[Soon-I Park as told to JRB, 1997]
You
know, I have good Korean friends who would be disturbed hearing me say anything positive
about the Japanese. Not everyone in the West knows how Japan occupied Korea for thirty-four years before the
end of the Second World War, but of course Koreans remember. I do not think
the Japanese met with much resistance when they first came in 1911. We had protectorate
status. I guess that meant Japan
was protecting us from Russia ,
England and America . We
were in fact pretty vulnerable. China
had been our patron for centuries—we had paid tribute—but now she was too weak to do anything for us.
There were some at the time who thought Japan would be a progressive force, bring us into the twentieth century.
They certainly
expanded education; we had public education for the first time. Before them, there were classes on the estates of Great Men for their children and the
children of their managers. That was meritocratic too in its way. A bright boy might
be sent to Seoul to take civil service
examinations, even become Prime Minister based on his results, or so they
said—the same system they had in China for a thousand years. If the
boy was only second best, they'd make him head of the Army! That's the way the
story was told, anyway. I guess people liked to dream of how once upon a time the army was
kept in its place!
Well,
meritocratic but not democratic was that system. The son of a farmer, much less of a farm labourer would never get any
education, and as for their daughters, forget it! Yet there was a girls school started by
Presbyterians from Canada
in the late nineteenth century. Did you know? Tra la la. Yea Canada ! Really. That's why I
emigrated here finally. Later during the Occupation, the Japanese closed our universities but let that girls school
continue. After the Second War, it became a university—Ewha. My
employer had me take professional classes at it, some from an old old Canadian
woman who may have been there all through the years of occupation. She taught Social
Policy—I worked for a directorate that was investigating total care institutions:
orphanages, mental hospitals, old folks homes, prisons—and she was wonderful, this woman. She was my favourite teacher. I loved her and felt her love for me.
Ah, well.
So
the Japanese may have advanced primary and secondary education. In the 1930s,
however, things darkened, for Japan
herself, not just for Korea .
The generals took over and attacked the part of China that is just North and West
of us. It was around that time they decided to annex Korea too. Henceforth we were to be
a full province of Japan, speak only Japanese, bow in the Japanese way, have
Shinto shrines in our temples and churches, (the religions could continue with their other faiths too), and so
on and so forth. My mother had to speak Japanese all day in school, even on the
playground, or be punished. She was the baby of her family. Her older brothers
were grown and teaching school already. Of course they had to teach in
Japanese, but they never talked to me about that. You can imagine how a people proud of being "The Hermit
Kingdom" for a thousand years felt about that, we who in our own minds felt superior to both the Great
Powers that hemmed us in—the other was China. So here's a secret: Koreans of my
mother's generation are all fluent in Japanese though they are too bitter and
ashamed to admit it.
Which
doesn't stop Song
Doh Elementary
School Song Doh
Elementary School
During
the Korean War at the beginning of the 1950s, however, Song Doh was flooded with refugees from the North,
thousands of orphans among others. So they extended the original building with
two wings made of concrete bricks, functional but ugly, like the schools my children in Canada go to today.
Back
then Song Doh was a farming community a couple of kilometres from the
street cars that took you to Busan proper. We were on that little neck
of land at the very bottom of South
Korea . You can see it on most maps. Now it's a thicker neck, built up with land reclaimed from the sea and developed for residences and
commerce. Busan is one of the world's great ports, a great
beneficiary of the "economic miracle" of the 70s and 80s. But I'm
writing about a time before that time. You can tell is the unimproved farm village Song Doh
that has first place in my heart.
You'll
be surprised if I call it my little village
school because those eighteen rooms had over a thousand students crammed into
them. I guess I think it "little" compared to the big city junior and senior high schools I was sent to in later years; they were truly scholar factories.
No running water or indoor plumbing, but the school was modern in one respect. By 1958 there were amazingly powerful loudspeakers
on its roof. As a country we were poor as church mice, but we had a state of
the art public address system.
