UN Forces under American command managed to protect the South from Communist takeover, but had virtually decimated the country through bombing.
As a direct result of the three-year war, Korea was left geographically and ideologically divided against the wishes of its own people, impoverished, and razed to the ground.
Freakish result of the war: thirty-five years later South Korea had become one of the richest capitalist economies in the world, while the communist North stood isolated, starving, and virtually brainwashed under the bizarre leadership of Kim Il-sung; the planet’s last Stalinist dictator.
After reading this catalogue of woe, I was almost winded by the scale of it.
I remembered a conversation my mother and I had once had about the war.
‘It was our fault,’ she said ruefully, ‘for not developing an effective army when we could see the Japanese arming themselves to the teeth. We were arrogant, not wanting to adopt Western industrialism and militarism. We believed that we could stick our heads in the sand while other countries joined the race. We were romantic, unrealistic … All we wanted to do was to read our books, farm the land, and watch the sunset,’ she said.
‘We were not interested enough in worldly power. And we were punished for it. So now we are interested in money and troops. Probably too interested.’
I was more upset about her tolerant attitude towards the Japanese invasions than I was about watching sunsets.
