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| Subject |
A Woman’s Story of the Korean War & ‘Encounter at the Airport’ by Park Wan-suh |
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367 |
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| Author/Position |
Park Wan-suh |
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| Photographer |
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Park Wan-suh
At the age of 40, Park Wan-suh (1931-) emerged on the Korean literary scene with her first novel The Naked Tree. Her novels about ordinary people, whose circumstances and actions expose their duality and hypocrisy, have earned her high acclaim as an exceptional storyteller. After enduring the Korean War experience in her youth, Park has penned a number of novels and short stories that reveal the war’s far-reaching consequences on Korean families.
CRITIQUE
A Woman’s Story of the Korean War
‘Encounter at the Airport’ by Park Wan-suh
Park Hye-kyung Literary Critic
Park Wan-suh maintains a unique position in Korean literature for her initiation of a literary approach to historical developments. With her feminine eye and sensibility, she has re-created the details surrounding such historical subjects as the Korean War and the Korean Peninsula’s division, which had long been dominated by male writers. Park’s novels bring to life the microcosms of everyday life, which have often been overlooked by the macro-perspective of history, closely associated with the masculine rationale. Consequently, she has been able to reveal, through an abundance of detail and rich narrative texture, the deep and intimate pain that the war has left on the life of individual Koreans.
In blending her personal experiences with grander realms of history and politics, Park’s natural gift for storytelling shines through her stories about Korea’s war-ridden past and division, as well as in her other works about the more recent lives of her contemporaries. Of particular note, the tumultuous period of Korean history, from the time of Japan’s
colonial rule leading up to the outbreak of the Korean War, overlaps with the formative years of her life, from her childhood to early adulthood. Therefore, the turmoil of Korea’s modern history, which she experienced during the most sensitive period of her life, has inflicted such an extreme trauma on her young soul that the Korean War has been a recurring theme in her literary works.
To the women in Park Wan-suh’s novels, the Korean War is a relentless process that only results in tragedy for all male members of the family, including young sons. The women who manage to survive the war’s devastation are left with the task of finding a way to live. With all the men of the family being lost in the midst of ideology conflicts, the women become solely responsible for earning a livelihood for what remains of the family, turning life into a day-to-day struggle for survival. As such, “Encounter at the Airport” is not about the Korean War’s well-known horrors, but rather the everyday experiences of the women who were left behind. During this time of chaos, as men did battle along the front lines, the women in the rear waged their own desperate struggle to replace the men in their families. The U.S. military PX store in this story is a telling symbol of the extreme hardship that Korean women endured during the war in order to deal with the widespread poverty. In the story, the Korean women workers at the PX store smuggle out American goods by wrapping their bodies with layers of items, which were concealed under their full skirts. The humorous depiction of the women, waddling unsteadily due to the bulk of the smuggled items, reflects the harsh reality that Koreans had to overcome amid the ruins of war.
As much as the Korean War was a civil conflict between the Koreans of the South and the North, it was also an international war waged on Korean soil, representing a clash of ideology between the West and the East. The United States emerged from the war as a powerful ally of South Korea, along its heroic image being engraved in the minds of Koreans for protecting them from the threat of Communism and providing much-needed aid to their poverty-stricken nation. At that time, whenever GIs appeared on the streets, a throng of raggedy children would surround them and shout in crude English: “Give me chocolate! Candy!” This ubiquitous scene symbolized the relationship between the two countries, as benefactor and beneficiary.
While children pestered American soldiers for treats, adult Koreans smuggled food and commodities from the U.S. military commissaries. This was their form of begging. For Koreans, driven into utter poverty and hunger by the war’s destruction, the commissary shelves, stacked high with an enticing array of “luxury products,” were an object of fierce desire. During the post-war period, the shiny products from America meant something more to the Korean people than just a means for eking out a meager living: They were like a mysterious amulet that offered a promise of future happiness. In “Encounter at the Airport,” what the women really desired, while smuggling goods from the commissary, were actually the hopes for a better life and brighter future.
Nevertheless, it was inevitable for post-war Koreans, who had to depend so heavily on U.S. aid, to swallow their pride in front of the American troops. Therefore, whether it was due to a desperate need to survive or a vain hope to attain happiness, their intense desire for the commissary’s items also created a sense of inferiority, which served to reinforce their cruel reality. In this way, ideology conflicts did not play out on the battlefield alone. The women in the rear, who had to accept the might of American capital and to suffer from the poverty of their own nation, were also engaged in their own war of ideology. In “Encounter at the Airport,” the foul-mouthed Mudaeso ajumma, whose curse words are neither Korean nor English, is portrayed as a staunch warrior with audacious pride, among the cringing subservience of her compatriots.
When the U.S. military authorities decide, after hours of blackout, to dump truckloads of possibly spoiled meat into the Han River, Mudaeso ajumma attempts to stop them by fiercely biting the arm of a soldier. With eyes that looked “like those of a beast on the brink of extinction,” this is a vivid testament to the solitary battle she sought to wage in order to not yield to the power of the strong, even at a time when “there really are thirty million of us benefiting from the Yankees.” Although she herself is an active accomplice to smuggling operations, the U.S. military’s dispassionate enforcement of health regulations, in front of starving Koreans, must have appeared to her as an act of indulgence, or even depravity.
For her, maintaining her dignity is more important that her very survival. That is why her first husband’s senseless death, while on his way home from the front, left her in such a state of complete devastation. And that is also why she declares so vehemently: “You fuckers think all thirty million of us are sponging off of you, but I’m telling you there are goddamn Americans who are not starving to death thanks to Koreans. And you’re looking at a Korean who’s keeping a fucking American alive and that American is my husband.”
Thereafter, she goes on to say: “Naw, you just wait till I get to America. I’ll never use those damned curly-tongued American curses anymore. I’ll be using my country’s language to curse my country to my satisfaction.” In this case, she is not motivated by patriotism, but rather is simply expressing her resolve to preserve her personal values in the face of any adversity. Her steadfast refusal to surrender, like that of a solitary beast on the verge of extinction, makes it possible for the reader to have a sense of empathy, when the speaker of this story ends her reminiscing by noting: “There really are thirty million of us benefiting from the Yankees; she alone went against the grain and supported a single Yankee – an outrageous and friendless undertaking indeed. But, in her case, one that was possible.”
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