The school day started at seven in the morning
but, half an hour before that time, recorded marches started booming out from those
loudspeakers, never anything but marches, and always loud. You could hear them
from a kilometre away. "Got to hurry," you'd say to yourself when they came in earshot. They did get me marching, and I won't say I didn't like that. I remember some of the tunes today. Good for
doing housework. If the music stopped before you reached school, you'd get a
sinking feeling, because that would mean you were late, and would be punished
with extra chores and the shame of being singled our in class later.
We
did not enter the school directly however. Instead we lined up beside our
teachers on the parade ground in front of the great steps I mentioned, all thousand of us. On the landing at the top where the two staircases met stood the principal, in a fenced podium, glowering down at us while our teachers called the roll. The lowest grades
stood at the front, and Grade 6 at the back. There were lines of boys and lines
of girls. Elementary school was co-educational while junior high and high schools
usually still were not, although even then things were changing. My parents could
have chosen to send me to a good co-educational Junior High, but they decided
otherwise; after Grade 6, I attended only all-girl schools.
We
were already more or less in order, but then all whispering would cease and we
would stand absolutely at attention, with our eyes turned to the top of the
stairs. The principal was about to speak. His voice boomed out over the great
loudspeakers, which would carry his voice to the countryside. He would talk the
kind of talk that principals talk everywhere. Try harder, take pride, stand
straight, think straight, the eyes of your parents and the nation are upon you,
and so forth. Naturally we wouldn't listen, yet he would sometimes talk on and
on, well, sometimes only for five minutes but at other times as long as an
hour, as if he had just forgotten to stop. Of course that meant less time at
our studies, but his speech was boring, and it was arduous too, standing at
attention like that was. When would he stop? When he was tired of talking I
guess.
Sometimes
in the morning, though more often at similar assemblies in the afternoon when
the sun was high in the sky, a weaker student might just collapse in place and
lie unconscious at the feet of their classmates. The rule in such cases was
that we would just let them lie there. It was forbidden to stoop to their
assistance, not just for students, but for teachers too. The principal would
keep on talking. Weakness was not to be indulged! We knew that was wrong of him
and our teachers must have known it was wrong, but he was the principal, and he
could do what he liked.
I'm
talking about the late fifties. In a few years things would change a little. You might be surprised how we followed developments
in the West. When the sixties happened, we knew about it. We gave up singing
"Good things in the valley," the Ho Ho Ho Green Giant Song, and instead sang, "the times they
are a-changing." I suspect you didn't know what was happening in South
Korea, how an uprising of students brought down a government, for example, when
it went too far in disciplining a trade
union, but we knew what was going on in America.
I
read where a couple of years ago university students at the National University
in Seoul, our number one institution, stopped responding to un yung, which is an abbreviated form of
address you use with children and servants. Formerly a professor had said un yung to start a class and the
students had replied in unison un yung a
sayo, un yung a shim n ka, which means "greetings, wise and revered
elder." But now when the professor said un
yung at the beginning of a lecture, the rebellious students kept silent,
whole classes of them. Dead silent. You know, the professors almost called in the
police, they refused to teach, they assigned those students failing grades. It
was a big deal and went through the courts. The students won. Now professors
must begin a class with at least un yung
a sayo, which shows respect, if not necessarily reverence.
Anyway,
I never
fainted at assembly because I was always a strong girl though I was as light as
a feather—like everybody else. We who were born at the end of the Korean War
were all skinny, all light as feathers. For lunch we ate noodles we brought
from home in thick aluminium containers. In summer we ate them cold but in the
winter we would heat them up. First thing in the morning we would pile these on
the great coal stove that was at the centre of every classroom, pile them one
on top of the other: sixty students, sixty cast aluminium containers, but just
one stove, and they slow cooked and were ready by noon, more or less ready,
depending on how close your container was to the surface of the stove itself.
The noodles were made from flour included in CARE packages from Canada and States, or sometimes from Australia or New Zealand . Mixed with a hint of
fish, that would have to sustain us for the ten hours of the school day. My
family was well to do. Our tenant farmers gave us milk and eggs and pork, under
the table no doubt; maybe those supplements kept me strong. The flour bags of
the CARE packages were recycled into dresses and other clothes. Not me, but
other kids, wore shoes fashioned from discarded jeep tires. I wanted a pair too, but Mother said we were above that. The "economic miracle"
had not happened yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment