For me, the most interesting line in the review was "his maternal grandfather was a distinguished novelist who defected to North Korea." How insane do you have to be to defect to NK? Grandpa Park Taewon defected in 1950, so maybe he didn't have complete information, but he was 'purged' already in 1956, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire would say.
For me, the most interesting line in the review was "his maternal grandfather was a distinguished novelist who defected to North Korea." How insane do you have to be to defect to NK? Grandpa Park Taewon defected in 1950, so maybe he didn't have complete information, but he was 'purged' already in 1956, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire would say.
ItтАЩs probably not an exact parallel but the German Nobel laureate G├╝nter Grass was born to an East German-Polish family in the Free City of Danzig when the borders of Germany stretched much further east. During the war he was lucky to be taken prisoner by the Americans and commence his career in West Germany but I presume he must have had family who ended up in Stalinist East Germany. His political positions favoring eastern Germans (eg opposing reunification) ended up hitting his popularity in confident post-1989 western Germany.
A general impression I have is that Korea, especially Korean politics, is more complicated than Americans would guess. The U.S. did a good job handling Japan from 1945 onward, in part because we invested a lot during WWII in getting ready to occupy Japan. (Lots of Japanese language instruction for officers and bureaucrats, lots of effort put into books about Japanese culture like Ruth Benedict's the Chyrsantheum and the Sword.) d
But we wound up with half of Korea in August 1945, and we didn't seem to have much of a clue what we were doing.
A big problem in the postwar world in places like Korea was that everybody who was competent in modern bureaucracies got their experience either in the Communist Party or in collaborating with the colonial power (in this case Japan). So the US inherited the collaborators, who weren't popular with either the Communists or the peasant masses who mostly wanted to throw out all the foreign devils.
The US found one non-Communist anti-Japanese nationalist who had been in exile in America and put him him charge, but Syngman Rhee was erratic and unpopular, with lots of uprisings against him. The Truman Administration worried more that he'd invade North Korea than that North Korea would invade South Korea.
This encouraged Stalin and Kim to invade, which eventually dragged the more reluctant Red Chinese in.
Nobody seemed to be a reliable decisionmaker in Korea in those years, even though the participants were mostly men who been the big winners in WWII.
The forcing out of the recent South Korean lady president who was the daughter of South KoreaтАЩs murdered dictatorial 1970s first couple over her ties to a cult called the Church of Eternal Life would seem like good material for a paranoid South Korean thriller in the vein of тАЬParasiteтАЭ or тАЬSquid GameтАЭ.
For me, the most interesting line in the review was "his maternal grandfather was a distinguished novelist who defected to North Korea." How insane do you have to be to defect to NK? Grandpa Park Taewon defected in 1950, so maybe he didn't have complete information, but he was 'purged' already in 1956, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire would say.
I wondered about that too. What goes through people's minds?
Angela Merkel's father moved from West to East Germany, right? Hmm...
ItтАЩs probably not an exact parallel but the German Nobel laureate G├╝nter Grass was born to an East German-Polish family in the Free City of Danzig when the borders of Germany stretched much further east. During the war he was lucky to be taken prisoner by the Americans and commence his career in West Germany but I presume he must have had family who ended up in Stalinist East Germany. His political positions favoring eastern Germans (eg opposing reunification) ended up hitting his popularity in confident post-1989 western Germany.
A general impression I have is that Korea, especially Korean politics, is more complicated than Americans would guess. The U.S. did a good job handling Japan from 1945 onward, in part because we invested a lot during WWII in getting ready to occupy Japan. (Lots of Japanese language instruction for officers and bureaucrats, lots of effort put into books about Japanese culture like Ruth Benedict's the Chyrsantheum and the Sword.) d
But we wound up with half of Korea in August 1945, and we didn't seem to have much of a clue what we were doing.
A big problem in the postwar world in places like Korea was that everybody who was competent in modern bureaucracies got their experience either in the Communist Party or in collaborating with the colonial power (in this case Japan). So the US inherited the collaborators, who weren't popular with either the Communists or the peasant masses who mostly wanted to throw out all the foreign devils.
The US found one non-Communist anti-Japanese nationalist who had been in exile in America and put him him charge, but Syngman Rhee was erratic and unpopular, with lots of uprisings against him. The Truman Administration worried more that he'd invade North Korea than that North Korea would invade South Korea.
This encouraged Stalin and Kim to invade, which eventually dragged the more reluctant Red Chinese in.
Nobody seemed to be a reliable decisionmaker in Korea in those years, even though the participants were mostly men who been the big winners in WWII.
The forcing out of the recent South Korean lady president who was the daughter of South KoreaтАЩs murdered dictatorial 1970s first couple over her ties to a cult called the Church of Eternal Life would seem like good material for a paranoid South Korean thriller in the vein of тАЬParasiteтАЭ or тАЬSquid GameтАЭ.